Nihilism In Action

If there was such a work as Introduction To Kantian Epistemology the complete text could be boiled down to three words: Reality is unreal.

For example, William A. Jacobson, a professor at the Cornell University Law School reported the following on one of his blogs:

Erik Loomis is an assistant professor of American history at the University of Rhode Island. He also blogs at “Lawyers Guns and Money” blog.

In reaction to the murders in Connecticut, Loomis tweeted that he had never been so angry except maybe for the invasion of Iraq (I guess 9/11 was chopped liver to him), and that he wanted the NRA chief’s “head on a stick”:

Now to the non-Kantian mind this constitutes a literal call for an act of murder.  Having been outed as a would be murderer Loomis then attempts to rhetorically cover his backside:

Dear right-wing morons, saying you "want someone's head on a stick" is a metaphor. I know metaphor is hard for you to understand.

Dear rightwingers, to be clear, I don't want to see Wayne LaPierre dead. I want to see him in prison for the rest of his life.

Well why didn't he just say so?   Would it be too clear?

Those of us who treat Reality as being real learned a hard lesson back in the Twentieth Century.  It was believed by many the when Hitler spoke of clearing the Jews from Europe that he was speaking metaphorically.  It was when the Allied armies liberated the death camps that we discovered that Hitler was speaking literally.

To us who aren't under the influence of Kant and in fact value our lives, a call for an act of murder has to be taken literally.  There's simply no other morally valid option.  Having been outed as a would be murderer Loomis then backtracks and says he would settle for an act of tyranny.  That he would settle for Wayne LaPierre to be imprisoned for life.

Punishing a man for an act he didn't commit is unjust.  Imprisoning a man for speaking the truth is tyrannical.  Disarming the citizens -- who're the sovereign authority of the nation -- is treason.

To say anything more would require the extensive use of barracks language.