Progressive Philosophy - Stupid or Evil?

Sometimes I just don't know what to say about things like this. 

Today is not that day.  

I see SWPL progressives going on about the evils of pesticides while millions of (I’m sorry, but it has to be said, because I know it has some sway in this discussion) brown people die every year because of insect-vectored diseases. I see them going on about the evils of GMO while millions of brown people die every year because of vitamin deficiencies. I see all of these things, and yet I'm supposed to think that they are the ones who care - who truly bleed for the less fortunate among us.

A progressive showing how much he cares by making a sign. Or something.

And what am I to think? That I'm surrounded by objectively evil people who support the deaths of millions of brown people every year? Or that I'm surrounded by an entire class of slavering dolts who are too insulated by their own safety, security, and satisfaction of need to understand that their policies and obstructionism are LITERALLY, QUANTIFIABLY KILLING PEOPLE EVERY YEAR?

And which of these two options is worse?  More abjectly horrifying? 

I prefer to use a certain razor every time I'm approached by a quandary like this, and it is a simple one:

"Do not attribute to malice, that which can be sufficiently explained by stupidity." 

And so, I think that what you have here is exactly the same phenomenon about which I wrote the other day, which is to say that these people are more hung up about the theory and philosophy behind their positions than they are the objective result of them. They can't see the tangible result of the babies dying because all they can see is their having saved the world from the theoretical, philosophical scourges of insecticides or of GMO.  

In short, not evil – stupid.  

Or dense, if you will.  Or incapable of seeing beyond their own security and their own satisfaction of needs to understand that this discussion is not philosophical but actually real, and tangible, and horrible.  I’ll bet that their opposition to GMO golden rice would dry up quickly if they were forced to hold a blind baby in their arms while she died slowly and painfully from a vitamin A deficiency, which could have been cured easily if they had just shut their goddamned mouths and not stood athwart the forward progress of humanity, shouting “STOP!” 

The “progress” espoused by the progressive movement

Likewise, you don’t see opposition to GMO from the people who would benefit from it.  Nor do you see many poor people espousing the benefits of veganism, or organic food production.  All of these things are a product of a vain, spoiled and transparently racist population of people who think that their monumental fortune in life is a result of their own unique intelligence and superiority, and not the luck of the draw that it absolutely is when you are talking about individual success on a global scale.  If they were born in Nairobi, and didn’t have the benefits of the fully stocked local organic market down the street, they wouldn’t be worrying about how organic, or local, or vegan, or “cage free”, or “non-GMO” the food that they have access to was - a person who lives under the constant threat of starvation is going to eat whatever food they can produce or collect.  If their children were going blind from vitamin A deficiency, you can bet your asses that they’d be clamoring for golden rice.  

But their children aren’t dying or going blind – its only a bunch of “theoretical” brown children on the other side of the planet, and just think of how superior it makes a person feel to think that they are smarter than the scientists who created GMO. Consider the boost in status that an individual must get to stand in defiance of an entire industry. How philosophical  they must be.  How fashionable. 

To paraphrase the words that I used in my blogpost the other day:

"They are so enthralled with the philosophies of Zeno that they don't even notice when the sprinter passes the turtle with ease."