When positives are really negatives

When a person says he loves animals or nature, or that humans are just a kind of animal, a question involuntarily flashes through my mind: “Uh oh, does this person hate humanity, and is he using animals or nature as his antithetical ideal?”

Same thing for “realists”: “Uh oh, does this person hate aspects of reality he can’t comprehend and control, and is he dismissing those things he can touch but not grasp as unreal and invalid?”

Same thing for religious folks: “Uh oh, does this person hate this world, and is he subscribing to this alternative beyond-world only in order to disparage this one?”

Same thing for environmental crusaders: “Uh oh, does this person hate business, and is he using environmentalism mainly to condemn business from a new angle?”

Same thing for libertarians: “Uh oh, does this person hate human deliberation and all its messy defiance of clean schematisms, and is he adhering to an impracticable mechanical fantasy in order to treat fully-dimensional human deliberation — and worse, all deliberate collective action — as a political disease?”

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