Whatever mainstream Western liberalism is—and I have no useful definition of it beyond something at its core transactional, centered on the magnanimous, enlightened image of the self and the dissonant belief that empathizing with the plight of the faraway oppressed is compatible with benefiting from the systems that oppress them—it subscribes to this calculus. People go to see the president in the White House for what they know is only a meaningless photo op and yet, in the hopes of getting him to see, to do something, anything, they show him pictures of the mangled bodies of children. It
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