I think it's just hard to re-configure one's epistemological prejudices (as if there were any other kind...!)!
Seeing your questions as questions of ecology (moral, sociological) pushes up some new kinds of questioning.
As you can see, from the way this thread runs, there is something ugly about the subject you raise, but also something ugly about the way you raise it. I am suggesting that your rhetoric, accurate as it's aim might be, furthurs the very sickness it's trying to heal. It is, what I would call, a pathological rhetoric. Most of us will recognize sickness without expertise-just like the beautiful...the 'festering' arguement...
This is an obscure point. What makes it obscure AND confusing is that pathology is 'relative'. One organism's sickness is another's health (take parasites for example).
So, what I am calling pathological in your rhetoric is, paradoxically, like a vitamin to the 'system' the rhetoric hopes to destroy.
Or, as your Mom says when you're telling your Dad he's a drunk: "You're making it worse!"
I think the martyr/apostatic example is, even more profoundly, to the point. Do we see martyrdom as beauty or sickness?
Can ecology and pathology have a moral dimension? (Or, are they purely functional?)
Can extinction be a moral alternative? Can it be beautiful? (When what would survive is not what we were, but what we've had to become?)
p.s. Massive digression to follow:
These last questions call to mind the dynamic tension present in starLisa's 'hyper-conscious' admonitions to live 'un-consciously': You can't talk yourself into it! This is the heart of the matter, or--to make a rhetorical point--"This is where the rockets are fired from...."
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