Symptom: the Coconut Treatment

From time to time, I use the term Coconut Treament. It's a personal coinage which I defined some years back, but it hasn't taken hold, so I still get askance comments when I use it. Here's the metaphor again.

Take a coconut, slice it in half, scoop out the meat from both halves and toss the meat—the substance--into the garbage disposal. Then take a pile of dog manure that Fido deposited into your yard, fill both halves of the coconut shells with it and glue the halves back together. What do you have now?

 A "coconut."

Take the meaning of a word or term, "scoop" it out (disregard it), and insert a meaning of one's choosing therein. That's the Treatment.

On his Twitter feed, Glenn Reynolds shares a perfect example of the Coconut Treatment, as noted by a guy named Chet Cannon.

This week in leftist rhetoric:

-@benshapiro (Jewish) labeled a Nazi
-@chelseahandler calls Ben Carson a 'black white supremacist'

Okay.

— Chet Cannon (@Chet_Cannon) September 17, 2017

Cannon shouldn't be surprised at this tactic; we see people do this everyday, so much so that it has become normal. Ask me how many times I've been call a racist for, say, defending conservative principles or for my long-term side-eye at Islam.

This type of thinking is merely a symptom of the rampant epidemic known by its fancier name --postmodernism. As with any other disease, attacking the symptoms eases the patient temporarily, but he still has not been cured. I think that this is the cure, but it's a voluntary one.

In the meantime, we should all be wary of this type of thinking, especially within our individual selves.

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