"There’s a new stigma in town: guns + mental illness = violence."

Says Scott Bryant-Comstock, president of the Children’s Mental Health Network, "And it should break the hearts of advocates nationwide."

Quoted in the Capital Times (a Wisconsin newspaper) under the headline "Some say efforts to boost mental health treatment to combat gun violence are misguided." Also quoted, Jeri Bonavia, director of the Wisconsin Anti-Violence Effort:

"We know that there are some problems with getting mental health records into the background check system, and I think that needs to be addressed," she says. "But it can’t be that we turn our attention just to mental health issues related to gun violence because people suffering from mental illness make up a very small percentage of the perpetrators of gun violence."....

A poll this week by Quinnipiac University shows that more than 90 percent of American voters support background checks for all gun buyers, which would close the so-called gun show loophole. And that's where Bonavia says Wisconsin should be focusing its effort. Her group is currently in the midst of a petition drive to urge Walker to propose background checks. 

So first Bonavia implies that we ought to make policy based on the percentages. But then she says, make a pervasive law that applies to everyone, without mentioning the very small percentage of perpetrators of gun violence within the truly vast category of Americans who buy guns. And by the way, the category "gun violence" lumps things together. Gun control has become a hot issue because of a few massacres. If you make a category out of the set of incidents that has inflamed present-day opinion, people suffering from mental illness seem to be 100% of the perpetrators! You only get your very small percentage if you throw in other types of incidents, such as gangsters wiping each other out. Wake me up when 90% of Americans want to do something about that. And explain to me how background checks have any curative power over that problem.

The appeal to statistics and reason falls flat when you shape it to suit the policy you already want.

"Only 4 to 5 percent of violent crimes are committed by people with mental illness," Dilip Jeste, the president of the [American Psychiatric Association], says in a statement. "About one quarter of all Americans have a mental disorder in any given year, and only a very small percentage of them will ever commit violent crimes."

See what I mean? Questions for Dr. Jeste: 1. What percentage of school shootings are committed by persons with mental illness? 2. If we cut the category "violent crimes" down to massacre-type shootings where the motive isn't robbery and the victim isn't someone with whom the shooter has a personal dispute, what percentage of those crimes are committed by persons with mental illness? 3. If we break the category "mental disorder" into subparts, so that depression and schizophrenia aren't lumped together, is there any category within which you cannot say that only very small percentage will ever commit violent crimes? 4. In your effort to shield the mentally ill from unnecessary stigma, are you giving cover to a set of persons who could and should be identified as dangerous? 5. What are the interests of the psychiatric profession that could affect whether you are giving truly honest answers to all of these questions, including this one?

"Althouse, you're playing games with the men here. Abstract hypotheticals are the problem."

"Abstract hypotheticals serve your purpose in advancing feminism. Abstract hypotheticals screw men."

Wow! I remember when it was a major feminist talking point to accuse males of dominating the discourse with abstract reasoning. Women lived in context, embedded in relationships, and the privileging of abstract reasoning was a method of subordination.

The quote above is from Shouting Thomas in the comments to my post about the feasibility of instituting the military draft before and after the removal of the ban on women in combat. I'm trying to get commenters to focus on the precise issue and not drag in other material or emote about how they feel about me. I'm amused to see myself accused of oppressing the men with the use of the kind of rhetoric that feminists used to condemn as typically male.

Why, I remember "The Master's Tools Will Never Dismantle the Master's House" by Audre Lorde. But apparently the master's tools are working quite well!

Obama resorts to the "if there’s even one life that can be saved" rhetoric.

"If there is even one thing we can do to reduce this violence, if there’s even one life that can be saved, we’ve got an obligation to try."

These are his gun control proposals, including those executive actions that don't require any of that troublesome interaction with Congress.

I loathe the absurd argument that if there is only one life to be saved then we must do something. Obviously, we do not follow that logic generally. For good reason!

IN THE COMMENTS: elkh1 said:

The mother saved three lives, hers and her twin sons' by firing five shots at an intruder.

"if there’s even one life that can be saved, we’ve got an obligation to try." We must require every citizen 18 and up to own a gun for protection. 

"Autism is related to different ways of processing information in the brain, but not in those areas related to violence..."

"Can autistic individuals get flooded emotionally and act irrationally?... Of course they can, like everyone else, but that’s not a defining characteristic."

Autism advocacy groups fend off the taint of Adam Lanza.

Sperm decline...

... in France.

Prof Richard Sharpe, from the University of Edinburgh, said: "Something in our modern lifestyle, diet or environment like chemical exposure, is causing this.

"We still do not know which are the most important factors, but perhaps the most likely is a combination, a double whammy of changes, such as a high-fat diet combined with increased environmental chemical exposures."

I love the way it's the usual suspects — things you're supposed to want to fix anyway, and here's one more reason why. How about considering the possibility of some causes that would be uncomfortable to admit, things you don't want to perceive as problems?

"Attention is not some monolithic brain process. There are different types of attention..."

"... and they use different parts of the brain. The sudden loud noise that makes you jump activates the simplest type: the startle. A chain of five neurons from your ears to your spine takes that noise and converts it into a defensive response in a mere tenth of a second — elevating your heart rate, hunching your shoulders and making you cast around to see if whatever you heard is going to pounce and eat you. This simplest form of attention requires almost no brains at all and has been observed in every studied vertebrate."

Excerpt from "Why Listening Is So Much More Than Hearing."

That passage calls to mind the subject of "incitement" in the constitutional law of free speech. Here's Justice Brandeis in 1927:

Those who won our independence by revolution were not cowards. They did not fear political change. They did not exalt order at the cost of liberty. To courageous, self-reliant men, with confidence in the power of free and fearless reasoning applied through the processes of popular government, no danger flowing from speech can be deemed clear and present unless the incidence of the evil apprehended is so imminent that it may befall before there is opportunity for full discussion. If there be time to expose through discussion the falsehood and fallacies, to avert the evil by the processes of education, the remedy to be applied is more speech, not enforced silence. Only an emergency can justify repression. Such must be the rule if authority is to be reconciled with freedom. Such, in my opinion, is the command of the Constitution. It is therefore always open to Americans to challenge a law abridging free speech and assembly by showing that there was no emergency justifying it.

There's a distinction between what is heard and what is listened to.

***

I Googled "incitement and free speech" to get a nice clear link to insert in the sentence between the 2 links above. Virtually everything that came up on the first page of results had to do with the "Innocence of Muslims" video/Muhammad cartoons.

"Why are people so much smarter at making personal decisions than deciding how to vote?"

Jaltcoh points to Bryan Caplan's discussion of self-correction, which keeps us from dumb decisionmaking in our personal affairs, but:

In politics, self-correction doesn't save the self-corrector a dime.  Voters who self-correct live under the exactly same policies as voters who don't self-correct.  The result is a dire shortage of self-correction - and reliably ridiculous policies no matter who wins.

"The crows maintain that a single crow could destroy the heavens."

"There is no doubt of that, but it proves nothing against the heavens, for heaven simply means: the impossibility of crows."

"Anyone who values truth should stop worshiping reason."

"We all need to take a cold, hard look at the evidence and see reasoning for what it is."

Said the psychologist Jonathan Haidt, quoted by Michael P. Lynch, who says:

According to Haidt, not only are value judgments less often a product of rational deliberation than we’d like to think, that is how we are supposed to function. That it is how we are hardwired by evolution. In the neuroscientist Drew Westen’s words, the political brain is the emotional brain.

Often “reasoning” really seems to be post-hoc rationalization...

That reminds me: new Supreme Court term starts today.

... we tend to accept that which confirms what we already believe (psychologists call this confirmation bias). And the tendency goes beyond just politics....

Lynch thinks Haidt goes too far:

Critics of reason, from Haidt to conservative intellectuals like Burke and Oakeshott, see reason as an inherently flawed instrument. As a consequence, they see the picture of politics I’ve just suggested — according to which democracies should be spaces of reasons — as unfounded and naïve. Yet to see one another as reason-givers doesn’t mean we must perceive one another as emotionless, unintuitive robots. It is consistent with the idea, rightly emphasized by Haidt, that much rapid-fire decision making comes from the gut. But it is also consistent with the idea that we can get better at spotting when the gut is leading us astray, even if the process is slower and more ponderous than we’d like.

Haidt's new book is "The Righteous Mind: Why Good People Are Divided by Politics and Religion."

"No one pretends that better laws would prevent all tragedies, but if that were the standard, then we wouldn't pass any laws at all."

On NPR last evening, the topic was the Aurora movie-theater murders, and the NPR host, Robert Siegel, invited WaPo's E.J. Dionne to comment on "mass shootings, guns and politics." Siegel quoted something Dionne had written, that events like this cause "our whole public reasoning process [to go] haywire." That is, other people go crazy and can't think straight, so let's check out the quality of Dionne's thinking.

What I mean by that is that the NRA and the rest of the gun lobby have such a firm hold on our political system that no one can bring up the notion, which we bring up with every other kind of tragedy, that maybe we can do better. Maybe there are laws we could pass that would prevent something like this.

No one pretends that better laws would prevent all tragedies, but if that were the standard, then we wouldn't pass any laws at all. We have the most permissive gun laws pretty much in the industrialized world. And I hope, but I have no confidence, that we won't make the same mistake again.

I'd like to think that one time, we could say: Oh, let's open this up. Let's talk about the assault weapons ban. Let's talk about ways in which we might reduce the chances that someone with mental problems might get a gun. And I'm just worried that we're going to revert right back to our usual sort of giving and saying, well, the gun lobby controls Washington, so we can never do anything about things like this.

Maybe we can do better.... laws can't solve everything... but if that were the standard, then we wouldn't pass any laws at all... so... so, what? Since we do sometimes pass laws, we must think that laws can sometimes help when there's a problem. And there's a problem, so... so... what?  Let's open this up. Let's talk about it.  E.J. Dionne is afraid we'll just knee-jerk do nothing, instead of knee-jerk propose gun control... I mean think and think with thoughtful contemplation and talk about and around and through and through and arrive at the solution that immediately popped into E.J. Dionne's mind.

I'm fascinated by this notion that we do sometimes pass laws and therefore that means that we should pass laws. The resistance to passing laws is some nasty dysfunction caused by a nefarious interest group — here, the NRA — but good people want to do something. This do something orientation is characteristic of the modern liberal mind. I heard Dionne saying that on the radio yesterday evening, but it came back to me as I was reading about rabies and marveling at the crazy — desperate — ideas for a cure: "you burn a hair from the dog that bit you and insert the ashes into the wound... [a] maggot from a dead dog's body... a linen cloth soaked with menstrual blood of a female dog... [c]hicken excrement, 'if it is of a red color'... [a]shes from the tail of a shrew-mouse...."

When is it that reasoning goes haywire? After Dionne presented his patchwork of liberal logic, the host called upon David Brooks. (Don't say NPR doesn't balance liberals and conservatives!) He said...

Well, I'm no fan of the NRA, I'm not really an opponent of gun control or an assault weapon ban...

That sounds like a necessary preface for the NPR listeners, but I'm going to give Brooks credit for subtly deactivating the bogeyman Dionne inserted into his call to action, because Brooks continues with:

... but, you know, public policy is based on evidence and data and whether it would work. 

Brooks is displaying the pin with which he is about to puncture the liberal's inflated self-image.

This is one of the most studied things in criminology. And the weight of the evidence is pretty clear that there's no relationship between gun control and violent crime. Areas with higher gun control do not have less violent crime. Over the last few years, the number of new guns entering the country has been about four million a year. 

So you've got to look at evidence, not your instinctive notions about what just might work. Put down that shrew mouse's tail now, E.J.

At the same time, violent crime has plummeted by about 41 percent a year.

Brooks's "evidence and data" dump seemed really powerful until he got to that implausible percentage. What is it, 41% a decade, I don't know what to make of this point-counterpoint style radio presentation. There are no links to click on, so I'm just forced to be suspicious of Brooks's I've-got-the-facts posturing. [ADDED: Meade suggests that the percentage of decline has increased by 41% a year.]

Brooks concludes:

So I'm not necessarily opposed to the policy, I don't really think it would matter in violent crime generally, and I really don't think it would matter too much in the case of lunatics or whatever who are committed to this sort of pre-planned massacre.

So Brooks retreats to reassuring the NPR audience: He's not opposed to gun control, he just doesn't think it would work.  He began with the assertion that "public policy is based on evidence and data and whether it would work," explained why he didn't think it would work, but nevertheless won't oppose the policy. Brooks isn't a conservative by my standard. I think to be conservative, you should have the instinctive orientation: do nothing. You have to convince us what you've got there is better than nothing. And what have you got there? A bucket of red chickenshit? A dog's tampon?!!

Now, how will the very very thoughtful E.J. Dionne deal with Brooks's argument from evidence! and data! He's got to demonstrate that he's one of the smart people, the non-haywire people, your betters who proposed open and thorough debate about solutions to problems (after the bogeymen are kicked out of the room):

DIONNE: If we had better background checks, yes we'll miss some lunatics, but with real background checks, we could reduce the number of lunatics who get guns. And there's also a spillover. If you have permissive laws in one state - as Mayor Bloomberg has shown, Mayor Bloomberg of New York, who has proposed a lot of very practical remedies, not sweeping remedies but practical remedies - he's shown how loose laws in one state can send guns into a state that may have stricter laws. So I don't think we should throw up our hands and say it's impossible...

BROOKS: Yeah, one area of agreement, I do think people who have history of mental health issues, and this came up with the Loughner case, that...

SIEGEL: The shooting of Gabby Giffords...

BROOKS: That should show up when you're trying to buy a gun. And legally, that's supposed to happen, but it doesn't always happen.

SIEGEL: We don't know all that much about the suspect. So far no indication that any such record would have shown up. We just don't know yet.

DIONNE: Right, and my argument is not that you can prevent every one of these things, but when I heard this this morning, like everybody else, I was, you know, sick about it. And I just thought that every time this happens, people say, well, there are very particular factors in this case, so let's not talk about gun control, gun control wouldn't solve it. Well, maybe it would, or maybe it wouldn't in a particular case, but it would prevent some of these things in the future.

And there you have it, the liberal mind at work, in real time.

49% of likely voters want "strict legal interpretation" of the Constitution.

And only 21% think that's what we're getting. 60% think the Supreme Court is giving us the so-called "living" version of the document.

Male voters are more inclined to favor strict interpretation of the Constitution, while female voters prefer more legal flexibility and tend to see it as a living document. Most voters under 40 see the Constitution as a living document; most older voters think the Constitution should be strictly interpreted.

Why are women like younger folk and men like older folk? Strict/flexible — what's that about?

What, exactly, makes some people express beliefs in the value of flexibility — or is it "living" — and others in the value of strictness? It would be simplistic to think that women (and young people) are themselves loose and flexible, while men (and old people) are strict and inflexible, because we learn perhaps only what feelings superficially attract them and how they like to think about themselves. I'm tough and neutral/I'm nuanced and merciful. So you say.

Prompted by this forum discussion at Isthmus the other day, I (and Meade) took a quickie Myers-Briggs test. Interestingly, Meade and I got the same result. But I think the test is a bit absurd. The questions test how you think about yourself, not what you really are. Even if we were to accept that there are 4 dimensions of personality and only 2 ways to go within each dimension, you couldn't know where you really are. For example, in the 3d of the 4 dimensions, you can be "thinking" or "feeling." But I suspect the folks who ended up with "thinking" were at least as emotional in response to the relevant questions as those who got pegged as "feeling." What makes a person say yes to "You trust reason rather than feeling"?

"Reason" sounds right... but what drives you to answer the way you think is right? How soberly and clearly have you analyzed where you have put your trust — really, as you live your life? Putting the question that way makes me think the more reason-based person is more likely to answer no to "You trust reason rather than feeling" than the person in the grip of impulsive emotion. Of course, I'm a reason guy! Yeah, and you believe in the strict legal interpretation of the Constitution. So you say. But can I watch you do it? Can I look into your brain, Justice Scalia, and see the reason-gears turn independently of emotion?

Smarter people are more vulnerable to thinking errors...

... that come in the form of taking mental shortcuts in place of getting the facts and doing the math.

"So to believe in magic — as, on some deep level, we all do — does not make you stupid, ignorant or crazy."

"It makes you human."

A public school teacher told her students "Republicans are stupid."

What's the worst part of that?

The worst part about a teacher saying "Republicans are stupid" is...
	She should not take a partisan position in class.
	As a model of how to speak, she should never call anyone "stupid."
	She should model high-level critical thinking, not simplistic conclusions.
	She made it seem acceptable to impose a stereotype on a societal group.
	She disrespected persons of below-average intelligence, some of whom may be in the class.
	She made students feel cowed about expressing opinions, lest they be regarded as dumb.
	She should be teaching something substantive, not wasting class time on politics.
pollcode.com free polls

"I have told myself a hundred times that I would be happy if I were as stupid as my neighbor, and yet I would want no part of that kind of happiness."

"But yet, upon reflection, it seems that to prefer reason to happiness is to be quite insane."

"[A]theists have been too timid, fearing any contact with religion will leave them contaminated with unreason."

According to Alain de Botton:

He writes that the form of religion, with “its dogmatic aspects burned off”, can be repurposed in the service of our modern secular way of life, and we can separate what is “beautiful, touching and wise” from what “no longer seems true”. In a clever twist he calls this “re-appropriation”, reminding us how many of the apparent innovations of religion – Christmas, monasticism, sacred sites – were taken over from previous cultures by the rampant colonisers of the monotheistic religions. It’s time, he says, for us to take them back.

... “We should,” he writes, “be allowed to talk gibberish, fasten woollen penises to our coats and get out into the night to party and copulate randomly and joyfully with strangers, and then return the next morning to our partners, who will themselves have been off doing something similar.” We are prevented from realising this ideal, he argues, because our secular world offers too much freedom, is too individualistic and isolated, everything a matter of personal choice. So if you want to go carousing you have to do it on your own initiative and take the consequences yourself. If we take a leaf out of the religious book, he argues, and stick it in the calendar, schedule it like a bank holiday or a board meeting, then we can enjoy it guilt-free.

Here's the book: "Religion for Atheists."

10 things wrong with the Freedom From Religion Foundation's atheist nativity scene.

(Here's my video showing the details of the creche, which is on the first floor of the Wisconsin Capitol, near some other holiday displays. You should watch the video to understand this list.)

1. Of the many figures in the display, only one is naked, ans it is a woman. This is the "clothed male, naked female" fantasy — promoted, presumably unwittingly.

2. The naked woman is Venus (the famous Botticelli Venus), and Venus is a goddess, a supernatural religious character, and therefore inconsistent with the overall theme of the display, which is that there is only the natural world and it's all we need.

3. The baby in the manger is huge in relation to the Venus figure, who is ostensibly the mother, so that is some scary cephalopelvic disproproportion, and yet naked Venus shows no signs of the C-section she would have needed to avoid death, unless we're to assume that baby got out of her body in some miraculous way, which is inconsistent with the theme of the display.

4. Atheism is promoted through a set of quotes from prominent figures — Thomas Jefferson, Charles Darwin, Albert Einstein, Emma Goldman, and Mark Twain — in other words, by reference to the revered words of authority figures, which is the same method of arriving at beliefs used by religionists — whom we're invited to disrespect for thinking like that.

5. A sign says "may reason prevail" and ends: "Religion is but myth and superstition that hardens hearts and enslaves minds," which is not even a remotely credible belief, because it is falsified by every example of a person who is moved to altruism and charity by religion. Reason doesn't prevail on the very sign that says "may reason prevail."

6. In 2 places, the display invokes the solstice as an occasion for contemplating the natural world as the totality of what is. We're told it's "the reason for the season." Reason is a buzz word for these atheists, but what reason is there for a reason-fixated atheist to pay any special attention to the solstice? It seems they've gotten their atheism mixed up with paganism, which betrays the religious component of their thought structure.

7. There's a sign saying "Thou shalt not steal" — a quote from God, as reported in the Bible.

8. Right behind the "Thou shalt not steal" sign, there's an array of brochures titled "About FFR's Natural Nativity," which I think they want you to take, but I didn't take one because of the intimidating God quote about stealing.

9. There's a sign that says "Heathen's Greetings," but "heathen" is a religious designation. "Heathenism" is Germanic neopaganism.

10. Unless only one heathen is greeting us, they've got the apostrophe in the wrong place in "Heathen's."

The NYT presents liberal fear-mongers as if they were intelligent, sober critics of Republican policy.

Monica Davey, reporting for the NYT from Madison, Wisconsin, looks at why "Many Workers in [the] Public Sector [Are] Retiring Sooner" and what it will mean for the states. Excerpts:

“You start to feel like, ‘What will they do next?’ ” said Bob McLinn, 63, a labor union president who left his job with the Wisconsin Department of Corrections in March, earlier than he planned, after political leaders pressed to cut benefits and collective bargaining rights for workers.

“There’s always been this promise that if you came to work and did your job, at the end there would be your reward — a defined retirement. The idea was you could retire with respect and dignity. But that whole idea has been slashed now, and I felt like, ‘What is the point?’ ”

What demagoguery! We have to contribute more to our pensions as we get each new month's pay, but there was no cut in the ultimate reward. Getting out early isn't a way to preserve the retirement benefit. It's just a decision not to continue putting a chunk of your pay into your pension as you go along working before retirement. If McLinn's communication is typical of labor union presidents, no wonder so many people freaked out and protested last winter.

Now, are states better off if a lot of older workers leave their jobs?

“What we’re going to see is a lot of young people reinventing the wheel,” said Karen Gunderson, 56, who retired this year from her information technology job with the State of Wisconsin after 26 years, a few years sooner than she had intended, saying she felt that public workers were being “turned into scapegoats” for a troubled economy.

“We’re going to waste a lot of tax dollars with young people attempting things that were tried before. You can get people cheaper, but whether you save money, I don’t know.”

I'm mostly curious why the NYT chose to feature this quote and the one above. This isn't serious analysis of what the state did and the real effect on workers. It's more of an effort to propagate hysteria. What did Gunderson — a woman who thinks she was scapegoated — do in "information technology" that younger workers — working at lower pay — would do more expensively? The secret wisdom of the elders is lost, apparently, when somebody retires, and their replacements must puzzle over how to do the complicated work the oldsters had down pat. Is that what it's really like?

[H]ere, in Wisconsin, the battle over public workers may have been the loudest... Union supporters pushed back, leading an effort to recall Gov. Scott Walker next year over the issue. But government workers also left: 16,785 workers filed retirement applications as of Oct. 31, while in all of 2010, 11,750 workers had done so.

“It’s about fear,” said Jim Palmer, executive director of the Wisconsin Professional Police Association. “A lot of people are seeing this war on public employees and saying, let’s get out.”

Where did that all that irrational fear come from? A lot of people are seeing this war... why? Why are they seeing the governor's effort to fix the budget as a "war"? Why do they see themselves as "scapegoats"?

Remember "The Culture of Fear: Why Americans Are Afraid of the Wrong Things"?

Why are so many fears in the air, and so many of them unfounded?...

We compound our worries beyond all reason....

We had better learn to doubt our inflated fears before they destroy us. Valid fears have their place; they cue us to danger. False and overdrawn fears only cause hardship....

Any analysis of the culture of fear that ignored the news media would be patently incomplete, and of the several institutions most culpable for creating and sustaining scares the news media are arguably first among equals....

The link goes to a long passage from that book at the "Bowling for Columbine" website. "Bowling for Columbine," you may remember, was the Michael Moore movie about guns in America, and the point was that the gun-clinging sector of America was seized with irrational fear.

I'd like to see some balance in the diagnosis of fear in the media, for example, the New York Times.

Krugman's swipe at Bloomberg's rhetoric about Occupy Wall Street.

Paul Krugman has a column about how various "plutocrats" are "panicking" about the Occupy Wall Street movement, and I want to focus on the 4th paragraph:

Michael Bloomberg, New York’s mayor and a financial-industry titan in his own right, was a bit more moderate, but still accused the protesters of trying to “take the jobs away from people working in this city,” a statement that bears no resemblance to the movement’s actual goals.

So the "actual goals" — presumably, something along the lines of a better world for everyone — should divert us from noticing the actual effects people are actually causing? Imagine that as a general principle: We should to back off from criticizing people who have good intentions, even when they adopt means that cause collateral damage, even when those means aren't likely to get us to the pretty goals they have in mind.

These are exactly the people we need to expose and criticize!

Now, Bloomberg did kind of ask for it, because of his use of the word "trying":

"What [the protesters are] trying to do is take the jobs away from people working in this city... They're trying to take away the tax base we have because none of this is good for tourism....

"If the jobs they are trying to get rid of in this city — the people that work in finance, which is a big part of our economy — we're not going to have any money to pay our municipal employees or clean the blocks or anything else."

Bloomberg's rhetoric assigns to the protesters the intent to achieve the natural consequences of their actions. Obviously, this rhetoric invites the Krugman response. But I think it's a good rhetorical device. It rips away the vanity of dreamers and demands that we look at real, concrete facts.

Today's protesters "have no understanding of civil disobedience."

Says Matthew Knee:

To far too many young leftists, “civil disobedience” is a get-out-of-jail-free card that should allow people to break the law so long as they are really, really, self-righteous about it. The idea of evoking sympathy through the moral power of passively enduring suffering for a just cause is foreign to many safe, middle-class, revolutionary wannabees who want a free lunch out of their rebellion as well as their government.

Yes, the Wisconsin man who poured a beer on a legislator he didn't like enjoyed himself and basked in the love and encouragement he got from the other protesters. (And speaking of "free lunch," our Wisconsin protesters got lots of free pizza.)

My test for the defenders of the protesters is: Think through a reverse hypothetical. Make the protesters an exemplar of the ideology you oppose and the target a proponent of what you love.  See my post yesterday about the Doubletree incident, in which I challenged someone who supported a pro-affirmative action protest: "Picture a press conference by a beloved advocate of civil rights stormed by a group of racist skinheads... Make all the actions exactly the same, but change the political viewpoints. Would you then use the words 'mob' and 'physically violent.'"

Those who cheered the beer-pourer need to picture a Tea Partier dumping a glass of beer on... You know, I'm too averse to violence to name a particular individual who is embodies the ideology of the left. I don't want to put the picture of an attack in anyone's head. That's why I wrote "a beloved advocate of civil rights" in my reverse-Doubletree hypothetical. To me, whatever the politics of the target, pouring a beer is physical violence. It's not cute. It's nothing to be celebrated.

It's not just that people lack an understanding of civil disobedience. They don't understand what principles are. In the previous post, I wrote about the French ban on covering your face in public and linked to a Metafilter thread. I just noticed that someone over there wrote:

Once again, I find myself not having sympathy for any parties involved. This French approach is simply antithetical to my American sensibilities. On the other hand, I just can't relate at all to these women, and I can see why French people don't like the niqab.

I responded to that:

If you really care about freedom and equality, you should move beyond the question of what kind of people you can "relate" too. The test of your principles is whether you can apply them to people you don't even like at all, who are making what you think are bad choices.

Is critical thinking a lost art?