re: #655 Slumbering Behemoth

And suddenly I find myself tired and depressed. I don’t know why, but this terrorist Anders bit and the wingnut reaction to it is bothering me way more than it should.

There’s evidently some sentiment out there that this event will serve to teach leftists a lesson or something. How that works beats me. People don’t normally do what you tell them after that sort of a crime. It just stiffens their resolve.

It has to be that way. Any other response simply invites further such atrocities. Kipling had it right—-that once you pay geld to the Dane, the Dane never goes away.

Even adopting the perspective of an anti-immigrant doesn’t make it possible to see any payoff to `the cause’ from what ABB did. On top of everything else wrong with it, for his side it has to count as an own-goal.

Warped thinking from people who are in some ways smart grows out of an exceptionally poor sense of how other people think and feel. A lack, if you will, of even the intellectual and strategic dimension of sympathy.