You don’t need to watch the video. I haven’t watched the video. I’m only highlighting it because it starts with a moronic question.

Meanwhile, in the social justice warriors vs inanimate objects department:

Kick that statue! Yeah! You show that big chunk of metal who’s boss!

And in inanimate objects vs. inanimate objects:

CNN is impressed by the fact that statues (normally) don’t move.

This one is stupid on several levels–the statue itself, erected by a male-dominated industry to celebrate “female empowerment,” infantilizes women by symbolically depicting them as a small, stupid child who doesn’t know enough to get out of the way of a charging bull.

You know, I could keep posting examples of stupidity all day.

Mob mentality is never good, but it seems like political discourse is getting progressively stupider.

It takes a certain level of intelligence to do two critical things:

1. Understand and calmly discuss other people’s opinions even when you disagree with them
2. Realize that cooperating in the prisoner’s dilemma is long-term better than defecting, even if you don’t like the people you’re cooperating with

Traditional “liberalism”* was a kind of meta-political technology for allowing different groups of people to live in one country without killing each other. Freedom of Religion, for example, became an agreed-upon principle after centuries of religious violence in Europe. If the state is going to promote a particular religion and outlaw others, then it’s in every religious person’s interest to try to take over the state and make sure it enforces their religion. If the state stays (ostensibly) neutral, then no one can commandeer it to murder their religious enemies.

*”Liberal” has in recent years become an almost empty anachronism, but I hope its meaning is clear in the historical context of 1787.

Freedom of Speech, necessary for people to make informed decisions, has recently come under attack for political reasons. Take the thousands of protestors who showed up to an anti-Free Speech rally in Boston on Sat, August 19th.

Of course no one likes letting their enemies speak, but everyone is someone else’s enemy. Virtually every historical atrocity was committed by people convinced that they were right and merely opposing evil, despicable people. Respecting free speech does not require liking other people’s arguments. It requires understanding that if you start punching Nazis, Nazis will punch you back, and soon everyone will be screaming “Nazi!” while punching random people.

Edit: apparently one article I linked to was a hoax. Hard to tell sometimes.

Now, Free Speech has often been honored more as an ideal than a reality. When people are out of power, they tend to defend the ideal rather strongly; when in power, they suddenly seem to lose interest in it. But most people interested in politics still seemed to have some general sense that even if they hated that other guy’s guts, it might be a bad idea to unleash mob violence on him.

In general, principles like free speech and freedom of religion let different people–and different communities of people–run their own lives and communities as they see fit, without coming into direct conflict with each other, while still getting to enjoy the national security and trade benefits of living in a large country. The Amish get to be Amish, Vermonters get to live free or die, and Coloradans get to eat pot brownies.

But that requires being smart enough to understand that to keep a nation of over 300 million people together, you have to live and let live–and occasionally hold your nose and put up with people you hate.

These days, politics just seems like it’s getting a lot dumber:

Cat that nearly died after being attacked by a thug “because he looks like Hitler” has now recovered despite losing an eye.