"Jury orders blogger to pay $8.4 million to ex-Army colonel she accused of rape."

WaPo reports.

Col. David “Wil” Riggins, after a highly decorated Army career that included multiple tours in Iraq and Afghanistan, was on the verge of promotion to brigadier general in July 2013 when he... learned that a blogger in Washington state had just accused him of raping her, when both were cadets at West Point in 1986...

Riggins waived his right to an attorney and immediately gave a statement denying any sexual assault of the woman, Susan Shannon of Everett, Wash. Shannon also cooperated with the CID investigation, which could not “prove or disprove Ms. Shannon’s allegation she was raped,” the CID report concluded. But in the spring of 2014, with the armed forces facing heavy criticism for their handling of sexual assault cases, Secretary of the Army John McHugh recommended removing Riggins from the list for promotion to general. Riggins promptly retired.

Then, Riggins sued Shannon for defamation, claiming that every aspect of her rape claim on the West Point campus was “provably false,” and that she wrote two blog posts and a Facebook post “to intentionally derail [his] promotion” to brigadier general....

The jury sided with Riggins and awarded him $3.4 million in compensatory damages and — "to make sure nothing like this will ever happen again" (as one juror put it) — $5 million in punitive damages. The punitive damages will be reduced to $350,000, because that's the cap in Virginia, and the compensatory damages are expected to be reduced to $2 million. Shannon is, according to WaPo, a "stay at home mother of 3 teenagers." WaPo quotes Shannon saying "I feel like I'm a financial slave for the rest of my life."

Much more at the article, including details about what Shannon wrote in the blog post and how some things she said were "provably false," such as the assertion that West Point served "FREE beer" on the night in question. The top-rated comment is:

I am a liberal feminist. Please do not paint all of us with the brush. That said, I believe in evidence and justice for all. Women have historically been disbelieved when accusing men of rape. Nevertheless, I also know that some women use the accusation for vengeance. Based on the information in this article, I would vote with those jurors without hesitation. Denial of the truth of the Newtown tragedy speaks volumes about the woman's credibility.

ADDED: The comment I quoted refers to Shannon's blogging, that the Newtown shooting was “a planned event." She wrote: “I believe our GOVERNMENT shot those kids and teachers and used Adam Lanza and his family to pull it off.” (But that was not part of the evidence the jury heard.)

"It's not going to be a contentious, sort of gotcha exchange," said Megyn Kelly to Alex Jones.

"It really will be about 'who is this guy?' ... I'm not looking to portray you as some boogeyman or just any sort of gotcha moment. I just want to talk about you... The craziest thing of all would be if some of the people who just have this insane version of you in their head walk away saying, 'you know what, I see the dad in him."

Alex Jones releases audiotape in advance of the show airing the interview. NBC is under pressure for giving Jones air time — because of the grieving victims of Sandy Hook — so Jones is setting it up so that he can be the victim.  

It's time once again to quote Janet Malcolm, "The Journalist and the Murderer":

Every journalist who is not too stupid or too full of himself to notice what is going on knows that what he does is morally indefensible. He is a kind of confidence man, preying on people’s vanity, ignorance, or loneliness, gaining their trust and betraying them without remorse. Like the credulous widow who wakes up one day to find the charming young man and all her savings gone, so the consenting subject of a piece of nonfiction writing learns—when the article or book appears—his hard lesson. ...

The catastrophe suffered by the subject is no simple matter of an unflattering likeness or a misrepresentation of his views; what pains him, what rankles and sometimes drives him to extremes of vengefulness, is the deception that has been practiced on him. On reading the article or book in question, he has to face the fact that the journalist—who seemed so friendly and sympathetic, so keen to understand him fully, so remarkably attuned to his vision of things—never had the slightest intention of collaborating with him on his story but always intended to write a story of his own. The disparity between what seems to be the intention of an interview as it is taking place and what it actually turns out to have been in aid of always comes as a shock to the subject.

Why don't we all know this by now?

Jones is a conspiracy theorist. You'd think he'd be more skeptical. Or... no, a conspiracy theorist is not a skeptic. He's credulous, indulging more heavily in what is the central human intellectual failing: believing what we want to believe. 

"As families of the Sandy Hook victims continue to pressure NBC to ax Megyn Kelly’s Sunday interview with conspiracy theorist Alex Jones, the network has been holding crisis meetings..."

"Insiders told us that staff were in panicked meetings all day on Monday. 'It’s a shit show. No one wants to withstand a whole week of criticism over this. There are a number of people who want to pull the interview.'"

I hadn't been following Alex Jones's theories, but I see now that he calls Sandy Hook "a hoax." Why would Kelly's show entertain such disgusting nonsense? Apparently, they're desperate to bump up their ratings. NBC sure extracted all the value from Megyn Kelly quickly, didn't it?

What's the strong gun-rights position on whether some very seriously mentally ill persons can be forbidden to bear arms?

I loved this segment of Part 2 of the Libertarian debate (which was on TV last Friday).



Watch Gary Johnson — the one who's been a state governor — concede — in a light whiff of pragmatism — that we should "be open to a debate and discussion" on the subject. He immediately — perhaps prompted by the boos from the audience — says that he has never seen "any argument" that would prevent the "mentally ill" category from being applied to "people like me.... because I'm gonna fail some sort of litmus test."

The mere entertainment of the possibility of a limit on gun possession lights Austin Petersen on fire: "Don't you think that King George would have declared the colonists to be 'mentally ill'?" That gets a big cheer from the audience — "Yeah!!!" "It's the government that sets the standards. The government has no right to take away our form of self-defense. It is an individual right to bear arms." Petersen gets rolling and ends up on: "The Second Amendment was not for hunting. The Second Amendment was to shoot at tyrants if the government becomes tyrannical."

That gets whoops and cheers from the audience, and we see Johnson scanning the crowd as if he's thinking: Come on, Gary, you are the non-demagogue here, you are a normal candidate, you are a genuine, mainstream alternative to the demagogues of the Republican and Democratic parties.

John McAfee — who has a fantastically resonant voice — follows on: It's the government who'd get to say who is insane. He segues into concern about denying gun rights to felons — especially those who've (unjustly) served time for marijuana possession. Petersen breaks in to demand that "the Governor" (i.e., Johnson) state a position on background checks. Now — this is at 16:52 — Johnson becomes extremely animated — agitated — and Petersen — hilariously — interrupts to say: "Take it easy. Don't act so crazy or we might take your guns, Governor."

Petersen keeps pushing — "Who do you think is mentally unstable?" Johnson, with controlled annoyance, says: "Somebody that is mentally unstable." Petersen asks how he would determine that, and Johnson says: "I find it — are you listening? — I find it difficult to be able to actually come up with a piece of legislation that would address that. That's what I said."

ADDED: While I'm putting this post together, studying the video, I comment that Austin Petersen looks like Og Oggilby (a character in "The Bank Dick" played by Grady Sutton). You can see him in a video clip, here, at 2:05. Still:



Meade sets out to show me how wrong I am to read Austin Petersen that way. He floods me with pictures of an Austin Petersen and assures me it's the same guy. I become — depending on how you define the term — mentally unstable.

ALSO: Here's how I answer the question "Who do you think is mentally unstable?":

"The wish to hurt others is tied not to autism but to psychopathy, which manifests in a deficiency or absence of empathy and remorse."

"Some autistic people may not recognize why they cause distress; psychopaths don’t care that they cause distress. Autistic people may see the world from a singular, personal perspective; psychopaths are often cunning manipulators who act according to perceived self-interest without regard for the destruction they cause. Psychopathy seems to have coincided with autism in the cases of Mr. Harper-Mercer at Umpqua and Adam Lanza at Newtown, Conn. Psychopathy apparently coincided with depression and grandiosity in the cases of Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold at Columbine and Elliot O. Rodger at Isla Vista, Calif. Psychopathy almost certainly coincided with schizophrenia in the cases of James Holmes in Aurora, Colo., and Jared Loughner in Tucson. You can categorize such people as having a common madness only if your criterion for madness is their behavior itself...."

From a NYT op-ed, "The Myth of the 'Autistic Shooter,'" by Andrew Solomon. Solomon is identified only as "the author, most recently, of 'Far From the Tree,'" so I looked up "Far From the Tree." Subtitled "Parents, Children and the Search for Identity," it's a very long book about the "startling proposition... that being exceptional is at the core of the human condition—that difference is what unites us."

"How many girlfriends have you had?"/"0. Never had anyone."

"Well, it means I’ve never been with anyone, no woman nor man (nor dog or animal or any other).... must be saving himself for someone special... Involuntarily so."

“He did not like his lot in life, and it seemed like nothing was going right for him,” a law enforcement official said, describing the writings found at the crime scene. “It’s clear he was in a very bad state of mind.”...

[H]e lived with his mother, Laurel Harper, a nurse who fiercely protected him from, among other things, the neighborhood sounds of loud children and barking dogs. Once, neighbors said, she went door to door with a petition to get the landlord to exterminate cockroaches in her apartment, saying they bothered her son.

Here are some "new details" about Harper-Mercer, whose relationship with his mother reminds me of Adam Lanza's. That sensitivity to sound is suggestive of an autistic disorder, and Harper-Mercer attended The Switzer Learning Center, which deals with "learning disabilities, health problems and autism or Asperger's Disorder."

Sofia Camarena of Long Beach, California, told The Oregonian/OregonLive that she used to date Harper-Mercer's father. "I used to change Chris' diapers when he was a baby," she said.... "He was born with problems. He was hard to discipline. If you told him 'no,' he would scream like you had just hit him."...

There are a number of indications that Harper-Mercer had mental health or behavioral issues. His screen name on some social media sites was "lithium love." Lithium is used as a psychiatric medication.

"Lithium" is also a song title. Lyrics: "I'm so lonely but that's okay I shaved my head..."



"... and I'm not sad/And just maybe I'm to blame for all I've heard/But I'm not sure..."

Harper-Mercer was discharged from the Army 5 weeks into basic training for failing to meet "minimum administrative standards."

Harper-Mercer was born in the United Kingdom, stepsister Carmen Nesnick told CBS Los Angeles, moving to the United States when he was very young. He grew up in the Torrance area. His parents, Ian Bernard Mercer and Laurel Margaret Harper, divorced in 2006.

Note the erasure of the racial element. As The Daily Beast reported: Harper's father is white and his mother black.

What dishonor to the dead of Charlie Hebdo, a journal devoted to the opposite of repression!

"Their crime isn't explained by cartoons or religion. Plenty of people read Charlie Hebdo's cartoons and managed to avoid responding with mass murder," writes Ezra Klein. "As my colleague Max Fisher wrote about the magazine's wonderful cover, 'Love is Stronger Than Hate':

Part of Charlie Hebdo's point was that respecting these taboos strengthens their censorial power. Worse, allowing extremists to set the limits of conversation validates and entrenches the extremists' premises: that free speech and religion are inherently at odds (they are not), and that there is some civilizational conflict between Islam and the West (there isn't).

Here's the "Love Is Stronger Than Hate" cover, which is funny because it's selling love while still making a lot of people mad (and grossed out):



I'm grossed out, and I'm very pro-gay (as you know). Here's how Fisher interprets the cover (which ran after Charlie Hebdo had published some cartoons depicting Muhammad):

Yes, the slobbery kiss between two men is surely meant to get under the skin of any conservative Muslims who are also homophobic...

Oh, good Lord, you don't have to be conservative Muslim and homophobic or even conservative or Muslim or homophobic for that cover to bother you. In fact, the cover would be worse — by comic standards — if it only disturbed the conservative Muslims who are also homophobic. The graphic depiction of slobber makes the intent to unsettle everybody quite clear.

For comparison purposes, here's the great New Yorker cover by Art Spiegelman to which I assume the Charlie Hebdo cover deliberately alludes:



That cover — which relates to discord between black people and Hasidic Jews in Crown Heights in 1993 — came in for criticism at the time, though Spiegelman had presented it as the dream that "beyond the tragic complexities of modern life... it might really be true that 'All you need is love.'" Now, imagine the image with wide open mouths in a clench and outpourings of saliva. That would radically change the message, from one that gives benevolent, modern people a thrill of warmth and sparkles of inspiration to one that challenges just about everyone — swamping some with disbelief or outrage and reducing others to a puddle of hilarity.

Comics are complex! I don't think Ezra Klein and Max Fisher see that (or maybe they just don't want to admit it). "Complex" is a word that Ezra Klein uses in his last paragraph, which is a call to simplicity:

These murders can't be explained by a close read of an editorial product, and they needn't be condemned on free speech grounds. They can only be explained by the madness of the perpetrators, who did something horrible and evil that almost no human beings anywhere ever do, and the condemnation doesn't need to be any more complex than saying unprovoked mass slaughter is wrong.

So... murder is evil and murderers are crazy. Why should we not look any more closely at what happened? What is the basis for saying that only madness can explain the murders? I don't even understand the sense of saying that if only madness explains something, our response "doesn't need to be any more complex" than saying what was done was wrong. If it's only madness, where's the compassion for the mentally ill? Where are the plans for identifying and treating mental illness?

Ironically, Klein's recommendation that we only say murder is wrong reveals that he doesn't think it's only madness. It's something he feels compelled to repress.

What dishonor to the dead of Charlie Hebdo, a journal devoted to the opposite of repression!

When a house deserves the death penalty.

"The overwhelming response we got from the survey is just to have the land taken over by woodland... to raze the house and have nothing there."

Last sentence of "Newtown Weighs What to Do With Adam Lanza’s Home."

"Heathers: The Musical."

I loved the movie, which came out in 1989 — pre-9/11, pre-Colombine — but quite aside from the whole problem of making movies into Broadway musicals, the theme of a teenage rebel blowing up all the kids at school feels quite different. But The New Yorker says the "issues of bully-related suicide, school shootings, and bomb threats are even more relevant."

"Bully-related suicide" is an interesting expression here. The bullied kids commit murder and disguise it as suicide. It's a dark and comic fantasy of revenge against the bullies, taken to the extreme of a willingness to blow all the other kids away. That's what — post-"Heathers"-the-movie — the Colombine shooters and Adam Lanza did. So the themes from the old movie are "relevant" only in a very distorted way. Where's the comedy now in killing the mean kids at school?

(I suspect The New Yorker writer was writing from a press release and doesn't actually know the movie and what the story really is.)

"Even in an age when a child’s every irregularity is attributed to a syndrome, the idea of a 'normal weird kid' seems reasonable enough..."

From a long New Yorker "Annals of Psychiatry" piece about Adam Lanza, based on an interview with his father Peter, who said that his son was "Always thinking differently... Just a normal little weird kid."

A supposedly extreme thing about Adam Lanza that doesn't sound at all extreme to me: "He showed such hypersensitivity to physical touch that tags had to be removed from his clothing."

And what if your child showed talent for writing in a manner that seems like those popular slasher films and Stephen King bestsellers?

[In 5th grade], Adam and another boy wrote a story called “The Big Book of Granny,” in which an old woman with a gun in her cane kills wantonly. In the third chapter, Granny and her son want to taxidermy a boy for their mantelpiece. In another chapter, a character called Dora the Berserker says, “I like hurting people. . . . Especially children.” Adam tried to sell copies of the book at school and got in trouble. A couple of years later, according to the state’s attorney’s report, a teacher noted “disturbing” violence in his writing and described him as “intelligent but not normal, with anti-social issues.”

And what if your child really loved the pop culture things from your youth that you showed to him?

When Peter took him to see Bill Cosby live, Adam laughed for an hour straight. He loved reruns of “The Bob Newhart Show” and “Get Smart,” which he would watch with his dad. One Christmas, Adam told his parents that he wanted to use his savings to buy toys for needy children, and Peter took him shopping for them.

Wouldn't you think your child was rather brilliant if you asked what he would do if he had 3 wishes and he said he'd wish "that whatever was granting the wishes would not exist"?

The parents took Adam to a psychiatrist, and the diagnosis was Asperger's Syndrome, which seemed helpful and specific, something they could work with. It made sense to Peter. But:

“Adam was not open to therapy,” Peter told me. “He did not want to talk about problems and didn’t even admit he had Asperger’s.” Peter and Nancy were confident enough in the Asperger’s diagnosis that they didn’t look for other explanations for Adam’s behavior. In that sense, Asperger’s may have distracted them from whatever else was amiss. “If he had been a totally normal adolescent and he was well adjusted and then all of a sudden went into isolation, alarms would go off,” Peter told me. “But let’s keep in mind that you expect Adam to be weird.”

AND:

When he was sixteen, [Adam] found a picture of Karl Marx (huge beard), Lenin (small beard), Stalin (mustache), and Mao (clean-shaven), and sent it around with a caption, “Comrades, we must rectify the faltering facial hair standards.” 

ADDED: It's obvious in retrospect that Adam Lanza needed to be institutionalized. Why didn't his parents do that?! It seems like a cartoon — a horror cartoon — of what happens when a child doesn't have a mother and a father together in his home. The mother seems to have appeased and comforted him constantly. And the fatherly judgment and discipline is exiled. But how much rationality is contained within Peter Lanza? He is responsible for the distance he took from what was a dangerous, hopeless relationship between mother and son. In this New Yorker piece, we get to read the story he's assembled for his semi-peace of mind, after the fact.

Peter was frustrated but felt that he couldn’t show up at the house in Newtown to force an encounter. “It would have been a fight, the last thing I’d want to be doing. Jesus. . . . If I had gone there unannounced and just, ‘I want to see Adam.’ ‘Why are you doing this?’ Adam would be all bent about me.” Later, Peter remarked, “If I said I’m coming, she’d say, ‘No, there’s no reason for that.’ I mean, she controlled the situation.”

"I used to think I was asexual, but the primary reason why I thought that was because my BMI was 14..."

"I castrated myself when I was 15 to rebel against society... a degenerate capitalistic system results in a commodification of sexuality...."

The desperation would be laughable, but it's not funny to write "How Adam Lanza Wrecked Obama's Second Term."

20 children were murdered, and 6 adults. Leave it alone. Conduct your pathetic search for someone or something to blame somewhere else, Alex Seitz-Wald. Have some decency. Find another grave upon which to dance the Dance of Obama Exculpation. 

A friend "remembers occasionally going to watch a movie with [Adam] Lanza after a dance marathon and chatting with him about current events and chimpanzees."

The inane/absurd search for meaning in the mind of a lost and now-hated soul.

"Look at this Boston bombing. The pictures of those two brothers. Aren’t they cute?"

Said I, as quoted in The New Yorker today in a piece by Paul Bloom called "The Dzhokar Tsarnaev Empathy Problem." I was being sarcastic and criticizing the media for using a strikingly baby-faced picture of Tsarnaev in practically every report.

Bloom concludes:

Relying on the face might be human nature—even babies prefer to look at attractive people. But, of course, judging someone based on the geometry of his features is, from a moral and legal standpoint, no better than judging him based on the color of his skin. Actually, both biases reflect the parochial and irrational nature of empathy—if Tsarnaev were black, would he evoke the same response from the mothers [Hanna Rosin described here]? When someone talks about the warm feelings she has for Tsarnaev because of his sweet face, we should treat this with the same wary understanding that we would give to someone who admits to caring more about those who have the same color skin. It’s an empathetic response, and a natural one, but hardly one to be proud of.

Bloom says nothing about the baby-faced picture of Trayvon Martin that the media tended to use. Sweet faces manipulate us emotionally even when they are black. And an individual's face isn't quite the same as his skin color, because the mind is revealed through the face (albeit incompletely and often deceptively). Bloom displays the media's favorite photo of Jared Loughner and declares that we don't feel much empathy toward that face. But the problem with that face is not inborn ugliness. It's craziness in the expression. We are properly repelled by that.

It is the true sociopath — I would suggest — whose does evil things but keeps a normal-looking face. We need to challenge ourselves to recognize the sociopaths in our midst. And let's not try to overcome our aversion to faces like Loughner's or Adam Lanza's. These people have terrible problems that we ignore at great risk.

ADDED: The post title corrects a typo that appears in The New Yorker ("bothers" for "brothers").

It's been a bad first quarter of first year of the second term for President Obama.

1. It's been so bad that the media dropped their erstwhile foible of talking about everything that happens in terms of what it means for Obama. And here it is, the first lap of his new term, when there's more reason than usual to talk about how things are working out for the President.

2. Obama made gun control his big issue leading into the new term. He tried so hard to deploy his speaking skills to channel the nation's emotion after the Sandy Hook massacre, and in the end he couldn't even wrangle all of the Democrats in the Senate, and he was reduced yesterday to surrounding himself with human vessels of tragedy and "a scowling Vice President Biden" and pronounce it "all in all...  a pretty shameful day for Washington." The media offered weak support by describing him as passionately angry, but I watched the video and found it surprising dull. I couldn't motivate myself to go over to my computer to blog about it last night. Obama knew he was going to lose. The theater of sympathy and outrage had gone on far too long, the show was a flop, and the leading man was obliged to take his curtain call.

3. North Korea apparently has a nuclear weapon and the nerve to use it (or to pose as if it does), and the new Secretary of State, the exceedingly dreary John Kerry, is sojourning in the general area nattering about global warming —  "the Foreign Minister and I agreed to raise the initiative above the level that it is today" — and meanwhile, back in the United States, it's really cold.

4. Obama's efforts to get some lightweight good press over basketball failed. His bracket was busted, and a cutesy photo-op produced an embarrassing video in which he went 2 for 22. That he could play basketball was an element of his legend, and now it's that video that comes to mind when we think of Obama and basketball. Does he even have another sport? Golf? Golf, unlike basketball, never worked as an element of the Obama legend.

5. He shut off White House tours, presumably on the theory that it would spark outrage at the sequester (and those terrible Republicans), but that gesture clashed with his own fun in the White House. Ordinary kids had their field trips canceled, while Obama's daughters got Justin Timberlake to come to the White House and perform right in front of them. It was another of the many parties. Wasn't Beyonce just there? And then she and Jay-Z went to Cuba, and, when criticized, Jay-Z put out a pissy rap tune that (I think) insulted Obama.

6. George Bush is making a comeback, with some charming new elements: He's a granddad and he paints pictures of dogs. The big library is opening. And then there's the new disaster in Waco, just 45 miles from his Crawford ranch, giving Bush reason to do a low-profile but touching trip to comfort the injured and the bereaved. So now does that mean Obama has to go to Texas? He's already going to Boston for a memorial service. How can he not go to Texas? But Texas is not comfortable territory for Obama.

7. Margaret Thatcher up and died. What rotten luck! What a platform for the promoters of the ideology in opposition to his! And then idiots take to the streets with all that "Ding, Dong the Witch Is Dead" childishness and disrespect, damaging the left-wing brand. Should Obama attend the funeral? Ah, at least send the Vice President. At least send somebody! No. He sends nobody.

8. What's the legislative agenda? Immigration reform? WaPo headlines: "Obama isn’t leading on immigration, and that’s a good thing." The media's attempts to help are getting really embarrassing. He's not leading, but, see, that's a good thing. Let us explain why: "Presidential leadership is a polarizing force...." Blah blah blah. What really matters are the 2014 elections. Just hang back and wait. Nothing but weakness and failure might just be a devious strategy for winning 565 days from now.

9. What's happening with Obamacare? That was the achievement of Obama's first term. If there's one thing he ought to do with this second term, it's make sure that thing gets implemented in a way that works with some degree of smoothness, at least enough that — when people finally notice what's been in the works for so long —  we don't freak out entirely. But: "A senior Democratic senator who helped write President Barack Obama’s health care law stunned administration officials Wednesday, saying openly he thinks it’s headed for a 'train wreck' because of bumbling implementation.'"

10. The trial of Kermit Gosnell is fogging up the clarity achieved in 2012 victory in the War on Women.

"Terrorists want large, splashy attacks on specific sorts of targets that have high emotional resonance..."

"... for both the victims and the people on your side who you hope to recruit, or tap for money.  This helps explain why Al Qaeda was so obsessed with the Twin Towers, a place that — until they fell — most New Yorkers regarded as a rather ugly landmark containing some so-so office space.  To a terrorist group looking for publicity, on the other hand, it had immense symbolic value: the tallest building in America's biggest city, with the hubristic name of 'World Trade Center.' That's why we don't get high-frequency, low-intensity attacks on crowded spaces near some Texas town that no one in Abottabad [sic] has ever heard of.  When attacks on those places happen, they tend to be the provenance of local lunatics for whom the nearby mall, or primary school, has some immense symbolic emotional importance."

Says Megan McArdle. This reasoning suggests that if only we'd avoid prideful spectacles we could deflect the Qaeda crowd. But there will always be local lunatics, and it's impossible to avoid all the tiny targets like schools and shops that every town has....

Adam Lanza was bullied while he attended Sandy Hook Elementary and his mother Nancy considered suing the school for turning a blind eye to the abuse, an unnamed Lanza family member told the New York Daily News.

“Adam would come home with bruises all over his body,” the relative told the Daily News. “His mom would ask him what was wrong, and he wouldn’t say anything. He would just sit there.”

Know your local lunatics. And for God's sake don't torment them. Don't create them out of whatever raw material you find around. Here's a pressure cooker. What can we put in it?

Now, these local lunatics tend to show their faces. It's a showdown. They die or get captured quickly. We know who did it.

On 9/11, every building I saw seemed shockingly vulnerable. I wondered if all buildings would come down. How deceptively solid these things seem, but there are people in the world who would destroy everything anybody builds. And yet so many buildings have remained standing all these years. I didn't think it would work out this well. Terrorists in my town bombed a minor spectacle of a building 40 years ago, but since 9/11, the building have held up.

After 9/11, I obsessed about what the terrorists would do next and, naturally, I thought of the things that would hit me and the people I knew. I pictured a day when 100 suicide bombers, one by one, in 100 different college towns stepped into a crowded café or movie theater or sports event and blew up. But that never happened. McArdle's theory suggests why. That's local-lunatic level. Too lowly for the Qaeda-type brand.

But is a crowd waiting at the finish line of the Boston Marathon such a spectacle? Are crappy pressure-cooker bombs the mark of a prideful organization that once commandeered 4 jet planes and piloted 3 of them into major landmarks?

We don't yet know who the Boston bomber is or even whether it's bomber or bombers. Using McArdle's reasoning, one wonders who fixates on the Boston Marathon. Do the people in Abbottabad care about our lengthy footraces? And why target the spectators? Or was the first bomb, planted in the spectators, supposed to make the runners run toward the second bomb? That's an evil trick, but hardly anything that seen from the other side of the globe could look like glory.

"Wait, I thought people had a 'right to die'..."

"... so why is preventing suicide a reason for gun control? Oh, who am I kidding — at the NYT, anything is a good reason for gun control."

Since most of the gun deaths are suicides, you'd have to throw away your best statistics if you didn't count suicides. But then they never stop to wonder how many of those suicides were people who felt an uncontrollable murderous urge. What if Adam Lanza had only shot himself? We'd never know what horrible plan he'd left unfulfilled.

The Sandy Hook massacre should "force us to confront yet again the ways in which ever more of our lives are lived on a screen, in the cloud, via our computers and phones and tablets...."

Says Michael S. Rosenwald, noting that:

Except for using the bathroom and eating his meals, getting a haircut was just about the only thing Lanza couldn’t do online.

Adam Lanza got haircuts, went to the bathroom, and ate food. Are we not forced to confront yet again our eating of food, getting of haircuts, and going to the bathroom?

[Lanza] seems to have found “an illusion of companionship without the demands of friendship”.... Lanza didn’t need to trek out into his town....

Shop owners in tightknit Newtown didn’t know him, I think, because he had no reason to know them. Amazon could deliver anything he wanted to his door by the next day.

The time we spend shopping is in decline.... The local stores we once loved visiting have been replaced by UPS drivers we rarely see....

Now, it's a problem that we don't spend enough time schlepping around at the mall? The cashiers at The Gap and Banana Republic were supposedly keeping us minimally socialized? Or is it that "tightknit Newtown" had shop owners who reinforced the social structure of the picture-book town — kinda like Mr. Gower, the drugstore man, in "It's a Wonderful Life"...

"We can’t go out and lock up all the socially awkward young men in the world..."

"But we have to try to prevent the unpredicted."

Says a psychiatrist quoted in a WaPo article titled "Predicting violence is a work in progress."

The photos at the link — a line-up of Jared Lee Loughner, James Holmes and Adam Lanza — create the impression that you can tell by looking at them, especially at their eyes. But if you look long enough, you'll see the 3 men are quite different. Only Loughner is smiling. One may sense that madness radiates out of his face, but if you can exclude what you know — that's a photo taken after his shooting spree — he may seem like a fairly ordinary guy. Holmes's face, especially stuck between those other 2, looks open — even empathetic — and sad. Lanza looks abnormal, like an alien. The oddness is enhanced by knowing that this isn't a mug shot like the other 2. Is that his driver's license pic? It's hard to believe — in this age of digital photography — that a picture that came out that bad wouldn't be trashed. If I were diagnosing Lanza from that photograph, I'd say his problem was anorexia. What that boy needs is cheeseburger*... and a better haircut.

An analysis of 20 studies published three years ago found that schizophrenia increased the risk of acting violently fourfold in men and even more in women. The risk of schizophrenics committing homicide was 0.3 percent — more than 10 times greater than the average citizen.

What is the risk of serious violence — not just homicide — for schizophrenics who are also young and male? What is the risk for young, male schizophrenics of the paranoid subtype? If we're going to reason from statistics, we need to be able to look at the numbers in different ways. I suspect that the 0.3 figure — which screams you can't just institutionalize schizophrenics — is massively diluted by including large numbers of females, over 30s, and the nonparanoid subtypes (disorganized, catatonic, undifferentiated, and residual).

Back to the WaPo article:

John Monahan, a University of Virginia psychologist... and many others came up with a constellation of “risk factors” and “protective factors” for violent behavior.... [that] the presence of a mental disorder as only a small contributor to risk, outweighed by other factors such as age, previous violent acts, alcohol use, impulsivity, gang membership and lack of family support.

Gang membership? Now, you've got a list of factors that's off the subject of mental illness and more about a young male's social context.

“From our research, we could quickly distinguish between a patient whose chance of being violent was 1-in-10 from one whose was 1-in-2,” [Monahan] said.

Some statistics skepticism: he's saying "violent," not homicide or even serious violence.

[A British Medical Journal analysis found that of] the people predicted to “violently offend,” 41 percent did. Of those predicted to be nonviolent, 91 percent were. In practical terms, that meant that if authorities used the tools for the purposes of public health, they’d have to detain two people to prevent one from becoming violent.

That is patently defective reasoning. Where did they draw the line in scoring individuals using their set of factors? Show me how the factors were scored and who ended up being violent. Why have you simply divided people into 2 groups? Look at different subsets within the predicted-to-be-violent group with the highest scores. For example, if you break out 10% of them, the predicted-to-be-violent ones with the highest scores, what percentage of them went on to commit acts of serious violence? If that approaches 100%, then the "practical terms" about the fairness of detention would look entirely different.
________________________________

*Adam Lanza was a vegan — "He didn't want to hurt animals."

"The liberal news and culture website Slate published an online map Friday that it says will show a 'daily tally of gun-deaths in America'..."

"... basing that tally on incidents collected by an anonymous Twitter user. The organization, however, won’t say who is behind the tweets or how reliable its data is as a statistical compilation."

Gun deaths? So... just mix in the accidents and the suicides. Now, personally, as you may know from previous discussions on this blog, I think suicide is murder. Morally, it should be recognized as the deliberate killing of a human being. But many people withhold moral judgment and express only sadness and sympathy. I am sympathetic when the self-killer is mentally ill, but I'm also sympathetic when those who murder others are mentally ill.

But what's with grouping self-murder and murder of others for the purposes of Slate's gun-death map? It's a great way to boost the numbers. Google statistics, and I think you'll see that in the United States, there are twice as many suicides as murders, and that proportion is also true within the category of gun deaths. Shooting oneself is the most common method of suicide.

I realize some people think that there would be less suicide if people didn't have guns at hand. But I wonder how many of the mentally disturbed/emotionally overwrought men who shoot themselves to death are self-executors — that is, persons who feel a compulsion toward violence and stop themselves. There are murderers — like Adam Lanza — who murder and then kill themselves. There is no sympathy for these suicides, yet many people think: I wish he'd killed himself first.

If he had, it probably wouldn't have made the news, but if you'd read his story, you would have reacted the way you usually do to suicide: How sad... if only he'd perceived that suicide is a permanent solution to a temporary problem... whatever it is you usually think when you read that an isolated, bullied 20-year-old man has shot himself in the head. Would you ever think to speculate that he knew that he had an irresistible, evil impulse to gun down children, and, thank God, he had one last shred of humanity and turned the gun on himself?

Gun deaths. You can collect them on a map as faceless pins, all looking alike. It's all numbers. No individuality. What are you counting? I don't know what these pins represent. Use a different color for suicides. And which suicides are uncontrolled mental illness? Who is checking out because of uncontrolled physical pain? Identify the justified killings, done in self-defense. I want to know which ones are criminals gunning down other criminals. I'd like to think about policy with some complexity and without irrational fear mongering.

Ironically, Slate seems to want to inspire urgency about the loss of human life, but it is reducing the lives we're supposed to care so much about to a bunch of dots who matter only because they're a massive crowd. Where is the individuality? There is particularity to each death, despite the common element of the gun.