"It was devastating to read a false accusation that I had anything to do with murder. I felt powerless – that I was up against Goliath. The people were David. I was David...."

"When you know lies are told about you...that causes some stress. Hard to get a good night’s sleep.... The New York Times, the be all and end all, the loud voice in the media, had… taken a knee-jerk reaction and tried to score political points, trying to politicize horrific violence." 

Sarah Palin testified, quoted in "Palin calls New York Times the ‘Goliath’ in libel dispute" (AP).

"Any future references to this talking point by politicians or political groups will receive Four Pinocchios."

The WaPo Fact Checker lets the NYT off with a warning in "The bogus claim that a map of crosshairs by Sarah Palin’s PAC incited Rep. Gabby Giffords’s shooting."

"By definition, killers like Tsarnaev are sociopathic and essentially dead inside."

"Consciously or subconsciously, they long for death. The State then rewards them by giving them the death penalty. I say, make him suffer; he deserves it. Make him live out his natural life in a cell, with no chance of freedom."

That's the top-rated comment at the NYT article "Boston Is Eager to Begin Marathon Bombing Trial, and to End It." The evidence of Dzhokhar Tsarnaev's guilt is overwhelming. The only point of going to trial is to determine whether he'll get life in prison without the possibility of parole or the death penalty.

[Tsarnaev's lawyer Judy] Clarke is famous for cutting deals that keep her clients off death row. At some point in the process, her clients — including Theodore Kaczynski, the Unabomber; Eric Rudolph, the Olympic Park bomber; and Jared L. Loughner, who killed six people in an assassination attempt on former Representative Gabrielle Giffords — pleaded guilty in exchange for a sentence of life in prison, with no chance of parole.

So far, Clarke has failed to get that deal for Tsarnaev.

Should the government give Tsarnaev the deal he seeks?

No. He deserves death.

No. We should see the full scale trial, with a jury deciding whether he deserves death.

Yes. He was very young and manipulated by his brother. Death is too harsh.

Yes. He deserves death, but the death penalty is morally wrong.

Yes. He deserves death, but deny him the drama and the sympathy that come with trial and execution.

pollcode.com free polls

ADDED: If you can't see buttons for voting in the poll, go here.

"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").

"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."

"Mr. Loughner, for the first and last time, you are going to hear directly from Gabby and me about what you took away on January 8th, 2011..."

"... and, just as important, what you did not. So pay attention."

... Mr. Loughner, by making death and producing tragedy, you sought to extinguish the beauty of life. To diminish potential. To strain love. And to cancel ideas. You tried to create for all of us a world as dark
 and evil as your own.

 But know this, and remember it always: You failed....

Even amid all that was lost, Gabby and I give thanks for her life, her spirit, and her intellect, which are a continued force in this world despite what you’ve done....

Mr. Loughner, pay close attention to this: Though you are mentally ill, you are responsible for the death and hurt you inflicted upon all of us on January 8th of last year. You know this. Gabby and I know this.

 Everyone in this courtroom knows this.

You have decades upon decades to contemplate what you did. But after today. After this moment. Here and now. Gabby and I are done thinking about you.

After more than a year of forcible medication to treat his schizophrenia, Jared Loughner is found competent and pleads guilty.

He will be sentenced to life in prison without the possibility of parole.

A suggestion for those of you who are tempted to devote time to understanding the psyche of the Aurora massacre madman.

Contemplate the psyche of someone you know and can speak to and relate to in your immediate life.

What if you had known James Eagen Holmes, and you could have interacted with him at a time when you were, in fact, preoccupied reading on-line articles about Anders Behring Breivik, or if you had known Anders Behring Breivik, and you might have spoken with him, reasoned with him, but you were distracted by some intriguing articles about Jared Loughner....

Are you really interested in psychology?

"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.

"Victim of Canadian porn star cannibal is Chinese gay lover as police reveal 'murderer' is on the run in France... dressed as a woman."

A Daily Mail headline. Are you having trouble keeping your cannibals in the news straight? (No pun intended!) I mean there's the porn-related-gay-Chinese-on-the-lam-transvestite guy...

Luka Magnotta, who is suspected of cannibalism, flew from Canada to France a day after placing gruesome footage of the murder on the internet.

Flew? Vampire or zombie? You decide. Anyway, there's that one. There's the naked-in-broad-daylight face-eater. That's Rudy Eugene, not on the lam. Shot dead by the police. And then there's the other one:

Authorities say Alex Kinyua, 21, admitted using a knife to kill and carve up Kujoe Bonsafo Agyei-Kodie, 37, before eating his heart and parts of his brain....

In February, Kinyua posted a question on Facebook, asking fellow students at historically black colleges and universities if they were "strong enough to endure ritual HBCU mass human sacrifices around the country and still be able to function as human beings?"

He referred to the tragic shootings at Virginia Tech and "other past university killings around the country" and warned "ethnic cleansing is the policy, strategy and tactics that will affect you, directly or indirectly in the coming months"....

I wonder if the sane people who engage in racial politics bear some responsibility for the paranoia that arises in weak minds? In fact, I wonder if the people who delight in japing about a zombie uprising bear some responsibility for the crazy people who actually do try to eat brains?

I'm thinking back to the clumsy efforts to assign blame for the Tucson massacre. Some people are insane. But why do they act out their insanity in the particular way that they do? What signals do they pick up and distort? You can't really blame the sane people who talk and distort and lie about things as they operate more or less competently in this place called reality that most of us inhabit. And yet... why are we hearing so much about cannibals these days?

ADDED: I crossed out "Chinese" in the first paragraph of this post. The headline had a few too many words in it for me to absorb. The victim was Chinese, not the cannibal.

"I have these other aspects of my life that no one knows about. I’m an artist. I’m a musician."

"Nobody knows that... They just see me at the guy who tried to kill Reagan.”

In the wake of last year’s shooting of Rep. Gabrielle Giffords by accused gunman Jared Loughner, John Hinckley asked one of his therapists, “Wow. Is that how people see me?”

"He’s not excusing Loughner, just describing what an isolated lifestyle in Arizona can do to people."

"The state ranks 48th among places where 'people trade favors with neighbors' and 45th among places where people eat dinner with their families.... The murders make Arizonans wonder if they’re leading mean, unexamined lives.... Isolation is slowly ruining Arizona, and ruining the rest of the country at a slower pace."

Link.

After all of the criticism of Sarah Palin for using target imagery in some campaign literature...

... it's it interesting to see the National Journal writing like this:

As they form a circular firing squad, Romney stepped back. Rather than engage his GOP opponents, as he's done most of his campaign, he's focused almost entirely on his No. 1 target, President Obama.

Romney has received cover from the primary's unprecedented volatility (at least since 1964), which has sent a bushel of candidates to momentary stardom atop the Republican field only to be torn down weeks later. Attacks from rivals and media scrutiny have followed each of these momentary front-runners...

And it's not as though Romney, his past rooted in blue-state Massachusetts, didn't supply his opponents plenty of ammunition. They have the bullets; they're just not firing them.

IN THE COMMENTS: First, the amusing. Mocks the writing in the National Journal — "This almost veers into Bullwer-Lytton territory" — Henry says "Why not go all the way?" and pens a rewrite:

While one candidate after another disintegrated like a clay pigeon at an English hunting weekend, former Governor Romney, encircled with the barrage balloons of his plastic bonhomie, so easily avoided the strafing attacks of candidates Bachmann and Cain, not to mention the kamikaze crash of Governor Perry, that the artillery spotters of the media could only wonder if their radios were broken: the guns of Sevastopol fire into the sea; the assassins' bullet bounces off the ghost shirt of the Mormon underwear; even the bloody dagger of professional ridicule fails to find the heart and the smiling to-be-tyrant only exclaims, "Gosh Brute, lovely day, wot?"

Second, the serious. Scott M wrote:

I don't know anyone that was taken in by the calls for a new civility after the AZ shootings. It struck me as just so much more "I want to feel good about something so this is what I'm going to say and assume it fixes the world" bullshit.

SGT Ted — noting that my "civility bullshit" tag "speaks for itself" — responded:

It struck me that after the AZ shooting that leftists and Democrat Party leadership were just trying to hang it around Republicans necks, when the shooter was a "leftwing pothead" according to his friends.

SGT Ted, Paco Wové said:

You should check out the Althouse comment threads from that day, for example. It took less than 30 minutes for the blame-orgy to start.

I just went back and read that long — 292 comments long — thread, and it's just appalling. 12 minutes after I put up a simple post — "U.S. Congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords shot, along with at least 11 others, at a political event in Tuscon" — the get-Sarah business started: "Sarah Palin had AZ's 8th district in her gun sights." That came from someone who was taking a distanced attitude about what other people will be saying —"It would be interesting to follow the conversation on teh Internets today...." But soon it was "Remember, the DHS warned us of the rising threat of violent extremism from the political right" and so on, including much push back from commenters who didn't think we should be talking like that.

"As the testimony proceeded, Mr. Loughner rarely made eye contact with others in the courtroom, sometimes peering at the witness out of the corner of his eye."

"For the most part, he remained stone-faced and still in his seat. Every now and then, his eyes would close for extended periods, then pop open when he heard his name mentioned. Dr. Pietz said the defendant was devastated when doctors told him that he was mentally ill. He did not want to believe it, she said."

Jared Loughner has a "strong personal interest in not being forced to suffer the indignity and risk of bodily injury that results from the administration of powerful drugs."

Says the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals panel, extending the ban on forcing psychotropic drugs on the man accused of the Tucson massacre.

Mr. Loughner's attorneys contend that the danger-to-others argument is a ploy to avoid a more stringent Supreme Court requirement that applies when the government wants to forcibly medicate a defendant to restore him to mental competency to stand trial. In May, Mr. Loughner was declared not competent by federal district Judge Larry Burns, who is presiding over the Loughner case. Administering drugs to return a defendant to competence requires a court hearing....

[The court noted] that prison officials have been able to keep Mr. Loughner in custody for over six months since the shootings "without injury to anyone."

"Thank you for the freak show. She died in front of me. You’re treasonous." Jared Loughner yelled....

... just before Judge Larry A. Burns found him incompetent to stand trial.

At his first courtroom appearance shortly after the shootings, Mr. Loughner had his head shaved clean and stood absolutely erect. On Wednesday, his hair was long and sticking out in all directions, he had a scraggly beard and he slumped during the proceedings like an old man. He put his head in his hands for some time just before his outburst, which he shouted at full throttle as the judge was talking.

Paul Krugman says "So, let’s try another shot to the head."

I realize he's talking about a misconception, and he has designated the misconception a "zombie," and according to zombie lore, zombies are destroyed by shooting them in the head. But still. That's quite a violent way to talk about the thoughts in the minds of the people you want to correct.

And it was just last January that Kruman, responding to a terrible shooting, wrote:

So will the Arizona massacre make our discourse less toxic? It’s really up to G.O.P. leaders. Will they accept the reality of what’s happening to America, and take a stand against eliminationist rhetoric? Or will they try to dismiss the massacre as the mere act of a deranged individual, and go on as before?

If Arizona promotes some real soul-searching, it could prove a turning point. If it doesn’t, Saturday’s atrocity will be just the beginning.

"Just a couple of months ago, in the wake of Jared Loughner's shooting of Rep. Gabrielle Giffords, simple talk of 'targeting' a political opponent for defeat was treated as beyond the pale."

"But let's look at some more recent language -- and conduct -- that our bien-pensant punditry can't be bothered to notice, let alone condemn."

Democratic congressman: "Every once and awhile you need to get out on the streets and get a little bloody when necessary."

Rep. Michael Capuano was speaking at the Boston rally in "solidarity" with the Wisconsin protests. Last month, after the Tucson rally, he said: "There's always some degree of tension in politics; everybody knows the last couple of years there's been an intentional increase in the degree of heat in political discourse. . . . If nothing else good comes out of this, I'm hoping it causes people to reconsider how they deal with things."

James Taranto cries hypocrisy, but it's not all that hypocritical. Capuano said there would always be "tension" in politics, that people are intentionally increasing that tension (or "heat"), and that people should think about "how they deal with things." You can read that a lot of ways!

Firing a tenured law professor because he used the dean's name in hypotheticals?

It's hard to guess what the full story is here. (Via Taxprof.) The professor, Lawrence Connell, has, according to this report, authorized his lawyer, Thomas Neuberger, to talk to the press, and the school, Widener, has a confidentiality policy in personnel matters, so we're seeing Connell's version for the most part.

Lawprofs use hypotheticals all the time, and Connell put the name of the dean, Linda Ammons, in "at least 10" hypotheticals depicting her getting shot. Supposedly, "at least two students filed complaints with administrators, calling it violent, racist and sexist." Connell is white; Ammons is black. A letter from the vice dean refers to "an 'outgoing pattern' of misconduct,"* including "cursing and coarse behavior, 'racist and sexist statements' and 'violent, personal scenarios that demean and threaten your colleagues.'"

The linked article has this quote from Gregory F. Scholtz, associate secretary and director of the American Association of University Professors:

"Education is all about pushing the boundaries, and it's all about controversial ideas, but the question always is when does it cross the line... Given our modern culture and the violence that exists, you're really asking for trouble when you talk about killing people."

It looks like Scholtz is channeling some of the unscientific blather that surrounded the Tucson massacre: There's bad speech out there and then bad people do bad things and that's bad.

Look, if you're teaching criminal law, you use hypos that have people doing criminal things. Putting real names in the hypos might be funny or attention-getting or just stupid, but let's not get hysterical. Was the professor advocating that somebody shoot the dean? Obviously, not. Are the students so confused they don't get that? Impossible.

But I can understand how law school bureaucrats feel compelled to make a showing of caring deeply when students — even only 2 students — complain that a professor seems racist. I have seen that happen. It can be hard for the administration to negotiate its way through the maze of academic freedom and student opinion even when it is trying to do everything right and cares only about the appropriate values like intellectual excellence and a favorable "climate" for learning. But who knows what is really going on here? Are the students oversensitive, vindictive, or pursuing an ideological agenda? Is there some distorted notion that any criticism or making fun of the dean is a racial matter?

Neuberger said Kelly and Ammons offered to allow Connell to return to campus if he recanted statements students found offensive and underwent psychiatric evaluation.

That reminds me of the fallout over NPR's firing of Juan Williams — after he said something that made sensitive people feel he might be insufficiently tolerant. Maybe he should talk to his psychiatrist, NPR CEO Vivian Schiller said. It's a distancing move, undercutting serious inquiry into the statements that are being questioned. The statements are no longer anything to engage with, but evidence of the speaker's mental disorder. There are insiders and outsiders, and suddenly the speaker is the outsider, to be talked about, not talked with.

As for "recant[ing] statements students found offensive" — how do you recant a hypothetical? I know how I would recant a hypothetical: with great sarcasm. You know, these little stories I tell in class — vignettes, if you will — they are inventions — sheer flights of fancy. I like to call them hy-po-THET-ick-uhls... 

But Connell refused to recant, "believing it would amount to admitting racism, among other things." This is what happens. It's such a big deal to be accused of racism that it forces a hard-line denial. There's also a political angle here. Connell's lawyer is saying that Dean Ammons "wanted to get rid of a conservative professor." And now the story is out in the legal blogosphere. Instapundit says:

PROFESSOR MAY LOSE TENURE FOR “A pattern of inappropriate speech and behavior.” Wait, I thought that was what tenure was supposed to protect. Of course, it’s at Widener. But with tenure already under attack from education reformers, an object case that it doesn’t actually protect controversial speech would seem to be either valuable, or a dreadful mistake, depending on your perspective.

And now, we'll all talk about it. That link on "Widener" is important, as Glenn connects some dots and puts the school's larger reputation on the line. There aren't too many conservative law professors, but they've got very well-connected power on the internet. Deal fairly with them.

*ADDED: What's an "outgoing pattern"? I've heard of ongoing patterns. Was Connell perky and sociable and racist and sexist all at the same time?