I used to ask Twin Cities media figures why they kept taking the likes of Heather Martens and the “Reverend” Nancy Nord Bence seriously, treating them as legitimate sources on the news, when the leading intellectual lights of Minnesota’s gun control movement burned them so consistently on actual fact.
On a national level, the same question goes.
This is an easy one. Facts be damned, people are looking for an outrage fix. As Theo Dalyrmple put it:
Outrage is a substitute for religion: It convinces us that our existence has some kind of meaning or significance beyond itself, that is to say beyond the paltry flux of day-to-day existence, especially when that existence is a securely comfortable one. Therefore we go looking for things to be outraged about as anteaters look for ants. Of all emotions, outrage is not only one of the most pleasurable but also one of the most reliable.
Note that the core target group of this is left-leaning females (upper class, suburban, white, probably chardonnay), but almost all leftists are are reliable outrage junkies as well. PV rants are textbook examples of leftist outrage.
It seems to me, however, there is also a right-wing analog. Radio hosts like Mark Levin or Michael Savage have a shtick that, to me anyway, seems to act as a reliable source of right-wing outrage.
jdm;
“PV rants are textbook examples of leftist outrage.”
With Emery and his brother EI closely following!
I remember reading about an experiment during my psychology class in college where rats were implanted with an electrode that went to the pleasure center of their brain, then were put in a Skinner box where they could flip a toggle to receive food, or flip another toggle to receive a little pleasure jolt to the brain. The researchers monitored the graph as each button was hit, and suddenly saw the pleasure toggle going off non-stop. Thinking they had a problem with the graphing program they went to check the cage – and saw that the rat being tested had stretched itself out next to the pleasure toggle, with a paw on either side of the switch, and was flipping the switch back and forth non-stop.
That’s kind of how I picture the PV sock-puppets typing.
As noted, however, this is a totally human (and rat-like) condition. As the Trump term began I tried to caution some of my more left-ward friends to pace themselves. I told them I’d had 8 years of constant headlines that “This will put Hillary/Obama in jail for good”, and it will get tiresome. Unfortunately, they couldn’t hear me over all the clicking.
It seems that Thomas Sowell’s proverb about some ideas being so stupid that they’d only be believed on a college campus should be modified to read “some things are so stupid, they can only be believed by the far left in general.” Come to think of it, I remember that as far back as the 1980s–saw a couple of publications of the Wobblies and interacted with Democrats who didn’t think the USSR was that bad. Evidence simply would not penetrate.
There is a glitch in Colorado’s new “red flag” law.
To get around that pesky “due process” thing that Americans generally are in favor of, the law allows for civil enforcement, not criminal enforcement.
This means that if the cops show up to take your gun, you can just say “no” and they will go away and let it grind through the civil courts.
CO sherriffs say they are reluctant to give Red Flaw orders a high priority because they will put officers lives at risk.
Most of these common-sense gone laws don’t work out because they lack common sense.