Rhetorical violence

Imagine a stupid wingnut columnist whacking a human face with a two-by-four- forever.

Yay for McMegan! That actually reads like she’s sorry she said it. Still, given her history, she ought to be more sympathetic to people who get a little carried away with the rhetoric.

Chait’s error was a writer’s error – he picked a vivid metaphor in an instance where more boring language would have been more appropriate. If he had suggested that Kinsley eviscerated or annihilated Mankiw’s argument, that would have been a more trite use of language, but also a phrasing that would have been less unpleasantly graphic.

It cracks me up that McMegan professes to not know which sort of blogs are nastier in their language, not being a reader of conservative blogs, but she is somehow nonetheless sure that conservative blogs are about the same as liberal ones.

So we have the convenient ignorance and the self-contradiction that are McMegan’s trademarks. However, I think reasonable people have to admit, given mw@3, that her trademark hypocrisy is not highlighted here.

Who says that stringing bankers up on lamp posts is funny? It’s not supposed to be. Although I have to admit the thought of, to randomly choose someone, Sarkozy being publicly guillotined makes me smile.

Also: apparently NY prep schools or Harvard don’t teach what a metaphor is. Next up for McArdle: outrage that anyone would call bringing additional pass rushers a “Blitz”.

Also in that apology she says she was in her mid-twenties. Which she was, if one’s mid-20s extend from the day after one’s 20th birthday to the day before one’s 30th (she was 29 when she committed that “youthful indiscretion”).

I find the curb stomping expression is bad taste, but on the other hand, I quite like the pyramids of supply sider skulls outside the Heritage Office.

Don’t know what to make of it, either.

Indeed. What’s the point?

It may indeed be passé to keep pointing out that a manifest idiot continues to be a manifest idiot. Again, what’s the point?

I thought it had been long established that McArdle simply didn’t realize 2x4s were made of wood, and was imagining protesters being comically whacked with baguettes.

Ian Tomlinson meets her revised and extended definition of what she meant.

Uncle Kvetch:
Susan of Texas is right. Especially for those Glibertarians that work for the know think tanks. Is it any wonder they always write about economic issues and not law and order issues(except for Radley Balko)?

“Do you know what happens when you” don’t “try to push past the police barriers? You get into a brawl with the cops, is what.”

Just don’t protest, except quietly in your house, and you never know who is watching you there.

I’ll agree there seems to be no difference in manner between bludgeoning by 2×4 and curb-stomping, but the difference in degree saves Megan from hypocrisy. As egregious as inflicting head injuries with blunt objects obviously is, curb-stomping is an horrific act of particular barbarity that, once witnessed, will haunt the you for a lifetime. I suspect Megan’s response was in reaction to some image of curb-stomping, either remembered or imagined, that thoroughly nauseated her.

Whoops. McArdle only apologized in 2008 for her 2003 rhetoric, and only then after having apparently been given a lot of crap about it. So I have to retract the benefit of the doubt I gave McArdle in comment #4.

(It is an iron rule of the Internets that any time you give McArdle the benefit of the doubt, you end up regretting it. I really thought I had found the exceptional case here.)

@30: Though I am inclined to agree that Megan McArdle frequently seems completely unconcerned with the facts, because she believes that they simply must conform to her a priori beliefs, I don’t see (i) where that separates her from many, many other bloggers or (ii) what that has to do with the original post here at Crooked Timer (McArdle isn’t factually wrong in her statement about rather horrific blogosphere rhetoric).

“a propos of the fact that everyone I know in New York is a) more frightened than they’ve been since mid-September 2001 ”

This bit’s always puzzled me. Granted, while I grew up in the Bronx, I was living in Poughkeepise in ’01 and Philadelphia in ’03, so I don’t have an especially firm basis for comparison either way … but were there actually a lot of New Yorkers terrified by … what? a new, pre-emptive terrorist attack before/when the war began? surely not the peace march? She does specify that she’s talking about “everyone [she] knows”, but is even that credible, or were they all early versions of the gentleman she met on the DC bus recently who provided such a helpful quote?

(I’m assuming “no”, “probably not”, and “all signs point to yes”, but am willing to be corrected …)

PhilaJester said: “As egregious as inflicting head injuries with blunt objects obviously is, curb-stomping is an horrific act of particular barbarity that, once witnessed, will haunt the you for a lifetime.”

I agree completely. I’m usually pretty happy with metaphoric violence (and ‘smack with a two-by-four’ to me is totally mundane language, although her exact wording strikes me as somewhat more threatening by calling on the reader to actually imagine the violence). But ever since I learned what curb-stomping refers to I can’t stand the way people of my acquaintance (college-age males) will use it casually. “Oh man we totally got curb-stomped at Halo the other night!” etc. Just thinking of the concept, having never even seen the movie, damn near gives me nightmares.

LassLisa, McArdle’s 2×4 was only metaphorical in the sense that it stood for some other unambiguously literal act of violence (or to be precise, was a metonym for a more general category of violent acts) that she imagined, clearly with relish, would happen to the renegade protester.

Whereas I can only guess that not everyone is aware that Michael Kinsley, the protagonist of Chait’s ostensibly-violent ostensible tableau, is battling Parkinson’s disease, and was terminally mild-mannered even beforehand? Because, if you know that, it’s pretty obvious that Chait was stretching for a less-commonly used expression than, say ‘smacks down’ or ‘slices and dices’, and not attempting to create a mental image of Kinsley, American History X-style, literally curb-stomping a conservative economics professor.

I don’t think that she is a deliberately malign or evil person, and she has been perfectly pleasant on the occasions when I have met her.

Have these conjuncts anything to do with one another? I’m sure she’s quite pleasant in person—I’ve even been within mere feet of her person and my soul is intact. I agree that she probably doesn’t act under the title of malignity or evil, but if that’s all it takes not to be deliberately evil, the only villains are supervillains.

Jonathan, evisceration is pretty blood curdling, too, but everybody understands that when you eviscerate somebody’s argument, when you slice it to ribbons, when you stomp it to death, you’ve done no actual violence, nor have you advocated violence. I agree that Chait chose an unnecessarily unpleasant image to make his point, but McMegan’s critique – that Chait debases the debate through his violent imagery – is absurd. It was – arguably – an ill-chosen phrase, but nothing more.

Meanwhile, Henry cited a situation where McArdle openly advocated violence against actual human beings. Even McArdle has acknowledged that her language was inappropriate. So, in the context that Henry presents, her taking offense at violence being done to an argument is rank hypocrisy.

However, she practices a kind of writing and journalism which is the closest unconscious approximation to Harry Frankfurt’s version of bullshit that I have ever seen (I don’t think she cares whether she is right on the facts or not, because she deeply and truly believes that she is correct in some Platonic sense). This results in some genuinely pernicious writing

BINGO!!! Got it in one. I try not to get sucked in, but every so often like her “my calculator doesn’t go up another 10” post I have to linger and comment on the carnage.

Megan’s problem is two-fold: first, she is – I firmly believe – functionally innumerate. Literally, not figuratively. Which is not necessarily a bad thing, and a lot of perfectly fine and pleasant and capable people suffer the same lack. Where she really falls down is that, like a lot of innumerates, she doesn’t realize the numbers are important. That’s where the Platonism comes in, because for her, the numbers merely support the argument. That they actually are the argument is, for her, inconceivable.

Of course, the very scary thing here is that a lot of our so-called elites seem to be innumerate in just this way as well . . .

Sebastian, since when does “civil disobedience”–McArdle’s own words–involve violence?

Hominds. k. Hominids.

I’m pretty sure that when she talks about “civil disobedience, Lenin style” that is difficult to read as equivalent to “peaceful opposition”.

Her sentiment is plenty attackable enough without creating a straw man worse than what she actually said.

In the very quote you use, Sebastian, you can see that she’s explicitly including not only violent protesters, and not just those who destroy property, but also those who simply march without permission. This would include, among others, the annual NYC Dyke March, or the Critical Mass rides. Legitimate targets for beatings?

Non-violent protest is not always polite or convenient. That’s sort of the point, sometimes. But that doesn’t make it violent, nor does it make violence against it ok.

“and, yes, I am happy to call it a killing, a perfectly proper term for a perfectly proper act — was a slow throttling,”

While Volokh’s approval of the method is, at least to me, disgusting, (as is, to me, any form of capital punishment) that “slow throttling” is not some Iranian specially invented form of hanging. It’s been the standard form of it throughout the ages.

http://www.capitalpunishmentuk.org/hanging2.html

Pierrepoint makes the point in his memoirs that those hung by himself (ie, the Brits) at Nuremburg got the calculated long drop and the broken neck. Those by the Americans, the standard short drop and, dependent upon their height/weight, either that broken neck or that “slow throttling”.

Henry —

I can understand why you keep trying to change the subject given your original post, but it doesn’t help your cause. You attempted to play “gotcha” by selectively editing McArdle’s post (excluding the setup in which the protestors initiate violence), failed to note she had apologized and withdrawn the sentiment years ago (“I shouldn’t have written it, full stop. No excuses,”), and then after your omission was noticed, continued to quote selectively from her seven-year-old comment thread. (No, you didn’t “paraphrase fairly” — as reading the rest of that comment thread would have made clear.) This is not behavior that suggests you’re trying to make a point in good faith. That other people, whether friends of mine or yours, may have said objectionable things in other contexts is beside the point.

JHA

Sebastian 10.26.10 at 6:58 am

“I’m pretty sure that when she talks about “civil disobedience, Lenin style” that is difficult to read as equivalent to “peaceful opposition”.”

Tell me – WTF is “civil disobedience, Lenin style”?

Raven beat me to it.

Henry —

Yes, I do deny it. That is not a fair characterization of her position as she explained it throughout the comment thread. Not only did you edit out the set-up in her original post — the allegedly peaceful protester “opening a can of whup-ass on some Korean vegetable stand” — but you also ignore her other statements making clear she was talking about more than simply disobeying the police. As she wrote later in the thread: “The police will be forming a wall around the protesters. Breaching the barrier will require knocking over police, at which time, said knockers will get hit. Their friends will jump in, and it’s “Pound the Police for Peace!” The police will win. The events are entirely predictable, and no, I don’t approve.” Physically pushing past a police barrier is not the same as “simply trying to go where the police don’t want you to go — legally or otherwise — and McArdle made clear that she was drawing this distinction several times in the thread.

I can’t believe I’m participating in the Most Tedious Argument Ever (which blogger has more rhetorical blood on their hands?), but McArdle thought ignoring police orders implied violence, not that ignoring police orders justified treating protestors as though they were violent. In other words, if you and McArdle were walking down the street and saw a bunch of protestors ignoring police orders in a non-violent manner, you would disagree about whether the sight was surprising, but agree that the police shouldn’t beat them up.

But honestly, you think McArdle wants to see cops whaling on nonviolent protestors? Allow me to join the chorus of shocked delicate sensibilities in this discussion by saying that seems a bit uncharitable.

Her sentiment is plenty attackable enough without creating a straw man worse than what she actually said.

Sebastian, “pre-emptive” is not a straw man. It doesn’t matter how she describes the opposition: she thinks you should march up to them, assume their intent, and brain them before they enact their nefarious plans.

Looks to me like what she is saying is that if rioters come to my place of business and try to wreck it, I am going to defend my business and myself rom them with a 2×4. Seems foolish to me, if rioters come to my home and attempt to harm me, I am going to use a .45, much more effective.

You do understand the difference between meeting words with violence, and meeting violence with violence don’t you? One is justifiable, and one is not.

In fairness to McArdle, she was so overwhelmed with conservative snuff-porn in Iraq and Afghanistan back then that she renamed her shower nozzle ‘MOAB.’

Whether conservatives get off on political violence because of their distaste for democracy, or vice versa, remains a ‘chicken and egg’ kind of question.

dsquared —

My “more charitable interpretation” would only have a problem with that sentence were it not qualified, elaborated upon and explained in numerous other statements throughout the thread. All sorts of statements create problems for “charitable interpretations” when read out of context.

Henry —

You may have a point about the post that Megan used as her starting point, but that was not the point of your original post, nor your subsequent defenses. You went after her for what she said, not the original post. If you’re going to keep moving the goalposts like that, I don’t think you should accuse others of “playing games.”

JHA

Henry,

If you’re going to add context, then you’ll need to mention the examples of other “peaceful protests” that turned ugly because some of those participating wanted violent confrontations with the police. I can’t frankly believe anyone as intelligent and well-informed as you is not aware that the last thing the authoritarian right and the radical left want to see is civil disobedience.

You support a president who refuses to declare even a temporary moratorium on home foreclosures and yet confess guilt for not attacking Megan often enough?

I used to take you seriously.

Please. Think of change, think of acting in good faith and setting an example. If an exemplary individual such as yourself can’t practice these virtues, what hope is there for the rest of us?

It may seem reasonable to you to make imaginary accusations regarding people’s plans, and then to argue that those people deserve to be beaten up for these plans. It does not appear reasonable to me.

It may not be reasonable, but it’s increasingly popular…

People who want to commit violence are usually eager to interpret nonviolent actions, like walking through a police barricade [whose legitimacy is subject to dispute!] with one’s hands behind one’s back. Pushing past someone is generally not considered ‘violence’ — unless one is looking for an excuse to legally commit an act of violence against the pusher.

Let’s take everything as generously as possible for a moment, taking it as given that: McArdle apologized for her blood lust, and retracted the statements in which she exhibited her blood lust, and acknowledged her blood lust to be categorically inappropriate. Even conceding all that, it doesn’t erase the fact that she exhibited palpable blood lust. Which is really scary.

Conversely, as much as I may emphatically protest the choice of words in saying person A “curb stomped” person B’s argument — along with everyone else, mind you; I haven’t noticed anyone defending that choice of words as appropriate or even as acceptable discourse, here, which is heartening — that does not exhibit blood lust.

Physically pushing past a police barrier is not the same as “simply trying to go where the police don’t want you to go

Really? I’ve “pushed” past police barriers before, in the sense that I’ve walked through them with my hands clasped behind my back. I did this because I was simply trying to go where the police didn’t want me to go. The barrier was illegitimate and there was no law authorizing the use of the barrier. (Oh, and I wasn’t reacted to with violence, either. The police questioned me respectfully but tersely, and I answered their questions civilly but tersely, and that was that. No violence necessary, though perhaps they had a bit of excuse to pound me as McArdle would have wanted.)

Their friends will jump in, and it’s “Pound the Police for Peace!”

This prediction is insane, completely disassociated from what actually happens in these situations, and it worries me that you’re endorsing it.

Henry,

Stating explicitly that you’re being misquoted or that your words are being taken out of context isn’t a qualification, it’s a claim. Megan asks us to read her post and yours and judge who’s being mean-spirited and leading readers astray. The evidence is unequivocal. You’re preaching to a particular choir, rather than engaging in fair-minded debate.

You’re welcome to assert that Megan’s past record justifies venality, but if that’s the approach you’re going to take, then shouldn’t you at least state clearly that you don’t believe she deserves the benefit of the doubt? I mean, that is your real position, isn’t it?

The left is about to twist itself into knots as the enormity of your collective blunders takes shape. I’ve always found you eloquent, opinionated, passionate, and intelligent. I’d hate to think you’ve joined the only way we can win is to take the low-road Dems like Grayson and Conway. And, yes, I think the politics of the moment very much informs your attack on Megan.

Anyway, you’ll have plenty of substance to criticize when the Republicans replace your party in week or so. Voters expected good governance. What they got was sneers and smears.

You can offer far more.

@43–for added context, note that when the arbitrary torture policies of a Republican administration were involved, the mystery author claimed to find the whole subject too unpleasant to even discuss.

Anyway, you’ll have plenty of substance to criticize when the Republicans replace your party in week or so.

Actually, the party in the White House nearly always loses seats in the legislature in mid-term elections. The impending losses are hardly a turning point in history (demographics and a failure to adapt are grinding conservatives to death in the long term) or a referendum on the Democrats. Obama and his party still poll higher nationally than the party that’s about to maybe take the House.

And, judging from what Republicans have been saying about their plans for the future, it would be foolish to expect “substance” from them.

Voters expected good governance. What they got was sneers and smears.

Death panels. Birth certificates. ACORN. Teleprompters. “Czars.” Waterloo.

I’m sorry, you were saying?

So Jonathan, you figure it’s pretty much a coincidence that McArdle was linking approvingly to, and elaborating on, that repugnant post? Just a lucky guess by Henry that there was something like this behind her words?

I can sympathize. In this very thread, because I read quickly and carelessly, I got sucked into the momentary illusion that McArdle was apologizing in good faith. I forgot the Iron Rule of Reading McArdle: It’s always bullshit.

I’d still be curious to understand what you think McArdle meant by “pre-emptively” whacking folks with a 2-by-4.(Emphasis hers in the original, curiously omitted in the “apology”).

And gosh, what about this, where she explains in her “apology” why she got carried away:

because I’m a lifelong New Yorker who lost a lot of people in the towers, including the first boy I dated in college, and I’d just finished up working at Ground Zero, aka The Pit. I was more than a tad overemotional at the thought of my city getting another dose of random ideological violence.

I mean, that’s repugnant on its face, right? Suggesting that anti-war protesters are capable of “another dose of random violence” like the 9-11 attacks. Even in 2003 that would be loathsome, but remember, she’s writing this in 2008 and casting it as an apology.

The Valentine’s Day March on Manhattan in 2003? That’s what this debate is all about? I went to that demonstration. Our bus left Cleveland State University late Friday evening and arrived in New York City early Saturday morning. The protest was an entirely boring event, aside from the Salvadoran butcher who held out a recently slaughtered chicken for our curious inspection as the bus circled the neighborhood in Queens prior to parking at Shea Stadium. We took the subway from Queens to Grand Central Station and milled around Manhattan for several hours. The police were out in force, but the sheer number of people who descended upon the city that day precluded any possibility of provocation, if any had been anticipated. Entire families, from grandparents to grandchildren, attended the event. The coffee shops and fast food outlets racked up land sale profits and quickly exhausted their inventory. By midafternoon, I returned to Queens and slept on the bus for the rest of the day. As usual, the media lowballed the number of people who went there to protest the Bush administration’s impending invasion of Iraq.

McArdle’s fervent desire to witness our poetic punishment never quite occurred, although the Bush administration did indeed decide to invade Iraq which, I must assume, did provide her with some minimal modicum of consolation.

I mean, that’s repugnant on its face, right? Suggesting that anti-war protesters are capable of “another dose of random violence” like the 9-11 attacks.

Repugnant, I guess, but also cliché. Conservative denunciations of the opposition ranged from claiming they were the moral equivalent of the terrorists to saying they were operationally cooperative. McArdle is stuck in her 2003 mode even now.

McArdle is stuck in her 2003 mode even now.

After all, it’s what led to the cushy gig she has now. Why change your shtick if it’s still working? I don’t blame her as much as I blame a once great magazine for giving its pages over to a bunch of dishonest hacks.

“She described someone getting clubbed for engaging in “civil disobedience,” not violence”

No. She described someone getting clubbed for engaging in “civil disobedience, Lenin style”. That would be the Lenin who led the October Revolution. The metaphor may not be brilliant or original, but it isn’t opaque enough to be translated as “peaceful”.

The metaphor may not be brilliant or original, but it isn’t opaque enough to be translated as “peaceful”.

Actually, conservative comparisons of anyone to the left of themselves with the Soviet Union (which apparently had “Czars,” according to FOX News) had already become so common and inapt, to the point of absurdity, that I had long since ceased to try and interpret them as having anything approaching meaning. Near as I can tell, “Lenin-style” in this context is a very lazy McArdle painting a picture of a scruffy and misled radical, as in an organization with the suffix “Marxist/Leninist,” which connotes a rigid, top-down hierarchy, not running into the winter palace, standing on tables, and waving little bits of paper at each other.

Are you saying McArdle expected peace protesters to engage in the violent overthrow of the US government? That’s almost weird enough to be true.

But, the polemical abuse of words to the point of meaninglessness, not to mention McArdle’s sense of entitlement to not need to know much of anything, suggests that an exact translation into sentient speech will elude us forever.

But yes, she does lump on “pre-emptive” at the end in what seems like convulsive frottage.

I’m with you that she probably didn’t understand what she was writing, but I’ll take what she wrote and curb stomp it.

I really don’t understand what the argument is supposed to be here. It’s well established that McArdle is a strong supporter of war, torture and the curtailment of civil liberties. That’s not at issue. Are we really supposed to believe that, in this particular interest, she set aside all of her other despicable beliefs in order to pen a passionate cri de coeur because of her legitimate fear of violent left-wing protesters whom she believed would attack the police and Korean shopkeepers and take over the government in order to impose a Bolshevik regime? Because that’s what it seems like the rightists here are arguing. And that’s absurd. McArdle was clearly, unequivocally advocating mob violence and police brutality against anti-war protesters. Why? Because it earns her money and notoriety. Simple as that.

So, I’ve been banned from the Zero Dimensional Chess thread for talking about political capital and the press, but people are still up there yammering on about a coming monarchy?

WTF happened to this blog?

McArdle is a cog in the Republican noise machine (a term we don’t use nearly enough any more). That machine produces a wide range of sounds, from virtually inaudible dog whistles to the deep crescendo roar of overt race hatred.

McArdle’s own sound is a genteel, self-satisfied burble. She’s nice but no nonsense, friendly but firm, no intellectual but full of common sense. Her target audience is young adults like herself– upper middle class college grads who are anxious about making their way in the world and don’t quite acknowledge all the help they get from mom and dad. These are people who like to be told that everything they have is the result of their own hard work and that the world is just about as fair as any world could possibly be. Logic and reason have nothing to do with her appeal – it’s all about the sound. Although the range of her instrument is limited, she plays it well and with plenty of energy.

So yes, of course she’s amiable in social situations. Her place in the machine requires a person who’s amiable. She’s not an overt asshole like Andrew Breitbart or Ann Coulter, because her sliver of the target audience isn’t resentful and angry.

So please, Henry, don’t tell us again what a pleasant person McArdle was when you met her at a party.

PS – the difference between a liberal and a conservative is like the difference between a a rhetorical curb stomp and a genuine one – http://tpmdc.talkingpointsmemo.com/2010/10/new-footage-emerges-of-moveon-activist-stomped-by-rand-paul-supporter-video.php?ref=fpblg

Do you think there’s even one person who was inclined to take her seriously, but won’t after being reminded of this post from seven years ago?

A positive result is that she gave this space over at The Atlantic where her editors once again get another shot at deciding whether or not she’s a fool (if that matters to them).

No, she can’t be read as saying that she is justifying attacking non-violent political opponents

If you pre-emptively attack someone, how can we know they were violent? These are Schrödinger’s Leninists?

As for “weak grounds,” suggesting that folks should beat up protesters (so Megan can laugh), and that said protesters are the equivalent of the 9/11 terrorists strike me as a pretty target-rich environment of sadistic and anti-democratic puling.

Truly, she will not be satisfied until all of us are dead.

Sebastian, I’ll respond thusly and then let you have the last word–

She doesn’t say that WALKING through a police barricade is violence. She says that forcing through it is.

Okay, then let’s be clear. I assert that I have “forced” my way through a police barricade before, at least twice in my life.^1^ You can’t just “walk” through a barricade. This is because it is a barricade. It prevents human beings, as well as other creatures, from walking through.

In order to make one’s way through a barricade, you need to move it, or some piece of it, which, in McMegan’s strained language, constitutes “forcing” your way through. “Forcing” your way through a crowd or barricade (which I’ve done) or even through the row of gallant shielded SWAT team cops standing shoulder to shoulder in McMegan’s fantasy scenario (something I have not done) is not inherently violent. Period.^2^ If you say this act is inherently violent, then there’s really nothing we can do to communicate with one another.

There is the side issue that McMegan seems to think cops at rallies, and barricades and etc, look and act the same way that an anti-prison-break SWAT task force looks and operates. She seems to envision a scene from a movie: rows of cops standing shoulder to shoulder, advancing with riot shields, bottles and rocks thrown from the crowd at their heads, etc.

When that sort of thing happens in real life at a rally as opposed to general rioting, it’s usually the police who are taking the offensive, illegitimately and immorally, with protesters engaging in self-defense (insofar as they engage at all: Dr. Martin Luther King, for one, advocated for protesters to not engage in self-defense, to highlight the injustice of police brutality).

Probably McMegan is thinking of riots. Probably she finds this satisfying. Hell yes, she shot the burglar! Hell yes, she curb stomped the rioter! She broke all his teeth out! And she’d do it again! With glee and thrill! This is what McMegan envisions as the “small-town mentality”:

This is “violence against vandals”, and I’m afraid I have a small-town, hell-yes-I-shot-the-burglar attitude about things like that.

Hell yes, she’d cheer the police on in acts of brutality. Arrest them and try them in a court of law for breaking property? Eff that, just “shoot” them instead. The (alleged) vandals apparently have it all coming to them, right?

^1^In both cases, I suppose I was engaging in civil disobedience. Sadly, neither time was it for some glorious cause. Note that in one of the two cases, the police didn’t much care; the barricade existed mostly to direct the flow of traffic [a legitimate goal], not to categorically prevent access. In the other incident, the police seemed to be a little bit conflicted about what their goal was, and there was a bit more verbal altercation — nothing hostile, just terse words back and forth (some questions about what the group I was traveling with was planning to do). In both cases I feel the police response to my/our malfeasance was appropriate, proportional, morally just, and mildly irritating.

In this context “forced” means “moved one or more objects and/or people with my body as I passed it, in order to pass” — but had I been beaten up by unreasonable cops instead of mildly talked-to by reasonable cops, I might easily have been reported as having “forced” my way through their barricade.

^2^Of course, if someone forced their way through a crowd or barricade or whatever by swinging punches at anyone within swinging distance, that would be violent. That’s also not what happens, not in these contexts. Granted, that’s invariably what the police say happened whenever they pummeled someone to the Earth, because [a] it makes them look better, and [b] it gives people like McMegan the chance to applaud, and enjoy applauding, and rerun the videotape through their mind when they, smiling, lie down for the night.^3^ But it’s truthiness, not truth. It’s interpreting things like “he bumped shoulders with me as he tried to slip past” as “he bull rushed me.” It’s crazy.

^3^Call this poetic license, if you like. Sometimes it’s necessary to highlight just how sick some people are, and a world where Saw 3D is a blockbuster is a world which requires a bit of poetic extension to make the damn point clear.

Sorry, away from the internet for a bit. That video is chilling and very bad. If we want to allow the democratic traditions, even such as they are, to continue, we can’t let violence against non-violence become a norm. This is one of those few moments where a politician can choose to make strong statements and take strong action, or not, and it appears that Rand Paul has failed his only real test. (Or at least we can hope it will be his only real test).

For the record, one minor quibble with how Bloix summarized what I said: I have no specific knowledge of who might or might not have been an official Rand Paul campaign operative, much less any knowledge of who was acting in their official capacity. Therefore, change the phrase Rand Paul campaign operative to person, in the above, and IMO it sums up the situation pretty well. There was clearly coordination, in the sense of people agreeing to act responsively, before they acted — hell, the tail end of that coordination should be caught on one of the videos, if someone can find one with the audio not news-over’d — I guess it’s debatable whether the individuals genuinely believed Lauren was threatening the physical safety of Rand Paul, or knew she was just protesting. I’m not aware of any silver bullet evidence that proves the specific beliefs of the folks involved, though it seems obvious enough to me that they knew Lauren was not a physical-safety threat. Furthermore, she was clearly subdued before Tim stomped on her, so the stomping has no relevance to whether Lauren was a physical-safety threat.

I have no knowledge of how things have developed in terms of ongoing police work (other than what I obtained via TPM) but I would be very surprised to learn the FBI has taken no interest in the incident. Still, hopefully Lauren and/or someone at moveon.org is aware of this 18 USC Sec. 241, because I agree that they should have a reasonable case for FBI involvement.

The concept of “preemptive” is of course at the core of the (near-) universally reviled idea of eugenics as well as the (not-so-universally-reviled) idea of preemptive warfare. Bashing the head in of someone who might (but in all probability won’t) do something permanently destructive to life and property is certainly “preemptive,” but only to the extent that executing those with presumably bad genes is a “good idea.” (Apologies to Godwin.)