Genes, Violence, and Testing
The abstract of an article in Molecular Psychiatry entitled Genetic background of extreme violent behavior reads as follows:
In developed countries, the majority of all violent crime is committed by a small group of antisocial recidivistic offenders, but no genes have been shown to contribute to recidivistic violent offending or severe violent behavior, such as homicide. Our results, from two independent cohorts of Finnish prisoners, revealed that a monoamine oxidase A (MAOA) low-activity genotype (contributing to low dopamine turnover rate) as well as the CDH13 gene (coding for neuronal membrane adhesion protein) are associated with extremely violent behavior (at least 10 committed homicides, attempted homicides or batteries). No substantial signal was observed for either MAOA or CDH13 among non-violent offenders, indicating that findings were specific for violent offending, and not largely attributable to substance abuse or antisocial personality disorder. These results indicate both low monoamine metabolism and neuronal membrane dysfunction as plausible factors in the etiology of extreme criminal violent behavior, and imply that at least about 5–10% of all severe violent crime in Finland is attributable to the aforementioned MAOA and CDH13 genotypes.
Now, we are in the early phases of something that will be one day be termed a genetic revolution. Whatever is known about genetic influences on crime (or anything else, for that matter) pales in comparison to what will be known in a couple of decades. We may not be far from the point where a journal article tells us about eighteen, twenty or fifty three genotypes that explain 85% or 90% or 99.9% of all severe violent crime in Finland. So it pays to think about the big questions early.
And this abstract raises one big question: what if we have the tools to detect those most likely to commit the worst of the worst violent crimes? Biology is not destiny, and some percentage of people who have a tendency toward violence (a big percentage? a small percentage?) may have the fortitude or wherewithal not to follow through. Or to avoid getting caught, which legally amounts to the same thing, though not for the victim(s). That makes widespread testing for these traits problematic, particularly if it were mandatory.
On the other hand, if the genetic link with violence turns out to be sufficiently strong, one can imagine situations arising where people formed associations whose membership is based on disclosure of results of tests for specific genetic traits. I’m guessing parents of young children would join en masse. Exactly what those voluntary associations might look like, and whether they could actually exclude those who “failed” or “tested positive” for the wrong thing might be something future courts will be considering. As long as nobody was being coerced, such situations might be deemed legal. All sorts of things seem to be legal depending on the context. For instance, age discrimination is illegal when it comes to jobs, but seems to be perfectly acceptable when it comes to determining who can live in a retirement community.
One additional tidbit of information worth considering. Despite a number of silly articles in the early oughts that violated all semblance of common sense, not to mention some insane drivel coming out of a few corners of academia today, increased levels of testosterone are associated with aggressive behavior. Testosterone, of course, happens to be the primary male sex hormone, and that’s a big part of the reason that in just about every human society, at just about every point in time, males have been the perpetrators of the overwhelming majority of the violence. (It goes for other primates too.)
Anyway, what can, what should, and what will be done may be three separate questions in a few decades. That’s all too far out for me to have a good idea of the shape of what is to come, but it will tremendously affect society and how we live. What are your thoughts?
“genotypes that explain”
As most it will be: genotypes that contribute to chemical imbalances/conditions which are correlated to
My thoughts, since you asked
Massive compulsory Eugenics policies by law “for the public good” which will then morph into all kinds of other Eugenics laws “for the public good” all decided by whomever is in power and what they deem “good”.
Think of all the money saved by not needing police, jails, prison’s putlic defenders and prosecutors to enforce violent crime… that’s the “public good”… with Eugenics we can create a pure “good” society, right? Think “designer babies”. extended a few notches.
Arne,
Your phrasing is more accurate than mine. To provide a limited defense of the wording I provided… I had a thought which I never got into in the post… what if some of the more, er, severe behavioral genetic deviancies are more compulsive than we think? We don’t, for instance, say that patients with severe schizophrenia have a choice not to have hallucinations or to avoid being convinced by their hallucinations, except insofar as they choose to take medication. Similarly, we don’t say that people with severe autism have the choice as to whether to behave in an affable and glad-handed way. I have a relative with severe autism. You couldn’t even explain the concept to him. I also have a first cousin with a slightly more severe than average form of schizophrenia, though not really severe. He dislikes taking his medication because it keeps him from hearing the voice of God. I cannot even imagine what either of those two situations are like, except insofar as to know they are outside the range of what I can imagine. If the compulsion toward violence, in severe cases, is at all like that, a lot of choice goes out the window for people affected.
Longtooth,
As (virtually) always, your comment is poorly thought through. Just as the West had slavery, and has since disallowed it, the West had eugenics programs which were consciously and purposely ended. For example, at one time there were programs to sterilize cognitively impaired people. Those programs do not exist any more. The ability to do such things hasn’t gone away. However, society stopped wanting to do them. If you posit that things will go backward, you need to provide some sort of chain of reasoning.
On an aside, this is another example of your inability to tell the difference between a) having the ability but not the desire and b) having the desire but not the ability. You did this on another recent thread where you conflated the US with ISIS.
“Paddock was also the son of Benjamin Hoskins Paddock, a serial bank robber who ended up on the FBI Most Wanted list back in 1969 when he escaped from federal prison in Texas while serving a 20 years sentence.”
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-4940918/Details-Las-Vegas-shooting-suspect-Stephen-Paddock.html
Hmm. Benjamin Hoskins Paddock was also the father of Stephen Paddock’s brother, Eric. Should be be locked up as a preventive measure? Should he be forced to undergo genetic testing? What test result could be a justification for curtailing his rights?
Mr. Kimel,
You postulated a possible future “ability”. You requested “my thoughts”.. you invited me to provide them. So I did.
I postulated a possible future “desire” which may result from and be due to your postulated future “ability”.
That human “desire” changes is a given undeniable fact of life and submit it’s safe to say, will never be otherwise. That those desired changes recycle over time is just as much an undeniable fact.
Eugenics is a method of modifying human behavior by selective gene reproduction. In the past the method was restricted to preventing genes from being reproduced through procreation. The issue is who decides the selection criteria? Given your postulated new ability to modify genes or their dominance or identify people with specific genes by blood or saliva tests or yet to be developed newer techniques, then the selection can be done cheaply and en-mass. We now routinely take DNA samples for every person arrested, a better method of identification than by ‘finger prints”, more cheaply stored in a data base and searched. If you’re pulled over at a sobriety check point and fail a physical test on the scene you have a choice of going to jail until an arraignment (hopefully the next morning) or breathing into a Breathalyzer.
Who’s to decide how the information is to be obtained that enable identification of types of genes or whatever other biological/chemical combinations cause people to do X, Y, or Z? and who decides whether it’s simply a part of blood samples taken at birth, or for other routine blood tests, or spitting into a cup.
And who decides which selection criteria to use and to what purpose and ends? And do those decisions change with time and circumstances or geographic regions, or economic status, or racial traits or what?
Maybe a National Socialist type regime decides. Maybe a far right wing white racist supremacist set of justices decides. Maybe a Teaparty type group obtains enough political power to decide. Maybe “Big Brother” decides.
That’s my point. That’s my only point. ointall
Actually Science Fiction has dealt with the ability to detect an inclination to bad acting. One example is Arthur C Clark’s 3001 the final odessey, where in 3001 everyone wears a brain cap and during the set up anti social brain states are detected and treated.
In one sense society did this with infection diseases in the past with quarantines, For example with TB you went to a sanitarium. Or you had no choice you got vaccinated for smallpox 100 years ago. With new tech to monitor blood chemistry, it might be that if drugs exist to mitigate a trait, it might be that such a device tests for the required blood level and alerts if not present.
It is a balancing act between individual rights and the right of people not to get shot for example, as indeed many issues are balancing act between various groups rights.
Joel asks some very good questions. I’d say the answers depend on the quality of the data. Right now it’s not so good. I don’t know of many mass murderers who have a similarly psychopathic fathers as in this case.
Joel,
As I noted, I suspect there will be “voluntary” associations rather than compulsory government testing. I imagine a community or HOA might require people to undergo some form of testing in order to become residents, just as you need to be more than X years old to live in various communities today. Provided that a given trait being tested for is not largely exclusive to a given ethnic group I imagine it would be legal, at least according to current laws, though IANA.
Also, you are the genetics guy. You would know better than I that the fact that a parent has X and a child has X doesn’t mean another child has X .
Lyle,
Precisely. The people who go shot in Las Vegas, presumably, had rights too.
“You would know better than I that the fact that a parent has X and a child has X doesn’t mean another child has X .”
Exactly my point. And if a parent is a violent criminal and one of their children, with no prior history of violence, commits a violent crime late in life, that is not prima facie evidence of genetic transmission of a “violent crime allele.”
Furthermore, genetics isn’t destiny. For example, we know alleles of certain genes that predispose to alcohol addiction. But a person carrying those alleles won’t evidence that risk if they are a devout Muslim or Mormon. We really don’t know much at all about the “genetics of criminal behavior.” The Nazis thought they did know enough to act on it. The enormity of that history should give moral people pause.
Joel,
No, but genetic testing that reveals the presence of those genes is that evidence. As I noted in the post and upthread, I don’t foresee the government in this country forcing people to take such tests (barring major cultural change, of course), but I would not be surprised with voluntary testing.
Mr. Kimel,
Oh, the benevolence of it all!
“No, but genetic testing that reveals the presence of those genes [sic] is that evidence.”
It is evidence of transmission of an allele, but not necessarily of the trait. See “penetrance,” “expressivity,” “recessive,” “gene-environment interactions” and “epigenetics” as factors that influence whether a particular phenotype results from the genotype. As I said, genetics isn’t destiny.
As of 2015:
“It is of course important to remember that current genetic research on pedophilia is still in its early stages, and the extent to which genetic or heritable contributions impact the development and presence of the disorder is still unknown. In terms of breadth, there is still very little genetic research on pedophilia.”
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4393782/
Apophenia: the tendency to perceive a connection or meaningful pattern between unrelated or random things (such as objects or ideas)
From: https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/apophenia
We have had the Salem witch hunts, the science of Eugenics, and currently the science of Genetics.
The governor of Massachusetts did not believe that his wife was a witch and ended the witch trials.
With Eugenics the devil was in the details. Who was to decide what would be a superior human being? How could any improvement be made without unintended consequences? And once we had taken on this task, where would it end? Hitler gave us the answer to those questions.
With modern Genetics, we are seeing discussions about human behavior and genes. But how much of human behavior is due to nature (inherited) and how much is due to nurture (learned)? There needs to be a recognition that this is not at all like finding genetic defects which cause some increased risk of a physical disease. Otherwise superiority of opinion will be claimed, only to be later disavowed. (To the detriment of science itself.)
We humans oversimplify. It is what we do, it is who we are.
Do we really possess that much more wisdom than our ancestors? Knowledge is not wisdom.
@Jim,
Actual geneticists will tell you that the genetic basis for behavior is poorly understood. Even for behavioral traits like autism, which twin studies tells us has a significant heritability, also is influenced by environment. Recent studies have focused on the gut microbiome.
See also my quote and link upthread regarding pedophilia.
The danger isn’t genetics or geneticists, it is the abuse of genetic arguments by non-geneticists for political and other nefarious purposes.
Joel,
You stated:
“The danger isn’t genetics or geneticists, it is the abuse of genetic arguments by non-geneticists for political and other nefarious purposes.”
To which I can only say “As has always been the case.”
There’s a clear difference between biological information used to treat human suffering or prevent it and its use to eliminate human traits deemed “bad” or promote those deemed “good”. The latter traits are purely subjective having no analytic objective measures and span an infinite scale where the lines between “good”, “bad”, “right”, “wrong” are subjectively decided by “somebody” … where the “somebody” differs by their belief systems.
If I were in charge of deciding for example, I would use biological information to modify the genes / dna of those persons who are inclined to conservative views —- fear of changing the status quo or preferences to revert back to some prior perceived “state” of being they deemed “good” for society.
And I’m sure that if others were in charge of deciding they would use the same information to modify the genes that promote people who prefer the status quo or “yesteryear”.
So I make distinction between uses for health and uses for “behavior”. which are subjective “moral” judgments. .
@Longtooth,
Agreed. I was reacting to this statement:
“We have had the Salem witch hunts, the science of Eugenics, and currently the science of Genetics.”
By its structure, it equates witch hunts and Eugenics with the science of genetics. Witch hunts, of course, had nothing to do with science. Eugenics was primarily a politically and racially motivated attempt to apply plant and animal breeding techniques to selection against certain human traits deemed “undesirable.” The “genetics” upon which much of eugenics was based wasn’t scientific. The science of genetics today, based on genomics and big data, is much more evidence-based than 100 years ago and is, accordingly, even more unlike witch hunting and more cautious about claims to predict human human health and behavior.
Mr. Kimel,
Instead of your focusing on policing, and the future with genetics why don’t we fix the present deaths by violence first… it’s pretty simple, btw, as the following data sows conclusively.
Gun violence, deaths in particular:
https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2017/10/2/16399418/us-gun-violence-statistics-maps-charts
Not parenthetically the NRA and its strongest defenders and proponents are the ones that need the widespread availability of guns to be able to mount their “citizens” insurrection and defense when the federal gov’t decides to take their guns away from them… and of course to physically defend “States Rigths”. when Whites lose their majority to non-whites … since under those conditions, voting will cease to maintain their superiority any longer. Shades of the same thing that happened due to demographics leading up to the civil war.. northern voting power (abolition) made southern voting power mute. When democracy fails the right wing, they resort to “other”.
Longtooth,
I will preface my statement with this: while I own guns, if it was up to me, any automatic weapons (or anything emulating an automatic weapon) would be illegal for a private citizen to own.
That said, this strikes me as a problem;
First, you don’t put everyone through chemo. You focus on people who have cancer.
Second, you’ve seen the homicide statistics. For whatever reason, the Black community is disproportionately (by quite a bit) affected. Most of those homicides use guns. So if guns were more severely restricted, or even made completely illegal, would you be complaining about the disparate impact of police searching for (and finding?) weapons in the Black community?
Additionally, in many jurisdictions, guns are already severely restricted. But they are being used anyway. I do believe that making them illegal everywhere would cut down on the guns that show up in Chicago and Washington DC, but not completely. By how much, I don’t know. But I’ve noticed that gun laws in Brazil are more restrictive than in the US, and yet guns are really, really easy to come by in Brazil. Similarly, many drugs are illegal in the US, but most high school students can pick some up for you with less than an hour’s notice, and they aren’t expensive. I have a feeling guns would be that way. Why? Because we have a violent population. Which is the answer to the question in your first sentence.
Joel,
The same desire not to believe in anything involving the atmosphere (pollution, climate, etc.) on the right is there with genetics on the left. And its growing.
“The same desire not to believe in anything involving the atmosphere (pollution, climate, etc.) on the right is there with genetics on the left. And its growing.”
Cite, please.
Wow, Mr. Kimel,
That’s a doozy.. “First, you don’t put everyone through chemo. You focus on people who have cancer.”
You’ve found your niche… illogic is your forte’.
If you want to use that analogy though then if you focus on the people who have cancer you do whatever’s in the power of health care methods to remove the cancer (foregn body material). So if you equate people who have guns to people how have cancer then you focus on removing the guns (the cancer).
With respect to the posted statistic on guns and homicides that I linked to in my last comment:
https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2017/10/2/16399418/us-gun-violence-statistics-maps-charts
Why bring up Brazil when the OECD’s are much closer to the U.S.’s makeup and wealth? I suppose you didn’t take a gander at chart #6, huh?,
In some Jurisdiction guns are more restricted than in others, and as the statistics show those states with fewer guns have fewer homicides per capita by guns…. duh. Look at chart #5.
You asked: “So if guns were more severely restricted, or even made completely illegal, would you be complaining about the disparate impact of police searching for (and finding?) weapons in the Black community?”
If guns were illegal except for hunting rifles of the bolt action or slow fire rate equivalents, guns wouldn’t be available to blacks any more than whites.
To a make guns illegal means search and destroy where-ever they can be found (oh, you want to cite constitutional freedoms I know.. but to eliminate most guns available to and used by civilians, that freedom can’t exist in term of guns… besides a warrant to search every house, location, building, room, and vehicle, and person’s body for illegal weapons can be provided on the basis of “national good”, so it’s a political issue, not an issue of whether it can or can’t be done effectively.
It means mfg’ers are tightly controlled by federal agents on site. It means imports of guns are tightly controlled, and I’m sure based on all statistics that nearly all guns in the US are mfg’ered n the US at least in the last steps. It means long term jail sentances for those who import and or distribute and/or mfg’er guns for other than legitimate on-duty law enforcement.
If most other OECD’s can do it then there’s no excuse why the U.S. can’t. Of course it means shelving the 2nd amendment interpretation of right to bear arms… which has been and remains the political problem.
Let people kill people and themselves (by gun suicides) and the violence it creates and perpetuates, or shelf the fu.king 2nd amendment right to bear arms. A very simple choice. Nobody needs guns and those who are able to obtain them will be a tiny fraction of those who can obtain them now, both legally and illegally. Homicides by guns drop in concert.
So it seems to me what you base your opinion on is the political resistance to throw out the 2nd amendment right to bear arms.
All I’m saying and showing is that the U.S. gun homicides and gun related violence is a direct function of the right to bear arms… eliminate that and the policing problem related to gun violence goes away as a major problem as the statistics clearly show.
I’m not proposing “restricted gun possession” I’m saying take away the right to bear arms other than by legitimate law enforcement (and I don’t mean making everybody who has guns or wants one into a “possee” or “national guardsman”) and allow only hunting rifles and their use in controlled target / shooting ranges or hunting preserves or designated hunting private property under permit only.
It’s a simple and effective proposition don’t you think… that is if you really want to reduce homicides in the US..
Mr. Kimel,
Don’t try to misconstrue or misinterpret my response to your “cancer” analogy where I stated:
“If you want to use that analogy though then if you focus on the people who have cancer you do whatever’s in the power of health care methods to remove the cancer (foreign body material). So if you equate people who have guns to people how have cancer then you focus on removing the guns (the cancer).”
The source of the cancer is the source of guns in the analogy and medical science would rid the world of the sources of cancers if they knew what they were an how to do it.
Since we know by definition the source of homicides by guns, then we know the source is guns and we know where they are mfg’ed, and how they are distributed, and to whom.. . so we can easily find and remove the source of homicides by guns (at least to the levels of other OECD’s on a per-capita basis).
I refer you again to chart #6 & # 5 in the sourced of statistics I showed and linked in my prior comment. Pay especial attention to #6.. I also refer you to chart #2 which shows graphically that the US has 4% of the population on the globe but owns 44% of civilian owned guns on the globe…. a little bit of evidence of our problem with guns… we have far too many per capita..
https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2017/10/2/16399418/us-gun-violence-statistics-maps-charts
Mr. Kimel,
And maybe you should ask yourself why the FBI stats you love to selectively pass around don’t show the information that I provided in the link I referred to (and show again for ease of clicking on it).
And because this information is available from sources that have looked at gun violence in the US relative to States and to the other OECD’s, I wonder why you never came across any of these various non-racist / non-libertarian / non-police enforcement related web-sites that you say you have just randomly found. Either you’re using self-selected web-sites or you’re being ted the information you tout by the web-sites you visit more often than others or perhaps even they’re in your “favorites” list, or perhaps even on your “favorites bar”, or even rss feeds.
Joel,
I have quoted from this Pinker article before:
https://newrepublic.com/article/77727/groups-and-genes
In recent decades, the standard response to claims of genetic differences has been to deny the existence of intelligence, to deny the existence of races and other genetic groupings, and to subject proponents to vilification, censorship, and at times physical intimidation. Aside from its effects on liberal discourse, the response is problematic. Reality is what refuses to go away when you do not believe in it, and progress in neuroscience and genomics has made these politically comforting shibboleths (such as the non-existence of intelligence and the non-existence of race) untenable.
Also this: https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2014/10/28/liberals-deny-science-too/?utm_term=.d4cdca25aeb8. (Note link to a journal article in the newspaper article.)
And this: https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.usnews.com/opinion/articles/2015/04/06/science-denial-is-not-just-conservative-or-liberal-its-bipartisan%3Fcontext=amp
But forget all of that. Try an experiment. Take the Pinker article I cited, or even better, the Cochran, Hardy and Harpending article to which it refers. Start reading it in a loud voice in the main quad in some college campus around noon on a weekday when school is in session. Let us know the reaction, and who reacted. In fact, Peter Dornan had a post here not long ago extolling Evergreen. I bet that would be a great place to try the experiment,
Longtooth,
There are countries where just about everyone has a gun. Some of them are violent, like Yemen. Some, like Switzerland, are not. Some are violent mostly as a result of people who are not citizens (Israel). I compared to Brazil because like the US, Brazil is a violent country. Gun control doesn’t work in Brazil. My guess is that it wouldn’t work all that well in Yemen. Or Mexico. Of course, things can change.
@Mike,
You posted “The same desire not to believe in anything involving the atmosphere (pollution, climate, etc.) on the right is there with genetics on the left. And its growing.”
None of your links document a desire on the part of the left not to believe anything involving genetics. What they document is skepticism for certain claims made in the name of genetics for certain human traits. The fact that you can’t tell the difference tells me that you don’t know enough about genetics to evaluate the topic. You are not alone in that deficiency, of course. Most of the lay public doesn’t know enough genetics to discuss the topic of heritability of human traits critically. But your statement quoted above is just silly.
“Start reading it in a loud voice in the main quad in some college campus around noon on a weekday when school is in session. Let us know the reaction, and who reacted.”
LOL! Sorry, Mike. The plural of anecdote isn’t data.
Joel,
OK. Let’s try it again. It is mathematically impossible for any two groups to have identical distributions of a wide range of traits. Throw in some amount of separation which prevents the exchange of genes between those various groups and drift will necessarily occur over time. Or assume the two groups are different on the basis of gonads and hormones. .
Collectively, people are willing to note such differences on just about any traits when discussing different groups of animals from the same species. We are even willing to accept such differences exist for some physical traits among people. But from what I can tell, it is mostly a feature of the left to deny that such differences could possibly affect performance on, say, marathons, or sprints, or jumping. And from what I can tell, that is doubly so if you suggest there might be differences in forms of cognition.
“But from what I can tell, it is mostly a feature of the left . . . ”
From what I can tell, you mostly trade in stereotypes, cartoons and straw men.
“How many geneticists would make through a public reading of CHH without being subject to physical violence?”
In the US? All of them. You obviously haven’t been on a college campus in awhile.
Joel,
A quick google search tells me there were violent protests on college campuses this year and in previous years in response to talks by Ben Shapiro and Charles Murray. I’ve never heard or read anything by Shapiro as far as I can remember, but as I understand it his shtick is that college campuses indoctrinate people into leftist thinking. Also, it seems the neo-Nazis really don’t like him. What I can find about him skimming quickly doesn’t seem all that offensive. Of course, with a quick skim I may be missing something. I do see an article stating that Berkeley had to spend $600K in security when he came to speak because of opposition from left leaning groups.
I am familiar with Charles Murray and have read some of his stuff. I can see where his choice of phrasing & conclusions would cause offense. But here’s the thing… from what I know about Murray’s oeuvre, its very tame compared to CHH, let alone what C of CHH has been writing since. Charles Murray doesn’t seem all that happy about the existence of a Bell Curve. CHH, and particularly C, doesn’t have that tone of compunction or wish for a more Disney-esque outcomes.
All of which is to say, if it costs $600K in security for Ben Shapiro to speak at Berkeley, reading CHH in the wrong campus in front of the wrong people without any security sounds unhealthy.
@Mike,
That latest post is a masterful example of speculation, self-confessed superficiality, opinion and innuendo. I’m a scientist. I’m interested in facts, evidence, data.
“All of which is to say, if it costs $600K in security for Ben Shapiro to speak at Berkeley, reading CHH in the wrong campus in front of the wrong people without any security sounds unhealthy.”
Hmm. And yet:
“On Thursday, with news helicopters hovering and hundreds of police officers deployed across the campus, many Berkeley students lamented they had become unwitting actors in a show of political Kabuki.
By the end of the night, the authorities said they had arrested nine people, some of them accused of carrying banned weapons. But no major violence was reported.”
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/09/15/us/california-today-price-tag-to-protect-speech-at-berkeley-600000.html
In science, we call this an experiment without a control.
Joel,
Nine people arrested, some with banned weapons. It sounds like the 600K prevented violence.
As to a control, perhaps the occurrence at Middelbury College with Charles Murray might qualify as a control, at least until the police stepped in. Here’s the account of a Middlebury professor (as it happens, a Democrat who believes in free speech): https://www.nytimes.com/2017/03/13/opinion/understanding-the-angry-mob-that-gave-me-a-concussion.html
Now, once again, take that message and amp it up to CHH level. (I’m not even suggesting James Watson level which is a few steps up from CHH.) You are seriously suggesting that it can be stated aloud in any college campus anywhere in the US, with no police protection, and won’t result in some physical consequence to the speaker inflicted by people who claim to be from the political left.
“You are seriously suggesting that it can be stated aloud in any college campus anywhere in the US, with no police protection, and won’t result in some physical consequence to the speaker inflicted by people who claim to be from the political left.”
I’m not in the prophecy business, Mike. I’ll leave that to you.
I wouldn’t be surprised if there’s someone, somewhere who claims to be from the political left who might inflict “some physical consequence,” whatever the hell that means.
Have you ever considered writing fiction? On the evidence, you have the aptitude.
Joel,
Actually, you made a prophecy upthread:
I’m merely incredulous that you would make such a prophecy given stories in the news about what has happened in Evergreen, Berkeley and Middlebury.
Like I said, you obviously haven’t been on a college campus in awhile. That you are incredulous doesn’t surprise me, given your rich fantasy life.