It's been a few days now since I attended the last day of CPAC, and I have been turning it over in my mind ever since. As Erin mentioned on the blog yesterday, for CPAC's attendees, "Logic is irrelevant." I generally have faith in popular movements that confront injustice (e.g. Civil Rights movement). But CPAC was, if anything, dispiriting; it is hard to have faith in people when confronted with crowds who are completely uncritical of what they were being told.

Leonard Pitts, Jr. at the Miami Herald recently used his column to mourn "a time when facts settled arguments." Reading Pitt's column, I was hoping for the uplifting ending, the moment where he told me how we would overcome this scourge of irrationality and fear. Instead, Pitts had written a eulogy:

"...increasingly, we are a people estranged from critical thinking, divorced from logic, alienated from even objective truth. We admit no ideas that do not confirm us, hear no voices that do not echo us, sift out all information that does not validate what we wish to believe."

Obviously, the failure of facts is problematic for Democrats. For example, it is difficult to debate health care reform with people screaming about death panels, or claiming that the president were born in Africa. For its political efficacy, the Republican establishment has largely played along. 2012 presidential contenders were at CPAC; Rep. Alex King commiserated with domestic terrorist/suicide bomber Joseph Andrew Stack (who is being hailed as an anti-government hero by some on the far right). But the Republican establishment is also notoriously short-sighted, and these political games can have serious ramifications.

An exception to the Republican myopia is Michael Gerson's Friday op-ed at the Washington Post. Gerson, Bush's former speech writer, is no moderate, but he is scared of what the far right is quickly becoming. He seems to believe, and I agree, that to reign in the extremist fervor on the right, Party leadership must take the firs step; that this state of anger and fear calls for top-down discipline, not populist outrage.

And the looting lie continues. Despite repeated and vehement protestations from the blogosphere, the mainstream media is still reporting on the disaster in Haiti with typically alarmist language, stirring up fear around the world with tales of "looting," "thieves," and "machete-wielding gangs."

One of the more egregious examples of poor word choice comes to us from the Boston Globe, in which a photograph of a dead man is captioned, "Looters steal a bag of another looter who lies dead, shot by the police on January 17, 2010 near the Hypolite Market in Port-au-Prince."

Because God forbid starving people "steal" food from a corpse.

Last month, MTV's hair-gelled juggernaut, Jersey Shore, came under fire when news broke that the program would air a scene in which female cast member Snooki is punched in the face by a man. The blogosphere was quickly in a tizzy, and lead feminist site Jezebel asked, "Should MTV have used the footage?"

As you might already know, MTV succumbed to the pressure, choosing both to black out the punch and append the episode with an anti-violence PSA.

Fast forward to last night's Jersey Shore, in which the musclebound Ronnie repeatedly decks some other drunk jock in the face in the middle of the street. Not only did MTV air the brutality, it drew it out, even going so far as to show two of the other male cast members, Mike and Pauly D, getting a phone call to come join Ronnie. After the episode, I looked for an anti-violence PSA, but, alas, found only a Bud Light commercial.

This is something I've written about before, but it obviously bears repeating: In order to be truly progressive, society needs to stop taxonimizing violence.

To be sure, I'm as averse as anyone to seeing a woman get smashed in the face. But I can't help but ask why it's acceptable to blot out that imagery yet air at length four idiot men beating the hell out of each other in front of a bar. In doing so, isn't MTV tacitly (explicitly?) saying that some violence is better than other violence, that some violence is tolerable and entertaining?

Leave it up to MTV and Jersey Shore to forget what every third-grader in the whole world knows: Hitting anyone, regardless of gender, is wrong.

I went down to City Hall and filed a complaint against the Olympia Police Department for their inciting the crowd to riot on Valentine's Day at Evergreen State College.

A new video posted by the Geoduck Student Union shows the Olympia Police ignoring both chain of command and rules of engagement policies. These policies are there to prevent riots from forming out of peaceful demonstrations. Their negligence and stupid bravado caused the event to escalate needlessly putting officers and students in danger.

I stated that the Thurston County officers at the car who never felt threatened enough to use crowd control actions were engaged in the process of a peaceful resolution. The Evergreen policewoman had announced to the crowd that she would let him go, after being advised that that would be the best solution, and was in the process of getting his name and contact information.

The police on the scene first, and therefore in command of the situation, gave no indication that they approved or condoned the other officers coming in and using force. The police on the outside of the circle did not have a strategically limited position like the cops inside the circle making their use of force seem unwarranted and dangerous to the officers surrounded.

I felt a little ill when I read this story this morning, about a 15-year-old boy who shot his father, mother, and two younger brothers while they slept late last week. The causes for this "familicide" is unknown, since Nicholas W. Browning "had no history of violence, mental health problems or drug problems, according to court documents." Furthermore,

It seems like such incidents have been rising in my lifetime. Still, the causes for executing family or friends is unknown, but the experts cited in this case noted the common thread was an easy access to firearms -- most of the time firearms kept in the home. It's really sad.

The Times has an article highlighting some interesting research that might silent those reactionaries who tell us that violent movies are not only a sign of degeneracy, but also an actual cause of real violence. Two economists, Gordon Dahl and Stefano DellaVigna, argue that by taking people who might otherwise be violent and putting them in a closed, calm, alcohol -free environment on weekend nights, violent movies reduce the number of violent incidents:

Instead of fueling up at bars and then roaming around looking for trouble, potential criminals pass the prime hours for mayhem eating popcorn and watching celluloid villains slay in their stead.

“You’re taking a lot of violent people off the streets and putting them inside movie theaters,” said the lead author of the study, Gordon Dahl, an economist at the University of California, San Diego. “In the short run, if you take away violent movies, you’re going to increase violent crime.”

Professor Dahl and the paper’s other author, Stefano DellaVigna, an economist at the University of California, Berkeley, attach precise numbers to their argument: Over the last decade, they say, the showing of violent films in the United States has decreased assaults by an average of about 1,000 a weekend, or 52,000 a year.

The stuttering response from the anti-fun forces is pretty funny. What they can’t seem to realize is that Dahl and DellaVigna have found a trade-off between engaging in behavior that could lead to violence and watching violent movies, “What would these people have done if they had not chosen to go and see a movie? Whatever they would have done would have had a greater tendency to involve alcohol. If you can incapacitate a large group of potentially violent people, that’s a good thing.”

But despite Dahl’s good work, the conclusion he drew from his research — that we just need ways to herd young men into movie theaters on weekend nights so they don’t drink and fight — has a pretty frightening implication:

“We need more Adam Sandler movies,” he said. “Even though I’m not a big fan of Adam Sandler, that’s the implication.”

Almost 100,000 people in the U.S. have been murdered since September 11, as Bob Herbert explains in an excellent column.

Herbert writes:

No heightening of consciousness has accompanied this slaughter, which had nothing to do with terrorism. The news media and most politicians have hardly bothered to notice.

At the same time that we’re diligently confiscating water and toothpaste from air travelers, we’re handing over guns and bullets by the trainload to yahoos bent on blowing others into eternity in armed robberies, drug-dealing, gang violence, domestic assaults and other criminal acts.

While the nation focuses on combating terrorism, expanding access to health care, and increasing economic growth --all worthy causes --it has ignored the perennial and growing problem of violence in America.

The firearms industry has lobbied so effectively that instituting controls to stop those prone to violence from acquiring guns is taboo for many politicians --and that's ridiculous.

It's time that talking about escalating violence in America was on the national agenda and that we actually do something about it instead of caving to inane interests like letting all Americans shoot Uzis.