Introduction to Politics

When trying to make a good bend, there's more than on way home. Just make sure your method can accommodate improvisation. 

You must overbend the material past the desired bend angle and allow it to return to the desired shape with the springback.

I lost patience with a couple of journalists who were complaining about the "fascist", "Maoist", student "thought police", so I thought of a way to explain political activism in the simplest way possible.

repeats: Political journalists imagine themselves as moral philosophers, but their job is to be ambulance chasers and get the story. No one listens to reason when their own deeply-held beliefs are questioned. No one, includes angry college students and pompous reporters.

I'm not impressed by the students. I'm not impressed by anyone. But the students are acting as their own advocates and journalists should do the same for their readers.

Related: the annoying response to the CNN anchors berating the representative of a French Muslim organization. The questioning was absurd, “If your camp is the French camp, then why is it that no one with the Muslim community knew what these guys were up to?”, but so was his reply.

“Sir, the Muslim community has nothing to do with these guys. Nothing."  

The CNN interviewers were right to be impatient. By that logic no community, religious or secular, has anything to do with groups who commit crimes in its name. It's the "no true Scotsman" argument, a form of evasion accepted by guilty liberals while liberal Zionism is more simply denial. Denial is a luxury of the powerful. But of course liberal Zionists are among the first to defend the spokesman's response as such.

Of course CNN would never interview an angry Arab after the Paris attacks unless he was full of inarticulate rage.