People v. State

In a post aptly titled To Hell With Toning It Down, Mark nails what I’ve been trying to say in my last two posts about the causal relationship between ideas and consequences and what if anything we should do about it. The whole post speaks to my condition, but I’ll highlight these paragraphs:

Third, anybody who’s ever given a speech or written a blog knows that it’s hard to make people understand what you want to say. Some people will misunderstand your point because they lack the background, or because they’ve had different life experiences, or just because they have a different way of thinking about the world. It’s hard work telling a story or making a point in a way that communicates clearly with most of your audience.           

And that’s just with normal, sane, and intelligent people. Throw in some real insanity, and there’s no hope of being understood properly. Crazy people are quite likely to hear something very different from what you’re saying. . . .

There’s no way to predict how someone like this will understand the things you say, and it’s madness to censor yourself in anticipation of every possible reaction. You just can’t let crazy people run your life that way.

Even as I wrote in my last post that taking on the IRS might not be senseless if the fight was 50 to 100, I wondered whether some crazy person at the USDOJ (whose computers according to sitemeter have been known to visit this blog) might read this and think I was saying it’d be a fine and moral idea in this day and age for me and 49 of my uncles and cousins to hole up in the family compound and take potshots at the 100 federal agents who’ve surrounded us in the woods. Maybe I could have worked harder to communicate my point more clearly, but I just can’t let crazy people run my life that way.

Follow