Anyone paying close attention would have noticed that last night I deactivated my Twitter account. The account for Wost President (Victory Books, actually) is still up and running and will remain so – but I dumped my personal Twitter account. There were several reasons for this, but one of the major reasons was to drop down the level of crazy in my life.

Not to condemn Twitter – which does have some very good uses, especially when there is major, breaking news – but we have in our society quite a large number of unreasonable people. People who don’t know history; are only hazily aware of the facts, but are absolutely convinced of their worldview and determined that anyone who dissents from it be squashed. This is mostly on the left, but it is all too common on the right, as well. Twitter is ready-made for such people – it is impossible to explain to someone in 140 characters or less just how they are wrong but it is very easy for someone to get very insulting in 140 characters. I found myself getting drawn into the crazy on Twitter too often. The Worst President account is easier to handle – as it is not a personal account, people seem less inclined to start a flame war on it; I guess its the difference between insulting Victory Books (meh) or insulting Mark Noonan (woohoo!!).

But this also brings to mind the general unreasonableness of our society – You might have heard that the President of Smith had to apologize for saying “all lives matter”, this a take on the Twitter hashtag #BlackLivesMatter. Because someone made a Twitter meme which has been identified by some as the “correct” position to have, the President of a major university had to crawl in apology essentially for not having the right hashtag in her statement. This isn’t just political correctness: this is crazy. And crazy is a good definition for the modern West in general.

And I do wonder just how crazy we will get before something really goes smash. It might seem cool to encapsulate an idea in just a few words, but the trouble with slogans is that they tend to shut down thought (which is, by the way, the secret of advertising). Mindless repetition of slogans and shouting hate at anyone who questions the slogans is picture perfect for a totalitarian society trying to have uniformity of belief…but in a still-free society like the United States, its the recipe for developing vicious hatred, on both sides.

I’d like to say that our solution is to convince those who don’t know to shut up and listen – but those who are least knowledgeable are most likely to believe they are practically all-knowing. Our actual solution is to try to ignore such silly creatures. In a sense, that is what we’ve done here – and while there are fewer comments, such comments as their are tend to increase the sum of knowledge. Of course, this is just a little-noticed blog – but I think it can serve as a model. Let us who are reasonable discuss what is best and then try to obtain the ability to implement it. Don’t engage every silly screwball out there who has an opinion armored from head to foot in ignorance. It just doesn’t pay – and it doesn’t help advance the solutions we need.

And just in case the crazy seems a bit much, some advice:

A Ballad Of Suicide by G. K. Chesterton

The gallows in my garden, people say,

Is new and neat and adequately tall;
I tie the noose on in a knowing way

As one that knots his necktie for a ball;
But just as all the neighbours—on the wall—
Are drawing a long breath to shout “Hurray!”

The strangest whim has seized me. . . . After all
I think I will not hang myself to-day.
To-morrow is the time I get my pay—

My uncle’s sword is hanging in the hall—
I see a little cloud all pink and grey—

Perhaps the rector’s mother will not call— I fancy that I heard from Mr. Gall
That mushrooms could be cooked another way—

I never read the works of Juvenal—
I think I will not hang myself to-day.
The world will have another washing-day;

The decadents decay; the pedants pall;
And H.G. Wells has found that children play,

And Bernard Shaw discovered that they squall,
Rationalists are growing rational—
And through thick woods one finds a stream astray

So secret that the very sky seems small—
I think I will not hang myself to-day.

Even given the fact that she’s grieving, this is astounding:

Michael Brown’s family reacted with anger and tears to the first televised interview with Darren Wilson, in which the officer said he “would not have done anything differently” about the sequence of events that led to the shooting death of Brown.

“He didn’t do what he had to do, he did what he wanted to do,” Brown’s mother Lesley McSpadden told CBS Morning News. “I don’t think he wanted to kill my son, but he wanted to kill someone.”

In the mind of Ms. McSpadden, it appears, is this picture: Officer Wilson, uniformed and in his police car, is cruising the streets of Ferguson looking for someone to kill.

Like all human beings, I suppose, there have been times in my life when I have been almost frantic with anger and sorrow. I’ve never experience the death of a child, of course, but I’ve lived long enough in this world and experienced enough things to peer into the depths upon depths of anger and sorrow that Ms. McSpadden must feel – but even with that, I simply cannot put the two together. I cannot comprehend someone actually believing that a police officer – in the normal course of his duties – would be out to kill someone…some random person on the streets. To be sure, there could be a situation in which there is a psychotic cop who does such a thing, but unless one has rock-solid evidence of this being the case, to make such an accusation is massively beyond the bounds of rational thought. But Ms. McSpadden thinks this.

And trolling the Twitter feed over the last couple of days on Ferguson, I realize she is not alone. Quite a lot of people believe the same sort of thing – and not just about officer Wilson, but about the police, in general.

As readers here know, I believe we need deep reforms of both the police and our larger criminal justice system – but to believe that the police, on the whole, are out to do evil in the world is, well, stupid. I really don’t like to use that word, but I can’t think of a word which better describes it. I mean, you’ve really got to be disconnected from reality to believe that – you have to have woven yourself (or have had woven for you) a series of myths which are entirely impervious to the facts. Police are, of course, human beings – they are prey to all our faults. They can be unreasonable; they can be unjust; they can make purely stupid mistakes – and in the case of Wilson and Brown, maybe the police officer didn’t handle the situation in the best possible manner…but it is abundantly clear that Brown also didn’t behave in the best possible manner. To hold up Brown as some sort of complete innocent in this case is to defy facts and logic – and to turn about and accuse Wilson of a malevolent desire is to go completely ’round the bend.

And it gets worse: the entire liberal narrative is built upon the concept that the police are deliberately malevolent, at least towards minorities. The belief that the system is built against black people and the police are created to enforce the system against black people is the core of this – and in the comments from the Brown family, we see it writ large. Understand it’s not an accusation that Wilson just didn’t do his job right – it is an accusation that Wilson is a murderer who went out to find someone – almost certainly black – to kill that night, because that is what police officers do…and they do it because a racist system sends them out to do it, to keep the black man down (we won’t even get into the particular lunacy of such a belief in a land where the President is black – and so is the attorney general; we don’t want to go too far down the rabbit hole lest we get swallowed up – stare into the abyss long enough and eventually the abyss stares into you, dig?).

I have things to say to my fellow conservatives on this. Don’t trust the word of the police – that is just the word of the government and if we don’t trust the IRS, no reason to trust the police, either. Understand that in the African-American community a lot of people are caught by the system and rather ground up in it – sure, maybe some so caught aren’t pure as wind-driven snow, but a lot of people are caught in the gears over trivialities and the overall community reasonably feels that they are being unjustly singled out: a lot of our laws are designed to be worked by people with plenty of education and resources but when applied to people with less education and resources, they can become an unjust burden. The police shouldn’t be so militarized. The police shouldn’t be effective strangers in the areas they patrol. We conservatives have our own blindness in the matter and we should be kind and understanding and try to see it from a different point of view.

That said, we’ve got a real problem in this nation – there are tens of millions of Americans who aren’t living in the real world. They are living in an intellectual fantasy world. I always wondered when I read accounts of the death of Stalin why so many Russians would be crushed under genuine sorrow for the man’s passing. If you look back into it, there was genuine grief when the man died – and not just from senior apparatchiks of the Stalinist regime, but from regular folks. A man who had done in at least 20 million of his own people – and millions of his people wept at his passing as if they had lost something good. Now I understand it a little better – just feed people enough lying propaganda long enough, and some will come to sincerely believe it. The American people have been fed a line of propaganda about race and the police – and for some, it has sunk right in, and they really believe such things as that racism is still a bar to achievement in America, and that the police are out to get minorities.

The cure for this will be a long time coming – because as we reform things, we’ll be also trying to undo 50 years of lies.

Well, there ya go – a Grand Jury of American citizens good and true ruled there was no cause to indict officer Wilson. We all suspected as much – when the autopsy information was leaked a little while back, it looked pretty clear that for whatever reason, Mr. Brown decided to attack the police officer. You do that, you’re risking your life. As I said when this whole thing first came up, the police had better have a very good reason for shooting when the dead person is unarmed. Per the jury, they had very good reason.

As for the “riots” in Ferguson – I don’t get a “riot” feel out of them. I was in the Los Angeles area when the King riots erupted and that was quite different from what happened in Ferguson. In Ferguson, I just get the feeling that criminal gangs had scoped out where they wanted to loot and were just waiting for the verdict – which makes the decision to release the verdict after dark exceptionally stupid. Also stupid was the decision to not have the police more spread out. From what I can tell, they were concentrated – ready to move, as it were, but not able to just be there out in front of likely looting targets. I could be all wrong on this, but I figure a couple of cops on each corner in the shopping center might have worked better in keeping the looting from happening.

Plenty of people were on Twitter, of course, venting their feelings – what most struck me is the rank ignorance of how the justice system works, and the sheer idiocy in people demanding a certain verdict from a court. You can’t do that – if you want justice, you have to just be fanatically in favor of juries and deeply respectful of whatever judgement they provide. It isn’t that juries are perfect, of course: but they are the only real defense any of us have against tyranny. People these days don’t seem to understand fully just how hard fought the battle was to just ensure that any accused will have a jury of his peers to judge the facts in his case. This is crucial to human liberty – only thus are we freed from fear that the police will just clap is in jail on the whim of the ruler. Trust me, I’ve seen jury verdicts I thought screwed up – but I still want to live in a world where if I’m ever accused of a crime, it will be 12 random citizens who will sift the evidence and decide if I did it.

We can’t write of Ferguson without taking a moment to note the race-baiters. Led, sadly, by our President and Attorney General, they had a field day in this. The really sad thing is that they helped to fuel the hatred and anger for the most trivial of reasons: just to try and gin up political support (Sharpton and Jackson joining in so they can rake off a few bucks and a bit of TV time).

All in all, an entirely pathetic performance – really sad for my nation.

Just another example of what I’m always yammering on about:

When Gov. Andrew Cuomo is inaugurated for a second term in January, he will have New York City voters to thank.

Cuomo’s 13-percentage-point win over Republican challenger Rob Astorino on Nov. 4 was fueled by a large margin of victory in New York City, where he took home 77 percent of the nearly 1 million ballots cast, according to the state Board of Election’s unofficial results.

Take away the city, however, and the rest of the state backed Astorino — albeit by a slim margin. Outside of the five boroughs, Astorino collected 1.3 million votes — or 49 percent — compared to Cuomo’s 1.2 million, or 46 percent, in a low-turnout election. Three third-party candidates were also on the ballot.

New York isn’t one State, it is two. There is the NYC-Albany bit of the State, and then there’s the rest of it. And the two are not in any way, shape or form of the same ideas.

Cuomo’s New York is perfectly within it’s rights in getting the government it wants. Those people want a nitwit socialist like De Blasio as mayor and a liberal political hack like Cuomo as governor. Good for them. But why do the rest of New York’s citizens have to put up with it? Why do the people of Buffalo have to deal with a governor – and a government – which is entirely subservient to the people of New York City? Don’t the people of Buffalo deserve to have people leading them who reflect the values of Buffalo?

The answer, as I’ve been saying for years, is secession – break up New York into two States. West and East New York. Think about it – the liberal pinheads of East New York will have a happy hunting ground for pure, unadulterated liberalism even more so than now, while West New York would get a chance for sanity in government. Everyone’s happy – and, Democrats, think about it: you’d have two Senators-for-life in East New York and still have a shot at some times grabbing a Senator from West New York. Its win-win for ya! Win-win for West New York, too, of course…because they won’t have to put up with quite as much liberal nonsense.