Nawwwm!

Norm gets it. But you knew that.

Here's a hypothetical situation. A certain newspaper carries, week in and week out, articles of a political complexion that one of its readers judges to be dreadful. Not all readers do, but she — for it is a she — does; and her view is shared by a lot of other people. This reader, alienated, one day heaps a bucket of excrement over the head of a pedestrian walking along the street in a city of the country in which the newspaper in question is published.

If A kills B, C kills D, to even things out: To a certain kind of leftist, it is unimaginable that this might not be reasonable, if C happens not to like the West. There's a short circuit there. It's hard to figure out the left-wing fetishization of violence against unarmed civilians. They certainly fetishize their own self-perceived weakness, and fantasize about the unstoppable, undefeatable, remorseless jihadis. To my ears there seems to be an eerie, triumphal, bragging quality when they claim that there's no defense against terrorism. They want it to be true. But they don't fetishize all violence against civilians. Sometimes it genuinely seems to bother them. Or is it just that they get excercised about it in cases where it's likely to provide some value of C, with an excuse to kill some value of D?

If you think Norm's analogy is broken because not all Brits are associated with the Guardhypothetical paper he's talking about, just change it to the equally preposterous BBC, which is an arm of the British government.