KILLING JOKE. This post by Jonah Goldberg got me thinking more seriously about his case than usual. He starts out okay:

A bunch of people have sent me this story (via Drudge) revealing that the University of Alabama shooter was a leftwinger. A few, at times contradictory, reactions: First: So what? It's hard to figure out how her political attitudes figure into her motives for murdering these people.

Then, in what appears to be an attempt at logical jiu-jitsu:

But one of the things I take away from this is that there are a lot of crazy people in academia. There's something about the tolerant atmosphere of campus life, plus the way really, really, odd or dysfunctional people can get by, that makes them havens for the maladjusted. Obviously, the vast, vast majority of these oddballs are harmless and decent people. But the few dangerous ones don't stick out as much as they might elsewhere.

Someone protests that he's dissing academics. You might imagine he'd fart his way out of it, as in his dogs-rule posts, but instead he thrashes:

I think the reader is misreading me. I didn't say that all or most academics are crazy, merely that academia tolerates weirdness in ways most other sphere don't (government bureaucracies come close). I've had this conversation with a lot of professional academics, and I've never met one who really disagrees with me. Walk through through the stacks in a college library sometime, some of those carrels are homes to some truly Tolkienesque creatures.

It becomes increasingly obvious that Goldberg was writing a joke post, based on the cultural assumptions of which such things are made (by me too) -- but he didn't know it was a joke. And it strikes me that he probably feels the same way about the silly dogs-vs.-cats stuff, and everything else he writes.

Suddenly I'm beginning to see what Liberal Fascism was really about.

(The Steven Hayward post Goldberg finds "more persuasive" is totally insane, btw.)