My Blogging Doppleganger

I find myself agreeing with Matt Yglesias more and more these days. He's right, there's this cottage industry online of "don't politicize this tragedy" posts, when the only time you can have a national conversation on anything is when something so big happens that everybody manages to look up from American Idol long enough to take notice. Tragedies are, well, tragic, but a national discussion on gun control, or mental health, or whatever, is not going to happen just because it's July 7th. And I also agree with (and have been saying for two days) this:

The only thing I would note with something like the VT shootings is that as terrible as an incident like that is, it's simply not the case that spree killings are a significant problem in American life, statistically speaking. I believe the USA suffers from more spree killings than do other non-war-torn countries, but still very few people die that way. You could completely eliminate mass-murder in the United States and you wouldn't save very many lives. Which isn't to say that we shouldn't try to prevent this kind of thing. But it is to say that it doesn't make sense to engage in policy shifts with large costs (in terms of money or even just inconveniencing tons of people) in order to reduce the risk of something that's already very rare.

Which isn't that different than saying that we shouldn't freak out and take everybody's civil liberties away in the even more event of a terrorist attack.

If this didn't happen at Virginia Tech, the revelation that Governor Corzine's car was going 91mph on the Garden State Parkway when he was severely injured in an accident, and the fact that he wasn't wearing a seat belt, would be a major story, and it may have spurred a national debate on the importance of seat belt laws and personal responsibility in wearing them, and that would also be a good thing, despite the expected calls of "you're politicizing this tragedy!"

Other things I agree with Yglesias about: Pundits talk about blogger incivility because they feel threatened by the medium, and white people feel resentful and threatened by their status in the persecuted majority.