Reply #8: It's time to stop being romantic about them.

[saras]

They're NOT RATIONAL. Trying to figure them out DOESN'T WORK.

Why "afraid" of criminals but not bacteria? Killing bacteria doesn't give them a chance to make anything suffer.

And they don't really want control. They want a system where control is failing, and violence is in common use to enforce it. It's not really about bad guys not getting away - after all, in the fundamentalist belief system we're ALL bad guys, condemned to an eternity in hell. It's about making people suffer, whether or not they're bad guys. And what worse suffering than to be innocent and condemned?

If you want to look at why and how hatred and rage has taken over and dulled their intellectual facilities, I think that neurology has quite a bit useful to say about it. But it's not like they made reasonable, intellectual, figure-out-able decisions to be the way they are. And the entire political spectrum seems to admit that reason is useless with them.