On the shooting of Daunte Wright

The New Neo Posted on by

I had originally theorized that the female police officer who shot Daunte Wright, having mistaken her gun for a laser, was a rookie making a rookie mistake. Wright’s killing has precipitated rioting in the area, a suburb of already-riot-ravaged Minneapolis.

But she was a veteran of 26 years’ duration:

Kim Potter, 48, tendered her resignation Tuesday in a brief letter to Brooklyn Center Mayor Mike Elliott and Police Chief Tim Gannon. Gannon followed suit, announcing his own resignation later on Tuesday.

Potter is a veteran and has served as her police union’s president, the Star Tribune reported. At an earlier news conference, where authorities played a nearly one-minute dash-cam recording of the fatal incident, Gannon said it appears that Potter intended to fire her Taser but instead made an “accidental discharge” from her gun…

According to local media, Potter has retained attorney Earl Gray. Gray is also representing former Minneapolis police officer Thomas Lane, who has also been charged in Floyd’s death…

Potter joined the Brooklyn Center Police Department in 1995, according to her LinkedIn page. She was first licensed as a police officer in Minnesota at age 22 that same year, the Star Tribune reported. In 2019, she was elected president of the Brooklyn Center Police Officer’s Association, according to the group’s Facebook page.

That WaPo article doesn’t go into the circumstances that caused Potter to attempt to tase Wright until near the article’s end, and it’s a rather long article. At the outset, Wright is described as “unarmed,” but it’s only much later that we learn anything else about why he might have been considered a threat or problem. This is the way his actions are described at that later point:

When the officers asked Wright for his identification, Gannon said at a Monday news conference, they found Wright had an outstanding warrant for a misdemeanor and attempted to take him into custody.

The video clip shows Wright slipping from an officer’s grip and returning to his car. That’s when Potter pulls out her gun and yells, “I’ll Tase you!” and then “Taser! Taser! Taser!” before firing.

Note the way that’s written – Wright “slips” from an officer’s grip – almost as though the officer’s hands were too greasy to hold him, rather than that he was actively evading arrest.

And what was Wright’s misdemeanor? Jaywalking? Littering? The WaPo doesn’t say, but apparently it was a gun violation:

Court records show Wright was being sought for fleeing from law enforcement officers and for possessing a gun without a permit during an encounter with Minneapolis police in June. In that case, a statement of probable cause said police got a call about a man waving a gun who was later identified as Wright.

If that information is correct – and I’ve read it in several places and never seen any article that says it’s not true – then does anyone think the WaPo’s omission of that part of the story is an accident? And might it not have figured into the reasons the officers were so intent on detaining Wright?

However, it’s clear that there would have been no reason to shoot Wright. It’s also pretty clear, from the videocam, that Potter did not intend to shoot Wright. And yet she did.

But my question is this: how on earth can a veteran cop mistake a gun for a taser? I know that errors happen, but that seems an incredibly basic one and an especially egregious one. In this case it had terrible fatal consequences.

I found a 2015-2016 case that is somewhat similar, in which the shooter (a 73-year-old volunteer reserve sheriff deputy in Tulsa) was found guilty of second degree manslaughter, “culpable negligence,” and sentenced to four years.

I also found the following comment at Powerline, but can’t find the case and I have no idea whether this is correct:

The Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals decided a 2002 case of a gun mistaken for a taser & identified five factors that they considered when determining whether the officer (incidentally a woman) should have known that she was holding the wrong weapon.

The factors are: (1) the nature of the training the officer had received to prevent incidents like this from happening; (2) whether the officer acted in accordance with that training; (3) whether following that training would have alerted the officer that [s]he was holding a handgun; (4) whether the defendant’s conduct heightened the officer’s sense of danger; and (5) whether the defendant’s conduct caused the officer to act with undue haste and inconsistently with that training.

It’s hard to imagine why anyone would want to be a police officer these days. It’s always been a job of great danger and tremendous opportunity for error, but now the public and even other public officials seem to be completely unforgiving of any errors and demand 100% perfection. This is, of course, impossible.

The net result will be that there will be a lack of police officers – of course, that’s one of the left’s goals, so they consider that a feature rather than a bug – and the people who do serve as police will be more likely to be of lower quality and far more jittery and risk-averse. One can expect a resultant a decline in public safety, a phenomenon we’re already seeing. Again, though, the left seems to consider that a feature rather than a bug.

Floyd’s cause of death as a legal matter

The New Neo Posted on by

In all trials but especially in an emotionally-charged trial such as that of Derek Chauvin, it’s hard to say how a jury will think and what it will decide. That’s true even if you’re aware of the law and the evidence, because although juries are told to consider both instead of going with emotion, the reality is that it takes a rare person to do that.

In order for the Chauvin jury to acquit on all counts, it would take twelve people putting aside their preconceptions and purposely-stirred-up emotions. Although that’s theoretically possible, it seems it’s highly unlikely. A hung jury – a split decision – is, however, a distinct possibility. In that event, Chauvin can be tried again, and I think the need to convict him for political reasons is so great that a retrial would indeed occur.

Yesterday “shipwreckedcrew” at RedState, a lawyer whose opinions have seemed mostly well-grounded to me in the past, explains some legal issues in Chauvin’s trial that I think are often neglected or misunderstood. In the following excerpt, shipwreckedcrew is discussing the testimony of Dr. Tobin, a medical expert who advanced a theory of Floyd’s death that doesn’t include the “knee on neck” but does include the actions of the police:

As Dr. Tobin explained, Floyd died as a result of the position of his body on a hard surface, the fact he was handcuffed behind his back, and because the four officers at various points in time were using their body weight to pin him to the ground in order to keep him from moving. The combination of these factors caused a decrease in the ability of Floyd’s lungs to expand and contract to take in oxygen. The reduced intake of oxygen into his lungs led to a gradual reduction in brain activity over the few minutes he was kept in that position…

This was the testimony that I believe caused Andrew C. McCarthy to write this yesterday [original emphasis]:

In the criminal law, a defendant is deemed to have caused a person’s death if his actions were a substantial factor in bringing it about. For a jury to convict, there is no requirement that it find the defendant’s actions were the exclusive cause of death….

Whether Derek Chauvin had the intent to apply excessive force on George Floyd, to the point of criminal assault, remains a very live disputed issue. It is no longer plausible, however, to claim that police restraint did not cause Floyd’s death. In the legal sense of causation, it surely did.

Intent is required in Chauvin’s case for a conviction on the two murder charges, but not for the manslaughter charge.

I read McCarthy’s piece several times to see if I was missing something, because whether or not I’ve agreed with McCarthy in the past (often yes, sometimes no), he has usually seemed to me to be writing with great clarity. Here, I don’t see that same degree of clarity, and one of the things I perceive him as neglecting is the concept of reasonable doubt. From what I’ve read elsewhere, Dr. Tobin’s testimony was based on a theory that could be challenged in a lot of ways, and I certainly have reasonable doubt that he’s correct about whether the police’s actions had a substantial contribution to Floyd’s death. We’ll see whether the defense brings in witnesses to contradict Tobin, but at this point the question is certainly not in the nature of you might call “settled beyond a reasonable doubt.” Am I missing something?

And then there’s also the following addition from “shipwreckedcrew” yesterday:

While the media has legal commentators have focused on Dr. Tobin’s testimony and how it points the finger of blame at Chauvin — and the other three officers as well — one aspect of this issue…has received little if any attention. The law provides that even if Chauvin’s conduct was a “substantial contributing factor” in Floyd’s death, Chauvin is still not guilty of any crime unless the prosecution ALSO PROVES that Chauvin’s conduct was “wrongful”. In other words, shooting and killing a suspect is not “wrongful” when the suspect poses a threat of great bodily injury to the officer. The same rationale holds true if Chauvin’s actions towards Floyd were not “wrongful” — a standard which is based on the “totality of circumstances” and based on what a “reasonable officer” in the same situation would have done.

That seems highly relevant to me.

There’s also another issue I want to highlight here, which is standards for police behavior, as expressed by a prosecution expert witness yesterday:

Interestingly, Stoughton [the prosecution witness] examines this question with zero inquiry into the standards, practices and policies of the actual department of the officer in question. That officer may have followed his own department’s policies to the letter, but if he didn’t meet the national generally accepted police standards as defined by Stoughton, his use of force was unreasonable and worthy of criminal conviction, and perhaps life in prison.

That seems inherently wrong. A police officer is not omniscient nor can he or she be expected to be. The officer is trained in the tactics of the local police department.

More:

In particular, Stoughton said, once a suspect is handcuffed, he no longer represents any degree of threat to anybody, and therefore the police should be using no force against him whatever. I guess that means once the suspect is cuffed the police are just supposed to ask him to meet them at the police station at his convenience, maybe call him an Uber?

Indeed, Stoughton at one point took all this to truly ridiculous lengths by suggesting that instead of trying to fight Floyd into the back seat of the squad car in attempting his lawful arrest, once he’d made them aware of his anxiety and claustrophobia the officers instead should have offered to allow Floyd to ride in the front seat of the squad car—presumably one of the two officers would take the back seat, behind the barrier, while Floyd rode up front with his partner.

This is absurd on its face. Even I know that handcuffed people can do a lot of damage. I guess you can find an expert who will say anything, literally anything.

And what’s more:

Indeed, whereas I’m largely speculating that other state’s witnesses followed this “build your rationale from the conclusion you want” approach, we actually have evidence consistent with that approach in the case of Professor Stoughton.

This came in the form of an op-ed that Stoughton wrote with two others (both co-authors on his latest book) in which they concluded that Floyd’s death was the result of Chauvin’s RACISTPOLICEMURDER!!! neck restraint and positional asphyxia.

How do we know about this Washington Post op-ed? Nelson was kind enough to ask Stoughton about it on cross-examination.

What’s notable about this conclusion was that the op-ed was written in a four-day period between the date of Floyd’s death and when it was published in the Washington Post, and before Stoughton had seen anything other than the bystander video—no medical reports, no autopsy report, no toxicology results, no hours of body cam footage or surveillance camera footage, no 40,000 pages of investigative reports and MPD policy and training materials.

The prosecution is apparently going to rest its case today. The judge has indicated – to my surprise and to the surprise of many people – that the defense will be presenting its case for about three days. That seems very short to me. I have no idea what that signifies, but it should be interesting.

I think France may be lost

The New Neo Posted on by

We used to hear more about the situation in France, but for the last few years there’s been so much focus on political events in the US that I haven’t kept up much with France. But it was already bad enough there a few years ago, so bad that this article doesn’t really surprise me:

Only one political party dares to speak clearly of the dangers arising from the Islamization of France and radical Islam: National Rally. Its president, Marine Le Pen, is also often summoned by judges and condemned. In 2015, a French journalist compared National Rally to the Islamic State. Le Pen responded by posting on Twitter two photographs of crimes committed by the Islamic State and added, “This is Islamic State”. On February 10, 2021, Le Pen had to appear before a tribunal to respond to a complaint lodged against her by the French Ministry of Justice for “dissemination of violent messages seriously undermining human dignity, likely to be seen by a minor”. In court, the judge asked Le Pen in an accusatory tone, “Do you consider that these photos violate human dignity?” Le Pen replied, “It is the crime that violates human dignity, it is not its photographic reproduction”.

France is the main Muslim country in Europe (officially, 8.8% of its population is Muslim). Islam is the second religion in France, but come in first if one counts the number of active practitioners…

France is also a country where more than 150 mosques spread across the country host imams who deliver extremely radical sermons and call for action against the West. The number of young Muslims under 25 who place Islamic law above French law continues to grow and has now reached 74%. During the last decade, Islamists who have committed deadly attacks in France were mostly Muslims born in France. This was true of Mohammed Merah, who murdered soldiers as well as Jewish children in Toulouse in 2012; Said and Cherif Kouachi, who murdered twelve people at the magazine Charlie Hebdo in 2015; Amedy Coulibaly, who murdered people at a supermarket in Saint Mande, a few days after the attack on Charlie Hebdo, and Samy Amimour, one of the three terrorists who murdered 90 people in November 2015 in the Bataclan Theater. That makes radical Islam and Islamic terrorism a French problem.

Macron, threatened by Le Pen’s growing popularity, promised a new law to crack down on growing Muslim “separatism.” But various Muslim countries boycotted French products in response to this prospect, and the pressure worked to water down the law considerably. There’s much more at the link, almost all of it depressing.

It’s hard to see a way out of this spiral. It’s been apparent for well over a decade that radical Islamists are expert at exploiting and appealing to Western values of tolerance in order to destroy Western values in the end. The left is their ally. And this process is especially well advanced in Europe.

Roundup

The New Neo Posted on by

Here we go again:

(1) Israel lets Iran know that it is able to toy with its nuclear program – at least for now. Israel realizes that Joe Biden and company are not going to protect it but are instead more inclined to continue Obama’s previous efforts to enable Iran, and so Israel took matters into its own hands and damaged Iran’s nuclear facility at Natanz and in particular some new centrifuges Iran had proudly unveiled in a ceremony about a day before.

The attack seems to have been of the cyber variety, apparently causing a fire or minor explosion that did the damage. However, reporting is murky – and of course that AP article I just linked is all worried that Israel’s action will hurt the Biden administration’s talks with Iran. Apparently there was an attack of some sort at the same facility back in July. It seems that there are some Israeli confederates working there. Or some advanced hacking into the computers that operate the place. Or both.

(2) Rush Limbaugh’s longtime sidekick Bo Snerdley (real name: James Golden) has started a PAC called New Journey. Here’s what he’s trying to do: “Our purpose is the realignment of the Black American vote with candidates and issues that support conservative values and by consequence, help the black community.” Golden is black, by the way.

(3) A black man is shot by police in a town near Minneapolis. His family tells one story (he was stopped because of air fresheners in his car) and the police another (he had an outstanding warrant, resisted arrest, and sped away, endangering others in the process), and riots ensue. I am going to go out on a limb and say that if there’s a videocam for the incident, it most likely won’t back up the family’s story.

UPDATE 10:40 PM: The police bodycam shows that the dead man, Duante Wright, was indeed wanted for illegal gun possession and resisting arrest when a female police officer intending to tase him pulled out her gun instead by mistake and shot him. Terrible situation, but seems to be negligence on her part rather than anything else.

(4) The people who make Clorox wipes probably won’t like this, although they’ve certainly had a good run. It may be the finale for COVID surface hygiene theater:

The principal mode by which people are infected with SARS-CoV-2 (the virus that causes COVID-19) is through exposure to respiratory droplets carrying infectious virus. It is possible for people to be infected through contact with contaminated surfaces or objects (fomites), but the risk is generally considered to be low.

But because the CDC never, never ever ever, wants us to relax, it hedges:

However, it is not clear what proportion of SARS-CoV-2 infections are acquired through surface transmission. There have been few reports of COVID-19 cases potentially attributed to fomite transmission. Infections can often be attributed to multiple transmission pathways. Fomite transmission is difficult to prove definitively, in part because respiratory transmission from asymptomatic people cannot be ruled out. Case reports indicate that SARS-CoV-2 is transmitted between people by touching surfaces an ill person has recently coughed or sneezed on, and then directly touching the mouth, nose, or eyes. Hand hygiene is a barrier to fomite transmission and has been associated with lower risk of infection.

Quantitative microbial risk assessment (QMRA) studies have been conducted to understand and characterize the relative risk of SARS-CoV-2 fomite transmission and evaluate the need for and effectiveness of prevention measures to reduce risk. Findings of these studies suggest that the risk of SARS-CoV-2 infection via the fomite transmission route is low, and generally less than 1 in 10,000, which means that each contact with a contaminated surface has less than a 1 in 10,000 chance of causing an infection

Etc. etc. at the link.

Branca’s summary of testimony in the Chauvin trial last Friday

The New Neo Posted on by

I’ve been recommending Andrew Branca’s trial summaries at Legal Insurrection because I think they’re especially clear and yet detailed. Today he’s posted one about the court proceedings last Friday, and once again it’s the clearest article I’ve read about what transpired that day.

My conclusion is that the prosecution’s case is not only weak, it’s so weak that it’s built on inconsistencies, unjustified conclusions, and in some cases perhaps outright lies. I also conclude that, if the jury is determined to convict – and it might be – those flaws in the prosecution’s case won’t prevent a guilty verdict.

This case has been subject to a greater amount of attention, misleading prejudicial information, and premature yet well-aired conclusions about Chauvin’s guilt (conclusions from both left and right, I might add, in a heated race to signal the most virtue) than I’ve seen in any case before in my lifetime. That’s saying something.

“Stayin’ Alive” is staying alive

The New Neo Posted on by

Whether you love the song, detest it, find it merely annoying, or are indifferent, you probably are familiar with the Bee Gees’ 1977 megahit “Stayin’ Alive” from the “Saturday Night Fever” soundtrack. Just about everybody is, even people too young to have heard it in its original setting. I certainly was familiar with it from back then, but until recent re-listenings I’d paid it almost no attention.

Think it’s just a simple song, as I previously had thought? And that the Bee Gees are just doing a simple thing with their falsetto voices here? Think again. There’s a reason so many people love this song so much. The bass line, of course, and the other instruments. But also there’s the energy the Bee Gees put into singing it, which is striking when you hear the isolated vocals and then the added instruments – as in the following video. The guy doing the analysis has a lot of energy, too, and he knows a great deal about singing (I’ve cued up an excerpt):

The Bee Gees constantly vary not just this emphasis or “push” of their voices, but also the lead versus the trio as well as falsetto versus chest voices on the “going nowhere” chorus. Their voices really do sound like horns, not just in this song but in many, and they have a tendency to use horns in their arrangements to emphasize the effect.

There’s also, when you watch their video of the song (which I’ll post in a moment), a strange (and to me interesting) contrast between the upbeat music and the depressing lyrics of near-desperation. As an ex-dancer, I also observe the unusual action of the video, which is mainly the brothers simply walking. Any dancer can tell you how incredibly hard that is to do onstage or for the camera without looking affected or tense, and I think they (especially Barry, who has a dancer’s carriage) excel at it. In the “Saturday Night Fever” movie, of course, you had John Travolta walking to the song in a sequence that’s become iconic, but his walk is more of a strut. The Bee Gees do something simpler and, I believe, actually more difficult.

Here’s that original Bee Gee video – 105 million views so far and counting:

And if you watch a lot of YouTube reaction videos to “Stayin’ Alive,” you’ll see that very often, young black people on them are stunned, absolutely stunned, to discover the song features white men singing (see this, for example). They often were previously quite familiar with the song but not the singers, and almost uniformly thought the singers were black men or even black women.

Here’s the definitive word on the “Bee Gees as white black people” perception. It’s a reaction video to the Bee Gee song “Jive Talkin’,” which preceded “Stayin’ Alive” by a few years and was their breakthrough hit when they reinvented themselves the first time. The song was based on the sound the car tires made crossing a bridge in their new home, Miami:

I could go on – and on and on – but I’ll stop now. For today, anyway.

[NOTE: You may or may not be aware that “Stayin’ Alive” is used in CPR training because just about everyone knows it, and it has an excellent rhythm for doing chest compressions.]

“Marxist BLM leader buys $1.4 million home in ritzy LA enclave”…

The New Neo Posted on by

…is the title of this article in the NY Post:

Patrisse Khan-Cullors, the leader of Black Lives Matter and a self-described Marxist, recently purchased a $1.4 million home in an exclusive Los Angeles neighborhood where the vast majority of residents are white, according to reports.

The home, which features three bedrooms and three bathrooms, is nestled in Topanga Canyon and has a separate guesthouse on the property, according to a celebrity real estate blog which reported the transaction last week.

The property, which is about a 15 minute drive from Malibu beaches, features bamboo floors and vaulted ceilings, according to the listing…

Black Lives Matter, which began as hashtag in response to the acquittal of George Zimmerman in the 2012 shooting of Trayvon Martin, took in more than $90 million last year and was at the forefront of protests across the country last year after the death of George Floyd in May.

Khan-Cullors, 37, signed a multi-platform deal with Warner Bros in October, although it is not clear how much she is paid by BLM since their finances flow through a complex web of for-profit and nonprofit corporate entities.

But isn’t Khan-Cullors just following in the illustrious footsteps of Soviet predecessors, who had their dachas in the country?

Also, in Topanga Canyon, Khan-Cullors probably will be safe from any riots. It’s fairly rural and secluded out there. Quite lovely, too. I’ve been there many times over the years, including way back when it was mostly a hippy retreat.

One thing that puzzles me about this Post story, though, is that, from what I know of LA area real estate, 1.4 million dollars won’t odinarily get you a whole lot these days. A nice house, yes. But no sort of luxury palace.

Joe Manchin has written an op-ed in the Wapo saying he will uphold the filibuster

The New Neo Posted on by

Here’s Manchin’s op-ed. An excerpt:

The filibuster is a critical tool to protecting that input [from smaller states such as West Virginia] and our democratic form of government. That is why I have said it before and will say it again to remove any shred of doubt: There is no circumstance in which I will vote to eliminate or weaken the filibuster. The time has come to end these political games, and to usher a new era of bipartisanship where we find common ground on the major policy debates facing our nation.

More at the link.

Also, I’d change that first sentence in the Manchin quote and have it read “and our republican form of government” rather than “democratic form of government.” But I think I understand why Manchin wrote it the way he did – so many people don’t know the definitions of those terms, and so many people also confuse the small “d” and small “r” forms of the words with the parties that have been given those names.

So, do I believe that Manchin will keep his word?

Maybe. How’s that for hedging? After all, Manchin has made promises before that he didn’t keep, always moving in the direction of voting with the left in the end, if his vote mattered. However, although I recall in the past him making statements that he’d vote in certain conservative ways on this issue or that issue and then breaking his word, I can’t recall him ever taking an unequivocal-sounding stand like this on it in a major newspaper prior to the vote.

That doesn’t mean he won’t change his mind if they offer him enough to do it, or threaten him enough. But in this case the subject matter of the vote also directly affects his own power. Right now, with the existence of the filibuster, he’s practically king of the Senate. If he votes to remove the filibuster, he’s just another one of the Democrats. Which will he choose?

What’s more, right now Manchin may be acting as a screen for other Democrats who may have doubts about killing the filibuster. I don’t know whether these people exist – although Sinema may be one of them – but I don’t rule it out.

Of course, we can never assume that all the GOP senators will vote to preserve the filibuster. However, I can’t see that it would be in the interests of anyone in the GOP to get rid of the filibuster – short of being offered a substantial financial bribe.

Actually, Manchin himself has been bribed with his wife’s new job, but that doesn’t seem to have been enough. Is he now just haggling over the price? Or does he mean what he says?

The fate of the republic may rest on it. If Joe Manchin is the only thing standing between us and tyranny, we are in extremely dire shape (something I believe anyway, Manchin or not).

I hate to have reached this level of cynicism, but unfortunately there are reasons for it.

The ladder of evil

The New Neo Posted on by

[NOTE: This is a repeat of a previous post. Unfortunately, it seems as though it’s always a timely subject, and right now even more timely. So I thought it could use another go-round, very slightly edited.]

Commenter “Ymarsakar” once made an interesting observation:

When the world declares Jews, Republicans, and whites to be non humans that need to be exterminated to get rid of a threat to humanity, most people will Obey.

Most will. They have nothing in their spine that can resist the Power of the World and its numbers. Nothing.

I have a slightly different take on it. I’ve long conceptualized the whole thing as a hierarchy of evil and the resistance to it, a sort of ladder with many rungs. Here they are, in order from most evil to most dedicated to fighting evil:

–Some people will conceptualize, plan, and implement it as leaders.

–Some people will actively cooperate with vigor.

–Some people will support it but not actively participate.

–Some people will be indifferent (or even unaware) unless it directly reaches them or their family.

–Some people will be somewhat disturbed by it, but manage to put it out of their minds most of the time and go on with their lives.

–Some people will be disturbed by it and contemplate various forms of resistance, but will be too frightened to act.

–Some people will be disturbed by it and will decide to act in small ways to resist it, ways they consider lower risk.

–Some people will be disturbed by it and will decide to take great risks in order to resist it, but could be stopped by threats (not necessarily threats to themselves, but threats to friends and family).

–Some people will risk all to actively resist it in every way they can.

An example of the latter would be those Poles who continued their rescue efforts and resistance despite this type of retribution from the Nazis:

Poland was the only place where German law rendered any assistance to Jews punishable by death. That punishment was severe and collective: It was meted out not only to the rescuer but also to his entire family and to anyone else who knew about such activities and did not report them. Almost 1,000 Poles were killed this way, including entire families whose children were not spared.

When we talk about the prevalence of evil in humanity, and whether people are “good at heart,” this is what I think we’re actually discussing. What percentage of the population belongs to each group? I don’t know, but if I had to guess at the shape of a graph, it probably would be a normal distribution—that is, the biggest bump would be in the middle groups, with much smaller numbers for the beginning and ending rungs of the ladder of evil.

So what causes the difference among the groups? Why is a person in one rather than another? Darned if I know, but I have ideas. Some of it probably has to do with devotion to something beyond oneself, which could be religion (in certain circumstances it could even be Communism—in Poland, for example, many of the resisters to the Nazis were Communists). This can lead to good or to evil (such as the 9/11 terrorists, for the latter).

Many of the differences among groups almost certainly involve personal traits that are some combination of nature and nurture, such as the extent of the devotion to liberty. And although psychopaths/sociopaths (the ladder’s first couple of rungs) are often born, certain societies in certain times can be especially effective at fostering and encouraging and promoting them, and using them most fully to further goals of the group rather than just goals of the individual psychopath/sociopath.

In the end, though, there is something mysterious about it all: the problem of evil, with which humankind has been wrestling for aeons.