Brevity on Breivik

I suppose that it was inevitable if that if a mass murderer posts an interminable manifesto on the internet before carrying out his crime it will be mined, equally interminably, by bloggers and columnists to prove that what they have been saying all along was right and that if we had heeded them all would have been fine. They should pause and consider that a melange of commonplace and contradictory ideas prove very little and that those who are attracted to them usually, interminably once more, fill the comments boxes on web sites with tedious scrawl, not Norwegian islands with dead children.

Nobody puts it better than George,

Breivik is one of those semi-intelligent people who are actually more stupid than any genuinely stupid person. Vastly overestimating semi-intelligence is not only stupid but worse. It is blind, arrogant, and always malevolent in effect. There is deadly danger in being obsessed by one's own importance or the importance of one's ideas: the two are almost the same thing. 

Pathological ideas are dangerous, infecting the minds of pathological people they can be murderous, embedded in pathological regimes they can be genocidal. We are kept as safe as we can be by the humility of democracy with its agonised uncertainties. Of that, and that alone, we should be overwhelmingly certain.