A brief follow-up to this post from last week: In our current climate of political assholery, no self-described “activist” can answer what I think of as an essential question: If you get what you want, what will be the costs? Every choice — every choice ever made by every human being — carries costs. Some of the costs are easily borne; some, though, are unmanageable, or even catastrophic. Especially if you’re a political activist, you have a responsibility to anticipate the costs of your preferred policy and develop a plan for dealing with them. But if you ask people who call themselves activists the question above, you’ll only get two responses: dumfounded blankness or sheer rage.