A friend who spends a lot of time with self-confessed "adjective-laden hippies" -- the protester, semi-anarchist, activist crowd -- once said to me that the problem with people who care passionately and deeply about things is that they forget that all humans make mistakes and errors in judgement, and they fall victim to the same unconscious prejudices as their opponents do.

We're all a little blind to that which we prefer not to see. And in the case of the left-wing types, it can make them blind to the reality that people don't always behave the way we'd like them to behave, and to the reality that sometimes people who agree with us and have great motives can lie and cheat and mislead just as cleverly as the "bad guys".

We need to question ourselves just as fearlessly on our own views and data as we question those we believe to be fundamentally wrong.