He was subsequently located some eight hours later when residents of a private home he was apparently trying to enter called the police. (So much for "Knock and the door shall be opened to you.") During arrest, the man (miraculously?) broke a pair of handcuffs but was eventually subdued by the
Thursday, April 19, 2007
Woe Unto Thee, Ye Scribes and Pharasees!
What with Buddy the donkey having made his appearance in a Dallas, Texas courtroom the other day, I guess I should have expected that He who rode an ass into Jerusalem might make a similar visit to the Dallas - Fort Worth Metroplex. Only in our updated story, the man claiming to be God to both a bank teller and a police officer drove a truck in place of a donkey and rather than driving the moneylenders out of the Temple, he (He?) relieved the same of an undisclosed amount of cash from a Fort Worth bank.
He was subsequently located some eight hours later when residents of a private home he was apparently trying to enter called the police. (So much for "Knock and the door shall be opened to you.") During arrest, the man (miraculously?) broke a pair of handcuffs but was eventually subdued by theSanhedrin police and taken for psychiatric examination to a hospital. The man's truck has since been located but the money has not yet been recovered.
He was subsequently located some eight hours later when residents of a private home he was apparently trying to enter called the police. (So much for "Knock and the door shall be opened to you.") During arrest, the man (miraculously?) broke a pair of handcuffs but was eventually subdued by the
Madness In Our Method
In his usual measured and even tempered way, Hugh Hewitt rhetorically asks if NBC’s decision to air portions of the video sent by Virginia Tech mass murderer Cho Seung-Hui is “the single worst editorial decision in the history of broadcast news.”
I’d still give the nod to the decision to hire Katie Couric for the Today Show chair formerly held by J. Fred Muggs, but reasonable people can disagree about such things.
I’m being flippant because, frankly, much of the commentary that has exploded in the aftermath of the Virginia Tech tragedy is worthy of, nay, begs for ridicule. I have already commented on the alleged causal connection between such tragedies and video game violence by America’s child psychologist for children of all ages, Dr. Phil.
Meanwhile, Radley Balko at Reason has nailed Barack Obama’s ludicrous comparison of the shootings to outsourcing as “ignorant,... exploitative and offensive.” And, of course, the finger pointing and ax grinding over everything from justifying more or less gun control to whether campus police and administrative officials acted properly or quickly enough and what about the early warning signs that Cho might have been mentally ill (you think?) and on and on and on continue to inundate the media and the internet and force their way into our collective consciousness.
Here’s a thought. It’s all garbage. The Virginia Tech massacre is the responsibility of one man and one man, alone. Cho Seung-Hui. He was a sick man, a deranged man and a tragic and pathetic man. None of the rest of the 20/20 hindsight pop psychology, ax grinding and blame spreading is worth a rodent’s hindquarters.
Yes, including my own ax grinding right here and now. None of us writing about this tragedy, when we attempt to say anything more at this point than what a tragedy it was and is and will remain, are contributing anything worthwhile to that terrible truth. Unforeseen, unforeseeable and unavoidable tragedies occur to innocent people every day, sometimes because madmen walk the earth, and innocent lives are lost as a result. The urge to make sense or to find something, anything redeeming from such events is understandable. So, even, are the baser urges to exploit those events to our own advantages. We are only human. But unlike madmen, we are supposed to be able to resist our urges.
Or at least to try.
I’d still give the nod to the decision to hire Katie Couric for the Today Show chair formerly held by J. Fred Muggs, but reasonable people can disagree about such things.
I’m being flippant because, frankly, much of the commentary that has exploded in the aftermath of the Virginia Tech tragedy is worthy of, nay, begs for ridicule. I have already commented on the alleged causal connection between such tragedies and video game violence by America’s child psychologist for children of all ages, Dr. Phil.
Meanwhile, Radley Balko at Reason has nailed Barack Obama’s ludicrous comparison of the shootings to outsourcing as “ignorant,... exploitative and offensive.” And, of course, the finger pointing and ax grinding over everything from justifying more or less gun control to whether campus police and administrative officials acted properly or quickly enough and what about the early warning signs that Cho might have been mentally ill (you think?) and on and on and on continue to inundate the media and the internet and force their way into our collective consciousness.
Here’s a thought. It’s all garbage. The Virginia Tech massacre is the responsibility of one man and one man, alone. Cho Seung-Hui. He was a sick man, a deranged man and a tragic and pathetic man. None of the rest of the 20/20 hindsight pop psychology, ax grinding and blame spreading is worth a rodent’s hindquarters.
Yes, including my own ax grinding right here and now. None of us writing about this tragedy, when we attempt to say anything more at this point than what a tragedy it was and is and will remain, are contributing anything worthwhile to that terrible truth. Unforeseen, unforeseeable and unavoidable tragedies occur to innocent people every day, sometimes because madmen walk the earth, and innocent lives are lost as a result. The urge to make sense or to find something, anything redeeming from such events is understandable. So, even, are the baser urges to exploit those events to our own advantages. We are only human. But unlike madmen, we are supposed to be able to resist our urges.
Or at least to try.
Think Locally, Act Globally
“The church of global free trade, which rules American politics with infallible pretensions, may have finally met its Martin Luther,” writes William Greider in The Nation. I wasn't aware that free trade advocates had been selling plenary indulgences, but Luther in this case turns out to be retired IBM executive and current president of the Alfred P. Slone Foundation, Ralph Gomory. Gomory wrote in collaboration with economist William Baumol, a book entitled Global Trade and Conflicting National Interests some seven years ago. As Greider puts it, the “book languished in academic obscurity and until recently was ignored by Washington policy circles.” As C. Montgomery Burns might say with a view to the latest elections, “Recently, eh?”
I haven’t read the book, but the gist of Greider’s lengthy review is an approving belief in Gomory’s thesis that the rise of multinational corporations engaged in free trade on a global level has resulted in and will continue to result in a net real loss to the U.S. economy. “If nothing changes in how globalization currently works, Americans will be increasingly exposed to downward pressure on incomes and living standards.”
Lucky for us, Gomory has a solution which Greider reports as follows:
Should we, now? And if so, can’t one make a reasonably good case that the constituencies of a truly multinational corporation include the world’s population and not merely the home nation of its incorporation?
Greider trots out the usual snippets about how other nations both protect their own economies and lure U.S. corporations to outsource primarily manufacturing facilities and acknowledges that this constitutes a win for both the emerging nations’ economies and for the corporations. But, alas, “there is another effect beyond the benefits for those two parties--high-value-added jobs leave the U.S.”
Well, yes, if your idea of a high-value-added job is working on an assembly line in a semiconductor factory. Exactly how high paying such a job can be and for how long it will remain so is another matter. Yes, various Asian nations effectively took the electronics manufacturing market and a good chunk of the automobile manufacturing market away from the U.S. over the past two or three decades. And now as the standard of living and cost of labor have risen in those nations, they, themselves, are facing essentially the same phenomenon as those very same manufacturing operations are now beginning to be outsourced to other, less developed nations. Golly, imagine the third world actually having the opportunity to work and grow its way out of poverty. Why, somebody ought to do something about this!
And, sure, the U.S. continues to import more and more goods and services as more and more goods and services at lower prices (and sometimes higher quality) become available. As a result, ignoring for a moment the lost U.S. jobs this process necessarily also entails, we nonetheless all benefit as consumers. And, sure, such benefits accrue only so long as we do, in fact, have jobs and, what’s more, jobs paying enough to be able to afford those foreign bargains.
So what about those lost jobs? Greider says, “Free-trade believers insist US workers can defend themselves by getting better educated.” Well, yes and no. On the one hand, the days of a U.S. labor force in the manufacturing sector earning salaries commensurate with that of their parents and grandparents in the manufacturing sector is probably gone for good and it is unrealistic to expect that the remaining blue-collar work force will be able en masse to educate itself to a comparable earning level in a different sector.
On the other hand, just as we are on average vastly better off economically in this post-industrial economy than we were during America’s primarily agrarian economy, it is far more likely than not that our expanding economy will continue to create a new job market as well, and not only of the burger flipping variety. (For that matter, when, oh when, is someone going to build robots to replace the largely incompetent workforce in what, once upon a time, was called the fast food industry?) Refresh my memory, how many computer related jobs were there in the U.S. thirty years ago?
But, sure, the notion that everyone is a winner all of the time in a free market is absurd and, yes, the disparity between the per capita wealth and earning capacity of the U.S. and other Western nations vis a vis the rest of the world will eventually close in a global market. Yes, also, although that is primarily because such a global market will result in an expanding economy on a world-wide basis, it is also a function to some extent of supply and demand in the labor market – more people capable of performing factory jobs or, for that matter, computer programming or any other jobs capable of outsourcing will result in downward pressures on the price of such local labor.
Which gets to the nub of what is wrong with the notion that the U.S. needs a protectionist national policy. First, it won’t work, neither here nor anywhere else. Not, at least, in the long run; and, yes, while in the long run we may all be dead, our children and grandchildren will not. Second, national protectionist policy is simply local protectionist policy writ large. Read Greider’s article and replace in your mind every mention of the U.S. and foreign nations with, oh, say, Michigan and Georgia (as, indeed, the same sort of progressives as Greider not so long ago routinely did and sometimes still do) and ask yourself if interstate commerce has turned out to be nearly as disastrous as international commerce is now supposed to become? Ask yourself, also, just how much you would have to earn to be able to afford the vastly higher prices and lower quality and choices of a truly local economy by comparison to the market you enjoy today.
These are not, I think, questions Mr. Greider takes very seriously. But if a painless global economy is a fairy tale so is painless protectionism. And only in fairy tales do we all get to live happily ever after.
I haven’t read the book, but the gist of Greider’s lengthy review is an approving belief in Gomory’s thesis that the rise of multinational corporations engaged in free trade on a global level has resulted in and will continue to result in a net real loss to the U.S. economy. “If nothing changes in how globalization currently works, Americans will be increasingly exposed to downward pressure on incomes and living standards.”
Lucky for us, Gomory has a solution which Greider reports as follows:
Gomory's vision of reformation actually goes beyond the trading system and America's economic deterioration. He wants to re-create an understanding of the corporation's obligations to society, the social perspective that flourished for a time in the last century but is now nearly extinct. The old idea was that the corporation is a trust, not only for shareholders but for the benefit of the country, the employees and the people who use the product. "That attitude was the attitude I grew up on in IBM," Gomory explains. "That's the way we thought--good for the country, good for the people, good for the shareholders--and I hope we will get back to it.... We should measure corporations by their impact on all their constituencies.
Should we, now? And if so, can’t one make a reasonably good case that the constituencies of a truly multinational corporation include the world’s population and not merely the home nation of its incorporation?
Greider trots out the usual snippets about how other nations both protect their own economies and lure U.S. corporations to outsource primarily manufacturing facilities and acknowledges that this constitutes a win for both the emerging nations’ economies and for the corporations. But, alas, “there is another effect beyond the benefits for those two parties--high-value-added jobs leave the U.S.”
Well, yes, if your idea of a high-value-added job is working on an assembly line in a semiconductor factory. Exactly how high paying such a job can be and for how long it will remain so is another matter. Yes, various Asian nations effectively took the electronics manufacturing market and a good chunk of the automobile manufacturing market away from the U.S. over the past two or three decades. And now as the standard of living and cost of labor have risen in those nations, they, themselves, are facing essentially the same phenomenon as those very same manufacturing operations are now beginning to be outsourced to other, less developed nations. Golly, imagine the third world actually having the opportunity to work and grow its way out of poverty. Why, somebody ought to do something about this!
And, sure, the U.S. continues to import more and more goods and services as more and more goods and services at lower prices (and sometimes higher quality) become available. As a result, ignoring for a moment the lost U.S. jobs this process necessarily also entails, we nonetheless all benefit as consumers. And, sure, such benefits accrue only so long as we do, in fact, have jobs and, what’s more, jobs paying enough to be able to afford those foreign bargains.
So what about those lost jobs? Greider says, “Free-trade believers insist US workers can defend themselves by getting better educated.” Well, yes and no. On the one hand, the days of a U.S. labor force in the manufacturing sector earning salaries commensurate with that of their parents and grandparents in the manufacturing sector is probably gone for good and it is unrealistic to expect that the remaining blue-collar work force will be able en masse to educate itself to a comparable earning level in a different sector.
On the other hand, just as we are on average vastly better off economically in this post-industrial economy than we were during America’s primarily agrarian economy, it is far more likely than not that our expanding economy will continue to create a new job market as well, and not only of the burger flipping variety. (For that matter, when, oh when, is someone going to build robots to replace the largely incompetent workforce in what, once upon a time, was called the fast food industry?) Refresh my memory, how many computer related jobs were there in the U.S. thirty years ago?
But, sure, the notion that everyone is a winner all of the time in a free market is absurd and, yes, the disparity between the per capita wealth and earning capacity of the U.S. and other Western nations vis a vis the rest of the world will eventually close in a global market. Yes, also, although that is primarily because such a global market will result in an expanding economy on a world-wide basis, it is also a function to some extent of supply and demand in the labor market – more people capable of performing factory jobs or, for that matter, computer programming or any other jobs capable of outsourcing will result in downward pressures on the price of such local labor.
Which gets to the nub of what is wrong with the notion that the U.S. needs a protectionist national policy. First, it won’t work, neither here nor anywhere else. Not, at least, in the long run; and, yes, while in the long run we may all be dead, our children and grandchildren will not. Second, national protectionist policy is simply local protectionist policy writ large. Read Greider’s article and replace in your mind every mention of the U.S. and foreign nations with, oh, say, Michigan and Georgia (as, indeed, the same sort of progressives as Greider not so long ago routinely did and sometimes still do) and ask yourself if interstate commerce has turned out to be nearly as disastrous as international commerce is now supposed to become? Ask yourself, also, just how much you would have to earn to be able to afford the vastly higher prices and lower quality and choices of a truly local economy by comparison to the market you enjoy today.
These are not, I think, questions Mr. Greider takes very seriously. But if a painless global economy is a fairy tale so is painless protectionism. And only in fairy tales do we all get to live happily ever after.
Politics as Usual at the High Court
As promised (threatened?), I have a few further comments about yesterday’s 5 to 4 Supreme Court decision in Gonzalez v. Carhart (and its simultaneously decided companion case, Gonzalez v. Planned Parenthood, hereafter collectively "Carhart").
Those interested in instant analysis from a more lawyerly perspective might do well to start with both SCOTUSblog and The Volokh Conspiracy. My quick read of the over seventy pages of the majority decision and dissent is that in purely practical terms Carhart accomplishes next to nothing for those who seek to restrict or prohibit abortions.
However, as Justice Ginsburg noted in her dissent, “[f]or the first time since Roe, the Court blesses a prohibition with no exception protecting a woman's health." Well, “blesses” is a bit strong, but the fact remains that since Roe and prior to today’s ruling, any attempted restriction on abortion that carried with it even the arguable possibility that such restriction might endanger the health of a woman seeking an abortion has failed to withstand challenge before the Court. In that sense, Carhart is a significant political victory for abortion opponents and setback for abortion rights defenders. How long lasting that victory or defeat may be or whether it amounts to anything more than a symbolic gesture remains to be seen.
It is worth remembering that in principle the ethics of abortion, like the ethics of any issue, is a separate matter from the proper role of the Supreme Court in determining what legal rights and liberties do or do not follow from the U.S. Constitution and therefore restrict or permit the (overtly) political branches of government to affect those rights and liberties. Thus, for example, while I might (and do) oppose abortion in general and also believe that Roe v. Wade and the Court's abortion cases since Roe have been bad decisions as a matter of law, I might (and do) also believe that while Griswold v. Connecticut was a bad decision as a matter of law and in some of its subsequent applications (especially Roe), a Constitutional right of privacy broader than the sort of privacy expressly protected in the actual text of the Constitution is a wonderful idea and that it should, by Amendment, be a part of the text of the Constitution.
I am aware that there are those who would disagree as a matter of legal philosophy with the first sentence of that last paragraph. Indeed, I am personally inclined to take the view myself that, at bottom, law like war is merely politics through other means. That is in fact the prevailing view amongst contemporary intellectuals, and perhaps understandably so. Perhaps the notion of law as being something above or apart from politics was always doomed once the notion of positive law of any sort being rooted in divine or at least natural law gave way to our prevailing jurisprudence of legal realism and critical legal studies.
Perhaps it follows from this that the Supreme Court should abandon its almost farcical pretense that its decisions on privacy and abortion (and any number of other matters) are possessed of some sort of consistent application of principles and some sort of unifying logic in that application. One need merely read the dissents in many of those typically split decisions to go a long way toward disabusing oneself of such notions. Indeed, I think, one would have to have the finely developed cognitive dissonance found primarily among Constitutional scholars and Supreme Court justices themselves to come to any other conclusion, and that is as true of Carhart as it is of its many "precedent" decisions.
Those interested in instant analysis from a more lawyerly perspective might do well to start with both SCOTUSblog and The Volokh Conspiracy. My quick read of the over seventy pages of the majority decision and dissent is that in purely practical terms Carhart accomplishes next to nothing for those who seek to restrict or prohibit abortions.
However, as Justice Ginsburg noted in her dissent, “[f]or the first time since Roe, the Court blesses a prohibition with no exception protecting a woman's health." Well, “blesses” is a bit strong, but the fact remains that since Roe and prior to today’s ruling, any attempted restriction on abortion that carried with it even the arguable possibility that such restriction might endanger the health of a woman seeking an abortion has failed to withstand challenge before the Court. In that sense, Carhart is a significant political victory for abortion opponents and setback for abortion rights defenders. How long lasting that victory or defeat may be or whether it amounts to anything more than a symbolic gesture remains to be seen.
It is worth remembering that in principle the ethics of abortion, like the ethics of any issue, is a separate matter from the proper role of the Supreme Court in determining what legal rights and liberties do or do not follow from the U.S. Constitution and therefore restrict or permit the (overtly) political branches of government to affect those rights and liberties. Thus, for example, while I might (and do) oppose abortion in general and also believe that Roe v. Wade and the Court's abortion cases since Roe have been bad decisions as a matter of law, I might (and do) also believe that while Griswold v. Connecticut was a bad decision as a matter of law and in some of its subsequent applications (especially Roe), a Constitutional right of privacy broader than the sort of privacy expressly protected in the actual text of the Constitution is a wonderful idea and that it should, by Amendment, be a part of the text of the Constitution.
I am aware that there are those who would disagree as a matter of legal philosophy with the first sentence of that last paragraph. Indeed, I am personally inclined to take the view myself that, at bottom, law like war is merely politics through other means. That is in fact the prevailing view amongst contemporary intellectuals, and perhaps understandably so. Perhaps the notion of law as being something above or apart from politics was always doomed once the notion of positive law of any sort being rooted in divine or at least natural law gave way to our prevailing jurisprudence of legal realism and critical legal studies.
Perhaps it follows from this that the Supreme Court should abandon its almost farcical pretense that its decisions on privacy and abortion (and any number of other matters) are possessed of some sort of consistent application of principles and some sort of unifying logic in that application. One need merely read the dissents in many of those typically split decisions to go a long way toward disabusing oneself of such notions. Indeed, I think, one would have to have the finely developed cognitive dissonance found primarily among Constitutional scholars and Supreme Court justices themselves to come to any other conclusion, and that is as true of Carhart as it is of its many "precedent" decisions.
When the judge says "Bring your ass to court,"
... sometimes he means it literally. Or so it would seem here in Dallas the other day when, during a civil trial between squabbling neighbors, one party did indeed bring his donkey Buddy to court as a "witness," apparently to demonstrate that, contrary to his neighbor's complaints, Buddy was quiet and well behaved. Buddy didn't exactly plead the 5th Amendment, but it seems he had nothing to bray say, and counsel for the opposing party wisely decided not to attempt any questions on cross-examination.
During jury deliberations following a three hour trial, the neighbors came to an amicable out-of-court settlement, perhaps proving that, while there may have been more than one jackass in court that day, they did finally manage to overcome their own mulishness.
During jury deliberations following a three hour trial, the neighbors came to an amicable out-of-court settlement, perhaps proving that, while there may have been more than one jackass in court that day, they did finally manage to overcome their own mulishness.
Wednesday, April 18, 2007
Supreme Court Upholds Federal Partial Birth Abortion Technique Ban
The slip opinion has not yet been posted, so I can comment only on the breaking AP report for now.
Abortion opponents, among whom I include myself, should properly greet any retreat from the Court's abortion cases beginning with Row v. Wade as good news of a sort. (And, of course, vice versa for abortion rights advocates.) Still, it is worth noting, first, that the surgical technique under consideration here is used in only a handful of the over one million abortions performed in the U.S. every year and, second, that as the AP reports:
That latter is, of course, a matter of dispute. (When it comes to abortion, what isn't?) Still, it must be taken as small comfort from the near-term human being involved that, while her death may no longer be effected by having her skull crushed, getting the job done by dismemberment remains a "viable" option.
More, no doubt, later.
Abortion opponents, among whom I include myself, should properly greet any retreat from the Court's abortion cases beginning with Row v. Wade as good news of a sort. (And, of course, vice versa for abortion rights advocates.) Still, it is worth noting, first, that the surgical technique under consideration here is used in only a handful of the over one million abortions performed in the U.S. every year and, second, that as the AP reports:
The procedure at issue involves partially removing the fetus intact from a woman's uterus, then crushing or cutting its skull to complete the abortion.
Abortion opponents say the law will not reduce the number of abortions performed because an alternate method _ dismembering the fetus in the uterus _ is available and, indeed, much more common.
That latter is, of course, a matter of dispute. (When it comes to abortion, what isn't?) Still, it must be taken as small comfort from the near-term human being involved that, while her death may no longer be effected by having her skull crushed, getting the job done by dismemberment remains a "viable" option.
More, no doubt, later.
Quick Draw McGraw
[T]he problem is we are programming these people as a society. You cannot tell me -- common sense tells you that if these kids are playing video games, where they're on a mass killing spree in a video game, it's glamorized on the big screen, it's become part of the fiber of our society. You take that and mix it with a psychopath, a sociopath or someone suffering from mental illness and add in a dose of rage, the is too high. And we're going to have to start dealing with that. We're going to have to start addressing those issues and recognizing that the mass murders of tomorrow are the children of today that are being programmed with this massive violence overdose. -- Dr. Phil (McGraw)
Just as we reserve the use of Roman numerals for only the most lofty and dignified of designations such as monarchs, popes and Super Bowls, the use of first names as sufficient identification for public persons is reserved for only the most lofty and exulted in society such as Pope Benedict, Queen Elizabeth, Oprah and her media prince consort, Dr. Phil.
Of course, if I may digress for a moment, there is one other class of adult humanity routinely called by their first name, and that is you and I as customers. It matters not that we might be more than twice the age of the sales clerk behind the counter who has just gleaned our given name from our credit card and whom we have only just met for the first time and barely met at that. He will grasp every opportunity thereafter to call you by that given name as though you and he were the bestest of buddies back in camp last summer. This is called "the personal touch" and taught to such minions by order of their company's executives who would no more tolerate being called by their own first names by said minions than invite them to the club on Saturday for a round of golf.
Not counting government (that's for another rant), this tacit infantilization of one's customers finds the zenith of its expression in medicine, where even the receptionist, incongruously attired in hospital scrubs (does she have a surgery to assist after the filing is done?) blithely calls you by your first name as she finally informs you "The Doctor will see you now."
Ah, yes, the Doctor. You can just hear the capitalization in her voice, can't you? And so it is with Dr. Phil. Who, after all, would take seriously or seek advice from a television psychologist just named Phil? So we have in the case of Dr. Phil a bit of psychological jujitsu, asserting his distancing professional status on the one hand, while projecting a friendly familiarity with his first name on the other.
And who among medical professionals ("medical" broadly construed to include clinical psychologists) make a routine practice of this bit of trickery? Why, pediatricians and child psychologists, of course.
Who better, then, to shoot from the hip ("I'll do the thinnin' around here, Baba Looey!") as in the above quote and explain the psychological nexus between rage-filled sociopaths and psychopaths and video game violence? You or I might have thought just being a rage-filled sociopath would suffice for someone to engage in some sort of rage-filled sociopathic behavior, but it takes Dr. Phil's common sense to connect the dots for us with a "massive violence overdose" ingested from too many hours playing Mortal Kombat.
Now, in fairness, although the research on this topic I have seen shows no statistically significant long-term or lasting effect on children or adolescents in general from their playing violent video games, that isn't McGraw's point. What he is saying is that, whatever the general effect or lack thereof, the higher suggestibility among the mentally ill in particular is causing an escalation in the nature and degree of the sort of violent acts such people may be prone to commit.
Fair enough. I know of no research on that point one way or another and, alas, Dr. Phil cites only "common sense" to support his hypothesis. That, in a nutshell, is the difference between a clinical psychologist and an experimental psychologist, never mind what counts as common sense among psychologists generally. But maybe he's right. Maybe there is a connection in that limited sense between the mentally ill and exposure to violence. Who knows?
Let's assume that it is true. Where does that leave us? Banning violent video games for the over ninety-five percent of the population who are not psychopaths or sociopaths? Following Dr. Phil's lead, I just pulled that number out of thin air, but, hey, you know, most of us ain't crazy.
To what extent are we willing to prohibit the population at large from something, anything that many of them want to do and that doesn't harm them because some tiny fraction of the population is thereby at risk? That, of course, is a question we can ask about any number of things including video games, drugs, gambling, et cetera ad nauseam.
But the libertarian takes the question a step further. What business is it of ours if such things do harm some small number of people or even if they contribute in some sense to their harming others in those still, thank God, extremely rare cases like the Virginia Tech massacre that gave occasion to Dr. Phil's thoughts on video games? How much freedom are we willing to sacrifice for a heightened sense of safety or security?
The answer to that question varies from person to person as a function of how important liberty versus security is to him. But there is one class of persons for whom we don't hesitate in asserting that security is more important; namely, children. And so as we allow ourselves increasingly to be infantilized, as we live on a diet of talk show guru prepared pablum and expert pronouncements for our own good and come to see ourselves more and more as children in constant need of protection from one another, Nanny State smiles warmly and waits to take us by the hand and tuck us into bed and read us a comforting fairy tale where they all lived happily ever after.
Tuesday, April 17, 2007
Update: Coble and Kirk Settle Their Differences
I wrote several days ago about threatened litigation against blogger Katherine Coble by legal counsel for JL Kirk & Associates for libel stemming from comments Coble and her readers had posted on her blog. Coble now reports that the Media Bloggers Association took up Coble's cause and, as these things tend to happen, a mutually agreed upon resolution short of litigation appears to have been reached.
Here's an old joke: The only lawyer in a small town was starving to death until another lawyer moved in and then they both got rich. Here's the reality, at least in many situations: The threat of litigation is a double-edged sword at least once competent attorneys are representing both sides in the dispute. Sanity short of expensive litigation usually prevails.
Here's another reality, albeit of an anecdotal nature: Being once a "starving" young lawyer, myself, I was approached by a would-be client who wished to sue someone for slander. We discussed the facts and, as it turned out, she had a reasonably good case as far as meeting the technical elements of the tort of slander was concerned but her only real damages were her wounded feelings. I explained to her that even if she were to win her suit the court would in all likelihood award no more than nominal damages (traditionally, one dollar) as a token of her vindication. She thought about this and decided not to proceed. Much though I would have liked to earn the fee, I was glad she did the right thing; but if she had decided to proceed I would have taken the case and not because I needed the work. Part of the problem with the so-called law and economics school of jurisprudence is that life is not a business.
One last reality, also mostly anecdotal, but I think relevant here: a memory from law school. We were discussing rental contracts, that is, leases in class one day and the almost universal inclusion in such contracts of clauses giving landlords putative rights that we had already learned were unenforceable. If you went in those days to an office supply store (these days probably somewhere online) and found boilerplate, fill-in-the-blank leases, you would find they almost all included such unenforceable provisions. Now, the ethics of a practicing attorney including such provisions in the drafting of a lease for a client are dubious at best, but that happens, too, and not because the lawyer doesn't know the clauses are unenforceable. Indeed, what she does know is that the average tenant will assume that such provisions are enforceable and is unlikely to challenge them. As often as not, perhaps, the law is as much a game of poker as it is of chess.
Here's an old joke: The only lawyer in a small town was starving to death until another lawyer moved in and then they both got rich. Here's the reality, at least in many situations: The threat of litigation is a double-edged sword at least once competent attorneys are representing both sides in the dispute. Sanity short of expensive litigation usually prevails.
Here's another reality, albeit of an anecdotal nature: Being once a "starving" young lawyer, myself, I was approached by a would-be client who wished to sue someone for slander. We discussed the facts and, as it turned out, she had a reasonably good case as far as meeting the technical elements of the tort of slander was concerned but her only real damages were her wounded feelings. I explained to her that even if she were to win her suit the court would in all likelihood award no more than nominal damages (traditionally, one dollar) as a token of her vindication. She thought about this and decided not to proceed. Much though I would have liked to earn the fee, I was glad she did the right thing; but if she had decided to proceed I would have taken the case and not because I needed the work. Part of the problem with the so-called law and economics school of jurisprudence is that life is not a business.
One last reality, also mostly anecdotal, but I think relevant here: a memory from law school. We were discussing rental contracts, that is, leases in class one day and the almost universal inclusion in such contracts of clauses giving landlords putative rights that we had already learned were unenforceable. If you went in those days to an office supply store (these days probably somewhere online) and found boilerplate, fill-in-the-blank leases, you would find they almost all included such unenforceable provisions. Now, the ethics of a practicing attorney including such provisions in the drafting of a lease for a client are dubious at best, but that happens, too, and not because the lawyer doesn't know the clauses are unenforceable. Indeed, what she does know is that the average tenant will assume that such provisions are enforceable and is unlikely to challenge them. As often as not, perhaps, the law is as much a game of poker as it is of chess.
"The Connection Between Race and Crime"
The shooter responsible for the Virginia Tech massacre has been identified as Cho Seung-Hui, a 23-year-old South Korean national and Virginia Tech senior majoring in English.
Cho’s identity now means we can add the topics of immigration and ethnicity to the cacophony that has already exploded throughout the media and the internet. Have at it, folks.
Meanwhile, over at The Agitator, Radley Balko yesterday posted what he called a Rambling Duke Post reflecting on what he took to be something wrong about the “comparative lack of coverage of the James Giles versus the Duke lacrosse case” and the concluding with “the fact that so many conservatives seem to have walked away from the [Duke] case thinking ... that we aren't doing enough to vilify black people, and that rich white people are the real victims here.”
Well, now.
Actually, I agree with much that Balko writes between those two quotes and most of where I don’t agree with him or don't agree entirely isn’t worth much argument. Moreover, I’m not a conservative, let alone an apologist for some of the conservatives he samples and links to in his post. I did, however, write with some passion about the sort of racism I take to be a motive force behind the deplorable behavior of Durham prosecutor Mike Nifong and I have never written about the James Giles case or the many other cases of wrongful convictions and cases of criminal injustice and police misconduct which Balko, to his great credit, reports on regularly.
What I want to say here, however, is that, while it is true that some in the largely conservative end of the media and blogosphere have made dubious comments about the “black crime rate,” just as many in the liberal end have made many dubious comments about the black incarceration rate in America, I’m not sure it follows that the former has especially been urging, as Balko puts it, the notion that “the media doesn't do enough to tell us about how black people are inherently more criminal and dangerous than white people.” (Emphasis in original.)
Some, no doubt have. We call such people racists. Some of them may be ignorant racists (“As opposed to what, Ridgely? Well informed racists?”) in the sense that they literally do not know, as Balko points out, that if you adjust for class and income the crime rate among whites and blacks is about the same. They may be oblivious or indifferent as to how, as Balko also points out, our idiotic War Against Drugs and some of its most insane policies drive up urban (mostly poor, mostly black) crime. Even so, it is one thing to note or decry that the incident of crime is higher among blacks as a percentage of the general population, with or without taking such factors into consideration, and quite another to claim or be accused of claiming that “black people are inherently more criminal and dangerous than white people.”
Take the Heather MacDonald City Journal piece to which Balko linked, for example. It is a column sympathetic to the New York Police Department and its officers and, by implication, sympathetic toward the subjective reasonableness of their perceptions and fears as they encounter what I will call (though MacDonald does not) the statistical realities of New York’s crime rates. MacDonald does indeed use the phrase “the connection between race and crime” and further states that “blacks aren’t stopped enough, considering the rate at which they commit crimes” and even, in what I would call a poorly worded disclaimer, says “most black residents are law-abiding and desperately deserve police protection.” (Don’t all black residents, law-abiding or not, deserve police protection?)
Of course, I’ve reprinted those quotes out of context, but I don’t read them individually or collectively, out of context or in context or, for that matter, the entire MacDonald column as stating or implying anything about blacks being inherently more criminal than whites. Maybe I’m missing something, but it seems to me that in that one example and on that one small but important point Balko is reading more between the lines than may really be there. Then again, maybe not. I have no more of a window into MacDonald’s mind or soul than I do into Balko’s or anyone else’s.
The thing is, race makes us all crazy. The War Against Drugs (if not drugs, themselves) makes us crazier still. When Homer Simpson calls alcohol "the cause of and solution to all of life’s problems," we laugh. When a young black man living in the inner city considers crack cocaine the cause of and answer to all of life’s problems, it isn’t funny at all. Does the Left truly want to lower the incarceration rate among black men in America? Does the Right truly want to lower the crime rate in the inner city?
Easily done. Legalize drugs.
Urban (black) crime rates will plummet as will incarceration rates, and not only the mere but far too many criminal convictions and incarcerations for possession and use but all the violent crime directly resulting from the illegality of such possession and use in the first place.
Or, if you can’t bring yourselves to support drug legalization, at least recognize that, for example, the criminal penalties attendant to possession of crack cocaine versus powder cocaine do more harm than good.
But let’s get back to race for a minute. Is there any reader here, is there anybody anywhere who, upon hearing yesterday of the horrible shooting spree at Virginia Tech thought to himself, “I’ll bet it was a Korean”?
Of course not. And no one thought to himself it was probably a black man, either. We all thought, at least I sure as hell did until later information emerged that the shooter was a white guy. Is that sort of subliminal racial profiling racist?
Perhaps it simply is beyond our meager powers of reason and reasonableness to think sensibly about race, itself a dubious and poisoned concept, or to think sensibly about how other people think about race. Perhaps we are like the divorcing couple whose rage at each other has blinded them both to any hope of seeing any remnant of good faith on the other’s part.
Some of us, indeed I would suspect the majority of those of us who have written, even in anger, at the travesty of the Duke lacrosse student prosecution did not do so because of some idiotic sense that rich white males are society’s new victims. Except, maybe, in this one highly limited sense: whatever the realities of racial profiling by the cop on the beat or the investigating officer at a crime scene may be, racial or class bias on the part of the prosecutor’s office is as ugly and inappropriate when it rushes to judgment against a rich white man as it is when it does so against a poor black man. Nothing more, but surely nothing less.
Of course, DNA testing should be performed wherever possible to exonerate the unjustly convicted, and perhaps the urgency of our moral imperative to do so is especially acute precisely because the majority of such men are black and poor and the criminal justice system has for too long been and still too much remains an institutional injustice to black men collectively.
But neither black men collectively nor white men collectively commit crimes. Individual men do that, one man and one crime at a time. And, yes, that is true even in the case of organized crime or criminal gangs – they are comprised of individual men, regardless of race or color or class, not the warped Platonic ideals of White Man, Black Man, Rich Man, Poor Man, etc.
We may try to understand the “underlying social causes and conditions” of inner city life that leads to high crime rates among young black men or we might find utterly incomprehensible the underlying mental causes and conditions leading to the horrific acts of a mass murderer. In the end, however, it remains that a single individual does what he does. In that sense, the racial accidents and even the socioeconomic class or status of his birth are entirely irrelevant. Or should be.
Which means, in turn, that just as MacDonald allows as how black (law-abiding) inner city residents deserve police protection, so too do rich white college students deserve unbiased coverage by the media and dispassionate and unprejudiced treatment from prosecutors.
Cho’s identity now means we can add the topics of immigration and ethnicity to the cacophony that has already exploded throughout the media and the internet. Have at it, folks.
Meanwhile, over at The Agitator, Radley Balko yesterday posted what he called a Rambling Duke Post reflecting on what he took to be something wrong about the “comparative lack of coverage of the James Giles versus the Duke lacrosse case” and the concluding with “the fact that so many conservatives seem to have walked away from the [Duke] case thinking ... that we aren't doing enough to vilify black people, and that rich white people are the real victims here.”
Well, now.
Actually, I agree with much that Balko writes between those two quotes and most of where I don’t agree with him or don't agree entirely isn’t worth much argument. Moreover, I’m not a conservative, let alone an apologist for some of the conservatives he samples and links to in his post. I did, however, write with some passion about the sort of racism I take to be a motive force behind the deplorable behavior of Durham prosecutor Mike Nifong and I have never written about the James Giles case or the many other cases of wrongful convictions and cases of criminal injustice and police misconduct which Balko, to his great credit, reports on regularly.
What I want to say here, however, is that, while it is true that some in the largely conservative end of the media and blogosphere have made dubious comments about the “black crime rate,” just as many in the liberal end have made many dubious comments about the black incarceration rate in America, I’m not sure it follows that the former has especially been urging, as Balko puts it, the notion that “the media doesn't do enough to tell us about how black people are inherently more criminal and dangerous than white people.” (Emphasis in original.)
Some, no doubt have. We call such people racists. Some of them may be ignorant racists (“As opposed to what, Ridgely? Well informed racists?”) in the sense that they literally do not know, as Balko points out, that if you adjust for class and income the crime rate among whites and blacks is about the same. They may be oblivious or indifferent as to how, as Balko also points out, our idiotic War Against Drugs and some of its most insane policies drive up urban (mostly poor, mostly black) crime. Even so, it is one thing to note or decry that the incident of crime is higher among blacks as a percentage of the general population, with or without taking such factors into consideration, and quite another to claim or be accused of claiming that “black people are inherently more criminal and dangerous than white people.”
Take the Heather MacDonald City Journal piece to which Balko linked, for example. It is a column sympathetic to the New York Police Department and its officers and, by implication, sympathetic toward the subjective reasonableness of their perceptions and fears as they encounter what I will call (though MacDonald does not) the statistical realities of New York’s crime rates. MacDonald does indeed use the phrase “the connection between race and crime” and further states that “blacks aren’t stopped enough, considering the rate at which they commit crimes” and even, in what I would call a poorly worded disclaimer, says “most black residents are law-abiding and desperately deserve police protection.” (Don’t all black residents, law-abiding or not, deserve police protection?)
Of course, I’ve reprinted those quotes out of context, but I don’t read them individually or collectively, out of context or in context or, for that matter, the entire MacDonald column as stating or implying anything about blacks being inherently more criminal than whites. Maybe I’m missing something, but it seems to me that in that one example and on that one small but important point Balko is reading more between the lines than may really be there. Then again, maybe not. I have no more of a window into MacDonald’s mind or soul than I do into Balko’s or anyone else’s.
The thing is, race makes us all crazy. The War Against Drugs (if not drugs, themselves) makes us crazier still. When Homer Simpson calls alcohol "the cause of and solution to all of life’s problems," we laugh. When a young black man living in the inner city considers crack cocaine the cause of and answer to all of life’s problems, it isn’t funny at all. Does the Left truly want to lower the incarceration rate among black men in America? Does the Right truly want to lower the crime rate in the inner city?
Easily done. Legalize drugs.
Urban (black) crime rates will plummet as will incarceration rates, and not only the mere but far too many criminal convictions and incarcerations for possession and use but all the violent crime directly resulting from the illegality of such possession and use in the first place.
Or, if you can’t bring yourselves to support drug legalization, at least recognize that, for example, the criminal penalties attendant to possession of crack cocaine versus powder cocaine do more harm than good.
But let’s get back to race for a minute. Is there any reader here, is there anybody anywhere who, upon hearing yesterday of the horrible shooting spree at Virginia Tech thought to himself, “I’ll bet it was a Korean”?
Of course not. And no one thought to himself it was probably a black man, either. We all thought, at least I sure as hell did until later information emerged that the shooter was a white guy. Is that sort of subliminal racial profiling racist?
Perhaps it simply is beyond our meager powers of reason and reasonableness to think sensibly about race, itself a dubious and poisoned concept, or to think sensibly about how other people think about race. Perhaps we are like the divorcing couple whose rage at each other has blinded them both to any hope of seeing any remnant of good faith on the other’s part.
Some of us, indeed I would suspect the majority of those of us who have written, even in anger, at the travesty of the Duke lacrosse student prosecution did not do so because of some idiotic sense that rich white males are society’s new victims. Except, maybe, in this one highly limited sense: whatever the realities of racial profiling by the cop on the beat or the investigating officer at a crime scene may be, racial or class bias on the part of the prosecutor’s office is as ugly and inappropriate when it rushes to judgment against a rich white man as it is when it does so against a poor black man. Nothing more, but surely nothing less.
Of course, DNA testing should be performed wherever possible to exonerate the unjustly convicted, and perhaps the urgency of our moral imperative to do so is especially acute precisely because the majority of such men are black and poor and the criminal justice system has for too long been and still too much remains an institutional injustice to black men collectively.
But neither black men collectively nor white men collectively commit crimes. Individual men do that, one man and one crime at a time. And, yes, that is true even in the case of organized crime or criminal gangs – they are comprised of individual men, regardless of race or color or class, not the warped Platonic ideals of White Man, Black Man, Rich Man, Poor Man, etc.
We may try to understand the “underlying social causes and conditions” of inner city life that leads to high crime rates among young black men or we might find utterly incomprehensible the underlying mental causes and conditions leading to the horrific acts of a mass murderer. In the end, however, it remains that a single individual does what he does. In that sense, the racial accidents and even the socioeconomic class or status of his birth are entirely irrelevant. Or should be.
Which means, in turn, that just as MacDonald allows as how black (law-abiding) inner city residents deserve police protection, so too do rich white college students deserve unbiased coverage by the media and dispassionate and unprejudiced treatment from prosecutors.
Monday, April 16, 2007
Massacre at Virginia Tech (Updated)
This is an absolutely terrible and gut wrenching story. ABC News reports that at least 29 persons are dead, apparently including the shooter himself, and at least 17 more are injured following a horrific shooting spree at Virginia Tech in Blacksburg, Va. Blacksburg, itself, is a beautiful and remote part of Virginia and the school, officially Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University, dates back to a land-grant in 1872 and is one of Virginia's premier institutions of higher education.
It is foolish to think of any place as one where "it can't happen here." But psychologically the sense of unlikelihood of such an occurrence, the biggest mass shooting on a college campus in American history, happening at Virginia Tech almost approaches the enormity of the act itself.
On a personal note and as a native Virginian, I have known dozens, perhaps hundreds of Hokies or Virginia Tech graduates over the years, my older son considered attending there, and I know at least one faculty member there who I hope and pray is unharmed and safe. This is awful, awful news and my heart goes out to the victims, the families and friends of the victims and the entire Virginia Tech community.
* * * * * * * * * *
UPDATE: The death toll has now risen to 33. Predictably, the blogosphere is awash with commentary, also predictably all over the map, some of it measured and sane, some of it not.
Over at Reason's Hit & Run, commenters are engaged in a lively but largely puerile debate over gun control, while Michelle Malkin has taken to posting reader's views on the campus weapons ban at Virginia Tech, suggesting that a well armed student body might have prevented or reduced the carnage. Maybe. So would wearing legal and readily available body armor. It is one thing to argue the right to bear arms, another to suggest that we all do so as a matter of course in our daily lives. Does anyone really want to live that way, and would it really make that much difference to a deranged murderer, or would his choice of weapons simply shift from firearms to explosives?
Meanwhile, The Nation's David Corn, writing at his own blog, notes that other societies have made other choices regarding firearms. True enough, although not self-evidently relevant. He quotes another blogger who, by way of attempting to provide some 'perspective,' writes: "Multiple body counts and explosions and shootings are the daily experience of the people of Iraq. They have been living this hell for four years. Just keep that fact in mind as you mourn the deaths of 22 American students slain in Blacksburg, Viginia." [sic]
One shouldn't need to reply, although apparently one does, that Iraq is a nation at war not only with the U.S. but with itself. Whatever the merits or failings of the war in Iraq and America's role in it, comparisons between a war zone and a killing spree on a college campus are obscene. Say what you will about firearms and gun control or, for that matter, the ugly brutality and bloodshed of any war at any place or time, firearms have always been plentiful and ready access to them has always been the case in America.
We can resume those discussions and debates tomorrow, not today. Such tragedies as today's in Blacksburg and before that at the University of Texas at Austin and elsewhere have not always been the case. This particular sort of insanity, for there is no other term for it, is of recent vintage.
It seems somehow inappropriate to quote even as respected a science fiction writer as Robert Heinlein today, and yet when events such as today's occur the first thing that comes to my mind is his calling (in 1941, no less) this modern era "the Crazy Years." Perhaps there has always been much madness in the world. Certainly today there is too much.
It is foolish to think of any place as one where "it can't happen here." But psychologically the sense of unlikelihood of such an occurrence, the biggest mass shooting on a college campus in American history, happening at Virginia Tech almost approaches the enormity of the act itself.
On a personal note and as a native Virginian, I have known dozens, perhaps hundreds of Hokies or Virginia Tech graduates over the years, my older son considered attending there, and I know at least one faculty member there who I hope and pray is unharmed and safe. This is awful, awful news and my heart goes out to the victims, the families and friends of the victims and the entire Virginia Tech community.
* * * * * * * * * *
UPDATE: The death toll has now risen to 33. Predictably, the blogosphere is awash with commentary, also predictably all over the map, some of it measured and sane, some of it not.
Over at Reason's Hit & Run, commenters are engaged in a lively but largely puerile debate over gun control, while Michelle Malkin has taken to posting reader's views on the campus weapons ban at Virginia Tech, suggesting that a well armed student body might have prevented or reduced the carnage. Maybe. So would wearing legal and readily available body armor. It is one thing to argue the right to bear arms, another to suggest that we all do so as a matter of course in our daily lives. Does anyone really want to live that way, and would it really make that much difference to a deranged murderer, or would his choice of weapons simply shift from firearms to explosives?
Meanwhile, The Nation's David Corn, writing at his own blog, notes that other societies have made other choices regarding firearms. True enough, although not self-evidently relevant. He quotes another blogger who, by way of attempting to provide some 'perspective,' writes: "Multiple body counts and explosions and shootings are the daily experience of the people of Iraq. They have been living this hell for four years. Just keep that fact in mind as you mourn the deaths of 22 American students slain in Blacksburg, Viginia." [sic]
One shouldn't need to reply, although apparently one does, that Iraq is a nation at war not only with the U.S. but with itself. Whatever the merits or failings of the war in Iraq and America's role in it, comparisons between a war zone and a killing spree on a college campus are obscene. Say what you will about firearms and gun control or, for that matter, the ugly brutality and bloodshed of any war at any place or time, firearms have always been plentiful and ready access to them has always been the case in America.
We can resume those discussions and debates tomorrow, not today. Such tragedies as today's in Blacksburg and before that at the University of Texas at Austin and elsewhere have not always been the case. This particular sort of insanity, for there is no other term for it, is of recent vintage.
It seems somehow inappropriate to quote even as respected a science fiction writer as Robert Heinlein today, and yet when events such as today's occur the first thing that comes to my mind is his calling (in 1941, no less) this modern era "the Crazy Years." Perhaps there has always been much madness in the world. Certainly today there is too much.
Sunday, April 15, 2007
Ward, I'm very worried about the Beaver.
File under "Great Minds Think Alike": Here I've been musing lately about the 1950's and over at The New Criterion's blog, Armavirumque, Roger Kimball -- well, he's a smart guy; me? [shrug] -- posts a friend's list of how times sure have changed in these here United States of America in the last fifty years.
Exposé: Imus Downfall Really Due To Threatened Revelation of 9/11 Secrets!
No, not really. (Sheesh! I already feel like Matt Drudge writing for the National Enquirer.) Still, with a hat tip to memeorandum, this too funny story in Pravda Online can't be missed.
At last it can be told! The Rutgers women's basketball slur? Par for the course for Imus (well, that part's true) and merely a smoke-screen for the real reason he fell from grace: he "threatening to expose the truths behind the events of September 11, 2001 and the Iraq/Afghanistan Wars; and to such an extent that another American media personality, Rosie O'Donnell, has expressed concern that US Military Leaders could actually imprison Mr. Imus." And when it comes to hard-hitting investigative reporting, well, I guess we all know you just can't do better than Rosie.
On a serious note here, this sort of nonsense is precisely why I criticized the Pelosi trip to Syria recently. Sure, Pravda even in its post-Soviet incarnation(s) is a journalistic joke in a way and to a vastly greater degree than even I would ever accuse the Washington Post or New York Times at their worst of being. But as with Russian Presidents Vladimir Putin's failure to understand the firing of Dan Rather, so too it remains the case that not only the average person throughout much of the rest of the world but also too many foreign leaders simply fail to grasp how America (still, thank God) works. Believe me, if former Soviet KGB guys like Putin can so completely miss the boat -- and remember, the Soviets poured extensive resources into studying the U.S. throughout the Cold War -- what are the chances of the Iranians, Syrians or whoever being able to put Pelosi's comments into perspective? I'd say roughly zilch.
Anyway, you can't say Pravda hasn't made at least some progress since the old Cold War days. Yes, I know, what are now published in print and online under the title "Pravda" are separate entities and neither is a continuation the old official organ of the Central Committee of the Communist Party. Still, the association persists, as no doubt it is intended to persist. And try as I might, I simply can't imagine the old Soviet Pravda running a photo spread on a "dwarf porn star". (The posted pics, btw, are not pornographic.)
At last it can be told! The Rutgers women's basketball slur? Par for the course for Imus (well, that part's true) and merely a smoke-screen for the real reason he fell from grace: he "threatening to expose the truths behind the events of September 11, 2001 and the Iraq/Afghanistan Wars; and to such an extent that another American media personality, Rosie O'Donnell, has expressed concern that US Military Leaders could actually imprison Mr. Imus." And when it comes to hard-hitting investigative reporting, well, I guess we all know you just can't do better than Rosie.
On a serious note here, this sort of nonsense is precisely why I criticized the Pelosi trip to Syria recently. Sure, Pravda even in its post-Soviet incarnation(s) is a journalistic joke in a way and to a vastly greater degree than even I would ever accuse the Washington Post or New York Times at their worst of being. But as with Russian Presidents Vladimir Putin's failure to understand the firing of Dan Rather, so too it remains the case that not only the average person throughout much of the rest of the world but also too many foreign leaders simply fail to grasp how America (still, thank God) works. Believe me, if former Soviet KGB guys like Putin can so completely miss the boat -- and remember, the Soviets poured extensive resources into studying the U.S. throughout the Cold War -- what are the chances of the Iranians, Syrians or whoever being able to put Pelosi's comments into perspective? I'd say roughly zilch.
Anyway, you can't say Pravda hasn't made at least some progress since the old Cold War days. Yes, I know, what are now published in print and online under the title "Pravda" are separate entities and neither is a continuation the old official organ of the Central Committee of the Communist Party. Still, the association persists, as no doubt it is intended to persist. And try as I might, I simply can't imagine the old Soviet Pravda running a photo spread on a "dwarf porn star". (The posted pics, btw, are not pornographic.)
Constant Viewer: 300
[Note: Constant Viewer's constant readers will discern at once that this review was originally posted at Inactivist on March 11, 2007. Well, the movie is still going strong at the box office, having already grossed just a tad under $200 million, so this bit of salvaging / recycling still seems relevant. More to the point, however, CV can't seem anything else in theatrical release to watch and review these days. Grindhouse, for example, grossed a measly $11.6 million in its opening week, and that's for a double feature by Quentin Tarantino and Robert Rodriguez, directors with strong fan bases. At this rate, Tarantino could wind up back behind the counter in the video rental store if it weren't for the fact that Rodriguez can bring in a film for around twelve bucks. CV doubts he'll be seeing Grindhouse on the big screen.]
Perhaps the most disappointing thing about Frank Miller’s 300 is that it isn’t nearly as gory as Constant Viewer expected. Yes, there are decapitations and severed limbs galore and buckets of virtual blood splattered hither and yon, but the graphic novelesque portrayal of such viscera and mayhem – what another reviewer called a slavish devotion to Miller’s original work – oddly tempers the visual impact. Indeed, given what passes for PG-13 these days, Constant Viewer is slightly surprised 300 carried an R rating.
That’s not to say 300 isn’t violent. Of course it is, the whole story being, after all, a retelling of the Battle of Thermopylae in 480 BCE between the Spartans and a Persian army variously estimated from 100,000 to over two million. Think Custer’s Last Stand except in this case the overwhelmingly outnumbered side was the “good guys,” more about which below. There is a back story of political intrigue and betrayal and, to spice matters up a bit, a handful of grotesques and the occasional bare female breast (also overwhelmingly outnumbered by the number of bare male breasts – as skin flicks go, this is far more of a beefcake festival for women), but basically we’re talking a good solid hour of battle, and it is splendidly portrayed.
300 is further evidence that digital cinematography and computer generated imagery have reached a trompe l'oeil level that bodes well for a new generation of vastly less expensive film making. "Now," one can almost hear Hitchcock wishing from the grave, "if only we could get rid of those pesky actors entirely, too."
Living in an age in which, as the Marxists once incessantly insisted, everything is political, the question occurs what polemical subtext we can squeeze out of 300. Is George Bush the modern-day Xerxes, spreading his American Empire by brute, overwhelming force across the planet? Indeed, are Iraq or today’s Persia (i.e., Iran) the “moral equivalent” of Sparta and Athens, boldly resisting the Barbarian Hegemon of the West?
No, of course not. Constant Viewer does expect any minute now to see Bush’s head photoshopped over the gold festooned body of Rodrigo Santoro’s Xerxes on his slave-borne throne, but the fevered imagination of ideologues aside, there are no contemporary lessons to be learned from the likes of 300, and axe grinding will not make it so.
Were the Spartans the “good guys”? By contrast to the Persian Empire, that’s a no-brainer. Inasmuch as the West is heir to ancient Hellenic culture, however, the more apt and almost inevitable contrast is with Athens, its sister state and principle Greek rival. The Athenians, it should be remembered, were hardly pacifists, so any comparison between the two stressing the fundamentally martial culture of Sparta is too facile. Constant Viewer is no historian, but there is at least some reason to believe that Sparta has suffered something of a bad rap over the ages, no doubt in part because it left little by way of a written history of itself. That said, the notion that the modern West has much in common with either ancient Athens or Sparta is on a par with the notion that the modern Middle East has much in common with ancient Persia.
300 is a ripping good yarn, appropriately filled as well with Laconic wit. Yes, the characters are one-dimensional and, no, despite what was written above, this isn’t a movie to take the kiddies to see. Constant Viewer’s constant readers will note there is little mention of the actors and none at all of the director or other principle crew. None is needed. 300 is acomic book graphic novel beautifully adapted in what amounts to living animation. If seen at all, it should be seen on the big screen. No home theater screen will do justice, for example, to the scene where, as threatened, so many Persian arrows are shot at once they blot out the sun.
To which threat the Spartans calmly replied, “Then we can fight in the shade.”
Perhaps the most disappointing thing about Frank Miller’s 300 is that it isn’t nearly as gory as Constant Viewer expected. Yes, there are decapitations and severed limbs galore and buckets of virtual blood splattered hither and yon, but the graphic novelesque portrayal of such viscera and mayhem – what another reviewer called a slavish devotion to Miller’s original work – oddly tempers the visual impact. Indeed, given what passes for PG-13 these days, Constant Viewer is slightly surprised 300 carried an R rating.
That’s not to say 300 isn’t violent. Of course it is, the whole story being, after all, a retelling of the Battle of Thermopylae in 480 BCE between the Spartans and a Persian army variously estimated from 100,000 to over two million. Think Custer’s Last Stand except in this case the overwhelmingly outnumbered side was the “good guys,” more about which below. There is a back story of political intrigue and betrayal and, to spice matters up a bit, a handful of grotesques and the occasional bare female breast (also overwhelmingly outnumbered by the number of bare male breasts – as skin flicks go, this is far more of a beefcake festival for women), but basically we’re talking a good solid hour of battle, and it is splendidly portrayed.
300 is further evidence that digital cinematography and computer generated imagery have reached a trompe l'oeil level that bodes well for a new generation of vastly less expensive film making. "Now," one can almost hear Hitchcock wishing from the grave, "if only we could get rid of those pesky actors entirely, too."
Living in an age in which, as the Marxists once incessantly insisted, everything is political, the question occurs what polemical subtext we can squeeze out of 300. Is George Bush the modern-day Xerxes, spreading his American Empire by brute, overwhelming force across the planet? Indeed, are Iraq or today’s Persia (i.e., Iran) the “moral equivalent” of Sparta and Athens, boldly resisting the Barbarian Hegemon of the West?
No, of course not. Constant Viewer does expect any minute now to see Bush’s head photoshopped over the gold festooned body of Rodrigo Santoro’s Xerxes on his slave-borne throne, but the fevered imagination of ideologues aside, there are no contemporary lessons to be learned from the likes of 300, and axe grinding will not make it so.
Were the Spartans the “good guys”? By contrast to the Persian Empire, that’s a no-brainer. Inasmuch as the West is heir to ancient Hellenic culture, however, the more apt and almost inevitable contrast is with Athens, its sister state and principle Greek rival. The Athenians, it should be remembered, were hardly pacifists, so any comparison between the two stressing the fundamentally martial culture of Sparta is too facile. Constant Viewer is no historian, but there is at least some reason to believe that Sparta has suffered something of a bad rap over the ages, no doubt in part because it left little by way of a written history of itself. That said, the notion that the modern West has much in common with either ancient Athens or Sparta is on a par with the notion that the modern Middle East has much in common with ancient Persia.
300 is a ripping good yarn, appropriately filled as well with Laconic wit. Yes, the characters are one-dimensional and, no, despite what was written above, this isn’t a movie to take the kiddies to see. Constant Viewer’s constant readers will note there is little mention of the actors and none at all of the director or other principle crew. None is needed. 300 is a
To which threat the Spartans calmly replied, “Then we can fight in the shade.”
[Insert "That sheep's a damned liar!" joke here]
The (U.K.) Daily Mail recently reported that Professor Esmail Zanjani, of the University of Nevada, has created the world's first human-sheep chimera, having 15 percent human cells and 85 percent sheep cells. The research is aimed at eventually being able to create sheep organs capable of being transplanted into human patients. The hoped for process is described as follows:
Excuse me, but... the brain?
[Note: An earlier version of this entry was posted at Inactivist on March 25, 2007.]
The process would involve extracting stem cells from the donor's bone marrow and injecting them into the peritoneum of a sheep's foetus. When the lamb is born, two months later, it would have a liver, heart, lungs and brain that are partly human and available for transplant.
Excuse me, but... the brain?
[Note: An earlier version of this entry was posted at Inactivist on March 25, 2007.]
Saturday, April 14, 2007
It's Like Deja Vu All Over Again, Man!
Insanity: doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results. – Albert Einstein
Actually, Einstein may have lifted the quote from an old Chinese proverb. Regardless, it seems that newly appointed interim U.S. Attorney Scott Schools has read neither, deciding to retry marijuana grower Ed Rosenthal on cultivation charges stemming (seedy pun intended) from Rosenthal’s having grown marijuana in 2003 for an Oakland, California medical marijuana program. Herewith, your tax dollars at work thanks to our vastly successful and eminently rational War Against Drugs:
Rosenthal has already been tried and convicted for these acts. Notwithstanding California law, federal law doesn’t recognize marijuana as medicine, so Rosenthal’s defense was not permitted to introduce evidence at the original trial of his relationship to the Oakland program, such evidence being ruled irrelevant. Even so, under the circumstances and despite minimum sentencing guidelines, Federal District Court Judge Charles Breyer sentenced Rosenthal to one day in jail, time already served, plus a fine and supervised release.
Still, it was a felony conviction. Rosenthal appealed and won at the 9th Circuit U.S. Court of Appeals on grounds of juror misconduct. (One juror had improperly discussed the case with an attorney.) Reversing the earlier convictions and dismissing as moot the government’s cross-appeal regarding the sentencing, the three judge appeals court panel noted in dicta they “would not be inclined to disturb the court’s reasoned analysis underlying its sentencing determination.”
The U.S. Attorney’s office then indicted Rosenthal again, not only on the original counts but this time tacking on four additional counts of money laundering and five counts of filing false tax returns. Judge Breyer threw out the additional charges, determining they amounted to vindictive prosecution in response to Rosenthal having won his appeal and publicly criticized the trial and the prosecution after what amounted to a jaw-dropping open court admission by Assistant U.S. Attorney George Bevan that such vindictiveness was indeed the government's motive behind the new charges.
Still, the U.S. Attorney’s office now intends to proceed once again with the original counts before the same judge whose sentencing decision from the earlier conviction has essentially already been upheld on appeal. Brilliant!
Speaking of swimming...
My friend Ron C. e-mailed me this bit of whimsy the other day from those wacky cut-ups at Google:
Go to Google Maps and select the Get directions tab. Enter “New York, NY” in the from first box and “Paris, France” in the second box. Then hit the Get Directions button. Read the results, especially Step #23.
Go to Google Maps and select the Get directions tab. Enter “New York, NY” in the from first box and “Paris, France” in the second box. Then hit the Get Directions button. Read the results, especially Step #23.
"How do you get to Carnegie Hall? ... Swim, buddy, swim!"
One of these days in your travels, a guy is going to show you a brand-new deck of cards on which the seal is not yet broken. Then this guy is going to offer to bet you that he can make the jack of spades jump out of this brand-new deck of cards and squirt cider in your ear. But, son, do not accept this bet, because as sure as you stand there, you're going to wind up with an ear full of cider. -- Sky Masterson (Marlon Brando), "Guys and Dolls"
Tired of the endless bickering in the blogosphere and barrooms over global warming? Think the doomsayers are full of hot air or the naysayers are all wet? Feel like telling them to put their money where their mouth is? Well, now you can. In fact, you can get in on the action, yourself. At BetUS.com (search “Global Warming”) you can get odds on polar bears becoming extinct by 2010, Antarctica being habitable for humans by 2015 and Manhattan being under water before 2012, plus much, much more. Who says you need a weatherman to know the way the wind blows? Step right up,
"I'm sorry, sir, but we packed the defibrillator instead."
With a hat tip to Memeorandum, CBS affiliate Channel 2 in Chicago reports that, with Vice President Dick Cheney on board, during its approach to landing in Chicago one of the engines of Air Force Two was struck by a bird.
“All of a sudden we heard this tremendous bang,” said another passenger on the flight. “We were pretty lucky that the pilot and the engine did exactly what they were supposed to do.”
Luckily, also, Cheney apparently didn't have his 28-gauge Perazzi shotgun with him on the flight, so none of the other passengers or crew were injured as a result.
“All of a sudden we heard this tremendous bang,” said another passenger on the flight. “We were pretty lucky that the pilot and the engine did exactly what they were supposed to do.”
Luckily, also, Cheney apparently didn't have his 28-gauge Perazzi shotgun with him on the flight, so none of the other passengers or crew were injured as a result.
Would You Like To Donate The Change To D.A.'s Crack Habit?
Watching some DVD movie set in the 1950’s the other day, I was struck by a bit of dialog where one of the characters tells the others his new Buick cost $2,700, which means new automobiles cost roughly ten times what they did back then. That led me to remember that as a child I had a weekly allowance once of thirty-five cents. A kid could actually buy stuff with thirty-five cents then. Not much, maybe, but some things. Candy bars were a nickel and there was a store within walking distance that had a whole display case of penny candies and another store that had racks of ten cent toys. No, the proprietors of these stores were not named Ike Godsey or Sam Drucker.
And, no, this isn’t about how things are so much more expensive these days, either. According to my father, who lived through the Great Depression, a young man possessed of thirty-five cents even in 1957 had the world at his feet. Why, back in ’32 he could have booked first class passage on the Queen Elizabeth to sail him to his villa on the French Rivera and still had a quarter left over. But unlike my father, who never really grasped the notion of inflation, I understand the difference between the real and nominal value of money, so I have refrained so far from boring my own kids with stories of what vast wealth that loose change found under the sofa cushions once represented. They seem to understand inflation, too, or at least the real value of a quarter these days. They never bother picking up the change lying about the house, anyway.
Not only are we all, on average, much richer than we were fifty years ago, some goods like food and clothing are actually cheaper in real terms than they were back then. Both rising real incomes and the lower cost of some necessities has resulted in our spending a significantly smaller percentage of the former on the latter.
I’m talking middle-class here, but even the poor in America have it better in many respects than the poor of previous generations. In some respects they even have it better than previous generations of the middle-class. You want to pay 1950’s prices for health care? Are you willing, also, to get 1950’s results?
Actually, what all this is leading up to is a curmudgeonly complaint. I wanted to set the stage first, though, to make it clear that I do understand that the marginal value to me of anything less than a dollar, let's say fifty-eight cents, is next to zero. Even so, it simply drives me crazy when the cashier at the grocery store check-out line these days finishes scanning and bagging my groceries and then asks me “Would you like to donate the change to [insert charity here]?”
Where did this extremely bad idea, that seems to be sweeping the retail nation, come from? I mean, really, who’s responsible for this affront?
Okay, before I go on with this rant, it’s time for the second disclaimer. Look, I have nothing against the Heart Association or the American Cancer Society or Katrina Relief or whatever charity-of-the-month these stores are collecting for. They’re all worthwhile causes and people should support them and I personally make contributions to some of them on a regular basis. Really I do. I’m a much nicer guy than you’d guess from reading this blog. Really.
But fergawdsakes, not like that! In the first place, I went to the grocery store to buy bread and milk. Okay, so maybe beer and cigarettes, what’s the difference? The point is, that’s the deal – they sell groceries, I want to buy groceries, they’ve got a big sign out front that tells me I can buy my groceries there, so that’s where I go to buy them. Sometimes those signs tell me I can buy stamps and prescription drugs and maybe even do my banking inside, too, but there isn’t a word of warning anywhere about dunning me for a donation. And they don’t mention breast cancer in those inserts with all the coupons in the Sunday paper, either. So, basically, it’s an ambush.
What they do is they wait until the very last minute when you’re standing there in line, trying to find your “courtesy card” for the “discounts” and punching in your debit card pin number on the point-of-sale pad and there’s a line of fellow customers in back of you, all of them anxious to pay for their stuff and get the hell out of there too, and the woman right in back of you is already eying you suspiciously because she thinks those three apples you didn’t bother putting in a plastic bag should therefore count as three items toward your fifteen item express lane limit and your bill comes to $37.42 and then and only then does the cashier look you square in the eyes and ask “Would you like to donate the fifty-eight cents to AIDS research?”
And, of course, you can’t say no. After all, you just finished buying a six-pack, potato chips and a copy of People, so if you begrudge those noble AIDS researchers a measly fifty-eight cents you’re going to look like the world’s cheapest cheapskate and the woman standing behind you, who strikes you as just a wee bit butch anyway, will be convinced you’re a homophobe to boot!
So naturally you say sure, take the damned fifty-eight cents “but can I get a receipt for tax purposes?” No, you don’t say any such thing. You just give up the change and as you’re leaving the store maybe you wonder why you don’t feel the same mild and fleeting sense of having done a good deed, however small, you feel when you give a panhandler the same amount even though you know he’s just going to spend it on cheap wine or drugs.
The reason you don’t get even that tiny frisson of smug self-satisfaction you get from giving to the derelict is because, deep down inside, you know you’ve just been had. Regardless of the amount at stake, unless an act of charity is genuinely voluntary it’s just another strong-arm shakedown, albeit of the psychological variety in this case.
By the way, I certainly don’t blame the poor cashier. She’s got a boring, low paying job, she’s on her feet all day and she’s only doing what her boss told her to do. Sure, I’d like to fight back, maybe say to her “No, I don’t think so, but what other charitable options do I have? After all, you folks gave me a choice of four different brands of peanut butter, not to mention smooth or chunky. How about passing along my fifty-eight cents to the Leukemia people, instead?” but, of course, I don't.
It’s simply none of Safeway’s or Kroger’s business whether you or I want to contribute to charity or not just as it’s none of your employer’s business when the office jerk makes the annual rounds for the United Way and that stupid placard by the front entrance tracks the amount pledged and the percentage of employees pledging. Okay, so maybe that’s just part of the deal of being an employee, even though it shouldn’t be. You’re not likely to change jobs as a result. But maybe you should consider changing supermarkets.
Okay, maybe not even that. It would probably cost you more than fifty-eight cents, gas prices being what they are, to drive to another store and back, and besides you know where everything is at your favorite store and it has better meat or produce or whatever. And, sure, it’s a trivial matter economically and maybe you aren’t annoyed by it, anyway. Maybe you think it’s a great idea. Maybe the stores have research showing that more customers like it than not and their sales actually go up as a result. Who knows?
Maybe this is just the wave of the future. Why bother making your own charitable decisions when the good folks at Whole Foods or Piggly Wiggly can make them for you? After all, didn’t you just spend five minutes already fretting over whether to go with the Pilsner Urquell or the Anchor Steam? Life is too short and, besides, the game starts in fifteen minutes. Keep the change. Gotta run.
And, no, this isn’t about how things are so much more expensive these days, either. According to my father, who lived through the Great Depression, a young man possessed of thirty-five cents even in 1957 had the world at his feet. Why, back in ’32 he could have booked first class passage on the Queen Elizabeth to sail him to his villa on the French Rivera and still had a quarter left over. But unlike my father, who never really grasped the notion of inflation, I understand the difference between the real and nominal value of money, so I have refrained so far from boring my own kids with stories of what vast wealth that loose change found under the sofa cushions once represented. They seem to understand inflation, too, or at least the real value of a quarter these days. They never bother picking up the change lying about the house, anyway.
Not only are we all, on average, much richer than we were fifty years ago, some goods like food and clothing are actually cheaper in real terms than they were back then. Both rising real incomes and the lower cost of some necessities has resulted in our spending a significantly smaller percentage of the former on the latter.
I’m talking middle-class here, but even the poor in America have it better in many respects than the poor of previous generations. In some respects they even have it better than previous generations of the middle-class. You want to pay 1950’s prices for health care? Are you willing, also, to get 1950’s results?
Actually, what all this is leading up to is a curmudgeonly complaint. I wanted to set the stage first, though, to make it clear that I do understand that the marginal value to me of anything less than a dollar, let's say fifty-eight cents, is next to zero. Even so, it simply drives me crazy when the cashier at the grocery store check-out line these days finishes scanning and bagging my groceries and then asks me “Would you like to donate the change to [insert charity here]?”
Where did this extremely bad idea, that seems to be sweeping the retail nation, come from? I mean, really, who’s responsible for this affront?
Okay, before I go on with this rant, it’s time for the second disclaimer. Look, I have nothing against the Heart Association or the American Cancer Society or Katrina Relief or whatever charity-of-the-month these stores are collecting for. They’re all worthwhile causes and people should support them and I personally make contributions to some of them on a regular basis. Really I do. I’m a much nicer guy than you’d guess from reading this blog. Really.
But fergawdsakes, not like that! In the first place, I went to the grocery store to buy bread and milk. Okay, so maybe beer and cigarettes, what’s the difference? The point is, that’s the deal – they sell groceries, I want to buy groceries, they’ve got a big sign out front that tells me I can buy my groceries there, so that’s where I go to buy them. Sometimes those signs tell me I can buy stamps and prescription drugs and maybe even do my banking inside, too, but there isn’t a word of warning anywhere about dunning me for a donation. And they don’t mention breast cancer in those inserts with all the coupons in the Sunday paper, either. So, basically, it’s an ambush.
What they do is they wait until the very last minute when you’re standing there in line, trying to find your “courtesy card” for the “discounts” and punching in your debit card pin number on the point-of-sale pad and there’s a line of fellow customers in back of you, all of them anxious to pay for their stuff and get the hell out of there too, and the woman right in back of you is already eying you suspiciously because she thinks those three apples you didn’t bother putting in a plastic bag should therefore count as three items toward your fifteen item express lane limit and your bill comes to $37.42 and then and only then does the cashier look you square in the eyes and ask “Would you like to donate the fifty-eight cents to AIDS research?”
And, of course, you can’t say no. After all, you just finished buying a six-pack, potato chips and a copy of People, so if you begrudge those noble AIDS researchers a measly fifty-eight cents you’re going to look like the world’s cheapest cheapskate and the woman standing behind you, who strikes you as just a wee bit butch anyway, will be convinced you’re a homophobe to boot!
So naturally you say sure, take the damned fifty-eight cents “but can I get a receipt for tax purposes?” No, you don’t say any such thing. You just give up the change and as you’re leaving the store maybe you wonder why you don’t feel the same mild and fleeting sense of having done a good deed, however small, you feel when you give a panhandler the same amount even though you know he’s just going to spend it on cheap wine or drugs.
The reason you don’t get even that tiny frisson of smug self-satisfaction you get from giving to the derelict is because, deep down inside, you know you’ve just been had. Regardless of the amount at stake, unless an act of charity is genuinely voluntary it’s just another strong-arm shakedown, albeit of the psychological variety in this case.
By the way, I certainly don’t blame the poor cashier. She’s got a boring, low paying job, she’s on her feet all day and she’s only doing what her boss told her to do. Sure, I’d like to fight back, maybe say to her “No, I don’t think so, but what other charitable options do I have? After all, you folks gave me a choice of four different brands of peanut butter, not to mention smooth or chunky. How about passing along my fifty-eight cents to the Leukemia people, instead?” but, of course, I don't.
It’s simply none of Safeway’s or Kroger’s business whether you or I want to contribute to charity or not just as it’s none of your employer’s business when the office jerk makes the annual rounds for the United Way and that stupid placard by the front entrance tracks the amount pledged and the percentage of employees pledging. Okay, so maybe that’s just part of the deal of being an employee, even though it shouldn’t be. You’re not likely to change jobs as a result. But maybe you should consider changing supermarkets.
Okay, maybe not even that. It would probably cost you more than fifty-eight cents, gas prices being what they are, to drive to another store and back, and besides you know where everything is at your favorite store and it has better meat or produce or whatever. And, sure, it’s a trivial matter economically and maybe you aren’t annoyed by it, anyway. Maybe you think it’s a great idea. Maybe the stores have research showing that more customers like it than not and their sales actually go up as a result. Who knows?
Maybe this is just the wave of the future. Why bother making your own charitable decisions when the good folks at Whole Foods or Piggly Wiggly can make them for you? After all, didn’t you just spend five minutes already fretting over whether to go with the Pilsner Urquell or the Anchor Steam? Life is too short and, besides, the game starts in fifteen minutes. Keep the change. Gotta run.
Friday, April 13, 2007
Aren't There Skyscrapers in Vancouver, Too?
Canada’s Green Party candidate in Vancouver-Kingsway, 44 year old bookstore owner Kevin Potvin, stands by his 9/11 editorial of four years ago in which he wrote:
Mr. Potvin is entitled to his opinions, then and now. I doubt they are widely shared in Canada, but you never know. Canada is a nice place and a loyal ally of the U.S., and the people I have met there really are very nice people just as they believe themselves to be. Except perhaps in Quebec when a Francophone occasionally mistakes you for a fellow Canadian Anglophone, but once they find out your monolingualism is the unfortunate result of being an American, all is forgiven.
Being an American, I don’t know much about Canadian politics, either; but if their Green Party is at all like ours – and why shouldn’t it be? – my guess is that ideology more than nationality is at the base of Mr. Potvin’s views. There is a segment of the environmentalist movement (not all environmentalist, mind you, just some) whose world-view can be summarized as follows: everything about nature is good except human nature.
Humanity, by this view, isn’t really a part of the natural order of things at all. Or if it is, it is as Agent Smith claimed in The Matrix, a virus. We spread to parts of the world unsuitable for us to live in without heating or air conditioning, screwing up the natural ecosystems as we multiply, performing all sorts of unnatural acts like damming rivers and chopping down forests for wood (to make, among other things, paper for books) and digging for coal and oil and then, worse yet, we build things – unnatural things such as cities like Vancouver and New York filled with unnatural things like skyscrapers. It isn’t hard at all for those who hold this world-view to cheer at any enemy of Western civilization, although perhaps it is a bit odd to find them also engaging in anything so decidedly unnatural and Western as electoral politics.
Here is another of Mr. Potvin’s printed opinions , this one claiming common cause with Islamist terrorists. I happened upon the article following a Google search from which I found, to my slight surprise, a Wikipedia entry for Mr. Potvin, himself. Reading the entry, it turns out that he may have written it, that is, the Wikipedia entry, himself, too.
Well, who am I to criticize self-promotion? And besides, like I said, everyone is entitled to his own opinion. Here’s mine. I was in the Pentagon on the morning of 9/11, fortunately far enough from the crash to have escaped safely. But several colleagues of mine were not so fortunate. So I’m afraid that if I should ever encounter Mr. Potvin in person, I'm of the opinion that I would very likely feel the urge to pump my fist in his face.
Of course, I would never do such a thing, it being too natural and uncivilized a thing to do. But then, that is only one of the ways in which I, unlike Mr. Potvin, do not share a common cause with terrorists.
When I saw the first tower cascade down into that enormous plume of dust and paper, there was a little voice inside me that said, 'Yeah!' When the second tower came down the same way, that little voice said, 'Beautiful!' When the visage of the Pentagon appeared on the TV with a gaping and smoking hole in its side, that little voice had nearly taken me over, and I felt an urge to pump my fist in the air.
Mr. Potvin is entitled to his opinions, then and now. I doubt they are widely shared in Canada, but you never know. Canada is a nice place and a loyal ally of the U.S., and the people I have met there really are very nice people just as they believe themselves to be. Except perhaps in Quebec when a Francophone occasionally mistakes you for a fellow Canadian Anglophone, but once they find out your monolingualism is the unfortunate result of being an American, all is forgiven.
Being an American, I don’t know much about Canadian politics, either; but if their Green Party is at all like ours – and why shouldn’t it be? – my guess is that ideology more than nationality is at the base of Mr. Potvin’s views. There is a segment of the environmentalist movement (not all environmentalist, mind you, just some) whose world-view can be summarized as follows: everything about nature is good except human nature.
Humanity, by this view, isn’t really a part of the natural order of things at all. Or if it is, it is as Agent Smith claimed in The Matrix, a virus. We spread to parts of the world unsuitable for us to live in without heating or air conditioning, screwing up the natural ecosystems as we multiply, performing all sorts of unnatural acts like damming rivers and chopping down forests for wood (to make, among other things, paper for books) and digging for coal and oil and then, worse yet, we build things – unnatural things such as cities like Vancouver and New York filled with unnatural things like skyscrapers. It isn’t hard at all for those who hold this world-view to cheer at any enemy of Western civilization, although perhaps it is a bit odd to find them also engaging in anything so decidedly unnatural and Western as electoral politics.
Here is another of Mr. Potvin’s printed opinions , this one claiming common cause with Islamist terrorists. I happened upon the article following a Google search from which I found, to my slight surprise, a Wikipedia entry for Mr. Potvin, himself. Reading the entry, it turns out that he may have written it, that is, the Wikipedia entry, himself, too.
Well, who am I to criticize self-promotion? And besides, like I said, everyone is entitled to his own opinion. Here’s mine. I was in the Pentagon on the morning of 9/11, fortunately far enough from the crash to have escaped safely. But several colleagues of mine were not so fortunate. So I’m afraid that if I should ever encounter Mr. Potvin in person, I'm of the opinion that I would very likely feel the urge to pump my fist in his face.
Of course, I would never do such a thing, it being too natural and uncivilized a thing to do. But then, that is only one of the ways in which I, unlike Mr. Potvin, do not share a common cause with terrorists.
Sandel on Embryo Ethics
With a hat tip to both Reason's Ronald Bailey and Arts & Letters Daily, herewith, with commentary, are excerpts from Harvard professor Michael J. Sandel’s recent Boston Globe column on the subject of embryo ethics. First, Sandel fairly states what is, more or less, my own position, as follows:
Then:
True. The issue isn’t whether a human blastocyst is merely human life but whether it is a human life. As a matter of ordinary language, what we call a human life is a human being. Moreover, what we typically call a human being is a person. Of course, convention and ordinary language do not settle the matter. Strictly speaking, they are not even arguments in support of one view versus the other. But neither are they wholly lacking in probative value. How we weigh that probative value is another matter, of course, but there are likely to be good reasons why we pre-reflectively sort out the world the way we do just as there are likely to be good reasons why biologists may choose to differentiate the life cycle of complex living organisms by deeming one stage a blastocyst, another a fetus or embryo, another as immature and yet another as mature or adult. Just as ordinary usage is far from dispositive insofar as ethical considerations are concerned, so too are biological terms of art.
Sandel continues:
Well, some may make that argument. I don’t. I think the better argument and the real point is rather who should bear the moral burden of proof. Regarding a human blastocyst (and note how those who hold Sandel’s position not only employ the distancing language of biology but also avoid as much as possible using the morally critical adjective "human") as a person calls for a moral decision. But so, dear reader, does calling you or me or Prof. Sandel a person.
That we typically have neither factual nor normative grounds to deny the personhood of, well, of another person means only that accepting or acknowledging such personhood is the standard condition and paradigm of our experience. If you accept the proposition that under ordinary circumstances those other beings you encounter every day are not only human beings in the biological sense but in the morally significant sense, i.e., persons, then the moral force of the so-called non-arbitrary line or slippery slope argument derives from personhood being a defeasible claim. That is, X (where X might be you or me or a child or infant or crowning pre-born or human blastocyst or even a Harvard professor) is a person unless, well, unless what?
Answers to the “unless what” question can be and have been offered to claim personhood in some such cases and deny it in others, but consideration of the soundness or persuasiveness of such answers and arguments is beyond the scope of this post which is intended only to respond to Sandel’s column. He considers the non-arbitrary line argument, as he phrased it, unpersuasive. I agree. But if the burden of proof falls, as I believe it morally must, on those who would contend “This X is not a person; therefore, we may harvest its cells or organs,” then it falls to Sandel’s side of the dispute to provide the morally significant criteria that make the line, wherever it may be drawn, not arbitrary.
More Sandel:
The acorn analogy seems to be very popular among academics, but I fail utterly to grasp its persuasiveness. How we should regard persons or, for the sake of argument, even putative persons is qualitatively different than how we should regard other entities or beings, and that is so regardless of how our taxonomy of such other beings might play out. The moral rights of non-human animals, sentient machines or intelligent space aliens aside, whatever my reasons for regarding an acorn one way and an oak tree another way may be, my relationship will be, to use Martin Buber’s distinction, an I-it relationship and not an I-thou relationship.
The analogy, in other words, is simply not relevant for precisely the reason the dispute arises in the first place; namely, that persons are different from non-persons in a moral sense. How we distinguish between persons and non-persons is therefore necessarily a matter of providing morally significant criteria. There may be all sorts of non-morally significant differences between oak trees and acorns, but there aren’t any morally significant criteria, at least none that I can think of. Again, that isn’t to claim that developmental differences in the lives of human beings are of no moral significance at all. Sometimes they are, sometimes they aren’t.
For that matter, it is one thing to note that there are morally significant differences among persons that are a function, for example, of their age or stage of development but that do not go to whether they are persons, another to assert that the fact that such distinctions exist are themselves evidence in support of denying the status of personhood in other cases. Arguing that a three year old child shouldn’t be allowed to do whatever it wants or given access to dangerous weapons, for example, is irrelevant both to whether that child is a person and to whether it was a person some three and a half years ago.
Sandel again:
This is completely question begging. The matter disputed precisely being what is a person and what isn’t, of course potential persons, as a subcategory of the vast universe of things that are not persons, are, well, not persons. Peter Singer and the PETA crowd aside, whether merely being a sentient creature suffices to “make claims” on us is, to put it mildly, not yet a settled matter, and Sandel’s mere assertion takes us no closer to settling it. Human life does indeed develop by degrees, but that is not to say we are clueless as to when and how it begins. Again, the question is whether that point in the life of a human being or some later point establishes that human being’s personhood.
Those arguing the later point typically assert something along the lines of Sandel’s “beings capable of experience and consciousness make higher claims still.” I agree. But what counts as being a “being capable of experience and consciousness” remains to be fleshed out, as it were. Must such a being be capable at present? Certainly, that can’t be the relevant criterion, otherwise we would not be people while asleep or unconscious (say, under anesthesia). What level of consciousness is necessary to make those higher claims? Does a newborn’s suffice or is a neonate still merely a potential person. Mind you, there are logically consistent and ethically defensible arguments to support the neonate’s merely potential personhood. Whether they comport with our moral sentiments is another matter. It takes a highly developed level of intellectual and ethical sophistication to believe, for example, that non-human animals have rights but third trimester prenates don’t. I don’t claim that Sandel believes that – I don’t know one way or the other – but some people do believe it.
The rest of the Sandel article raises objections to President Bush’s supposedly morally inconsistent position on embryonic stem cell research on grounds that it is, um, morally inconsistent. I am no apologist for the Bush Administration, but I will offer a couple of observations in response. First, it is true that the logically consistent view of those who contend that there is something immoral about embryonic stem cell research because human embryos are human beings must be “that the 400,000 excess embryos languishing in freezers in US fertility clinics” are also human beings. Whether “they should also be leading a campaign to shut down what they must regard as rampant infanticide in fertility clinics” is another matter.
Whether what Sandel calls Bush’s “don’t fund, don’t ban” policy is morally inconsistent or not, legitimate moral distinctions can be made regarding the proper use of federal funds without raising the underlying moral objection to a Kantian categorical imperative. So, too, a robustly utilitarian ethos of the sort all too familiar at, say, Harvard and Princeton can quite reasonably agree, for example, to permit abortions in cases of rape or incest as the regrettable price to pay in a political compromise to save other human lives. There is no per se moral inconsistency or failing in saving however many people one can from a burning building despite not being able to save all the others. Not even from an ivy-covered building at Harvard.
Human beings are not things. Their lives must not be sacrificed against their will, even for the sake of good ends, like saving other people's lives. The reason human beings must not be treated as things is that they are inviolable. At what point do we acquire this inviolability? The answer cannot depend on the age or developmental stage of a particular human life. Infants are inviolable, and few people would countenance harvesting organs for transplantation even from a fetus. Every human being -- each one of us -- began life as an embryo. Unless we can point to a definitive moment in the passage from conception to birth that marks the emergence of the human person, we must regard embryos as possessing the same inviolability as fully developed human beings.
Then:
This argument can be challenged on a number of grounds. First, it is undeniable that a human embryo is "human life" in the biological sense that it is living rather than dead, and human rather than, say, bovine. But this biological fact does not establish that the blastocyst is a human being, or a person. Any living human cell (a skin cell, for example) is "human life" in the sense of being human rather than bovine and living rather than dead. But no one would consider a skin cell a person, or deem it inviolable. Showing that a blastocyst is a human being, or a person, requires further argument.
True. The issue isn’t whether a human blastocyst is merely human life but whether it is a human life. As a matter of ordinary language, what we call a human life is a human being. Moreover, what we typically call a human being is a person. Of course, convention and ordinary language do not settle the matter. Strictly speaking, they are not even arguments in support of one view versus the other. But neither are they wholly lacking in probative value. How we weigh that probative value is another matter, of course, but there are likely to be good reasons why we pre-reflectively sort out the world the way we do just as there are likely to be good reasons why biologists may choose to differentiate the life cycle of complex living organisms by deeming one stage a blastocyst, another a fetus or embryo, another as immature and yet another as mature or adult. Just as ordinary usage is far from dispositive insofar as ethical considerations are concerned, so too are biological terms of art.
Sandel continues:
Some try to base such an argument on the fact that human beings develop from embryo to fetus to child. Every person was once an embryo, the argument goes, and there is no clear, non-arbitrary line between conception and adulthood that can tell us when personhood begins. Given the lack of such a line, we should regard the blastocyst as a person, as morally equivalent to a fully developed human being.
Well, some may make that argument. I don’t. I think the better argument and the real point is rather who should bear the moral burden of proof. Regarding a human blastocyst (and note how those who hold Sandel’s position not only employ the distancing language of biology but also avoid as much as possible using the morally critical adjective "human") as a person calls for a moral decision. But so, dear reader, does calling you or me or Prof. Sandel a person.
That we typically have neither factual nor normative grounds to deny the personhood of, well, of another person means only that accepting or acknowledging such personhood is the standard condition and paradigm of our experience. If you accept the proposition that under ordinary circumstances those other beings you encounter every day are not only human beings in the biological sense but in the morally significant sense, i.e., persons, then the moral force of the so-called non-arbitrary line or slippery slope argument derives from personhood being a defeasible claim. That is, X (where X might be you or me or a child or infant or crowning pre-born or human blastocyst or even a Harvard professor) is a person unless, well, unless what?
Answers to the “unless what” question can be and have been offered to claim personhood in some such cases and deny it in others, but consideration of the soundness or persuasiveness of such answers and arguments is beyond the scope of this post which is intended only to respond to Sandel’s column. He considers the non-arbitrary line argument, as he phrased it, unpersuasive. I agree. But if the burden of proof falls, as I believe it morally must, on those who would contend “This X is not a person; therefore, we may harvest its cells or organs,” then it falls to Sandel’s side of the dispute to provide the morally significant criteria that make the line, wherever it may be drawn, not arbitrary.
More Sandel:
Consider an analogy: although every oak tree was once an acorn, it does not follow that acorns are oak trees, or that I should treat the loss of an acorn eaten by a squirrel in my front yard as the same kind of loss as the death of an oak tree felled by a storm. Despite their developmental continuity, acorns and oak trees differ. So do human embryos and human beings, and in the same way. Just as acorns are potential oaks, human embryos are potential human beings.
The acorn analogy seems to be very popular among academics, but I fail utterly to grasp its persuasiveness. How we should regard persons or, for the sake of argument, even putative persons is qualitatively different than how we should regard other entities or beings, and that is so regardless of how our taxonomy of such other beings might play out. The moral rights of non-human animals, sentient machines or intelligent space aliens aside, whatever my reasons for regarding an acorn one way and an oak tree another way may be, my relationship will be, to use Martin Buber’s distinction, an I-it relationship and not an I-thou relationship.
The analogy, in other words, is simply not relevant for precisely the reason the dispute arises in the first place; namely, that persons are different from non-persons in a moral sense. How we distinguish between persons and non-persons is therefore necessarily a matter of providing morally significant criteria. There may be all sorts of non-morally significant differences between oak trees and acorns, but there aren’t any morally significant criteria, at least none that I can think of. Again, that isn’t to claim that developmental differences in the lives of human beings are of no moral significance at all. Sometimes they are, sometimes they aren’t.
For that matter, it is one thing to note that there are morally significant differences among persons that are a function, for example, of their age or stage of development but that do not go to whether they are persons, another to assert that the fact that such distinctions exist are themselves evidence in support of denying the status of personhood in other cases. Arguing that a three year old child shouldn’t be allowed to do whatever it wants or given access to dangerous weapons, for example, is irrelevant both to whether that child is a person and to whether it was a person some three and a half years ago.
Sandel again:
The distinction between a potential person and an actual one makes a moral difference. Sentient creatures make claims on us that nonsentient ones do not; beings capable of experience and consciousness make higher claims still. Human life develops by degrees.
This is completely question begging. The matter disputed precisely being what is a person and what isn’t, of course potential persons, as a subcategory of the vast universe of things that are not persons, are, well, not persons. Peter Singer and the PETA crowd aside, whether merely being a sentient creature suffices to “make claims” on us is, to put it mildly, not yet a settled matter, and Sandel’s mere assertion takes us no closer to settling it. Human life does indeed develop by degrees, but that is not to say we are clueless as to when and how it begins. Again, the question is whether that point in the life of a human being or some later point establishes that human being’s personhood.
Those arguing the later point typically assert something along the lines of Sandel’s “beings capable of experience and consciousness make higher claims still.” I agree. But what counts as being a “being capable of experience and consciousness” remains to be fleshed out, as it were. Must such a being be capable at present? Certainly, that can’t be the relevant criterion, otherwise we would not be people while asleep or unconscious (say, under anesthesia). What level of consciousness is necessary to make those higher claims? Does a newborn’s suffice or is a neonate still merely a potential person. Mind you, there are logically consistent and ethically defensible arguments to support the neonate’s merely potential personhood. Whether they comport with our moral sentiments is another matter. It takes a highly developed level of intellectual and ethical sophistication to believe, for example, that non-human animals have rights but third trimester prenates don’t. I don’t claim that Sandel believes that – I don’t know one way or the other – but some people do believe it.
The rest of the Sandel article raises objections to President Bush’s supposedly morally inconsistent position on embryonic stem cell research on grounds that it is, um, morally inconsistent. I am no apologist for the Bush Administration, but I will offer a couple of observations in response. First, it is true that the logically consistent view of those who contend that there is something immoral about embryonic stem cell research because human embryos are human beings must be “that the 400,000 excess embryos languishing in freezers in US fertility clinics” are also human beings. Whether “they should also be leading a campaign to shut down what they must regard as rampant infanticide in fertility clinics” is another matter.
Whether what Sandel calls Bush’s “don’t fund, don’t ban” policy is morally inconsistent or not, legitimate moral distinctions can be made regarding the proper use of federal funds without raising the underlying moral objection to a Kantian categorical imperative. So, too, a robustly utilitarian ethos of the sort all too familiar at, say, Harvard and Princeton can quite reasonably agree, for example, to permit abortions in cases of rape or incest as the regrettable price to pay in a political compromise to save other human lives. There is no per se moral inconsistency or failing in saving however many people one can from a burning building despite not being able to save all the others. Not even from an ivy-covered building at Harvard.
Thursday, April 12, 2007
Nifong: "Oops! My bad!"
No, not really. What Durham County District Attorney Mike Nifong actually said today was:
Okay, let's play Spot The Equivocation:
(1) "To the extent that..." A classic. Right up there with "Insofar as...." Certainly no more than to that extent, whatever it may hypothetically be, though. After all, it only qualifies...
(2) "I made judgments..." And don't we all? What the heck? So Nifong's "judgments" were supposed to be supported by credible evidence, a respect for the law and the ethics of the profession and the integrity of the criminal justice system, but "judgments" has a nice distancing tone, doesn't it, as though those "judgments" did not amount to actions he took or ordered in his professional capacity as a prosecutor. And who can really hold him to blame when, after all, they were only...
(3) "ultimately proved wrong..." I mean, "ultimately," right? Not, oh, say, within a matter of days or weeks or even months of the investigation but only at the very end. The real problem, you see, is that those "three students" were ...
(4) "wrongly accused." Not wrongly charged by Nifong, mind you, but only wrongly accused. It isn't as though he might have made inflammatory comments to the press or possibly withheld exculpatory information from the defense along the way or dragged the whole damned prosecution out far longer than the credible evidence justified, you know. Oh, those pesky false accusers! What trouble they've caused!
Oh, yes, and Mr. Nifong also said this:
I'll bet you do, Mike. I'll just bet you do.
**********
NON-GRATUITOUS ADDENDUM: When, I wonder, will we be seeing an equally defensive and weasel-worded attorney work-product purporting to be an apology from Duke University?
GRATUITOUS ADDENDUM:
Like the answer to New York Post columnist Andrea Peyser's question whether any evidence of contrition will be forthcoming from the New York Times after its shoddy and heavy-handed reporting in this case, the answer to future XM Radio personality Don Imus as to when Al Sharpton will be apologizing to the three former defendant Duke students is:
When Frosty the Snowman reigns in Hell.
"To the extent that I made judgments that ultimately proved to be incorrect, I apologize to the three students that were wrongly accused."
Okay, let's play Spot The Equivocation:
(1) "To the extent that..." A classic. Right up there with "Insofar as...." Certainly no more than to that extent, whatever it may hypothetically be, though. After all, it only qualifies...
(2) "I made judgments..." And don't we all? What the heck? So Nifong's "judgments" were supposed to be supported by credible evidence, a respect for the law and the ethics of the profession and the integrity of the criminal justice system, but "judgments" has a nice distancing tone, doesn't it, as though those "judgments" did not amount to actions he took or ordered in his professional capacity as a prosecutor. And who can really hold him to blame when, after all, they were only...
(3) "ultimately proved wrong..." I mean, "ultimately," right? Not, oh, say, within a matter of days or weeks or even months of the investigation but only at the very end. The real problem, you see, is that those "three students" were ...
(4) "wrongly accused." Not wrongly charged by Nifong, mind you, but only wrongly accused. It isn't as though he might have made inflammatory comments to the press or possibly withheld exculpatory information from the defense along the way or dragged the whole damned prosecution out far longer than the credible evidence justified, you know. Oh, those pesky false accusers! What trouble they've caused!
Oh, yes, and Mr. Nifong also said this:
"It is my sincere desire that the actions of Attorney General Cooper will serve to remedy any remaining injury that has resulted from these cases."
I'll bet you do, Mike. I'll just bet you do.
**********
NON-GRATUITOUS ADDENDUM: When, I wonder, will we be seeing an equally defensive and weasel-worded attorney work-product purporting to be an apology from Duke University?
GRATUITOUS ADDENDUM:
Like the answer to New York Post columnist Andrea Peyser's question whether any evidence of contrition will be forthcoming from the New York Times after its shoddy and heavy-handed reporting in this case, the answer to future XM Radio personality Don Imus as to when Al Sharpton will be apologizing to the three former defendant Duke students is:
When Frosty the Snowman reigns in Hell.
Bible Belt
James Lee Sheppard, a guard at the Blue Earth County (MN) Jail, is alleged to have forcibly turned inmate Jeremy Hansen's other cheek for him when Sheppard took Hansen's Bible and struck him in the face with the book. Apparently, there is a surveillance video of the incident but it hasn't made its way to the intertubes yet.
[Insert stern "separation of church and state" comment or "throw the book at him" joke here.]
[Insert stern "separation of church and state" comment or "throw the book at him" joke here.]
The Internet v. The Immediate Jewel of Their Souls
Clearly, the biggest little story sweeping through the blogosphere today is that of the dispute between blogger Katherine Coble and JL Kirk Associates (the latter being represented by the law firm of King & Ballow) over apparently less than mutually satisfactory business dealings between the parties and statements subsequently posted by Ms Coble and readers on her blog. Ms Coble has now received a letter from legal counsel for JL Kirk Associates demanding that she remove allegedly defamatory statements from her blog site and cease publishing any further such statements.
Predictably, the blogosphere is closing ranks in favor of Ms Coble. (Bill Hobbs offers what appears to be a good roundup tracking the story, as does Nashville is Talking.)
I may be one of the few libertarians, not to mention libertarian bloggers, who continues to believe that the law of defamation, properly understood and applied, is a good thing; that is, that one’s reputation is properly the subject of legal protection under some circumstances. But that’s for another day. I care to weigh in only on a point or two that so far seems not to have been addressed by my fellow bloggers.
First, however, the inevitable disclaimer. I am not a member of the Tennessee State Bar, nor do I have sufficient factual information nor have I conducted sufficient legal research to hold or offer an opinion as to the legal merits of the dispute one way or the other. I’m not taking sides and I'm sure as hell not offering legal advice to anyone. I’m not quite that big an idiot.
(Besides, I’m more of a contracts guy than a torts guy, anyway. And some would say even that is stretching my dubious credentials to their limit. I would be fascinated to know, however, what my old sparring partner at the (unfortunately now defunct) blog Left2Right, Don Herzog – not, to his credit, a lawyer, but an expert on tort law at the University of Michigan’s Law School – thinks about the law of defamation as it applies or should apply in general to the internet. Don, any thoughts?)
I was intrigued, in any case, by a paragraph in the demand letter as reprinted at Ms Coble’s website ** because it struck me that it could be interpreted to be claiming that the applicable law of defamation in Tennessee was substantially different from the general law of defamation as I understand it. The relevant paragraph is as follows:
[** - Lest either Ms Coble or Mr. Korpady, the attorney who apparently signed the demand letter, accuse me of libel per quod (see below), I have no idea whether the word "company" was misspelled by either or both of them nor do I imply nor should the reader infer any carelessness on either's part. I merely cut and pasted the excerpt from Ms Coble's blog site and noted the misspelling without correction. Indeed, I have only Ms Coble's blog as evidence for any of this affair, as far as that goes. There, now that that little bit of CYA is done...]
As a general rule of law, the truth of the defendant’s published statements being alleged to be defamatory is a sufficient defense against a charge of libel. So the question occurs when it might be, under the law of Tennessee, that truth is not a sufficient defense.
Unsurprisingly, because the cited case is not all that recent it could not be found online except through subscription legal research services to which I do not have current access. I did, however, find at the Tennessee Supreme Court website several subsequent cases citing Nichols, including one that briefly summarized its relevant facts, as follows:
Hunt v. Tangel, C.A. No. 01A01-9705-CV-00199, __ S.W.2d __ (Tenn. Ct. App. 1997)
Ah, now that makes sense. It appears the court was grappling with the common law distinction between libel per se and libel per quod, a question of whether the published statements were defamatory on their face or required knowledge of extrinsic facts to make out the defamatory meaning which, in turn, affected the plaintiff’s burden of proof regarding damages. In its modern manifestation, however, one might say informally that a ‘falsehood’ is still required to prove a charge of libel when the published statements are themselves true in that the reader must be reasonably likely to draw a false and defamatory conclusion from those otherwise true statements as published.
Let me repeat that I neither know nor care to speculate on what statements were true or false or what sort of extrinsic facts there might be that could result in whatever truthful statements Ms Coble published being deemed defamatory or where, as lawyers are wont to say, "the equities" lie in this matter. It does not, in any case, appear that the law of defamation in Tennessee is especially different from that of other jurisdictions at least on the point herein considered.
One other observation, though. The phrase “intending to injure the character” from the demand letter also struck my eye. I don’t know whether that is the phrasing of Mr. Korpady, himself, or a phrasing merely taken from one or more defamation cases. Probably the latter. Courts, themselves, can be notoriously casual in their phrasing, causing much legal mischief as a result. Even so, as my long-ago torts teacher once observed upon hearing a student (not me!) use the often heard phrase “defamation of character,” defamation is about reputation, not character. False assertions can injure another person’s reputation; the quality of his character is up to him.
Predictably, the blogosphere is closing ranks in favor of Ms Coble. (Bill Hobbs offers what appears to be a good roundup tracking the story, as does Nashville is Talking.)
I may be one of the few libertarians, not to mention libertarian bloggers, who continues to believe that the law of defamation, properly understood and applied, is a good thing; that is, that one’s reputation is properly the subject of legal protection under some circumstances. But that’s for another day. I care to weigh in only on a point or two that so far seems not to have been addressed by my fellow bloggers.
First, however, the inevitable disclaimer. I am not a member of the Tennessee State Bar, nor do I have sufficient factual information nor have I conducted sufficient legal research to hold or offer an opinion as to the legal merits of the dispute one way or the other. I’m not taking sides and I'm sure as hell not offering legal advice to anyone. I’m not quite that big an idiot.
(Besides, I’m more of a contracts guy than a torts guy, anyway. And some would say even that is stretching my dubious credentials to their limit. I would be fascinated to know, however, what my old sparring partner at the (unfortunately now defunct) blog Left2Right, Don Herzog – not, to his credit, a lawyer, but an expert on tort law at the University of Michigan’s Law School – thinks about the law of defamation as it applies or should apply in general to the internet. Don, any thoughts?)
I was intrigued, in any case, by a paragraph in the demand letter as reprinted at Ms Coble’s website ** because it struck me that it could be interpreted to be claiming that the applicable law of defamation in Tennessee was substantially different from the general law of defamation as I understand it. The relevant paragraph is as follows:
Under Tennessee law, any malicious publication expressed in writing intending to injure the character or diminish the reputation of a business is libel. Moreover, even if statements are literally true, the publisher of those statements is subject to monetary damages where “the meaning reasonably conveyed by the published words is defamatory.” Memphis Publishing Comany [sic] v. Nichols, 569 S.W. 2d 412 (Tenn. 1978)
[** - Lest either Ms Coble or Mr. Korpady, the attorney who apparently signed the demand letter, accuse me of libel per quod (see below), I have no idea whether the word "company" was misspelled by either or both of them nor do I imply nor should the reader infer any carelessness on either's part. I merely cut and pasted the excerpt from Ms Coble's blog site and noted the misspelling without correction. Indeed, I have only Ms Coble's blog as evidence for any of this affair, as far as that goes. There, now that that little bit of CYA is done...]
As a general rule of law, the truth of the defendant’s published statements being alleged to be defamatory is a sufficient defense against a charge of libel. So the question occurs when it might be, under the law of Tennessee, that truth is not a sufficient defense.
Unsurprisingly, because the cited case is not all that recent it could not be found online except through subscription legal research services to which I do not have current access. I did, however, find at the Tennessee Supreme Court website several subsequent cases citing Nichols, including one that briefly summarized its relevant facts, as follows:
... Plaintiff cites Prosser for the proposition that “[t]he form of the language used is not controlling, and there may be defamation by means of a question, an indirect insinuation, an expression of belief or opinion, or sarcasm or irony.” William A. Prosser, The Law of Torts § 111 at 746 (4th ed. 1971) (footnotes omitted). Our review of Prosser and the cases cited therein, leads us to the conclusion that Prosser was referring to situations where actionable defamation may occur through sarcasm, insinuation, and the like, when the truth is twisted by either omitting relevant facts and circumstances, or alluding to “facts” and circumstances that do not exist. The classic Tennessee case on point is Memphis Publishing Co. v. Nichols, 569 S.W. 2d 412 (Tenn. 1978). In Nichols, the Memphis Press-Scimitar published an article stating that Mrs. Nichols had been shot “after the suspect arrived at the Nichols home and found her husband there with Mrs. Nichols.” Although true, the Tennessee Supreme Court held that this statement could be defamatory because the story failed to mention that several others, including Mr. Nichols, were present at the time. Without this important fact, the article implied that Mrs. Nichols was having an adulterous affair with the suspect’s husband. The Court held that: “Truth is available as an absolute defense [to a charge of defamation] only when the defamatory meaning conveyed by the words is true.” Nichols, 569 S.W.2d at 420.
Hunt v. Tangel, C.A. No. 01A01-9705-CV-00199, __ S.W.2d __ (Tenn. Ct. App. 1997)
Ah, now that makes sense. It appears the court was grappling with the common law distinction between libel per se and libel per quod, a question of whether the published statements were defamatory on their face or required knowledge of extrinsic facts to make out the defamatory meaning which, in turn, affected the plaintiff’s burden of proof regarding damages. In its modern manifestation, however, one might say informally that a ‘falsehood’ is still required to prove a charge of libel when the published statements are themselves true in that the reader must be reasonably likely to draw a false and defamatory conclusion from those otherwise true statements as published.
Let me repeat that I neither know nor care to speculate on what statements were true or false or what sort of extrinsic facts there might be that could result in whatever truthful statements Ms Coble published being deemed defamatory or where, as lawyers are wont to say, "the equities" lie in this matter. It does not, in any case, appear that the law of defamation in Tennessee is especially different from that of other jurisdictions at least on the point herein considered.
One other observation, though. The phrase “intending to injure the character” from the demand letter also struck my eye. I don’t know whether that is the phrasing of Mr. Korpady, himself, or a phrasing merely taken from one or more defamation cases. Probably the latter. Courts, themselves, can be notoriously casual in their phrasing, causing much legal mischief as a result. Even so, as my long-ago torts teacher once observed upon hearing a student (not me!) use the often heard phrase “defamation of character,” defamation is about reputation, not character. False assertions can injure another person’s reputation; the quality of his character is up to him.
Wednesday, April 11, 2007
"All right, Sheriff, pull over and let me see my license and registration."
From the AP Strange New file, Brown County, Wisconsin Sheriff Dennis Kocken wrote himself a ticket for an unsafe lane change while trying to pace a possibly speeding car ahead of him. "As sheriff, I'm held to the highest standard in law enforcement. How can I hold officers accountable if I don't hold myself accountable?" he said. "I'm satisfied I'm doing the right thing."
Sorry, but I call bullsh*t. Either Kocken is too focused on the letter versus the spirit and intent of the law – issuing a traffic citation is always discretionary on the part of a law enforcement official, and mitigating circumstances are supposed to be taken into consideration – or, more likely, it’s a cheap bit of political grandstanding. As in most American counties, the office of sheriff in Brown County is an elected position.
Back in the day, the occasional “man bites dog” story about some cop giving the mayor or governor a ticket would make the news. No more, I guess. Nowadays, involving someone else in one’s holier or more law abiding than thou gestures runs the risk of having to share the spotlight. If I were the judge in Sheriff Kocken’s case, I’d take him at his word and ensure he really was being held accountable by, oh, say, sentencing him to a bit of remedial driver’s education.
Sorry, but I call bullsh*t. Either Kocken is too focused on the letter versus the spirit and intent of the law – issuing a traffic citation is always discretionary on the part of a law enforcement official, and mitigating circumstances are supposed to be taken into consideration – or, more likely, it’s a cheap bit of political grandstanding. As in most American counties, the office of sheriff in Brown County is an elected position.
Back in the day, the occasional “man bites dog” story about some cop giving the mayor or governor a ticket would make the news. No more, I guess. Nowadays, involving someone else in one’s holier or more law abiding than thou gestures runs the risk of having to share the spotlight. If I were the judge in Sheriff Kocken’s case, I’d take him at his word and ensure he really was being held accountable by, oh, say, sentencing him to a bit of remedial driver’s education.
"Hi Ho, Hi Ho, It's Off The Air We Go!" (Updated)
"My goal is to goad people into saying something that ruins their life." -- Don Imus
I can’t imagine myself ever writing or uttering the phrase “nappy-headed hos” except, as here, in quote marks. Not that I’m all that pure and punctilious when it comes to insensitive or offensive speech or comments, mind you. Say only that it isn’t my style personally and draw whatever conclusions you wish as a result.
Much ado has been made already about Don Imus and his latest failed witticism, but I don’t listen to Imus in the morning or at any other time or to radio much at all except for XM in the car, and then it’s either one of the jazz channels or the comedy channel where the programming would make “nappy-headed hos” (there, I wrote it again!) sound like I accidentally tuned to one of the kids’ channels. But then, that’s comedy.
We essentially empower or give comedians permission to say things on stage they could not get away with saying as private individuals. Not that he seemed to have much talent as a stand-up to begin with, but it was obvious from the Michael Richards video that he was no longer "on" but had lost it emotionally and was merely ranting and reacting as just another jerk, having lost both his comedian persona and control of the audience.
Even when a comedian doesn't lose control, how the audience might react to a racial joke can be risky business. Sarah Silverman, doing a bit about getting out of jury duty, said (not verbatim) "A friend said put something racist in the juror questionnaire and they won't take you, so first I wrote 'I hate chinks,' But that sounded mean, so I erased it and wrote 'I love chinks.'"
She caught some flak for that joke and responded beautifully. (Again, not verbatim) "I got criticized in the press for using the word 'chink' and, speaking as a Jew, I just want to say that I find it deeply disturbing that we may be losing control of the media."
Now, that's funny.
Imus, on the other hand? [shrug] Under the “First they came for the Jews” line of reasoning, I should probably rise to his defense at least as far as noting that people should have the right to make jackasses of themselves in public without being forced to go to reeducation camps. Then again, that freedom of speech thingie also entails the right of the annoyed, insulted or supposedly injured to respond accordingly. (Today's Washington Post article on Imus reports Rutgers Coach C. Vivian Stringer as saying, "We have all been physically and emotionally spent and hurt" by Imus's remarks. Physically? Sheesh!)
And, yes, this isn’t about government censorship but about public opinion, a vastly different kettle of fish, and more to the point about Imus keeping his overpaid job. But I’ll come to Imus’s defense this far: the man had to spend an hour with Al Sharpton. Surely, that should be punishment enough no matter how big a jackass he is.
Truth is, Imus and Howard Stern and most other so-called shock-jocks and, for that matter, Ann Coulter and Mike Adams and most other so-called pundits are, just like Silverman and Chris Rock and Sasha Baron Cohen, in show business. There is no bright line or at least none worth drawing between, say, Lenny Bruce (whom Nick Gillespie finds less than funny) and Ann Coulter (whom I find less than insightful) however they may be categorized by others. They’re selling a product. Some are profiting handsomely from it, which means they are selling a product people want; but the market tends to sort that sort of thing out nicely, if not the way you or I would sort it out, ourselves.
I’m all for civility, though I have my own lapses now and then; but what I find mind-boggling is the endless torrent of self-indulgent righteous indignation and alleged aggrievement these petty incidents invariably arouse. Can we really have become such thin-skinned hothouse flowers -- how’s that for a mixed metaphor, by the way? -- that the national psyche must be purged over and over again via Mao-esque show trials of public denouncement and contrition? Or are such events, as some cynics might suspect, merely opportunities for posturing and preening identity politicians to capitalize on?
I don’t care whether advertisers decide to disassociate from the likes of Don Imus or not. They will, in any case, be making a business judgment, not a moral one. Crude and tasteless as his comments were, if the worst thing in life that happens to the women on the Rutgers basketball team is that they were insulted by a guy who himself looks like the Marlboro Man ten years after he died of lung cancer, they should consider themselves blessed.
**********
UPDATE: No, not about Imus getting sacked. A New York Daily News blog reports that Hillary Clinton plans to visit the Rutgers woman's basketball team on Monday. My God, haven't those young women suffered enough already?
I can’t imagine myself ever writing or uttering the phrase “nappy-headed hos” except, as here, in quote marks. Not that I’m all that pure and punctilious when it comes to insensitive or offensive speech or comments, mind you. Say only that it isn’t my style personally and draw whatever conclusions you wish as a result.
Much ado has been made already about Don Imus and his latest failed witticism, but I don’t listen to Imus in the morning or at any other time or to radio much at all except for XM in the car, and then it’s either one of the jazz channels or the comedy channel where the programming would make “nappy-headed hos” (there, I wrote it again!) sound like I accidentally tuned to one of the kids’ channels. But then, that’s comedy.
We essentially empower or give comedians permission to say things on stage they could not get away with saying as private individuals. Not that he seemed to have much talent as a stand-up to begin with, but it was obvious from the Michael Richards video that he was no longer "on" but had lost it emotionally and was merely ranting and reacting as just another jerk, having lost both his comedian persona and control of the audience.
Even when a comedian doesn't lose control, how the audience might react to a racial joke can be risky business. Sarah Silverman, doing a bit about getting out of jury duty, said (not verbatim) "A friend said put something racist in the juror questionnaire and they won't take you, so first I wrote 'I hate chinks,' But that sounded mean, so I erased it and wrote 'I love chinks.'"
She caught some flak for that joke and responded beautifully. (Again, not verbatim) "I got criticized in the press for using the word 'chink' and, speaking as a Jew, I just want to say that I find it deeply disturbing that we may be losing control of the media."
Now, that's funny.
Imus, on the other hand? [shrug] Under the “First they came for the Jews” line of reasoning, I should probably rise to his defense at least as far as noting that people should have the right to make jackasses of themselves in public without being forced to go to reeducation camps. Then again, that freedom of speech thingie also entails the right of the annoyed, insulted or supposedly injured to respond accordingly. (Today's Washington Post article on Imus reports Rutgers Coach C. Vivian Stringer as saying, "We have all been physically and emotionally spent and hurt" by Imus's remarks. Physically? Sheesh!)
And, yes, this isn’t about government censorship but about public opinion, a vastly different kettle of fish, and more to the point about Imus keeping his overpaid job. But I’ll come to Imus’s defense this far: the man had to spend an hour with Al Sharpton. Surely, that should be punishment enough no matter how big a jackass he is.
Truth is, Imus and Howard Stern and most other so-called shock-jocks and, for that matter, Ann Coulter and Mike Adams and most other so-called pundits are, just like Silverman and Chris Rock and Sasha Baron Cohen, in show business. There is no bright line or at least none worth drawing between, say, Lenny Bruce (whom Nick Gillespie finds less than funny) and Ann Coulter (whom I find less than insightful) however they may be categorized by others. They’re selling a product. Some are profiting handsomely from it, which means they are selling a product people want; but the market tends to sort that sort of thing out nicely, if not the way you or I would sort it out, ourselves.
I’m all for civility, though I have my own lapses now and then; but what I find mind-boggling is the endless torrent of self-indulgent righteous indignation and alleged aggrievement these petty incidents invariably arouse. Can we really have become such thin-skinned hothouse flowers -- how’s that for a mixed metaphor, by the way? -- that the national psyche must be purged over and over again via Mao-esque show trials of public denouncement and contrition? Or are such events, as some cynics might suspect, merely opportunities for posturing and preening identity politicians to capitalize on?
I don’t care whether advertisers decide to disassociate from the likes of Don Imus or not. They will, in any case, be making a business judgment, not a moral one. Crude and tasteless as his comments were, if the worst thing in life that happens to the women on the Rutgers basketball team is that they were insulted by a guy who himself looks like the Marlboro Man ten years after he died of lung cancer, they should consider themselves blessed.
**********
UPDATE: No, not about Imus getting sacked. A New York Daily News blog reports that Hillary Clinton plans to visit the Rutgers woman's basketball team on Monday. My God, haven't those young women suffered enough already?
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