CBS News | Lott Will Step Down | December 20, 2002 11:19:42

To a whole bunch of really good bloggers; I just realized that I deleted the note where I’ve been keeping all the people I’ve meant to add to the blogroll. Sigh. I’ll thumb through the CD-ROM’s and see if I was smart enough to back it up.
Otherwise, it’ll be a week or so before I get enough reading done to do an update.
I’m a moron sometimes…

It’s just great, too. The St. Crispin’s Day speech from Henry V:

If we are mark’d to die, we are enow
To do our country loss; and if to live,
The fewer men, the greater share of honour.
God’s will! I pray thee, wish not one man more.
By Jove, I am not covetous for gold,
Nor care I who doth feed upon my cost;
It yearns me not if men my garments wear;
Such outward things dwell not in my desires.
But if it be a sin to covet honour,
I am the most offending soul alive.
No, faith, my coz, wish not a man from England.
God’s peace! I would not lose so great an honour
As one man more methinks would share from me
For the best hope I have. O, do not wish one more!
Rather proclaim it, Westmoreland, through my host,
That he which hath no stomach to this fight,
Let him depart; his passport shall be made,
And crowns for convoy put into his purse;
We would not die in that man’s company
That fears his fellowship to die with us.
This day is call’d the feast of Crispian.
He that outlives this day, and comes safe home,
Will stand a tip-toe when this day is nam’d,
And rouse him at the name of Crispian.
He that shall live this day, and see old age,
Will yearly on the vigil feast his neighbours,
And say ‘To-morrow is Saint Crispian.’
Then will he strip his sleeve and show his scars,
And say ‘These wounds I had on Crispian’s day.’
Old men forget; yet all shall be forgot,
But he’ll remember, with advantages,
What feats he did that day. Then shall our names,
Familiar in his mouth as household words-
Harry the King, Bedford and Exeter,
Warwick and Talbot, Salisbury and Gloucester-
Be in their flowing cups freshly rememb’red.
This story shall the good man teach his son;
And Crispin Crispian shall ne’er go by,
From this day to the ending of the world,
But we in it shall be remembered-
We few, we happy few, we band of brothers;
For he to-day that sheds his blood with me
Shall be my brother; be he ne’er so vile,
This day shall gentle his condition;
And gentlemen in England now-a-bed
Shall think themselves accurs’d they were not here,
And hold their manhoods cheap whiles any speaks
That fought with us upon Saint Crispin’s day.

I don’t care that Kenneth Branagh is reduced to being Harry Potter’s foil; I hope he’s happy and healthy and being banged into insensibility by starlets every day for his incredible version of Prince Hal, in Henry V.
Every so often, an actor will nail a role so well that every time you pick up the book and read it, you hear the actor’s voice, and when I quoted Shakespeare below, I heard Branagh’s voice. The only other time that’s happened as strongly was in Catch-22; I still hear Alan Arkin’s voice in every line Yossarian speaks.
Sorry, back to serious politics later.

Read this Mercury News article about the legal aftermath of a fatal car accident in the Bay Area, and look at the window it gives into our attitudes about responsibility.

Her attorney, Louis Goodman, said his client is “devastated” by the crash and does not deserve a lengthy jail sentence.
“It’s very appropriate disposition,” Goodman said, referring to the promise of no or low jail time. “It’s a traffic accident. It’s a tragic traffic accident,” but “it’s a risk that motorcyclists take.”

His client was driving 60 in heavy fog, and ran into a group of stopped cars, killing a motorcyclist.
Oops.
One of the things I think about a lot, and will amplify more, is the disconnect between action and consequence. People can’t learn that way.
So we breed idiots like the guy I saw on the 405 (a stupendously busy freeway here in Los Angeles) today, driving in stop and go traffic, reading a document on his steering wheel and driving in his lane by Braille.
And if he’d run me over and killed me, it would have been my fault for being so vulnerable.
This has wider consequences, which we’ll discuss later.

I’ve been thinking a lot about doubt, lately, triggered in part by the great Learned Hand quote below:
“The spirit of liberty is the spirit which is not too sure that it is right…,”
and thinking about why that matters so much.
I tend to see way to much self-certainty around me, on the Right, Left, Libertarian, Young Socialist, or whatever. In reality, the world is messy and uncertain. One of my favorite examples ever is from Henry V; not the famous St. Crispin’s Day speech, but the scene at the end of the battle:

EXETER. Here comes the herald of the French, my liege.
GLOUCESTER. His eyes are humbler than they us’d to be.
KING HENRY. How now! What means this, herald? know’st thou not
That I have fin’d these bones of mine for ransom?
Com’st thou again for ransom?
MONTJOY. No, great King;
I come to thee for charitable licence,
That we may wander o’er this bloody field
To book our dead, and then to bury them;
To sort our nobles from our common men;
For many of our princes- woe the while!-
Lie drown’d and soak’d in mercenary blood;
So do our vulgar drench their peasant limbs
In blood of princes; and their wounded steeds
Fret fetlock deep in gore, and with wild rage
Yerk out their armed heels at their dead masters,
Killing them twice. O, give us leave, great King,
To view the field in safety, and dispose
Of their dead bodies!
KING HENRY. I tell thee truly, herald,
I know not if the day be ours or no;
For yet a many of your horsemen peer
And gallop o’er the field.
MONTJOY. The day is yours.

I know not if the day be ours or no;
You don’t know. You don’t know if you’re winning until after you’ve won, and still you have to press on in the face of that not knowing. That’s a pretty good statement of the human condition.
There is something about ‘not knowing’ that seems to terrify many people, so they do soemthing about it: the decide to ‘know’, and close their eyes to anything that might contradict their knowing, and then they try to live their lives with their eyes closed.
Look I’m not going to collapse a thousand years of the philosophy of knowledge into one blog post, even if I could. But let me suggest some things in broad strokes.
I often feel like what is going on in the world of politics is a clash of ideas more than a clash of people. I meet people with whom I sometimes violently disagree, and I find them warm, personable, decent human beings. And yet we – all of us – get hung on someone’s idea that doesn’t fit into our constellation of ideas, and we get intensely focussed on refuting it or on beating them into submission to get them to give up the ‘bad idea’ that posesses them.
And so one of the traits I despise in modern politics, and that is blossoming in the blogoverse is the neglect that the other folks are people, with all the subtlety, complexity, contradictions, and history which that involves. Instead, they become proxies for their idea, and the battles between people become battles between ideas.
I could take half and hour pull a thousand citations from blogs on the left, right, and radical center to demonstrate this. I won’t, because then it becomes an attack on them, on the author and I’m suddenly doing exactly what I’m trying to criticize by attacking them as a person for a snippet of one thing that they said at one point in their lives.
This matters a lot because we have to find a way to deal with each other if we are to live together, and to do that we are going to have to become tolerant of doubt, uncertainty, and complexity.
This ties in with one of my earliest themes, the idea of a ‘4th Generation” liberalism, in that it is an effort to unite my core political values (liberalism) with a recognition of uncertainty and complexity.
So in the next few days, I’m going to try and explain what this is, why it is an issue, and what we might do about it.
Next: THE WORLD IS BIGGER THAN YOU IMAGINE IT TO BE

In today’s L.A. Times, Norah Vincent’s current column, Putting the Brakes on Blowhard ‘Bloggers’, (intrusive registration required, just use ‘laexaminer’/’laexaminer’) gives an object lesson in what’s wrong with the media class today (an extension of the point I made below).

If the Internet is a frontier, then the online self-publishing phenomenon called Web logging, or “blogging,” is the virtual Wild West where any old varmint with a Web site can shoot his mouth off. A recent decision by the High Court of Australia, however, could civilize the Internet, perhaps to the detriment of the 1st Amendment.
…
This wouldn’t matter so much if it meant simply that major media outlets would have to spend more time fending off complaints. After all, they can afford to, although all such costs eventually trickle down to consumers.
But what about pipsqueak bloggers who can’t afford to protect themselves from the umbrageous hordes at home, let alone abroad? The Australian precedent could burden them immeasurably and thus raises the question: Is policing speech in the blogosphere a good and necessary thing or just another way to mum the common man?
Actually, it’s both, which is why there is cause to be heartened and concerned.
We should be concerned because, until recently, the blogosphere has been a haven of free expression.
Though libel law has always applied to Web content, most bloggers have flown beneath the radar, making it possible to disseminate their sometimes injudicious remarks with virtual impunity. And most of the time that has been a good thing because, unlike in the gated confines of print newspapers and magazines whose hand-picked and bowdlerized letters sections abrogate reader feedback, anybody can participate in public debate on the Net. One-man bands such as Instapundit, Kausfiles, andrewsullivan.com and a hundred smaller operations are spicing the debate, keeping the media powers honest and putting our free press through its paces.
But there’s a flip side to this. As much as the blogosphere is full of brave and vital input, it’s also full of the careless, mad and sometimes vengeful ravings of half-wits who will say anything, especially about established journalists and writers, just to attract more attention to their sites. This can get ugly when content is unregulated.
…
(emphasis added)

So ranting about average citizens, politicians, or the bad car repairman on the corner is excusable. But if you dare say a word about your betters…watch out.
Overall, I’m frustrated, because she does raise interesting issues about the maturation of blogging, and the increased responsibility that bloggers are struggling toward (as opposed, say, to the typical Usenet political thread participant). As folks who have dealt with me here and in real life know, I’m also a serious believer in ‘civil’ discourse, and in the futility of commentary that consists only of snarky slams.
But if you want to know what’s wrong with Big Media today, you have to look into the eyes of its practitioners and see the insularity. Norah Vincent has given us just such a look, and I want to thank her for it…
(edited for tone)

SkyBox Davis makes a brilliant hire as he brings on ex-Senator Steve Peace as his director of finance.
Peace is famous for two things: he’s fabulously temperamental, and as far as I know, not widely loved in the Legislature (I’ll go to Ann Salisbury for confirmation), but even better, he was the main water-carrier for the corporate energy interests that demolished the budget with their ill-planned (from the state, utility, and consumer’s point of view) deregulation of the energy markets.
If there’s a state political figure who ought to be at Tassajara Zen monastery, cutting wood and thinking about humility, it’s Peace.
Instead the Gov. is tossing him into what will be one of the bloodiest and highest-stakes political battles we’ve seen here in CA in this decade.
Thanks, Gray!!

So I scanned the research study on hiring today.
Personally, I’d have designed it slightly differently, to track two other dimensions: the effect of names that are obviously ethnic but non-African American (Juan, Ashish, Yuri, Isao and Wei come to mind immediately) as well as names that are fairly obviously white but ‘non-traditional’ (Rainbow, Sunshine, Redwood).
The fact that the investigators were only looking along the white-African American axis and ignored these other effects leaves their study subject to criticism (which it seems to be receiving in bulk … I almost said ‘in spades’, then decided to save myself the hate mail.).
First I should qualify my comments by the fact that I have a hard time with most social science ‘research’. Coming from a physical sciences background, I find that many, if not most of the research I’ve seen in the social sciences is just bad science, which simply sets out to document the prejudices of the researcher (Bellesiles, anyone?). So I have a knee-jerk reaction … call it a prejudice … when I first read about studies like this.
I tend to see them as interesting anecdotes, and in some ways find it frustrating that pseudo-quantitative research gets standing above meaningful personal anecdote.
Having stood on a chair and ranted for a bit, I’ll also defend the study as a useful anecdote.
I’ll defend it from two points of view.
The first is my own, as someone who has from time to time been involved in ‘mass market’ hiring and has seen for himself that certain resumes are shoved to the side for reasons that have little or nothing to do with their content.
The second is that we have to look on the study as reflecting what really happens when we take a pool of African American applicants…LaToyas and Muhammeds…real people…and try and understand what they see in the world.
And the reality is that for a million reasons, they face barriers that others don’t.
Some of the barriers are self-imposed.
But some of them aren’t.
And whether those barriers mean it’s 50% harder to get an interview or 5% , that’s just damn wrong.

CNN has the latest proposals for the WTC site.
Go check them out, and vote early and often.
I voted for #2, but reserve the right to decide that they all suck.

Go read this right now. Don’t go to bed. Don’t change the channel. Rachel Lucas: Guns and Freedom.
If I wore a hat, I’d doff it in respect to Rachel Lucas and her commenter/essayist Bill Whittle.
(via Instapundit)