Scanning the blogs at lunch, I came across Jeff Cooper’s link to Jeanne d’Arc’s post about the Manhattan ‘wilding’ arrests, and the news that a recent confession and DNA testing are set to exonerate the youths convicted back in 1989.
Jeff’s reaction is cautionary:

The large quantity of cases reversed by DNA evidence over the past several years ought to give us pause as the government seeks broad new investigative and prosecutorial powers as part of the war on terror. Much as I admire prosecutors (full disclosure: my wife was a deputy prosecutor in Indianapolis for five years), there is a tendency—not invariable, but nevertheless real—on the part of police and prosecutors to sink their teeth into particular suspects and hold on regardless of contrary evidence. Why should we be confident that prosecutorial abuses would be less of a problem in secret or military courts with secret evidence than they are in the public trials that produced verdicts that we now know were erroneous?

While Jeanne’s is more…I’m looking for a word…self-satisfied:

A lot of people say that September 11 changed everything, which is nonsense, of course, but it changed a lot of things, among them Americans’ willingness to set aside the Constitution and launch wars that no one can explain. Some stories change the way we view the world, and the story of the Central Park jogger was one of those. It emboldened people who were already filled with hate, and made those of us who weren’t a little more defensive. I, for one, grew more embarrassed by people like Al Sharpton, who seemed to cry racism at every turn. (It should be noted now — for whatever it’s worth — that one of the few people to stand up for the Central Park “rapists” was Al Sharpton). I became less likely to wonder if racism lay behind an arrest. I assumed the boys were guilty. And I became more likely to assume that if a nagging suspicion that something was wrong tugged at me, I was simply guilty of having an embarrassing “bleeding heart.”
The revised story wasn’t widely covered. It won’t have an emotional impact on as many people as the original story had. It probably won’t change anything big.
But it will make me trust my bleeding heart again. And nobody’s going to make me feel embarrassed or defensive about it.

My reaction is actually surprisingly different. I’m thrilled. And excited. And proud. I feel bad for the youths wrongly convicted (although my bad feelings are somewhat offset by the admitted fact that they had been wilding…randomly assaulting innocent people in the park…). I’m bothered by the fact that poor kids of color get worse legal representation than rich white guys like Skakel.
But none of this changes the fact that I’m proud because we live in a society where we are willing to face up to and admit our mistakes. To correct them where possible. No politically connected prosecutor was able to bury the confession or prevent the DNA testing that ultimately appears to have exonerated them. I’m thrilled that we have been able to take the fruits of our technology and apply them, fairly and objectively to support the interests of people who would normally be beneath consideration. I’m excited because I believe that these tools…the technology and the open legal system…that are the product of this society will be used in the future to prevent bad things from happening…like convicting the wrong people of horrible crimes.
I’m interested in why our three reactions are so disparate, and it cuts to one of my significant core issues, the alienation of many of us from our society and the overt disgust with all the instruments of government. In other words, the collapse of legitimacy.
I’m interested in why it is, when we correct the injustices of the past, and devise tools to ensure that it will be difficult to make the same mistakes again, we are dwelling on the “Oh, no, we were so bad” rather than the “we’re getting better”. See, I think that real liberalism…the kind that builds schools and water systems and improves people’s lives…comes from a belief in progress.
We aren’t perfect. No one is or ever will be…to quote William Goldman, “Life is pain, Highness! Anyone who says differently is selling something.” But we can either keep trying to get there or sit on the floor dwelling on our shortcomings. Which one would you rather do, and why?

Sorry, but real life continues to interfere with time in front of the computer; yesterday Tenacious G (my SO) managed her re-entry motorcycle ride into the Santa Monica mountains, where we met and breakfasted with friends. She hasn’t ridden in the mountain roads since her two accidents last year, and to be blunt, I haven’t exactly encouraged her.
She did great, a good time was had by all, and I will slowly learn to give up trying to ride her motorcycle and mine at the same time. It’s not easy to live in anxiety about someone you care for, but in order to care for them you have to respect their choices…even the ones that make you anxious.
This somehow plays into today’s Steve Lopez column in the LA Times (signin ‘laexaminer’/’laexaminer’), in which he tells the story of a young man who ultimately succeeded in committing suicide, despite the efforts of his mother to protect him. He ultimately shot himself with his handgun – which had been taken away by the LAPD when he had been picked up and taken in for evaluation, and then given back by the LAPD when he was not admitted.
We have a terrible mental health system here in California, where care for ill people takes a back seat to ‘respect’ for their rights, and a desire not to spend any money on them. The results can be seen daily on Main and Los Angeles streets downtown, where the homeless congregate. And can be seen in this small tragedy.
And above all the policy issues, we want to make things better and to keep our children safe.
So again, in today’s Times, an article about a high school here in Southern California which is being used as a testbed for surveillance technology, in part because

” Schools are among the first to embrace new technology, often because companies view campuses as perfect testing grounds before rolling products out to corporate America.
For instance, one of the companies behind West Hills’ system, PacketVideo Corp., predicts that demand for products like SkyWitness will grow, as people are tracked at factories, office parks, stadiums–even places such as the Third Street Promenade shopping district in Santa Monica.
Companies like the fact that students enjoy fewer constitutional protections than adults and have lower expectations of privacy than their parents.”

The desire to keep our kids safe places them in Bentham’s Panopticon, the perfect prison where visibility would ensure behavior. This is ass-backwards; I’ll try and get into why it doesn’t work later, but for now, simply want to say that, hard as it is to say and do, we cannot provide total safety to those we love. I don’t know enough facts about the case Lopez talks about, but I do know the feeling I get when someone I love straddles her motorcycle and rides away. And despite those feelings, I know that I simply have to put my head down, ride my own motorcycle, and let her ride her own.
Anyway, a great dinner with friends last night, too much Big House Red, lunch and a movie today with my brother (who still owes me for this), and another dinner with friends tonight.
It’s a rough life, isn’t it?
But I’m working on a review of Embattled Dreams and some other stuff…so please come back tomorrow!

In Erin O’Connor’s academic blog, she details the incoming orientation for Brown frosh-of-color.

That pomp is also a politics: the TWTP web site offers a remarkable explanation for why well-heeled, privileged Brown students should choose to call themselves “third world” students. It’s a remarkable explanation, which I quote here in full:
Students first began using the term “Third World” over “minority” because of the negative connotations of inferiority and powerlessness with which the word “minority” is often associated. Although the term “Third World” may have negative socioeconomic connotations outside of Brown, Third World students here continue to use the term in the context originating form the Civil Rights Movement.
Frantz Fanon, author of The Wretched of the Earth (1961), urged readers to band together against oppression and colonialism, by pioneering a “Third Way” meaning an alternative to the ways of the first world (U.S. & Europe) and also the second world (USSR & Eastern Europe). When students adopt the term “Third World”, they use it in the sense of a cultural model of empowerment and liberation.
Brown students of color continue to use the term “Third World” in a similar fashion: to describe a consciousness which recognizes the commonalities and links shared by their diverse communities. This consciousness at Brown also reflects a right, a willingness, and a necessity for people of color to define themselves instead of being defined by others.
The concept of “Third World” has special meaning for minority students at Brown. It is not to be confused with the economic definition of the term used commonly in our society today, but understood as a term that celebrates the cultures of Arab, Asian, Black, Latino, Multiracial and Native Americans.
TWTP thus understands itself as a local materialization of Frantz Fanon’s vision of resistance to oppression and colonialism–a vision that was explicitly violent in nature: “Violence,” Fanon argued, “is a cleansing force. It frees the native from his inferiority complex and from his despair and inaction; it makes him fearless and restores his self-respect.” The TWTP website glosses over the fact that Fanon’s “Third Way” was the way of revolution, that his notion of liberation involved completely destroying the present world order. But in affiliating itself with Fanon’s vision and vocabulary, TWTP nonetheless expresses a distinctly militant perspective on what exactly constitutes racial empowerment. The Wretched of the Earth, hailed by TWTP as the origin of Brown’s ideal “cultural model of empowerment and liberation,” was hailed by its publisher as “the handbook for the black revolution.” A Marxist account of Fanon’s experiences in Algeria during its struggle for independence, the book outlines the role of class conflict in the creation of a new nation’s national consciousness, arguing that postcolonial African nations will implode if they merely replace white leaders with black ones while conserving an essentially bourgeois capitalist social structure.

I don’t see the priviledged underpriviledged of Brown lubing up their AK-51’s and packing Semtex into suicide belts. But I do see hpw a national leadership weaned on Fanon (and the leadership of this generation was) could be paralyzed into inaction by the guilt this ideology lays on them, and more, be inwardly sympathetic to the ‘liberating purity’ of the Palestinian and Al Queida ‘militants’.

E-Gray : Government favors at auction prices – Gray Davis.
Via The Indepundit.

Check out the latest Field Poll (requires Acrobat Reader); After shooting himself in the head at least three times by my count, Simon only trails Davis by 6 points…down, Ann!! Down! Please don’t hurt me!!
I just finished Embattled Dreams, the latest by Kevin Starr, and believe me, I’m inclined to vote for Earl Warren over these morons, and he’s been dead for a long, long time…

I read Part 3 of Wright’s article with glee…while he and I differ slightly (and I think he’s done a much better job of laying out his arguments than I have done)…we fundamentally agree that the enemy we are facing is a contagious mindset…a meme…to which I’ll add that this meme is rooted in a philosophical tradition here in the West…which must be addressed.
I’ll follow up with an amplification of his points, but want to first address Eugene Volokh’s response to him.
Here are some key points made by Volokh:

But I think Wright is missing an absolutely fundamental point: Trying to get people to love us — especially the sorts of people who might become suicide bombers, or even cheerleaders for suicide bombers — may actually make them love us less. The problem with appeasement isn’t some abstraction about honor or sticking to one’s guns. Appeasement is often in a very basic way counterproductive.
…
So the brutes end up having a competitive advantage over the nice guys (or, to be precise, more of one than they had before). Either the nice guys will turn brutish, or the nice guys will be overrun by the brutes, and it is the brutes, not the nice guys, who will reproduce their brutal culture of terrorist threat. Evolution will help the fittest survive — except in the policy structure that Wright recommends, the fittest (the ones whose interests we’ll treat with the most concern) are the ones who are the most likely spawning grounds of terrorists.
What then, should be done, given the risk that small groups could kill millions of Americans? I don’t know the answer to that. But I am pretty sure that while technology may have magnified the power of small groups (for good and for ill), it hasn’t repealed basic laws of human nature: Behavior that is rewarded, as I mentioned, gets repeated. The violent appeased come to demand more and more of the appeasers, and come to have more and more contempt for the appeasers. And to the extent that willingness to murder becomes an effective weapon in deterring us, the result will be more groups that choose to use that weapon against us.

I have a couple of responses.
First, that he would be right if in fact Wright’s point was to lavish the potential terrorists with love, instead of threats of violence. But my take on Wright’s point is more subtle. He says:

The Philippines escapade resulted from taking the phrase “war on terrorism” literally and thinking of the enemy as a finite group of warriors, rather than a contagious mind-set that may spawn new warriors faster than you kill the old ones. We mounted a “show of force”—something that may work when you’re trying to intimidate a potentially aggressive nation but that may backfire when the enemy is, in part, Muslim resentment of American power and arrogance. This suggests Policy Prescription No. 4: In a war on terrorism, applying force inconspicuously makes sense more often than in regular wars.

He also suggests:

Policy Prescription No. 2: The substance of policies should be subjected to a new kind of appraisal, one that explicitly accounts for the discontent and hatred the policies arouse.

and

Policy Prescription No. 3: The ultimate target is memes; killing or arresting people is useful only to the extent that it leads to a net reduction in terrorism memes.

And here he is right on the key point. While you could (and Volkh does) interpret Policy #2 as “appease them”, and some of the actual points made by Wright lead you there, the substance of what he says is simple: our deeds and policies have both physical and ‘psychological’ reactions. We need to think through the ‘psychological’ ones carefully, and make sure that the reaction in that sphere doesn’t outweigh the physical effect.
Number 3 is useful because it lets us decide to target the origins of the problem, rather than the symptoms. Now here, as in first aid, we must be aware that the symptoms can kill us, and that they need to be managed. But the simple fact is that the costs of terrorism are so low, relative to the costs of defending effectively against it, that we will be bankrupted (forgetting the moral and political consequences of a tight terrorism defense) if we allow it to continue. We must both find ways to defend ourselves, and simultaneously find ways to carry the attack to the sources of the problem…which may require a war where the weapons are ideas.
Number 4 is critical. It is about the difference between ‘bluster’ and ‘threat’. Because we can effectively turn the whole of the Middle East to a glass plain, we expect our to be respected and our desires to be obeyed, or at least considered. But because of the (literally, if you’re a Believer) apocalyptic nature of our response, it’s also clear that there’s a pretty high threshold for triggering it.
On the other hand…does anyone else remember the story in the 80’s about the Russian response to a kidnapping of one of their embassy staff in Beirut? This was when Western diplomats and journalists were being kidnapped and held hostage fairly frequently. The story was, and I remember reading this in the paper at the time, that the Russians had sent over a spetsnaz team, who kidnapped members of the clan who did the kidnapping, and sent several of their body parts in lieu of cash to the kidnappers…who promptly released the hostage, and never took another. We parked aircraft carriers off the beach and sent a bunch of negotiators.
Which was the effective response?? And, in the context of who we are and want to be, how do we duplicate the effect of the effective response? I’m not exactly sure, but it involves small, quiet, probably lethal actions in lieu of the large and loud actions we tend to take.

‘Threat assessment’ is something I mentioned in the post below; it is a simple concept. Martial arts skills can be crudely divided into two parts: what to do and when to do it.
The ‘what to do’ part is more easily taught, and is what is studied in dojos and on traditional shooting ranges. The ‘when to do it’ part is more complex, both because it deals with real-life situations in which there are many uncontrolled variables, and because it introduces the element of uncertainty and risk.
Uncertainty is important because in real life, threats seldom walk up to your door, knock, and introduce themselves as threats (actually, two of my favorite cinema bits…the ATM mugger in “LA Story”, who introduces himself as “Hi, my name is Bob and I’ll be your robber tonight.”; and the brilliant Wile E Coyote v. Bugs Bunny cartoon…have threats that introduce themselves). So you have to make a decision, and the problem is that on one hand the decision probably shouldn’t be to shoot anyone who seems vaguely menacing, nor should it be to wait until that vaguely menacing guy is within Tueller range or worse, has you in “the hole” (a close enough distance where being armed or skilled isn’t enough to overcome the element of surprise, and where a skilled opponent could effectively control you). These concepts are important, because they add the variable of ‘potential threat’ that must be assessed. A guy with a knife is not necessarily a significant threat to someone with a gun, until the opponent is within about 21 feet…the Tueller range at which someone can close and strike before a typical person could unholster and shoot. A skilled jujitsu practitioner will most likely control, disable, and kill an armed opponent if the fight starts with the two within arm’s reach.
The best class I have ever seen (although I did not take it) in dealing with this issue is the IMPACT/Model Mugging series. They teach their students to actively interact with potential threats, which allows you to make the determination of risk at a range you select. When I walk up, the IMPACT student is taught to say “Excuse me, but you’re coming too close to me,” and then escalate from there depending on the response. If this were directed at me (affable, but sometimes irritable), I’d back up, and probably shake my head at the oversensitivity and lack of trust in the modern world. The Bad Guy won’t, and that difference in behavior lets you know what you are dealing with.
My role model Clint Smith puts it pretty well: “You better learn to communicate real well, because when you’re out there on the street, you’ll have to talk to a lot more people than you’ll have to shoot, or at least that’s the way I think it’s supposed to work.”
This is relevant to our situation in the ME, because we are, as they would say in the South, all full up with ‘what to do’ and pretty well dry on ‘when to do it’.
Neither the leadership of the country nor the citizenry has really come to any resolution on what constitutes a threat, and how we agree we can appropriately react.
I genuinely believe there are people who wonder why we haven’t turned the Middle East into glass in response to 9/11, as I believe there are folks whose response to two nukes and smallpox in U.S. cities would be “but killing all those innocent people won’t bring back the dead”.
Somewhere between those two factions, we’d better come to a conclusion on the level and source of the threat and our response and do so fairly quickly.

OK, it’s getting interesting, and I have to finish reading a 300 page document in time for a 0900 interview in BFE tomorrow morning. So comments will be delayed until tomorrow afternoon.
But meanwhile, read Part 3 of Wright’s article, then read Eugene Vokolh’s reply, and think about them…

Over at Blogcritics, they’ve got an interview with Homer Flynn, graphic artist for The Residents.
If you’ve been listening to Jon Bon Jovi for your whole musical life, you may not know them; they are a troupe of two men and two women, along with associates, who record and perform some of the most amazing pieces around.
I saw their performance of the King & Eye here in LA, and it probably ranks with one of the most amazing concerts or dance performances I’ve ever seen. In it, they deconstruct American music, culminating in…wait for it…Elvis.
Go check these guys out. As far as I’m concerned, The Residents and Survival Research Labs alone justify the entire artistic pretentiousness output of the San Francisco Bay area…

Chris Bertram emails:
From the preface to Hobbes’s De Cive:
“For though the wicked were fewer than the righteous, yet because we cannot
distinguish them, there is a necessity of suspecting, heeding, anticipating,
subjugating, self defending, ever incident to the most honest and fairest
conditioned.”
Relevant to your latest post, I thought.
The more things change…