Conservatives, we are told, oppose big government and mistrust government in general. Liberals, on the other hand, love them some big government.

Given a sufficiently generic and uncritical definition of “conservative” and “liberal”, that might be true — on some issues. “Conservatives” definitely tend to oppose government intrusion into the sphere of economic activity, whereas “liberals” urge and welcome it.

But here’s the grotesque irony: when you stop talking about business — about money — and start talking about blowing shit up, putting people in jail, and executing them, the opposite seems to be true. The mainstream American voices generally identified as “conservative” tell us we must trust the government when it decides which enemies of the state to lock up (whether they are suspected terrorists or accused criminals), and tell us that insisting upon some semblance of due process for such people puts critics on the side of terrorists and criminals. People who are extremely skeptical about the government’s right and competence to regulate, say, the amount of rat feces in breakfast cereal suddenly become the government’s biggest boosters when the question becomes whether the government has the right and the competence to jail and execute a man accused of murder.

I submit that this is breathtakingly irrational (as is the belief of “liberals” that the government can’t be trusted to run the criminal justice or military spheres, but can be trusted to regulate every element of our economic lives). Prosecutors, cops, and military commanders are not some different species than IRS agents and regulators and city councilmen. They are all human: broken, fallible, subject to the insidious lures of power and the immense pressures of the culture in which they find themselves. All of them – any person who comes to wield the authority of the state against us — should be viewed with a healthy skepticism.

But that’s just not our culture. Ask anyone who has ever tried to have a conversation with the average citizen about the presumption of innocence. Ask any defense lawyer who, during voir dire, has ever asked prospective jurors whether they think that the guy probably did something if he’s sitting there at the defense table.

Ask Anthony Graves.

Anthony Graves spent 18 years in prison in Texas because of prosecutorial misconduct. Mark Bennett has been documenting the story admirably; read his work and follow his links to the searing Texas Monthly story about the case.

Anthony Graves was accused of a horrific mass murder. He was accused despite an utter lack of physical evidence: rather, he was accused based on the uncorroborated word of a man who admitted to participating in the murder, and based upon an expert’s opinion that Graves’ knife, among many other knives, was “consistent” with the weapon used in the killings. Graves was tried and convicted despite the fact that the actual murderer — Robert Carter, Graves’ accuser — recanted and admitted that Graves had nothing to do with it. You’d think that would matter to a jury. Perhaps it would have — but multiple courts found that prosecutor Charles Sebesta didn’t disclose that his star witness, the only witness establishing that Graves had anything to do with the murder, had recanted and exonerated Graves, then flip-flopped again in time to testify against him. The actual murderer, Robert Carter, went to his execution declaring that Graves was innocent. Yet Texas courts rejected Graves’ appeals. It took the United States Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit to reverse the conviction. This week, the special prosecutor assigned to the matter dismissed charges against Graves, and he walked free after 18 years of incarceration.

Carter was patently a killer and a liar, uncorroborated by relevant evidence. But the jury bought his story — because the government told them to, and when the government wears the prosecutor’s hat, people trust it. The proposition that the government’s concealment of Carter’s recantation was irrelevant is facially ridiculous — yet Texas courts bought it, because judges are people too, and when the government wears the prosecutor’s hat, people trust it. Prosecutor Charles Sebesta — who took out an advertisement in the paper defending the conviction — still has his supporters, and many will say that this result is an example of clever lawyers getting criminals off on a “technicality” — because the government accused Graves of a crime, and when the government wears the prosecutor’s hat, people trust it. I suspect that if you said to many of those people “when the government decides how much taxes you should pay, or how you should run your business, or what kind of health care plan you ought to have, you should trust the government,” those people would react with disgust, seeing that statement as morally treasonous and displaying a canine level of devotion to the state. But tell them that defense lawyers spin bullshit to get the guilty off the hook, and they’ll nod sagely and agree. It’s a cultural thing. Some people identify more with folks who like to shoot dogs, and some people identify more with folks who like to tell you that you can’t buy dogs.

Giving the government the power to do things we like tends to give the government the power to do things we don’t like. In a perfect world, conservatives would see that reposing uncritical trust in prosecutors and cops ultimately promotes the government’s power to regulate their businesses and their health care. Liberals would see that trusting regulators and bureaucrats increases the government’s power to jail citizens upon flimsy evidence. Maybe one day more people will meet in the middle and recognize that the appropriate stance of an informed citizen towards all elements of the government is vigilance, skepticism, and firm support of individual rights against the state. Perhaps more people will agree that the correct response to any government attempt to control the individual is to question: “What evidence do you have to support this? Is it really believable? Can it be trusted? Is it enough?”

But I’m not holding my breath.

who shows up out of nowhere.  He won’t tell you his name.  He’s not from around these parts.  He just says what needs to be said, and moves on never to return.  But the place is never the same.

I’m speaking, of course, about the abrasive first-time blog commenter who’s just there to insult the author and his readers.

Generally we ignore or delete these people, but every once in a while it’s nice to give one of them a thorough workout.  The kind of workout where you can almost hear the author cracking his knuckles before hitting the keyboard.

This reply, to something calling itself HumboldtBlue, is a masterpiece of the genre.

The Giants won game 1 of the World Series last night. It’s a thrill to see how excited this city is. There is Giants gear everywhere, and a buzz throughout the town. I so want my team that I have loved almost all my life to win the World Series. But, history gives me pause. Now, before I start with my sad memories, this is not some insipid Dan Shaunessy “Curse of the Bambino” Red Sox thing. I will not die sad if the Giants never win, and my love of the team does not define me. That being said…

Continue Reading »

Oh, Canada.

You continue to be a haven for speech-despising thugs.

Today’s main culprit: our old friend Richard Warman, crusading censor of incorrect thought and expression. Warman, you may recall, has a penchant not only for using Canada’s malevolent and totalitarian speech bureaucracies to suppress incorrect thought, but also for suing people who criticize him for doing so. He’s also got a knack for endangering the lives of the most pitiful of his foes, even when they roll over and show their belly, and of a generally thuggish approach to public discourse.

So it should be no surprise that, once again, he is suing Canadian bloggers, this time for merely linking to posts criticizing him.

The suit arises, indirectly, from British Colombia’s shamefully censorious and unprincipled pursuit of pundit Mark Steyn. I don’t agree with the Canadian blog Blazing Cat Fur on much, but I agree with its consistent strong stance against Canada’s totalitarian speech laws, which are premised on the concept that certain favored groups have a protected right not to be offended. Blazing Cat Fur has drawn Warman’s ire, and he has sued for $500,000 Canadian (which in this poor economy is almost as good as real money), complaining that Blazing Cat Fur wronged Warman by linking to a Mark Steyn post about him and by allowing rude comments, including one that — brace yourself here — calls him “Billy.”

As I said, I don’t agree with Blazing Cat Fur about a lot of things. They’ve written some things there that make me angry. But because I’m not a moral defective or a big girl’s blouse, I articulate my disagreement if I am in the mood, or otherwise just get over it. But there are creatures in this world, creatures like Warman, who revel in abusing the system to inflict harm upon their detractors. Even a frivolous and patently abusive suit can be financially ruinous — Canada is even worse than the United States in that regard, as at least many U.S. jurisdictions have anti-SLAPP statutes.

Blazing Cat Fur could use your help fighting the good fight. Consider a donation to their defense fund. Or, at least, consider publicizing the issue and speaking out against a system that allows censorious thugs to sue citizens for pointing out that they are censorious thugs —- whether you are talking about Warman, or about Canadian cops who harass citizens for blowing bubbles and then sue people who make fun of them for doing so. The tide may be turning in Canada against such things, but for now the censors and their apologists are firmly entrenched there.

Hat Tip.

Vladimir Putin Action Comics!

Note that the middle panel is an homage to Russian artist Dmitri Vrubel, a subversive from a country where being a subversive artist is actually dangerous, rather than a cocktail party pose as it is in Hyde Park.

Plenty more here.

Hat tip: Angus.

Via Radley, a brutal video: Why Chuck Can’t Start A Business.

Sucks To Be Chuck

Quoth Joe Biden, in defending the party that openly supports omnipresent government (as opposed to the party that gives lip service to limit government whilst relentlessly increasing the power of government):

“Every single great idea that has marked the 21st century, the 20th century and the 19th century has required government vision and government incentive,” he said. “In the middle of the Civil War you had a guy named Lincoln paying people $16,000 for every 40 miles of track they laid across the continental United States. … No private enterprise would have done that for another 35 years.”

I actually think Joe Biden is partially correct. Certainly in the 21st century, and for most of the 20th, every single great idea has required government involvement, as a result of government’s steadily increasing ubiquity.

Where you stand on the role of government depends on this: do you think those great ideas were imagined and implemented because of government — that they required government involvement? Or do you think that great thinkers were able to bring their dreams to fruition despite government involvement? Or is it something in between?

I lean strongly towards “despite government involvement,” as you may have guessed.

I think Biden is clearly wrong to use the terms “vision” and “incentive”, though. First, governments don’t have vision. People do. Sometimes those people are in government. Sometimes the visions are positive. Sometimes enough of the rest of the people in the government cooperate with the vision to allow it to work, and sometimes they don’t. Meanwhile, the most powerful vision experienced by people in government remains staying in government, preferably with more power.

Second, many great ideas of the last three centuries have succeeded despite strong government disincentive. Take any small, medium, or large business. They succeed — if they do — despite enormous government disincentives to operate. Now, there ay be individual, isolated, and minimal incentives — say, a tax credit — but those pale compared to the overall disincentive created by government involvement. It’s irrational to focus on individual purported incentives, as opposed to the entirety of the government’s treatment of . After all, if you are thinking of working for me, and I promise that I will refuse to pay you, kick you in the nuts, insult your mother, and throw dung at you all day, but also say that I may give you an ice cream cone at the end of every day, would you say that I’m giving you an incentive to work for me?

Via, among others.

Just be careful going through the checkout line.  Some of the customers are pretty nasty.

Not parenthetically, at the rate George Romero is achieving mainstream saturation, he’s on his way to a lifetime achievement award at the Oscars.  Which will be given one day after he dies.  As a fan of Romero before it was cool to be a fan of Romero, I like to see him getting his cultural due, but I’d prefer that he got loads of money, or at least had Martin recognized as the weird work of genius that it is.

Hat tip: David.

As Halloween is upon us, I thought I’d share this wisdom, which has kept me alive in a world teeming with serial killers, aliens that aren’t interested in bringing peace to mankind, backwoods cannibals, and corpses that hunger for the flesh of the living:

1. If the sign says, “Last gas for sixty miles,” it’s time to buy gas.
2. Better still, turn around.  Drive to the station where the sign says, “Next to last gas for seventy miles”.
3. Historic anniversaries divisible by five are overrated. If a tragedy occurred ten years ago at the house on Maple Street, mark your calendar to visit on the eleventh anniversary.
4. The psychiatrist is not your friend.
5. If it sleeps an ancient slumber, don’t wake it up.
6. Don’t go into the cellar.
7. Don’t get into the shower.
8. Don’t climb up to the attic.
9. If you have to climb up to the attic, don’t enter head first.
10. I don’t care how hungry you are: If a stranger offers you food, don’t eat it.
11. Bullets cannot stop it.
12. Unless they’re made of silver.  Good luck finding that in nine millimeter.
13. Unless bullets can stop it.  In that case, aim for the head.
14. Large black dogs are nothing but trouble.
15. Charming, urbane, vaguely European men of wealth and education are nothing but trouble.
16. Pale beautiful women with wide eyes are nothing but trouble.
17. “Do not call up that which you cannot put down.”
18. If you hear a solitary bassoon playing but you’re not in a concert hall, stop what you’re doing immediately.  Walk out of the building slowly, get into your car, drive to the 7/11 and buy a Slurpee.  Nothing ever happens at 7/11.
19. When you meet a small, precocious child, beat it to death with a hammer.  Just in case.
20. Rural vacations in mountain cabins are overrated.  Miami is warm this time of year.
21. If science teaches us anything, it’s that there are Things Man Was Not Meant To Know.
22. Old, dusty books are dusty for a reason. Who are you to open them up and disturb the dust?
23. It’s better to build a new house than to buy an old one. New construction keeps the economy strong.
24. But do a thorough title search on the land where you build the new house.  Just in case.
25. “Don’t look back.  Something might be gaining on you.”

Keep these lessons in mind, and you might live to be as old as I am.

Update: LabRat’s list is better than mine: “Avoid cornfields and apple orchards at all costs.”

What does it take to defeat the ravening unquiet dead, who inexorably seek our brains? Will it be a properly prepared armed force equipped with lobotomizers? Will it be small bands of desperate citizens standing behind rough barricades with a motley array of shotguns and chainsaws?

No. The zombies will only be thwarted by the most petty and verminous little things, which God, in His wisdom, had put upon this Earth.

I refer, of course, to bureaucrats.

The National Park Service says it has no permit filed for zombie activity at the Lincoln Memorial Tuesday morning by AMC, a posse of zombies, or anyone else.

Tariq Aziz has been sentenced to hang.

Not to minimize the crimes of the Ba’ath regime in Iraq, but Aziz seemed a  powerless figurehead, a guy Saddam trotted out for television because he looked like a strange, avuncular owl who spoke perfect English.  Aziz was at most a cover for the really grisly characters who sprayed chemical weapons on Kurds.

To the extent most westerners will even remember Aziz, it’s as a character who used to appear on early 90s  television interview programs, much like George Plimpton.  You could tell the regime was in trouble when, for the sequel war, they replaced Aziz with Baghdad Bob.

It’s been a little while since we did a Friday Timewaster, so for your entertainment I offer up Road of the Dead. It’s a surprisingly deep little flash game where you commit vehicular zombie slaughter on a pretty epic scale. The graphics are impressive, and the game itself is good fun. I should warn our younger viewers (and recommend to the others) that this game has lots of blood and graphic scenes of bad driving.

I am not very good at the game, but it sure is fun. So, don’t ask why you never run out of gas, just start running over zombies. Oh, and this tip, don’t let a zombie get on your hood. Bad news there.

As much as I’m disgusted by NPR’s termination of Juan Williams, it’s not a First Amendment violation, and it’s silly to say that it is. So naturally Sarah Palin said it is. As Doug Mataconis points out, it’s just the latest instance of Palin misconstruing or misrepresenting what the First Amendment says and what it means. I can’t stand her, so I’m biased, but it seems that this pattern ought to matter to people who actually care about the First Amendment and care about politicians accurately construing the Constitution.

In October 2001, I had to fly up to Toronto for a deposition. I sat next to a middle-aged gentlemen with dark skin wearing what appeared to me to be traditional Sikh garb. The other passengers were staring at him, watching him the way you’d watch Michael Jackson if he showed up at your eight-year-old’s swim party. The poor bastard looked utterly miserable. I tried to engage him in conversation, to make him feel more comfortable, but he had limited English and was clearly not at ease speaking with me. So I just sat. I knew, intellectually, that (1) his dress marked him as a Sikh and not a Muslim, and (2) that it was irrational and destructive of the values I cared about to assume the worst about him even if he were a Muslim.

But I’d be a liar if I said that some part of my lizard brain didn’t think he looks different, he is the Other, he may be one of Them, you may be in danger. That’s the lizard brain that’s the target of commercials (this beer will make me sexually attractive!) and most modern political rhetoric.

I didn’t voice what my lizard brain thought. This week political commentator Juan Williams did. And National Public Radio fired him for it.

Williams went on Bill O’Reilly’s show to talk about O’Reilly’s recent all-around horror show of an appearance on The View, which culminated in O’Reilly saying “Muslims killed us on 9/11″ and Whoopi Goldberg and Joy Behar storming off the stage, possibly because it’s their job to say extremely stupid things on The View. Now, I know that Bill O’Reilly is a pompous looftah-fondling gasbag, and the View is the most convincing rebuttal to the concept of gender equality ever televised (where else can you find a show where the hosts say that drugging and raping a 13-year-old girl is not “rape-rape”, that it’s not clear if the earth is flat, and that there were no humans before Christianity?). So it would be silly to expect this was going to be My Dinner With Andre. But it was still ugly.

Anyway, Williams went on O’Reilly’s show to discuss what happened and O’Reilly’s views on Muslims in America. In deciding to fire Williams, NPR apparently focused on one comment:

“I mean, look, Bill, I’m not a bigot. You know the kind of books I’ve written about the civil rights movement in this country. But when I get on the plane, I got to tell you, if I see people who are in Muslim garb and I think, you know, they are identifying themselves first and foremost as Muslims, I get worried. I get nervous.”

(As an aside, allow me to point out that nobody ever said the phrase “I’m not a bigot, but . . .” and followed it with anything flattering.)

Taken out of context, you could read that as a statement of prejudice against Muslims. But context matters. The full exchange — which you can find, among other places, here — suggests that Williams was merely confessing what he felt in his lizard brain — and even voicing regret about it. In the rest of the exchange, he criticized O’Reilly and repeatedly made the point that all Muslims should not be tarred with the brush of extremists. In fact, he even implied that rhetoric like O’Reilly’s encourages violence against innocents. Consider the parts that William Saletan at Slate emphasized:

A few seconds later, Williams challenges O’Reilly’s suggestion that “the Muslims attacked us on 9/11.” Williams points out how wrong it would be to generalize similarly about Christians:

“Hold on, because if you said Timothy McVeigh, the Atlanta bomber, these people who are protesting against homosexuality at military funerals—very obnoxious—you don’t say first and foremost, “We got a problem with Christians.” That’s crazy.”

Williams reminds O’Reilly that “there are good Muslims.” A short while later, O’Reilly asks: “Juan, who is posing a problem in Germany? Is it the Muslims who have come there, or the Germans?” Williams refuses to play the group blame game. “See, you did it again,” he tells O’Reilly. “It’s extremists.”

Williams warns O’Reilly that televised statements about Muslims as a group can foment bigotry and violence. “The other day in New York, some guy cuts a Muslim cabby’s neck,” Williams reminds him. “Or you think about the protest at the mosque near Ground Zero … We don’t want, in America, people to have their rights violated, to be attacked on the street because they heard rhetoric from Bill O’Reilly.”

In that context, it’s clear that Williams’ confession about how he feels on a plane is not a boast, any more than Jesse Jackson was voicing a feeling he was happy about when he infamously suggested he was afraid upon encountering young black men on the street. Saletan argues that what NPR did is analogous to what the White House did to Shirley Sherrod — it reacted to an out-of-context clip, maliciously and deceptively circulated by ideologues, to fire someone without thinking about all of the facts. As my title suggests, I agree.

Let’s be clear: this is not a First Amendment issue. Despite getting about 16% of its funding from various public sources, NPR is not a state actor. It can fire people for unpopular views, just as I can ban any commenter who annoys me. (Actually, that’s Patrick’s role, but you get my drift.) NPR answers to its customers for doing such things, not to the Constitution.

I’m an NPR customer. I’m appalled. Look — I don’t agree with many of Williams’ views, but in that full interview with O’Reilly, he was acting like the voice of reason. However much that out-of-context quote sounded Glenn Beck style tones, it’s clear from context that he was regretfully confessing the lizard-brain reaction many people have — both because of actual events (like extremists Muslims killing innocents) and because of relentless, and increasingly successful, wall-to-wall propaganda that strives to convince us that it’s perfectly acceptable to view an entire religion of 1.5 billion people as inherently dangerous and suspect. For God’s sake, we live in a country where the Department of Justice has to file a brief saying that yes, Islam is actually a religion. In modern America, Williams’ explicit rejection of calls to collective responsibility is effectively significantly left-of-center on this issue.

The lizard brain has its uses. The lizard brain has occasional insights. But what separates us from the lizards is our ability to question whether the thoughts that bubble up from our lizard brains are supported by facts, and reason, and principle. Whether we exercise that ability is another matter. The culture increasingly celebrates defiant ignorance, unapologetic emotionalism, and capitulation to fear. We need not follow.

NPR has its head up its ass. NPR used its lizard brain. It’s going to lose a lot of money, and support, over this. It ought to.

Edited: After I wrote this, I see that Doug Mataconis and E.D. Kain both said it better.

As long as we’re discussing reactions to seeing Muslims traveling by air, let me tell a story of my son’s lizard brain. When he was about 7, we were at the international terminal at LAX. We saw a group of (I assume) Muslim women in full black burkas nearby. Evan stood transfixed looking at them. “DADDY!” he said. “Look! NINJAS!!”

I am currently going through resumes & trying to find a candidate for an unpaid internship. I have been shocked by the lack of forethought people put into their cover emails.

First off, if you want a job (or even an internship) make sure your email address is professional. I will not be hiring AZNPRINZEZZ08. Ever.  And despite the popularity of Prop 19, having 420 in your email address is probably a bad idea.

Next, when you write the cover letter, at least give it the illusion of personalization. When I was applying a few years ago I had a template, sure but I always had at least one paragraph that was specific to the organization. And I always mentioned the organization and position in the first sentence of the letter.

None of the candidates have so much as put the name of the organization in their letter. Or mentioned our issue (which I think is vital for an application to an advocacy non-profit!)

So, if you read this, please make sure that your cover letters are specific and make the reader want to learn more about you. Don’t just send the same memo 30 times. It will make anyone more likely to hire you. And, I will guarantee an interview to any who uses a pirate cover letter!