Had an interesting conversation the other night - along the same lines as this post from David’s Journal. David, talking about an episode of ER in which a character lost a limb, asks that set of questions….Would you rather lose an arm than a leg, and so forth. Here’s a sample of some of David’s more male-centric questions:

Would you rather lose both arms or your penis?
That would be a really tough choice, and I’m sure I’d have big problems with depression no matter which I picked. But in the end I’d have to say a fond goodbye to my penis. [...]

If you are heterosexual, would you rather have sex with a dog of the opposite sex or a human of your same sex?
Every guy I’ve ever asked this picks the dog. Every woman always picks the person. I’m no exception.

And here’s one I just thought of, that’s actually got me a little stumped:
If you are male, would you rather lose a finger or one of your testicles?
I keep going back and forth.

Reading stuff like this - especially David’s comment that "every guy I’ve ever asked" says the same - makes me feel very alienated from, well, guyhood. I’m sorry, but both arms vs penis is not a tough choice, and neither is finger vs testicle; I’d miss my penis and all (not so much the testicle), but they are outta here! And who on earth would pick the dog? Ewwww….

But anyhow, Bean - who had watched the same episode of ER - brought up an interesting question. How many years of memory would it take, for their loss to feel as great as the loss of a limb? That is, is losing a year of memory as bad as losing a limb? How about ten years of memory? If you had a choice between permanently losing all memory of the first twelve years of your life (although not losing skills gained, like walking or tying shoes), or losing your choice of limb, which would you take?

Halley took an extreme positions - she’d rather lose a limb than a single year of early memories. Her memories, after all, are part of who she is now; losing those memories irrevocably loses who she is. Losing a limb would change her future, but she’d still be herself, just herself with an injury. In her view, those memories are who she is; when asked about what if she lost all her memories in some Gilligan’s-Island-esque accident with a falling coconut, Halley said that the person who’d proceed from that point forward would be someone other than herself.

I took the opposite view - my memories helped mold who I’ve become, but now that I’ve been molded, I can lose memory without changing the essence of who I am. (My decision was made easier by the fact that I have almost no memories from before I was twelve). I’d definitely lose the memories up through my mid-twenties (I’m almost 34 now) before giving up a limb. Blueheron felt the same way.

We also discussed giving up memories of recent years versus memories of early years. The idea of losing recent memories - including more recent friendships and relationships - frightens me (we knew someone this happened to; she had a accident involving head trauma, and when she woke up she had lost a year’s worth of memories, and didn’t know her current friends, why she no longer hung out with her previous friend group, or that she and her boyfriend had broken up months ago). Although I think I’d still be myself without my recent memories, I think I’d be a sad and confused version of myself who would have trouble adjusting. Not unlike what I’d be like if I lost a limb, I suspect.

Halley, surprisingly to me, was blasé about losing recent memories; she felt that her life hasn’t changed much recently, so losing the last five years of memory wouldn’t make that much of a difference.

The conversation then lost focus and wandered in other directions. Blueheron told us about a science-fiction story he had read, in which literature had come to a standstill because people had gained the ability to wipe out their memories, and as a result people simply reread one book - their favorite - over and over again, wiping out the memory of it between each reading. (I can’t decide which book I’d choose - possibly Doomsday Book by Connie Willis - one of many Willis works that refutes Charles Murtaugh, by the way). A few chronic rereaders in the room, me included, objected that you’d lose much of the pleasure of rereading if you didn’t have memories of past readings.

Although I didn’t bring it up, I was reminded of my favorite Kim Stanley Robinson story, the novella Green Mars (not to be confused with his novel of the same name). In the novella, humans have life-extending technology enabling people to live for 800 years or more - but the human brain, it turns out, is only capable holding approximately two hundred years of memory. So although someone may be 500 years old, they can only recall back to around their 300th year - all memory before that point is missing. But there are some people, like Green Mars’ protagonist, who due to a genetic chance have normal memories of their entire lives. In the novella, the protagonist spends time with an ex-lover of his who has, of course, totally forgotten him and their relationship. I’ve reread Green Mars a dozen times, and I always find its depiction of memory fascinating and sad.

UPDATE: I just noticed Blueheron has posted about the same conversation in his journal.

UPDATE II: David has responded to this post.

UPDATE III: Just got this in email, from my friend Tishie.

The comments by bean about that choice were spurred, I believe, by an IM conversation between us. My prof and I made a measure of that for a specific purpose. In our pilot study, we asked people to imagine that they were missing one of their legs. Then we asked them to imagine that they were missing the memories from birth until a certain age, and asked them to indicate the age at which the two things would seem equal in severity. The mean age was 14. So, in college students at BSU, losing a leg is equivalent to losing the memories from birth to age 14. Just thought you might find that interesting.

The following is part of a blogburst, a simultaneous, cross-linked posting of many blogs on a single theme. This blogburst concerns Buffy the Vampire Slayer and its spinoff series, Angel. For a guide to other Buffy/Angel articles, go to The Buffy BlogBurst Index.

Here’s a confession: I can’t do good caricatures. But I’d like to learn. Here’s another confession: I get nothing done without a deadline. So when Meryl Yourish announced the Buffy BlogBurst, I thought, hey, a deadline! That’ll force me to work on caricatures! I emailed Meryl and told her I’d be doing something with caricatures of Buffy cast members.

Then I noodled around a little with pencil and paper.

Then I forgot about it.

Then came the reminder in my email. Deadline! Lovely deadline! Wellspring of all productivity!

In some ways, Buffy cast members are ideal for this. I know their faces well, which is necessary for me to judge if a likeness has that feeling of "oh, her!" But I haven’t seen many cartoons of Buffy characters. This is important, because most political cartoonists, when they draw (say) George Bush, aren’t really drawing Bush - they’re drawing a sort of unspoken cartoonist’s consensus of what cartoons of Bush look like. And we recognize Bush, not because the cartoons have any particular resemblance to Bush, but because they look like other cartoons of Bush we’ve seen.

The trouble is, it becomes hard for me to draw Bush my own way, because I can’t even figure out what my own way is. My imagination is poisoned by images of what other (often, much better) cartoonists have done with Bush.

The problem with drawing TV characters is that most actors have bland, pretty faces (as discussed in this post). Being "pretty," to a great extent, is dependent on having few or no outstanding features to caricature.

For some reason - maybe just because she’s my favorite character - I decided to draw Willow.

This was my first attempt. Drawn using this photo as reference. As I was working on it, a friend of mine - attempting to be kind, but not realizing who I was trying to draw - told me it was a "nice Hillary Clinton." Several of my other friends then agreed, a nice Hillary Clinton. Too late, it occurs to me that a big disadvantage of blogging caricatures is the high likelihood of embarassing myself with my incompetence. Oh, well.

Looking at it now, the big problem with it isn’t that the features are wrong , but that none of them scream "Willow." There are lots of pretty woman who smile and have round cheeks, after all.

Time to get some more photo reference. At first the photos I found weren’t very helpful; eventually I realized that this was because most photos are of Alyson Hannigan, but what I needed was photos of Willow. (A photo like this, for instance, just emphasizes the way Alyson Hannigan looks the same as other pretty woman - and bears no resemblance to Willow). After wasting too much time clicking through publicity photos, I run across the solution - "screencaps," still images from the TV show itself. A little googling turned up the wonderful Alyson Hannigan Corner, where some blessedly obsessed AH fan has gathered hundreds (thousands) of screencaps of Willow.

Here’s my second try (not include a half-dozen false starts). Deciding that a more detailed drawing style might help - I’m a big fan of David Levine’s work - I had done some careful work on the features. Too bad she ended up looking like a troll. Worse, although some of the features are right, overall the drawing has nothing of Willow’s personality in it.

On the bright side, I was getting a better idea (in my mind, if not on paper) of what Willow’s nose looked like. And I realized that I needed to draw a hairstyle which emphasized Hannigan’s distinctive widow’s peak.

I spent a while just looking at screencaps and doodling. I decide that I need to emphasize how baby-faced Willow is (that’s why Hannigan seems so adorable-looking; despite being thin as a rail, she has a very round face).

Try number three (not counting many aborted attempts), and (to my eyes, anyway) the first successful drawing. About damn time! I don’t think David Levine has anything to fear from me, but at least this seems to capture some of Willow’s personality, as well as being a decent likeness.

Here, if you’re curious, is the photo I looked at the most while drawing this.

Of course, because I think it’s good right now doesn’t mean a thing; maybe in a week I’ll look at this with fresh eyes and realize how at one with the suckage it is. For now, though, I do a quick coloring job (I can’t decide if the colors help or hurt the drawing) and - forgetting all about putting it online - go to sleep.

The Ms Magazine boards are holding a "Dumsnut poetry contest," featuring poems using the word "dumsnut." With Chrisdoodah’s kind permission, I’m reproducing her entry here.

"Dumsnut," as I’m sure you all know, is Swedish for "annoying little twit."

Quoth the Dumsnut, “Nevermore.”
by Chrisdoodah

Once upon a midnight dreary, while I pondered, weak and weary,
Over how there came to be a Dumsnut behind the oval office door—
While I sobbed, my gums a’ flapping, suddenly there came a tapping,
As of someone banging and rapping his clumsy knuckles on my front door.
“Probably the pizza delivery,” I muttered, “tapping on my front door—
It better be a large extra cheese, and nothing more.”

Ah, distinctly I remember it was in the bleak November,
Of the year two thousand, back when elections were a real snore.
Eagerly I cast my vote for Nader, who knew what would happen later
When Jeb and George stole the election from the poor Al Gore
For compared to George, he is a radiant angel, that Al Gore
But not President here for evermore.

Now as my stomach grumbled louder, I was craving some nice clam chowder,
But pizza would do fine, so I trudged forward and opened the door.
There was no one standing there a rapping, or with their hands ratta-tat-tapping
On the knocker or surface of my plain brown front door.
“Is anyone there?” I called into the hall. “Is it you, Al Gore?”
But there was darkness and nothing more.

Back into the house I walked, but deep inside my stomach balked,
For without pizza or chowder, I was as hungry as I was before.
When suddenly there was a new tapping, a strange and soulless sort of rapping
On my windowsill, which I had no choice but to explore
I opened the window and shouted, “Is that you, Al Gore?
Or is it the wind and nothing more?”

Imagine my surprise indeed, ‘twas Dumsnut Dubya laughing as he peed,
Right on the wall next to my plain brown front door.
Then climbing whilst he threw up, not even pausing a moment to do up,
His pants as he hauled himself through the window onto my floor—
There, in a pool of his own vomit, he began to heartily snore—
Bloated, sickly, but saying nothing more.

The disgusting Dumsnut just lay there, looking as if to spend the day there,
By his relaxed posture and the noisy fart he let roar.
I shouted, “Who are you to come here and toot? You aren’t fit to lick my boot,
Ghastly piggish and stinky Dumsnut straight from the House floor.
Are you just gonna lay there, or do I need to insult you some more?”
Quoth the Dumsnut, “Nevermore.”

“Dumsnut, are you drunk tonight?” I asked though I could tell on sight
That he’d been drinking all day, all week, perhaps more.
“And what were you doing spying, right outside my window trying
To tap my phone or read my mail, is that what you had in store?
Or to convince me to vote Republican in 2004?”
Quoth the Dumsnut, “Nevermore.”

“I see then,” said I getting pissed, as I started to run down my laundry list
Of concerns I had with the Dumsnut administration (quite a chore)
“No trees means no forest fires, but you and your cronies are a bunch of liars
And it doesn’t take big brains to figure out who you’re working for,
The lumber industry and big business treat you like their whore.”
Quoth the Dumsnut, “Nevermore.”

I added, “You spend the biggest bucks on guns, Star Wars, and army trucks
While millions go without health care and work two jobs but stay dirt poor.
Your tax plan helps the richest one percent, but it doesn’t even make a small dent
In the personal debt of the average citizens you claim to care for.
And on top of all that, you’ve fooled this country into going to war!”
Quoth the Dumsnut, “Nevermore.”

“But I don’t care,” I said, gathering steam, as my voice rose up to a scream
“’Cause you and your buddies in Washington aren’t fooling me anymore.
It’s plain as the day to me, that the real ‘axis of evil’ I see,
Is between Nike, GM, McDonalds, and a mouse I once worked for.
And of course, let’s not forget you, the Dumsnut behind the oval office door!”
Quoth the Dumsnut, “Nevermore.”

“Get out of my sight, you fool!” said I, showering him with spittle and drool.
“I can’t take having you here in my home for a second more.
Get to your feet and sober up, or I’ll call your Dad or Cheney up
And they’ll let you have it like nobody’s business, either that or
They won’t let you be the big bad President anymore!”
Quoth the Dumsnut, “Nevermore.”

“Why do you keep saying that? What exactly are you getting at?”
I asked, confused, as my eye fell on the calendar hanging up by the door.
Suddenly my eye grew brighter, and my spirits felt so much lighter
As I realized it was already November in the year 2004.
“Aha!” said I, “You’re already not the President anymore!”
Quoth the Dumsnut, “Nevermore.”

And so it was that I did shout, after dragging that Dumsnut directly out
Of my lovely home through my plain brown front door,
“Goodbye, Dumsnut, hit the bricks, looks like you’re in a miserable fix,
‘Cause you’ve got no White House to sleep in anymore,
And you’re sure as hell not crashing on my floor.”
And so the Dumsnut was President - nevermore!

Harvard President Larry Summers weighs in against the anti-Semitic menace of divestment. According to The Harvard Crimson (via Meryl Yourish):

How is advocating divestment from Israel anti-Semitic?

Summers suggests that it’s anti-Semitic because Israel is being "singled out." This is a common argument from those who see anti-Semitism behind every criticism of Israel; why else, they implore, could Israel be criticized? Here, for example, is perennial bigmouth Alan Dershowitz (who says he’ll resign from Harvard’s faculty if Harvard divests - another argument in divestment’s favor):

Despite Dershowitz’s claim, there are legitimate reasons to "single out" Israel.

• Israel is the leading beneficiary of US foreign and military aid.

  When I shop, I consider the ingredients of the groceries I buy - I don’t want to be swilling dolphin along with my tuna, and so forth. I don’t waste my time peering at the ingredients of Spam (enlightening as they doubtless are), because I’m not paying for Spam. The fact that Spam is worse than tuna is irrelevant. Similarly, I’m bothered more by what Israel does than by what Zimbabwe does, because I ain’t paying for Robert Mugabe’s guns.

  Presumably Summers, when he visits the A&P, reads each and every label, to avoid "singling out" the groceries he’s paying for by treating them differently from those he isn’t paying for. But not all of us go so far overboard when attempting to be evenhanded.

• Israel was created in a mostly nonwhite, nonwestern region by a white, western government (England). Israel’s government is dominated by white westerners, who use American-manufactured weapons to rule over non-white-westerners in the West Bank and Gaza. Given how concerned student leftism is with white, western imperialism, is there any reason to doubt that many student protesters would be protesting even if the average Israeli were Christian?

  It’s really funny. For decades, right-wingers have been complaining that campus leftists protest anything white and western (dead white men, California egg farms, whatever). But when it comes to Israel, they imply the campus left objects to Israel out of anti-Semitism, as if campus leftists would be fine with white-westy-dominated Israel if only it weren’t Jewish. Do conservatives even attempt to be consistent? (I know Summers isn’t right-wing - but some of the folks applauding him are.)

  (Some will object that Israel’s actions are justified self-defense. But that’s a separate issue; it goes to the question of whether the protesters are right. The question at hand is whether a "divest from Israel" campaign is anti-Semitic; even if you say the protesters are wrong, that doesn’t show they’re anti-Semitic)

• Here’s a head’s up: nobody can protest everything. (Not that everything doesn’t deserve it, dammit!) It’s called "specialization" - to be effective, activists must "single out" particular concerns, and that’s the way it’ll be until God curses us with a 3000-hour day. Dershowitz understands this perfectly well, which is why he’s not slamming pro-Israel activists for ignoring the human rights situations in Tajikistan, Togo and Tibet. Yet when the divestment campaign does the same thing, it’s accused of anti-Semitism.
• A lot of protesters are either Palestinian or Jewish. All Palestinians and Jews have (like it or not) a connection to Israel/Palestine; our connection makes it legitimate for us to "single out" the region for special concern.

  (You know, when I was a kid, I was taught to think of Israel as something special in the world. Now I’m told that if I hold Israel to standards higher than the most dismal tin-pot third-world dictatorial human-rights-abusing nation on the globe, I’m a self-hating Jew. Ironic how times change.)

• Finally, Israel and Palestine get so much attention from protesters simply because it’s a popular media issue. It’s rare to go a week without seeing TV stories, front-page news, and editorials about Israel and Palestine, most of which is written and narrated by professional shallowists who don’t give a crap about Israel or Palestine, so long as ratings are strong. Probably it’s silly to pay more attention to whatever drivel the media is feeding us, but hey, that’s the way things work - and it’s not anti-Semitic

Why do I care? Well, as others have written, the use of false accusations of anti-Semitism to silence dissenting voices is disturbing. But primarily, it bothers me because anti-Semitism is not a joke.

Let me repeat that: Anti-Semitism is not a joke. It’s a serious problem about real harms caused by real bigots. That so many of Israel’s supporters seek to cheapen the term and make it meaningless, by accusing everyone who criticizes Israel of anti-Semitism, disgusts me. It harms Jews to have the idea of "anti-Semitism" become yet another empty partisan label.

Summers knows better - or he did, in the past. It’s disappointing to see him join the chorus of Israeli advocates determined to leech all meaning from the term "anti-Semitic"

Here’s a few related links I’ve seen today (many via Instapundit).

The writers of the petition commented on this issue - quite a while ago, in fact.

Hub Blog (permalinks not there, so scroll around for it) weighs in with this:

Who, exactly, has said that anti-Semitism isn’t part of the overall equation? No one I’ve read.

I think the "effect/intent" distinction (which isn’t in the Crimson story, but is in the full speech) is in this case a bunch of hooey. The "effect" of divestment won’t be to wipe out Israel’s existence, which is what anti-Semites want; it would be to pressure Israel to leave the occupied territories and end legal torture (as the petition demands), neither of which are distinctly anti-Semitic goals. To be "anti-Semitic in effect," the petition would need to achieve, or at least strive for, some distinctly anti-Semitic goal; it does not.

Hub Blog takes, I think, a slightly different stance than Summers’ intended. He argues that "the minority of divestments supporters" who are anti-Semitic justify calling divestment itself "anti-Semitic" in effect if not in intent. But if a minority of bigoted supporters deligitimize an entire moment, what movement is legitimate? I can’t think of any that couldn’t be said to have a minority of bigoted supporters.

For example: although most Israelis and pro-Israeli advocates aren’t anti-Arab racists, some are; would Hub Blog therefore agree that the pro-Israel movement is racist "in their effect if not their intent?" That’s where his logic leads.

Finally, check out this excellent and very balanced critique of "Campus Watch" by Jacob Levy. You may have to hunt around a bit, since blogspot’s permalinking is permastinking lately.

Via Barroom Philosophy comes this Guardian article by Katharine Viner.

Just as he bombed Afghanistan to liberate the women from their burkas (or, as he would have it, to free the "women of cover"), and sent out his wife Laura to tell how Afghans are tortured for wearing nail varnish, so now Bush has taken on the previously- unknown cause of Iraqi women - actually, look at the quotes, it’s women everywhere! - to justify another war. Where next? China because of its anti-girl one-child policy? India because of widow- burning outrages? Britain because of its criminally low rape conviction rate?

At home, Bush is no feminist. On his very first day in the Oval office, he cut off funding to any international family-planning organisations which offer abortion services or counselling (likely to cost the lives of thousands of women and children); this year he renamed January 22 - the anniversary of Roe vs Wade which permitted abortion on demand - as National Sanctity of Human Life Day and compared abortion to terrorism: "On September 11, we saw clearly that evil exists in this world, and that it does not value life… Now we are engaged in a fight against evil and tyranny to preserve and protect life."

[...]"feminist" George Bush has abandoned the women of Afghanistan: where is his concern (or Laura’s, or Tony Blair’s, or Cherie Blair’s, who was also wheeled out by her husband) for the very many Afghan women who live in fear of the marauding mojahedin who now run the country and are in many ways as repressive as the Taliban? Where were their protests when Sima Samar, Afghanistan’s women’s affairs minister and one of only two women ministers in Hamid Karzai’s western-installed government, was forced from her job this summer because of death threats?[...]

And in the west, feminists are left with the fact that their own beliefs are being trotted out by world leaders in the name of a cause which does nothing for the women it pretends to protect. This is nothing less than an abuse of feminism, one which will further discredit the cause of western feminism in the Arab world, as well as here. When George Bush mouths feminist slogans, it is feminism which loses its power.

Of course, anything bad for the Taliban is wonderful for the world. But helping the women of Afghanistan requires more than overthrowing the Taliban; it requires a level of commitment and follow-through that the US is lacking.

(Cartoon I drew last December which is unfortunately still relevant.)

(This is the second of two posts about the "Central Park Jogger" case.)

So what do I think? I don’t know if the five (or six, counting Kharey Wise) teens accused of raping the Central Park jogger did it or not. But I don’t need to know. I’m convinced that - even at the time, and even more so now - there is reasonable doubt about their guilt. And that should be all our system requires. Where reasonable doubt isn’t enough to prevent a conviction, we have a problem.

I think AL has missed the point. The DNA evidence hasn’t exonerated them (it was known in 1990 that the DNA found didn’t belong to any of the defendants) - and, really, it can’t. Reyes’ confession is what exonerates them (assuming they are, in the end, exonerated, which still might not happen); the DNA evidence just makes his confession credible.

But I think AL is missing the real problems in the system. That Reyes chose to come forward and confess is a freak occurrence. Let’s suppose Reyes is telling the truth - he and he alone committed the rapes. It follows that the 1989 confessions were coerced (deliberately or not doesn’t matter) by police who took advantage of the defendants stupidity and youth. (As far as I know, the confessions are the only proof for the "admitted fact that they had been wilding," in which case it’s illogical for AL to assume that part of the confessions must be true while other parts are false. But maybe AL has another source that I don’t know about)

Armed Liberal complains that "we are dwelling on the ‘Oh, no, we were so bad‘ rather than the ‘we’re getting better‘." He writes:

AL’s rather (to use his term) "self-satisfied" argument simply doesn’t mesh with the facts. DNA technology existed in 1990, when the teens were tried - and it showed that someone other than (or in addition to) the teens had raped the victim. The same "open legal system" that we have today was there in 1990. The only thing different now is that - freakishly - the guilty party has come forward and confessed.

Has anything changed since 1990? Not that I can see. It’s still "the fact that poor kids of color get worse legal representation." It’s still the fact that police sometimes coerce confessions. It’s still the fact that racism and sexism screw up the legal system. What, then, justifies AL’s self-satisfied claim that "we’re getting better"?

I agree with A.L. when he writes that we shouldn’t be "paralyzed with grief and self- loathing." But I don’t think that’s what Jeanne D’Arc is calling for. What she is saying, if I understand her correctly, is that we should listen to our internal doubts about the justice of the system, because those doubts are too-often right. If more people at the time had been suspicious of the confessions, maybe the convictions wouldn’t have happened. If we remember this the next time a case like this comes up, maybe we’ll do better. I think Jeannie’s worrying about injustice is probably more useful than A.L.’s complacent belief that technology and an open legal system are already fixing the problems.

I’d agree, as far as that goes. But I’d add that there’s another test: whether or not we constantly attempt to improve the system, to make repeating the same mistakes less likely.

Talkleft has some plausible ways the system can be improved - but in an era when even Democrats favor making it harder for people to defend themselves against criminal charges, I doubt even a commonsense remedy like the Innocence Protection Act can make it through congress. And - again - without the freak occurrence of a voluntary confession, an IPA wouldn’t have helped these defendants.

What would have prevented these convictions? Laws forbidding lengthy, high-pressure police interrogations of minors would be a good start. Evidentiary laws allowing psychological evidence about the propensity of defendants to make false confessions. Laws requiring competent legal council during all police interrogations for major felonies, regardless of if the person being questioned asks for it. And a more skeptical press.

Talkleft has another suggestion (probably better than my suggestions, since she knows much more about it than I do), which would have helped in this case:

If the goal is to prevent further false convictions of this sort, then these are changes we need.

Until we have those changes, I think that Instapundit’s false "real test" and Armed Liberal’s "it’s getting better" complacency both miss the point. The question (or "real test") is, or should be, has anything changed since 1990 to make this sort of unjust conviction less likely? And has the "trust the system-ness" and racism that made nearly everyone so sure the confessions were valid gone away? Until we can answer "yes," the folks who see this as a real and current problem - Body & Soul, Uppity-Negro, Sipyphus Shrugged, and Negroplease, for example - are the folks we should all be listening to.

UPDATE: Body & Soul just put up a new post on this subject.

UPDATE 2: New post from Uppity-negro.

(Some links found via Instapundit.)

(This is the first of two posts about the "Central Park Jogger" case.)

A bit more time has passed, and I’ve done a bit more reading. So here are some thoughts on the case.

Despite my initial reaction, we don’t know that the 5 teens who were convicted are innocent. We do know that Matias Reyes is guilty - but police have said all along that DNA evidence showed that there was one more rapist who hadn’t been caught. It’s possible that what took place was a gang-rape involving the five convicted teens and Reyes. (Reyes has said he acted alone, but the word of a murderer and multiple rapist isn’t absolute proof).

Furthermore, the essential finding of the DNA evidence - that there was a rapist besides the six people arrested - was known in 1989. Even in the 1989 police version of events, some of the defendants contributed to the rape by holding the victim down and "fondling" her - still legally rape (and rightly so), but not something that would leave semen behind. Despite the new evidence, at least one of the original jurors still believes the guilty verdicts were correct (Newsday, September 6 2002).

But we don’t know that they’re guilty, either. And a presumption of innocence should go in favor of the accused. And I’m not convinced the prosecutors ever had an open-and-shut case:

• Even back in 1990, based on the evidence that existed then, one of the jurors - Ronald Gold - nearly hung the jury based on disbelief in Antron McCray’s videotaped confession. According to a report in Manhattan Lawyer (October 1990), based on interviews with the jurors, Mr. Gold wanted to report a hung jury, but had his mind changed when George Louie essentially screamed at him. (I’m reading between the lines - the article refers to Mr. Louie’s "shear vehemence" and quotes another juror saying Mr. Louie "raised hell" and "stunned us all"). Gold gave in and voted to convict, but other jurors said he just "capitulated out of exhaustion," and Gold later said he felt terrible about his guilty vote.

• Only one of the six defendants’ lawyer - Kharey Wise’s lawyer - pressed the issue of racism and coercion at the trial as strongly as possible (American Lawyer, Jan/Feb 1991), "arguing that the six black and Latino youths charged with the crime had been framed by racists in the police department and the Manhattan district attorney’s office." Although the mainstream press criticized the legal strategy for being "divisive," the jury was convinced - Wise was the only defendant to be acquitted of rape.
• There’s no evidence that these five teens are guilty other than their confessions. (The victim has no memories of the rape, and there were no important eyewitness accounts - which makes Mark Kleiman’s statement that "The basic problem is that Anglo-Saxon law relies on witnesses, and witnesses aren’t really very reliable," although true in general, wrong applied to this case). Reyes’ claim that he acted alone is what has brought their confessions into doubt.

  But even without Reyes’ statement, the confessions are dubious. Raymond Santana, for instance, confessed after being held and interrogated more than 24 hours (LA Times, July 27 1990), after which he probably would have confessed on video to being Jack the Ripper if he thought it would please his interrogators. And after an ordeal like that, that the parents - who didn’t even know enough to demand a lawyer - were present for the videotaping at the end isn’t a meaningful protection.

• The fact is, what the teens describe in their confessions isn’t what actually happened. From Newsday, July 27 1990:

  McCray, for instance, talks on his videotape about attacking a female who was jogging around the Central Park reservoir. But, the 30-year-old investment banker was discovered in a ravine off the 102nd Street cross-drive.

  The youths also said on their tapes that the woman was neither bound nor gagged when they attacked her. But two medical experts testified that the female jogger’s mouth was gagged and her neck nearly strangled by her own bloody jogging shirt, tied like a rope twice around her. The woman, they said, was found near death in the early morning hours of April 20.

  The timing of events is also unclear. The prosecution contends that the attack on the female jogger came in between attacks on other joggers and bicyclists. But Santana, in his statement, says her assault came last.

• The police lied to trick the defendants into confessing (which is legal in New York). The defendants were told, falsely, that fingerprints were found on the scene; that other defendants had already implicated them; that a conviction was a sure thing. It’s possible that innocent boys, believing they were doomed anyway, would confess in hopes of leniency - "it’ll go easier on you if you just confess."

  Yusef Salaam, for instance, denied being present at the rape at all, until Detective Thomas McKenna told him that Salaam’s fingerprints had been found on the victim’s tights (Newsday, July 25 1990). Maybe, as Detective McKenna believed, Salaam was guilty and confessed because (he thought) the police had him dead to rights. Or maybe Salaam was innocent, exhausted and scared, and confessed because (he thought) it didn’t matter what he said because he’d be convicted anyway.

  Jason, writing in the comments at Negroplease, summed it up better than I can:

If I was walking through Central Park being an asshole teenage boy that could’ve been me. And at 14, 15, 16…hell, today, I don’t know how well I’m going to be standing up to Officers of the Law, Men and Women of Authority in their house telling me that I did some shit and they were going to prove that I did some shit and did I know that my friend already said that we did the shit together and I better start talking to or there’s going to be no more leniency and they are just trying to help a brotha out but a woman got raped and somebody’s got to pay and they know about niggas like me I was just out having a good time and shit got out of hand, I just saw this girl and she was jogging through central park and I was just going to take her purse but my friend, yeah, your friend, he was the one that wanted to rape her. In fact, I tried to stop him, see, that’s what we think happened. If that’s what you did then we’re sure that you can just go home. We know you’re tired, we’ve been talking about this for 15 hours. You’re just tired. You want your mother and you just want to go home right. Sign this right here and you can just go home. It’ll be over. All over.

• It’s useful to keep in mind that the defendants were young, poorly-educated, and - there’s no nice way to put this - stupid. Although the judge didn’t allow it, lawyers for the defendants wanted to show the jury IQ tests to make this point (Toronto Star, June 27 1990). Would smart, innocent people have confessed? Probably not - but these were not smart people.

  (You could argue that IQ tests are culturally biased in favor of white people. I admit, you might be right, in which case my use of the word "stupid" is wrong and perhaps offensive. BUT - it makes no substantive difference to my argument here. Whether IQ tests measure intelligence, or whether they measure the ability to understand and respond correctly to white-biased cultural institutions, in either case someone who scores very low on an IQ test is ill-suited for protecting their best interests in a police interrogation. If the cops aren’t a white-biased cultural institution, after all, what the hell is?)

• Guilty or not, it seems likely that - had Reyes’ confession and DNA evidence been available at the time - more of the defendants, or perhaps all of them, would have been acquitted.
• Guilty or not, if the defendants - or their parents - had known enough to insist on a lawyer, they wouldn’t have been convicted. Because no lawyer would have let them confess, and without the confessions the prosecution had no case. ("Along with resolving the case against the defendants, legal experts say the trial will delineate the legal pitfalls that often confront poor people accused of crime and the legal protections readily available to better-off suspects who know their rights and can afford a lawyer to protect them." - NY Times, June 11 1990).

  And, of course, they would have had a much better chance of being well-educated if they hadn’t been poor. And they would have had a much better chance of not being poor had they been white.

Of course, there was not only racism but sexism involved in this case - particularly from some of the activists who felt the defendants were being railroaded. Kharey Wise’s lawyer questioned (insanely) if a rape had taken place at all, and also suggested that the guilty party might be the victim’s boyfriend, whom the victim was lying to protect. (The jury, who did convict Wise of assault, evidently didn’t buy this line of argument at all).

That was mild compared to what some non-lawyers were saying. According to Newsday (July 17 1990), "Some of the more vocal spectators denounced the defense lawyers for not questioning the jogger about her sexual activities around the time of the assault." From The Sunday Times, July 22 1990:

The fact that some of their most vocal defenders were asshole misogynists doesn’t show that the defendants were guilty or innocent, of course. I guess I’m just mentioning it because it seems to have been largely forgotten (the only person I’ve seen mention this element is a poster on the Ms Magazine discussion boards), and it shouldn’t be.

I’m oddly proud to see that Oberlin College (where I enjoyably wasted some of my younger years) is number five on ESPN’s ten “Worst college football teams of all time.”

In 1994, Oberlin went 0-9, giving up 358 points and scoring only 10. In 1995, the Yeoman were outscored 469-72. After losing 56-0 to Allegheny in one 1992 game, the Yeoman had so few players they had to forfeit their next game against Wittenberg — and the forfeit turned out to be one of their finest outings. “Nobody got hurt,” one school official told Sports Illustrated. “And a forfeit shows up as a 6-0 loss in the books, which was better than most of our scores.” Swarthmore and Oberlin scheduled a 1999 matchup just so one of them would end their losing streak. Swarthmore succeeded, while Oberlin marched on, not ending a 40-game skid until October 2001.

Personally, I think “at least nobody got hurt” would be a great slogan for the team. I am, however, disappointed that there have been four teams even worse than ours. Oh, well, can’t lose ‘em all.

Cut on the Bias - whom I disagreed with regarding abortion recently - has posted about a current brew-ha-hah: is the blogosphere sexist? (Cut on the Bias also has a well-written post about breasts, first of a series, which is recommended reading).

The debate was started by this post, by Dawn Olsen at Up Yours, but really took fire after Meryl Yourish weighed in. (Ms. Yourish also has a great "public service" post linking other folk’s comments). Of the comments I’ve so far read, the one that comes closest to my view is this post by Diane E (scroll down or search for the words "Meryl is right" to find it). Here’s a sample, but she says a lot more, so go and read the original.

Sexism doesn’t lie in the fact that there are more male bloggers, and more linked male bloggers, but the fact that there is a huge double standard: whatever certain male bloggers say is accepted and worthy of the blogosphere richochet; whereas if a woman were to say it, it would have been dismissed or ignored. And–when a woman speaks with knowledge on a subject, using logic and evidence, she is ignored.

Example: me and Steven den Beste.

I have to agree; if this were a pure meritocracy, Diane E. would get tons more links than SDB and many other "foreign policy conservative" bloggers, because she’s simply better: better-informed, better logic, better prose. (On the Blogosphere’s smaller left side, the paucity of links to Body and Soul, compared to many less thoughtful and interesting blogs, might be an equivalent case).

A 1997 study of scientific credit, published in the journal Nature (Wenneras and Wold, "Nepotism and Sexism in Peer-Review." Nature, volume 387, May 22 1997, pages 341-343) provides evidence of a mechanism for sexism that’s pretty similar to what Diane’s suggesting.

What the Nature study did was examine productivity (measured in terms of publications in scientific journals, how many times a person was a "lead author" of an article, and how often the articles were cited in scientific journals) and sex. Publication in peer-reviewed scientific journals is often considered to be the most objective and "concrete" sign of accomplishment in the sciences. These factors were then compared to how an actual scientific review panel measured scientific competence when deciding which applicants would receive research grants. Receiving grants like these are essential to the careers of scientific researchers.

The results? Female scientists needed to be at least twice as accomplished as their male counterparts to be given equal credit. For example, women with over 60 "impact points" - the measure the researchers constructed of scientific productivity - received an average score of 2.25 "competence points" from the peer reviewers. In contrast, men with less than 20 impact points also received 2.25 competence points. In fact, only the most accomplished women were ever considered to be more accomplished than men - and even then, they were only seen as more accomplished than the men with the very fewest accomplishments.

Similarly, "audit" and "blind audition" studies have shown that female job applicants, applying for the same position as identically-qualified men, are less likely to be offered a job - especially when applying for higher-status jobs. It’s unlikely many employers would consciously sabotage her own business by hiring an inferior employee; so why the male advantage? One possibility is that, even when viewing two basically identical resumes, some employers tend to "credit" the male applicant’s work higher; so they subjectively choose the employee they see as more accomplished.

* * *

So what’s to be done about it? Not much. It’s a good idea for bloggers to question themselves - if you only have one or two female links in your blogroll, maybe you should see if there’s a female blogger (or a dozen) who merits being included, but isn’t. (Which doesn’t show that you are yourself sexist, by the way, since a huge part of whom we all link is influenced by who the other folks we read have linked to. Mathematically, because the nonsexist bloggers will be influence by links of sexist bloggers, it’s possible for a minority of prejudiced bloggers to have a significant effect on an entire system.)

Beyond "be aware," though, there’s no particular action I’d advocate. After all, no one’s livelihood is dependent on getting more blog hits; nor is blogging a "zero-sum" activity, where one blog must lose for another to gain; given how little "who gets more hits" matters in the world at large, it doesn’t seem that more extreme measures (like affirmative action) could be justified, even if they were possible.. It’s a shame that folks don’t link more to excellent female bloggers like Diane E. and Je’anne D’Arc - and unfair to Diane and Je’anne, who don’t get to be as influential as they merit - but I haven’t the slightest idea, beyond what I’ve already said, how to remedy it.

IMPORTANT UPDATE: Credit where credit is due - Bruce R. has now edited his post to add in a link to the Toronto Star.

Flit often provides thoughtful
conservative commentary. In
this post, however, Bruce R. is actually dishonest. He says he’s critiquing
articles in "Canada’s largest newspaper" - but he doesn’t provide
the name of the newspaper, or any links. Maybe that’s just carelessness on his
part - but it’s awfully convenient. It turns out that his quoting is less-than-honest.

Here is Bruce’s summary of the newspaper’s editorial:

The paper’s daily editorial sympathizes with Toronto’s Muslim community,
which suffered through having a Mississauga learning centre’s windows smashed
by vandals last Sept. 15 for some reason. Toronto has seen a "surge in
hate crimes" in the last year, it writes, without giving evidence, and
criticizes non-Muslim Canadians for being "small minded… rock throwing
vandals."

Geez, that’s pretty harsh. But readers who managed to track down the
actual editorial (which came, by the way, from the Toronto Star) found a
different message:

Such acts - and the small-minded attitudes that drive them - diminish
us all. [...] Muslims should know the heart of this city and this country
isn’t the rock-tossing vandal. Rather, it’s the political and community leaders
like Prime Minister Jean Chrétien who spoke out against the intolerance
directed at Muslims, saying racist acts "have no place in Canada."

So where Bruce R. saw a statement that all non-Muslem Canadians are "rock
throwing vandal[s]," the editorial said the exact opposite; Canada is represented
by folks like non-Muslim Chrétien, who stand up against bigotry. At what
point does misquoting become lying?

UPDATE: I looked up another Flit-cited article. According to Bruce R., "Michele
Landsberg writes of how Afghan women still live in misogyny, which makes the
whole war on terrorism a failure."

First of all, Bruce R. must realize that Landsberg’s
article - which is a good update on the situation in Afghanistan, by the
way - spends paragraph after paragraph outlining the sins of various Afghan
groups. Like other articles, this puts the lie to his claim that Sunday’s Toronto
Star doesn’t have "a single criticism of anyone but the United States."

Second, Ms. Landsberg doesn’t discuss the "whole war on terrorism."
She does say the campaign in Afghanistan has been "bungled," but cites
many more reasons than Flit admits:

If Bush carries out his war on Iraq, we had better pray that he doesn’t
bungle the job as disastrously as he has in Afghanistan, where Osama bin Laden
is still undiscovered, the Al Qaeda network is said to be shipping vast amounts
of gold to new hiding places, the country remains in ruins, the people face
mass starvation, known criminals among the Northern Alliance are ensconced
in government, and the situation of women has changed only marginally. One
of the two women in cabinet, Dr. Sima Samar, has already been hounded from
office by Islamic conservatives.

She also reports that "In a town west of Kabul, the local Taliban has
just blown up a girls’ school and vowed to kill any woman who goes to school
or work."

The stated goals of invading Afghanistan were, if I recall, getting Bin Laden,
dismantling al Qaeda, and freeing the people of Afghanistan (especially women)
from radical Islamic tyranny. That not one of these goals has been fully accomplished
is a legitimate criticism; especially since many conservatives are declaring
the invasion of Afghanistan to have been a complete success. Logically, there
are three possibilities: either 1) the stated goals were met and the invasion
was a success; 2) the stated goals were not sincere goals and the invasion -
measured by some other set of goals - was a success, or 3) the stated goals
were not met, and the invasion was therefore not a total success.

Number 1) is clearly not true. I don’t know if the truth is number 2 or 3 (I
suspect it’s 2 - the way conservatives have so suddenly lost their concern for
the plight of Afghan women suggests that it was never a sincere concern for
most of them), but in either case criticism is legitimate, and doesn’t necessarily
represent irrational anti-Americanism, as Bruce R. implies.

Instapundit provided some links showing that Swedes are poorer than residents of Mississippi, and have more crime. The ever-engaging Maxspeak provides links and his own argument showing why Instapundit’s links are meaningless. Max’s comments are worth reading - but I’m actually linking to highlight an interesting response by Maxsspeak reader Scott Martens, who has lived in the United States but currently lives in Belgium, which (he says) is "widely hated on general principles." (I thought it was hated because it was widely understood to be a dirty word, but no matter).

However, let me offer some anecdotal evidence that middle-class people are actually wealthier here than in the US. I recently finished a graduate progrmme at a Belgian university. Since I’m deep in hock from a year of schooling without work, naturally I pushed quite hard to find a job and to start it immediately. However, among the graduates from my that I know well, I am the only one to have found a job. One wants to take a few months vacation before he starts looking for work. Another is laying low until October or so when the job situation is expected to pick up. Yet another has decided to stay in school with a paid assistantship. Another wants to take a year off to move to Germany and work in an unpaid internship. Still another is going to Paris to live with her boyfriend.

None of them is willing to take a job in retail or flipping burgers. None of them have wealthy parents or trust funds. One is an adult with no financial assets, another is the son of a rural agricultural family, still another has two unemployed parents. Yet, they can afford to wait for a job in their fields and take time after finishing school. They have no debts and there is no pressure for them to rush into unsatisfying work.

I don’t know anyone in the US who has that kind of choice except the children of privilege. In Belgium, however, even lower middle-class people enjoy that sort of economic freedom. If weath doesn’t correlate with economic freedom, then something has to be wrong with the way it is measured.

It’s amazing how often I’ve gotten into discussions with conservatives or libertarians in which they’ve denied anyone in the US is poor, because relatively few Americans (compared to, say, Zimbabweans) starve and nearly everyone owns a VCR (as if consumer durables were a measure of poverty). In their view, poverty is just being unable to fulfill immediate material needs.

That’s part of poverty, of course; an essential goal of any poverty-reduction program should be meeting immediate needs. But as Mr. Martens points out, that’s not everything. Few people talk about the damages of economic insecurity; having just enough to cover rent and food today, but not having the slightest idea if you’ll have it next month, plus every credit card you own is maxxed out and the electricity will be cut off next Thursday. “This week I’m okay, but I don’t know if I’ll eat or have a home next month” is a fairly common sentiment for minimum-wage workers in the US, and (I suspect) unusual for low-income workers in Belgium.

That kind of insecurity can’t be measured by looking at how many sneakers US workers versus Belgium workers can buy, yet it has a larger effect on "quality of life" as it’s really experienced. Especially for parents or other folks with dependents. The big difference between rich and poor in the U.S. isn’t if food’s on the table right now; it’s worrying about if there’ll be food there next week.

Getting back to Mr. Martens’ point - this has a big effect on liberty. People who are worried that they’re about to drown (economically, I mean) have much less freedom of choice than ivory-tower libertarians imagine; they’re forced to stick with a narrow path of immediate economic survival. Freedom from economic insecurity is nearly as essential for liberty as free speech or the right to a jury trial; and more important than many freedoms libertarians often discuss (e.g., "freedom from paying taxes which go to welfare"). As far as I know, this sort of thing hasn’t been measured; but if it were, I suspect that poor and working-class Swedes might turn out to be freer than their American counterparts.

(Oh, and if you were puzzled by my saying Belgium is a dirty word - don’t panic. It just means you’re not a geek. If you did get the reference - well, then, I’m afraid we’re both geeks, and if that bothers you then you can go Belgium yourself.)

For no apparent reason, this
story is currently front-page news on mensactivism.org.

A six-year-old boy has been suspended from an elementary school in Ohio after he rushed to the French window at his home to signal the approaching school bus to wait for him - neglecting to put some clothes on first in his excitement.

His mother said school officials in Canton ordered him to sign a statement saying he understood the sexual harassment charge against him, then handed him a three-day suspension.

That is outrageous. In fact, it’s idiotic. But it also happened more than two years ago; time to move on, guys.

Still, seeing it on mensactivism.org made me curious enough to spend five minutes doing research. The full story - which isn’t told on mensactivism.org (I’m sure they don’t know it), nor by the right-wing pundits who hyped this story (such as John Leo) - doesn’t end with the suspension. What the pundits don’t say is that after the principal suspended the boy, the school district reversed the principal’s decision, cleared the boy’s record, and issued an official statement of “regret” for the incident. They also don’t mention that the real problem, according to the boy’s attorney, is the school’s "zero tolerance" policy.
"The problem is these administrators say, I want zero tolerance, period…
This is just an example of that."

The whole truth illustrates flaws in the “zero tolerance” policies conservatives have favored. Which may explain why, two years later, conservatives are still telling only part of the story.

Wandered in on my partners Sarah and Charles, who were discussing time travel in Connie Willis novels (Connie Willis, for those who have missed out, is the best science fiction novelist currently writing). In Doomsday Book, her best novel, Willis presents a world in which time travel is possible, but the universe - through some unknown mechanism - refuses to allow time travel that would cause paradoxes. And although people can travel from the present to the past and return, they can’t take anything from the past into the future.

In To Say Nothing of the Dog (the very funny sequel to grim-as-an-Idaho-bagel Doomsday Book), Willis develops her time-travel rules further: it turns out that objects can be brought forward in time, just as long as they were about to be lost to history forever, anyway. Kittens who were about to drown; priceless works of art moments away from being destroyed by fire; that sort of thing.

So it turns out that history can be altered; we can subtract, for example, a cat with no problem. But only so long as no one is in a position to ever notice the cat’s absence.

Sarah argued that Willis’ view of time travel was at the least deistic, and probably theistic. The universe isn’t random or arbitrary in what objects it allows to jump forward in time; it will allow such jumps only if it doesn’t cause a problem in human perceptions. This suggests a human-biased watchmaker, doesn’t it? The system decides what time travel is legitimate based on what humans would notice. (That other creatures - for instance, fish that might have found nourishment in an unfortunate cat’s corpse - not to mention the cat itself - have their life-paths altered doesn’t bother whatever’s in charge of time-travel).

Charles came up with an interesting counter-argument, pointing out that Sarah’s case was a bit like arguing that the laws of physics prove that the universe was designed for human life; because if any of those physical laws were even slightly different, human life as we know it could not exist. The problem with that argument is that if the laws of physics worked some other way, then whatever existed under those laws might say the exact same thing.

Looked at this way, Willis’ time travel isn’t necessarily deistic It isn’t that time travel adjusts itself around human perceptions of what is or isn’t an important alteration in the universe’s timeline. Rather, our perceptions of what is and isn’t a significant change are created by the time-travel changes the universe permits. If time-travel made it possible to change who our grandmother was or who won World War Two, then we wouldn’t perceive those things as significant changes; it would seem perfectly normal for the identity of our ancestors to change from moment to moment, just as it’s normal for the sun’s light to increase and then grow dim throughout the day.

The New York Times (via the Joe Kenehen Center) has an interesting article about privatization in Montana. It started as it always does: the privatizers ride into town and begin making pie-in-the-sky promises while begging legislators to accept cash and gifts.

…at the end of the 1997 legislative session, Montana Power, looking to get out of the stodgy, regulated utility business, pushed through a deregulation bill, which made its assets more attractive to prospective buyers. The company said the public would benefit, with lower costs and more consumer choices.

The Legislature, made up mostly of farmers, ranchers and small-business owners, approved the measure with little hesitation. "The dining, the free drinks, the contributions — it all paid off when Montana Power called in its chips," said Hal Harper, a former speaker of the Montana House, who has been both a Republican and a Democrat but is now out of politics. "We’re stuck with the bill."

Montana Power’s goal in all this, by the way, was to leap into a phone booth, strip off that stodgy "old economy" three-piece suit, and emerge revealed as… New Economy Man! Well, actually, it morphed into Internet service provider "Touch America," and immediately managed to lose "more than 90% of its market value."

After that brief-but-tasty just dessert, the privatization story comes to its usual conclusion.

The first shock of deregulation here was felt by business. In a fourth year of increases, power prices soared to unheard-of levels in 2001. Paper companies, mines and other industries that provide some of Montana’s few good-paying jobs began to close or lay off workers because they could not afford to pay their electricity bills… For residential consumers, whom the deregulation law shielded from the first four years of price jumps, bills started to go up this summer, and will rise again next summer.

And finally, the postscript, featuring the inevitable special pleading from privatizers.

Deregulation can still work, supporters say, if it is set up properly.

(Digression: You know who the privatizers remind me of? Hard-line communists. Again and again, their policies fail catastrophically. Again and again, they whine that it’s not fair to judge them based on their conspicuous failures, because their system wasn’t implemented perfectly. Electric prices skyrocketing everywhere they’ve been privatized in the Northwest? It’s because the legislature mucked up privatization by compromising. Argentina, until recently the poster-child for free-market reform, collapsing? It’s cronyism ruining what otherwise would have been a great privatization. Privatized London trains literally killing consumers? If the markets had been allowed to function perfectly, it wouldn’t have happened.

(Reality check, folks: governments will always have some cronyism and corruption. Legislatures always compromise. Merkets never function perfectly. If your idea can’t work around those realities, then it can’t work.

(Like communists, free-market worshipers forget that a policy that only works in perfect conditions is what most people call a "failure.")

But what makes this story interesting is that some Montanans want to reclaim the power grid for their own. Initiative 145 (generally just called "I-145"), if passed, will begin a process for buying "back Montana’s dams and establish[ing] an agency to sell power back to Montanans at the price it costs to produce it."

The power companies are taking this seriously - according to an AP report (Aug 16 2002) "Taxpayers Against I-145 has raised $439,571 and spent all but $26,527, the latest report shows. That is 21 times more money than backers of the measure have raised." In addition to that $439,571, another half-million has been spent opposing the measure by PPL Montana (a branch of a Pennsylvania company) and Avista (based in Washington), the two corporations that currently own Montana’s dams. Anyone who thinks this is a fair, democratic system probably still believes in the tooth fairy.

Despite the overwhelming money disparity, anti-privatizers could win this one, because they’re much cooler. Think "Taxpayers against I-145" (which, incredibly, doesn’t appear to have a website) is a dorky name? It’s a big improvement over the group’s original name, "Energy Producers Against Property Confiscation." (Why didn’t they just call themselves "Big Energy against Holding Big Energy Responsible," and leave it at that?) Compare that to the reformers - they’ve got some dull official name, but even the Associated Press calls them "Montanans for Dam Cheap Power." Goliath has the big wallet, but David’s got panache.

Susanna at Cut on the Bias has been debating abortion with AC Douglas. Go and read ‘em, if you like. Personally, I agree with AC - but I think Susanna has done a better job advocating her position. If this were a formal debate and I were the judge, Susanna would get the win.

But this isn’t a formal debate, and I’m not the judge. This is blogville - which, happily, means I get to take sides with my totally unasked-for opinions. Susanna writes:

AC says the hero analogy is stupid because no one unselfishly gives his or her life for someone else. [...] how about men at war who jump on a grenade to save the others? Or go into a battlefield risking life to save a comrade? How about a mother who would fling herself between her child and a threat - be it animal, human or mechanical? How about family members who give up one of their healthy kidneys so their loved one can live?

I agree with Susanna’s argument here. There are indeed heroes who act altruistically (and if AC wants to deny it, he should support his denial with an argument, rather than just assertion). But does Susanna think people should be forced to do all these heroic things by the government?

If I was dying and needed a kidney, it would be swell of my sister to offer me one. But I don’t think the government should force her to "donate" her kidney to me. If I understand what Susanna is saying, she’s trying to analogize an altruistic kidney donation to an altruistic mother birthing an unwanted child. But unless Susanna wants the government to enforce altruism on unwilling kidney donors, the analogy doesn’t work.

So what makes your beliefs and assumptions accepted and mine not, to the point that you can unilaterally dismiss mine without even a logical argument as to why yours are superior?

I agree that AC didn’t provide an argument, so let me try to provide one.  I’d say that pro-choice "beliefs and assumptions" should be accepted with less argument, because they don’t impose on liberty. The pro-life position calls on the government to impose pro-life beliefs on the entire U.S. population. The pro-choice position, in contrast, leaves it up to each individual pregnant woman to decide.

Now, imposing on other people’s lives ain’t always bad. I might find laws against arson an imposition, for example, but that doesn’t make anti-arson laws wrong. But in our society, liberty is the default state. We don’t say "skipping rope is outlawed until rope-skippers prove their case"; we say that skipping-rope is allowed until the skip-rope-prohibitionists prove their case. For an activity to be legal requires no special defense; outlawing an activity, in contrast, requires ultra-strong arguments.

And that’s how it ought to be. Forcing a pregnant woman to go through with the pregnancy against her will is a terrible thing to do; it attacks her autonomy, her health, and her independence. And by attacking the liberty and autonomy of women and women only, it perpetuates male dominance.  It’s a bad thing to do. Now, maybe that’s justifiable - but the people who want to do the harm should have to make the justification good and solid! Enforced childbirth is a hell of a lot more imposing than banning skipping rope, after all.

None of that proves abortion shouldn’t be outlawed. It merely says that the pro-lifers - like all people wanting to restrict liberty - have a harder case to make.

Anyhow, back to Susanna.

Susanna spends a paragraph arguing that abortion is usually selfish. I don’t agree (nor do I understand why Susanna makes an exception for rape and incest - why is a child’s life worth less according to how it was conceived?), but more importantly I don’t understand why she’s bringing this up at all. We don’t outlaw things because they’re selfish.

AC finally defines the central issue in the abortion debate as when the mass of cells becomes developed to a point that “entitles it to be considered an individual human person, and therefore qualified for a conferring of individual human rights.”

AC may concede this much, but I sure don’t. Even if a fetus is a "person," that doesn’t establish that the government should force childbirth on its unwilling mother. I’m an individual human person, but that doesn’t make it right for the government to force other people to act altruistically in my best interest (for instance, by forcing my sister to donate her kidney).

It might be nice of big sis to give me her kidney. It might be nice for an unwilling mother to go through birth. But why should the law force either of these actions on either of these women?

Nor are Susanna’s arguments about timing (conception? viability? birth?) convincing. I mean, sure, it’s human at conception - Susanna proves that nicely. But everyone agrees on that. Obviously it’s human; it’s certainly not a Vulcan or a frog! But just because something is human doesn’t establish that it has rights. My fingernail clippings are human (don’t believe me? do a DNA test), but they don’t have rights.

What you won’t concede is that the new state is sufficiently changed to be worthy of rights. And that is an arbitrary decision, AC , why wouldn’t it be? Answer me that.

I think Susanna’s reversing the burdens. She’s the one who is willing to impose her beliefs on unwilling pregnant woman; she’s the one who wants to go against the default position of allowing folks to make their own choices. It should be up to her to prove that the new state (by which she means conception) is enough "to be worthy of rights," not up to pro-choicers to show that it isn’t.

I admit, I’m a bit confused how a brand-new embryo could have rights. Where do these rights come from?

Does it have rights merely as a side effect of existence? No, because lots of things exist without having rights.

Does it have rights merely because it’s made of human tissue? No, because some things made of human tissue have no rights (fingernail clippings, hair clippings, blood samples, unused sperm, etc).

Does it have rights because it may someday become a person? But if this is so - if the potential being has the same rights as the actual being -  then why do laws protecting old growth forests not also protect acorns? I have the potential to have a great job with IBM, but that doesn’t mean that IBM owes me a paycheck, because I don’t actually have it. I have the potential to buy a car, but that’s not the same as actually owning it; and until I actually own it, I have no right to drive it off the lot.

There’s a very good reason for this distinction: it’s reality. An acorn is not the same as an oak; a embryo is not the same as a person. When pro-lifers deny that obvious difference, they’re in battle with reality. Having potential to be X is not the same as being X.

And even if Susanna can show that there’s no meaningful difference between potential and actual, that isn’t enough to justify state-enforced childbirth. Actual people don’t have the right to use other people’s bodies, even when their life is at stake (as in me and my sister’s kidney); so why should potential people have that right?

You know, I remember years ago, the Village Voice had an excellent article on how the “wilding” teens who confessed to raping the “central park jogger” hadn’t really confessed. The confessions were a combination of coercion and simple fakes by the cops. I thought the article was pretty convincing. The press rhetoric around the case quickly became filled with that nasty combination of racism and hating-the-young, and I thought that was pretty annoying.

Even so, I accepted that the accused were guilty. I thnk pretty much everyone did at the time, even leftists like me who should have known better. As someone later said about O.J., it seemed “they framed a guilty man.” Besides, you don’t want to be going on about the cops conspiring to frame a bunch of innocent black teens, because, y’know, that kind of talk makes you look nutty.

Sisyphus Shrugged has the skinny (via the Washington Post), but here’s the short version: DNA tests have proven that the so-called “wilding teens” didn’t rape the central park jogger. They were totally innocent. They were totally framed. And I totally bought into their guilt.

Is there any chance the cops who framed those kids will see the inside of a prison? I doubt it.

As Sisyphus says, “I feel frozen right now.”

Antifeminists tend to be very hung up on blame. According to antifeminists, feminists blame men for all their problems, and feminist men are masochists who enjoy guilt.

My personal experience of feminism ain’t at all like that. I’ve met a handful of feminists who blame men for everything; but the vast majority of feminists I’ve met don’t waste their time with that. Which makes perfect sense. Blaming men would be unproductive for feminism, for several reasons:

1. It makes some women and many men who might otherwise be indifferent to feminism - or even willing to listen to feminism - defensive and angry. In this way, blame creates enemies and reduces potential converts.

2. It wastes time by paralyzing many pro-feminist men in a useless mire of defensiveness and guilt (trust me, there’s nothing as boring as an hour spent with a guilt-ridden feminist man).
3. It blurs the distinction between the Alan Johnsons and the Jerry Fawells of the world (not to mention between the Anita Bryants and the Susan Faludis), by assigning people blame according to their genitalia rather than their actions.
4. It deflects attention from the real powers-that-be. If we’re going to blame anyone, I think it makes the most sense to blame the real rulers - CEOs, high political mucky-mucks, Network executives. People who have real power to change society. Remember, although the vast majority of society’s ruling class are male, the vast majority of men aren’t in the ruling class.

That isn’t to say that men shouldn’t be blamed for the ways in which they personally perpetuate male dominance (by not treating daughters and sons equally, by abusing wives/lovers, by holding a female coworker to unfairly high standards, by refusing to do a fair share of housework, by telling sexist jokes, etc…). And it’s true that men do these things far more than women do. Still, some individual women do some of the same things, and some individual men do none of them. Any blame cast should be a matter of individual’s actions and not their genitalia.

If we do make blame a matter of genitalia rather than individual action, that significantly reduces the motivation for individual men to reform or change their actions. If they’re equally at fault no matter what they do, what’s the point?

Judging individuals based on their genitalia, rather than their actions, is not just wrong; it’s antifeminist. It would be like beating people up for pacifism.

I don’t feel guilty for being male. What would be the point? My guilt wouldn’t improve anything. Although I’ve benefited from being male in a male-dominated society, that’s not my fault. The system was in place a hundred generations before my birth; how could I be to blame?

So if we don’t have blame, what’s left? I would say, responsibility.

Although not all men perpetuate sexism, virtually all men benefit from sexism. Virtually all men have in some way gotten gains that we don’t deserve, at the expense of women. And that means that even though we’re not to blame, all men have a special responsibility to support feminism and fight sexism - because we owe women for our unjust gains.

(Ditto, by the way, for White people and anti-racism).

Blame is silly and counterproductive: it gets hung up asking “who made this mess?” Responsibility is productive: it says, “time to clean up this mess.”

Wendy McElroy used her August 20th Foxnews column for an attack on RAWA, the Revolutionary Association of the Women of Afghanistan. According to McElroy, American feminist groups like the Feminist Majority Foundation (which McElroy mysteriously refers to as "FMN") "should be called to account for its role in funds directed toward the Revolutionary Association of the Women of Afghanistan." That certainly sounds serious. So what has RAWA - know for running desperately-needed schools and hospitals for Afghan women - done, that’s so awful?

First, McElroy worries that RAWA lacks fiscal accountability. This is a fair concern- but McElroy, who has expressed this concern before, needs to display some journalistic accountability. In two columns attacking RAWA, McElroy doesn’t produce a shred of evidence to suggest that RAWA has ever misallocated funds. Isn’t it usual to have proof when demanding that people be "called to account"? Apparently, that’s not how journalism is done at Foxnews.

Although fiscal accountability is a legitimate concern, it’s one that probably can’t be resolved in the real world - not unless we refuse to support indigenous third-world organizations like RAWA. As McElroy probably realizes, third-world organizations don’t have the resources to document finances the way most U.S. charities do. Even the tiny nonprofit I work for (a local historic site) requires specialized software, Western-educated employees to run the software, and the services of two CPAs to keep our financial records straight. RAWA hasn’t had access to any of that; furthermore, RAWA has been working in the midst of violent suppression and a war. No reasonable person thinks RAWA can meet American standards of fiscal accountability.

Why donate to RAWA, then? It’s a tradeoff; donors lose some accountability, but gain the advantages of supporting an indigenous organization. Unlike any American organization, RAWA is Afghan women doin’ it for themselves; isn’t that better, in the long run, than Western NGOs doing it for Afghans? RAWA’s members know firsthand, in the way that no American can, where aid to Afghan women does the most good. And RAWA members, who have risked execution opposing the Taliban, have shown a commitment and (as even McElroy has admitted) heroism that cannot be matched.

McElroy ignorantly suggests accountability can be provided by "letter writing" - the model of charity suggested in late-night commercials starring Sally Struthers, asking us to "sponsor" a starving child, in exchange for the child’s grateful letters. However, the accountability of letter-writing is an illusion - as the Chicago Tribune, ABC News, writer Michael Marin, and others have shown, letter-writing didn’t prevent Save the Children from badly mismanaging funds and decieving donors.

Furthermore, as the New Internationalist (among other critics) argues, letter-writing is a fundimentally flawed approach to charity. It’s a fundraising gimmick that doesn’t benefit people in need. When Westerners "sponsor" a child or a teacher, the primary beneficiary is the Western donor, who gets an ego-boost; meanwhile, the supposed beneficiary - in this case, teachers - get a needless addition to an already huge workload. "However well-intentioned such aid may be, the kernel is the creation of a paternalistic relationship which is unnecessary and potentially harmful." Rather than forcing teachers to waste time and money writing fundraising letters to Americans, I’d prefer RAWA’s resources to be used actually helping Afghan women - and I doubt I’m the only RAWA donor who feels that way.

But don’t letters prove that some money is being spent in the right ways? Maybe. But better proof is already available, from Westerners who have seen RAWA’s operations firsthand, such as FemAid’s Carol Mann, the Guardian’s Natasha Walter, and University of Maryland professor Anne Brodsky. Is this accountability perfect? No, of course not; there is no absolute guarantee (with RAWA or any other charity) that no dollar has been misspent. But despite McElroy’s insinuations, there’s no evidence of RAWA misusing funds, and considerable evidence of the good RAWA does; for an American wanting to help Afghanistan women, donating to RAWA is a good bet.

McElroy has a couple of other complaints about RAWA. She claims that a "prominent RAWA member… blasted" Ms Magazine - but it seems extremely unlikely that Elizabeth Miller of Ohio is a member of RAWA, prominent or otherwise. (Fact-checking, like having evidence before implying misuse of funds, is apparently not a Foxnews staple.) (Speaking of fact-checking, McElroy claims that the Feminist Majority Foundation, which owns Ms, "has reacted with silence" to Elizabeth Miller’s letter - even though McElroy herself links to an article in American Prospect quoting the president of FMF’s reaction).

McElroy also complains that RAWA "is not, as it claims, apolitical." But when has RAWA ever called itself apolitical? McElroy doesn’t say, and a google search of RAWA’s website doesn’t find a single use of the word "apolitical." As McElroy knows, RAWA describes itself as "an independent political/social organization"; and RAWA openly states its political goals. So what mysterious "political" goal does McElroy fear RAWA is hiding?

McElroy’s purpose here, it turns out, is red-baiting. McElroy mentions that "Other political goals can be discerned from RAWA’s activities. For example, at its 2000 celebration of International Women’s Day, one of RAWA’s featured speakers was Afzal Shah Khamosh, the heads of Pakistan’s openly Communist Mazdoor Kissan Party." (A paragraph later, McElroy admits this is meaningless - so why did she say that political goals could be discerned from it?) McElroy also slips in that RAWA’s founder attended a French Socialist Party Congress twenty years ago; in last week’s Foxnews entry, McElroy brings up unsubstantiated accusations of Maoism. For her coup de grace, McElroy points out that RAWA has criticized the United States’ actions in Afghanistan (gasp!).

Does any of this add up to the slightest proof of impropriety? No, of course not; but McElroy is here for unsubstantiated insinuations, not evidence.

McElroy rightly criticizes RAWA for unfair attacks on other Afghan feminists, a legitimate point (albeit one swiped from The American Prospect). Unfortunately, like the Prospect, McElroy hypocritically does the same thing herself, quoting an anonymous wit who dubbed RAWA "the Talibabes." (Apparently unfair attacks by RAWA are bad, but unfair attacks on RAWA are cool). But that RAWA has unfairly maligned other women’s groups doesn’t erase the real good RAWA’s funding of schools and hospitals has done Afghan women.

All of McElroy’s concerns - name-calling and angry letters to Ms., the pathetic red-baiting, the desire for Afghan teachers to waste time writing letters - miss the point. The bottom line is, or should be, helping the women of Afghanistan. As eyewitnesses have verified, RAWA uses its resources to help; and as long as that remains true, donating to RAWA is a sensible choice for Westerners who want to help Afghan women.

* * *

For coverage of the RAWA flap worth reading, skip Foxnews and go to Noy Thrupkaew’s essay in The American Prospect. Thrupkaew argues that, in a post-Taliban period in which the goal is reconstruction rather than revolution, more moderate women’s groups can accomplish more than RAWA. This may be true, but it’s a little simplistic. Western feminist history shows that both moderates and "extremists" have been needed; during the fight for emancipation, for example, Alice Paul’s uncompromising dedication to absolute equality both laid ground for reforms beyond the vote and made feminists like Susan B. Anthony seem moderate and reasonable by comparison.

Of course, Afghanistan is not the pre-suffrage U.S., but it would have improved Thrupkaew’s essay if she had at least considered if a similar dynamic could be at work among Afghan women’s groups. It’s possible that RAWA, by demanding a level of women’s equality beyond what most Afghans are ready for, is creating more space in the national Afghan discourse for "moderate" reform groups like the Afghan Women’s Resource Center.