Holocaust stories: temperament and trauma [Part I]

The New Neo Posted on by

[Hat tip: Open Blogger at Ace’s.]

[NOTE: Part II can be found here.]

Here is a fascinating interview with an elderly concentration camp survivor. If you’ve read or heard many camp survivors’ tales, the horrors he faced will not surprise you. But that’s not why I’m linking to the interview, because I assume you’re all familiar with the almost unimaginable type of brutality this man experienced.

No, I’m linking because of statements such as these:

Q: In those dark days how did you find the strength to survive? Did you ever want to give up so the suffering would end?

A: Well, the answer to that question is simply that it’s human nature to overcome most of the atrocities and difficulties that are thrown at them.

But I didn’t think that I was any different than any other person. At least at that time, I didn’t give it any thought. I just wanted to survive – to get by every day, to stay out of the way, not to be as visible, because these – I don’t know what to call them – these monsters just look for any kind of reason to pull someone out to kill them, to set an example…

And I was always very – don’t know how to say it? I was always very enthusiastic about life itself.

I hadn’t had a life, until that point, and whatever I did have, at this point, was sort’ve blocked out of my mind. I didn’t remember the good years any more. So to me, life was very important, and I had to do everything humanly possible to survive, not to give them a reason or a cause to pull me out, and kill me.

The speaker (who is not named in the excerpt) seems to think he wasn’t unusual. But I would say he is quite unusual. In fact, since most people did not survive the camps he was in (Auschwitz and Dachau), there is no question he had unusual mental and physical strength. He says it is “human nature to overcome most of the atrocities and difficulties that are thrown at them”—and that’s true, up to a point. But some people in the camps did give up, and it hastened their deaths (that is, if they had been spared to work in the first place; most people who arrived at death camps were killed on arrival).

The speaker had been a young man during the war, probably in his early-to-mid-teens. He was smart; he figured out that keeping a low profile would be a good thing under those circumstances, and that helped. But I think the most revealing statement he made in that passage was “I was always very enthusiastic about life itself.” He had a vigorous and naturally optimistic life force that held him in good stead throughout some of the most trying circumstances human beings can ever experience.

Perhaps he was born that way. Continue reading →

A few more thoughts on last night’s debate

The New Neo Posted on by

You knew there’d be some, didn’t you?

I listened to maybe the first third of the debate, and then I turned off the audio. I’d planned to turn it back on within a few minutes, but as time went by I realized I’d had it with both of them and never turned the audio back up again, although I kept thinking I should.

So I’m probably not the greatest authority on what happened during this debate.

But from what I did see and hear, and from what I’ve read around the blogosphere, I don’t think the event will have very much effect on the polls one way or the other. Trump merely needed to avoid sounding like a disjointed lunatic, and I think he succeeded. Hillary needed to keep standing and seem to have physical endurance, and she succeeded.

We knew he’d be volatile, and he was. We knew she’d be smug and fake-smiley, and she was. What surprises me, though, is how surprised some people were at any of this. I’ve read comments on other blogs that indicate that quite a few of Trump’s supporters were uncharacteristically disappointed in him. “He didn’t go in for the (metaphorical) kill!” “He didn’t hammer her enough on (fill in the blanks)!” “He wasn’t coherent enough!” He didn’t do his homework!” “He was too defensive!” Have they not ever taken a look at the man they’ve been cheering for over a year? Most of those characteristics have been fully in evidence since the start, and certainly were clear during the Republican debates. The only one that was a bit different from back then was that the failure to insult Hillary quite as viciously as he did his fellow Republicans, and even that is something a lot of people predicted would happen.

I see it as another example of people seeing only the Trump they wanted to see for way too long. Last night some of them were looking at the Trump that is. Nothing in Trump’s previous debate performances should have indicated he’d be good at this particular activity. In fact, I was surprised he did as well as he did, and I think his debating skills have improved since last year.

But his debating skills still stink. However, fortunately for Trump, I don’t think people are going to make a decision about him based on his ability to make a rhetorical point with flair and polish. I think many people are still put off by Hillary Clinton—in part by her personality—and I don’t think she did herself any favors on that score last night. However, anyone who was counting on her falling down or having some other obvious physical difficulty during the debate last night has been dreaming. Anyone who watched the Democratic debates knows that Hillary has enough stamina to stay alert and feisty during a longer debate than this one was.

What a long year it’s been, though. And in November one of these people will have been elected president.

Crutcher: the eyes have it

The New Neo Posted on by

In reports on the Crutcher case, I couldn’t help but notice a certain detail I haven’t seen anyone else remarking on, which is that some of Betty Shelby”s distrust of Terence Crutcher appears to have been based on his lack of eye contact, on his shifty eye-gaze:

Wood said that Shelby then said to Crutcher, “Hey, is this your car?”

Crutcher didn’t respond, simply dropping his head while continuing to look at Shelby, “kind of under his brow,” (“which she thought was unusual” according to the video at the link) Wood said. Crutcher then began to put his hand into his left pocket,

Another description of the same exchange is this:

Her attorney said the man’s head lowered but he locked his eyes on Shelby “so he’s looking right out underneath his eyebrow which she thinks is really weird.”

“It’s like a thousand-mile stare,” Wood said his client recalled.

Later:

Shelby tried to get Crutcher to talk to her, but he simply mumbled something unintelligible and stared at her, Wood said. He then turned and walked to the edge of the roadway and turned to look at her, his hands still in the air, Wood said…

The eyes are one of the ways we judge people’s character—the way they look at us is a basic part of human interaction. Is their gaze straightforward or evasive? If the latter, maybe they’re hiding something. We respond to a thousand cues, subtle and not-so-subtle, often without even realizing it, and they help shape our view of someone’s character and our ability to predict what they might do next.

We now learn of Crutcher, about a previous traffic stop in 2013 (for speeding and DUI):

Once confronted, Crutcher was slurring his speech and had “the extreme odor of an alcoholic beverage” on his breath, the affidavit states. The patrolman found an open can of Steel Reserve beer in the vehicle’s center console.

The cop also noticed one of Crutcher’s eyes did not appear to be functional, according to the police report.

When pressed, Crutcher confirmed “that he had a fake eye.”

The trooper proceeded to book Crutcher, citing the “very droopy, heavy eyelids” of “Crutcher’s good eye” and noted that he “seemed to be disoriented and confused,” the affidavit states.

I haven’t seen the fact that Crutcher had a false eye reported elsewhere—and maybe I’m the only one who finds it possibly relevant anyway. And I’m certainly not saying that this is the whole reason that Officer Shelby became so suspicious almost from the start. But it probably didn’t help, and she probably never realized that Crutcher had a false eye that may have affected his gaze and his “thousand-mile stare.”

Liveblogging the first presidential debate, 2016 (if I can take it)

The New Neo Posted on by

Well, it’s been a long time coming hasn’t it? But here we are at last, about to be treated (?) to a spectacle many thought would be highly unlikely to happen: Hillary Clinton vs. Donald Trump, the first debate.

I plan to watch as long as I can bear it. I have no idea how long that will be. My usual distaste for debates is compounded by my distaste for both participants, but offset at least somewhat by the hideous fascination of the thing.

A few observations. Despite their differences, Hillary and Trump share certain somewhat unusual characteristics for presidential candidates. To begin with, they’re both of a certain age, and that age is pretty old for the job. They’re both from the greater New York metropolitan area; Trump’s a native of the city and Hillary’s more of a latecomer to the region, but she’s been there a long long time now. I seem to recall that in recent decades the conventional wisdom has been that successful presidential candidates can’t come from New York, especially anywhere near the city; that heartland America just won’t tolerate it. Well, 2016 seems designed to upset conventional wisdom.

I was going to try to do a riff on the phrase “Thrilla in Manila” for the title of this post, using the location of the debate instead of “Manila” and then looking for a good rhyme. The debate’s being held at the Hofstra University’s David S. Mack Sports and Exhibition Complex on Long Island. “Hofstra” doesn’t really lend itself to rhymes (Kafka? Cosa Nostra? No, not quite). “Long Island” isn’t easy, either. This USA Today article does pretty well with “Smackdown at the Mack.” But it’s not exactly a rhyme, either. So I offer the rather weak sauce of “Yackety-Yak and Flak at the Mack.”

Later on in this thread I’ll try to liveblog the debate.

9:10 PM: It occurs to me once again, as the two come out and shake hands, that these people know each other. Not exactly friends, certainly not ex-lovers, but they know each other better and over a longer time than most presidential opponents ordinarily do.

They both have their game faces on.

9:20 PM Trump’s refrain seems to be “you’ve been thinking about this for 30 years, why haven’t you done more about it?”

9:23 PM The male/female dynamic presents an interesting balancing act for both of them. Trump has to be careful not to be too relentlessly browbeating, while Hillary has to not seem too schoolmarmy and defensive. Of course, they’re attempting to appeal to different constituencies, but there’s always that “undecided” group in the middle where elections are often decided.

Hillary calls on the fact-checkers. Recall that that was the meme du jour of the MSM.

9:33 PM Can they both lose?

I keep having to turn the sound off for a few minutes and then I turn it on again. Sorry, I just hate debates. Just looking at the visuals, right now she looks very smug, he looks serious.

9:55 PM I keep turning the sound off and on, but my strong impression is one I often get from debates (and one of the reasons I tend not to like them)—seems to me the winner is in the eye/ear of the beholder. I don’t see anything here that would change the mind of anyone who already favored either of these candidates. My gut feeling (right or wrong) is that most people, even the “undecideds,” are quite familiar with Hillary Clinton, and less familiar with Trump in his role as politician and would-be statesman. That means the bar for him is low. If he sounds reasonably intelligent and reasonably sane, I think he gains more than Hillary does by anything she can do in this debate.

10:30 PM Since I turned off the audio about twenty minutes ago, I thought I’d check up on the comments section of various blogs to see what people think of how it’s going. I had it in mind to go to a blog where the majority of commenters don’t lean one way or the other, but of course such a blog doesn’t exist. The only real way to tell how this debate has gone is in the post-debate polls. And then, whatever has happened in the polls, subsequent events will intervene which can change things.

What a long strange trip it’s been.

10:37 PM I’m not the least bit surprised at how well Hillary has held up. In the Democratic primaries, she debated Sanders for hours in several debates without flagging, and I saw no reason it should be any different here, engaged in the fight of her lifetime.

Waiting for backup : the Crutcher case and police protocol

The New Neo Posted on by

One of the main suggestions I have made about the Crutcher case and Officer Betty Shelby is that she should have called for backup and then waited. A lot of people seem to have either missed that statement, ignored it, or misunderstood what I meant and on what I was basing that suggestion. So here’s a post to clarify.

I’m not a police officer, nor am I any sort of expert on all the ins and outs of their training in general, or the training of the Tulsa police in particular. Those things are relevant, of course. But I am not making this idea up. It came to me, originally, from two sources. The first is this quote:

Police do, however, have some guidelines for when to shoot a suspect. For instance, research has shown that a suspect who comes within 21 feet of an officer can inflict harm before the cop has time to react (though some contest the validity of the “21-foot rule” in certain circumstances). So officers try to distance themselves from the suspect.

The second was an interview I saw on a cable news show with an NYPD officer (unfortunately, I didn’t catch his name and don’t know how to locate the show) who said this is what Shelby should have done, according to protocol: called for backup and waited in her vehicle.

Crutcher was not a crime suspect, much less a suspect in a violent crime. As I’ve said many many times here, there was no particular problem if he happened to get away and no special urgency. However, there was no reason to imagine he would get away, for several reasons. One is that the road had been cut off from traffic. Another is that a police helicopter was hovering above. It was taking the video that we have seen, and it could have tracked his efforts to get away. In addition, Shelby had his license plate number. Considering that this was no “fleeing felon,” there was no particular reason that he needed to be apprehended at that moment.

As I said, I don’t know the Tulsa police protocol. But you can find scads of articles (not about the Crutcher case, just general articles about police work) saying that when the person a police officer is trying to talk to is not a felon or a violent person in the act of attacking people or waving a gun around—that is, in an ambiguous situation that might become dangerous (such as Shelby’s suspicion that Crutcher might become dangerous)—and the officer is alone (as Shelby was), the officer should call for backup and wait.

See, for example, this.

See also this:

Ask any officer what the most important aspect of policing is, and the most likely answer is going to be officer safety. But studies conducted by the United States Department of Justice seem, to some extent, inconsistent with this premise. These studies were Killed in the Line of Duty: A Study of Selected Felonious Killings of Law Enforcement Officers (1992), In the Line of Fire (1997), and Violent Encounters: A Study of Felonious Assaults on Our Nation’s Law Enforcement Officers (2006). This last study comprises a summary of behavioral descriptors of victim officers compiled from all three studies. While there were a number of descriptors that were common to all, the most alarming was the finding that many officers did not follow all rules and procedures related to handling arrests, traffic stops, and waiting for backup (when available).1 The purpose of such rules and procedures is to keep officers safe or at least as safe as possible. If rules and procedures are meant to keep officers safe and officer safety is paramount to most officers, how can they be reconciled? The simple answer is that many officers do not realize their officer safety skills have eroded. They never had a problem doing it that way before, so, therefore, they should not have a problem in the future.

Also see this:

Calling for back up and waiting for backup are two different things.
Having another officer on the way can become more of a psychological security blanket than a tactical move. If a call or contact can be delayed or stabilized until additional help arrives, a wise course of action is for the officers to stage first and determine an approach as a team. If an officer plows into the call before help arrives, the officer responding to assist will enter a hot zone without important available information.

This article is about encounters with confrontational “extremists,” but the principle is the same:

Call for backup. If an officer realizes that he or she is in a potentially dangerous situation involving an extremist, one of the first things to do is to call for backup. There is no point in proceeding with an encounter when the officer may clearly be at a disadvantage vis-é -vis the extremist. Moreover, once an officer has made the decision to call for backup, that officer should wait until that backup arrives before proceeding. Several violent encounters have occurred where officers called for backup during a traffic stop involving an extremist, but did not wait for the backup to arrive before confronting the extremist.

Also see this from Police Officer’s Handbook: An Introductory Guide. It’s about searching a motor vehicle with the suspect present, but it states the principle of waiting for backup. So does this when dealing with ambiguous and potentially dangerous situations (“suspicious or unknown-type complaint”).

That’s the gist of it.

Again, I’m basing this not on my own speculations but on what I’ve read and heard about police training and policy in general, policies put in place to protect both police officers and the public. I am not a police officer and have no inside info on this, but if any of my readers are police officers please feel free to explain either where I’ve gone right or where I’ve gone wrong.

There’s a debate tonight: the immoderate moderators

The New Neo Posted on by

In case you’ve just returned from a year’s stay on planet Xenon, I am here to inform you that there’s a presidential debate tonight.

I have no idea what to expect, but it depends in great part on which candidates show up, particularly Trump. Will it be the more sober, “presidential” Trump? The angry insulting pouty Trump? The braggart Trump, the—you get the idea. And which Hillary? The strange one with the shrill voice and the odd off-putting laugh? The calm and sober lawyer-type one?

I was going to say “well, at least it won’t be boring,” but you know what? Maybe it will indeed be boring.

And at Powerline, Paul Mirengoff notes the following advice liberals are giving debate moderators this year:

In advance of Monday night’s debate, Hillary Clinton’s cheerleaders in the media have been encouraging moderator Lester Holt to contradict, during the debate, candidates whose assertions of fact they disagree with. Glenn Kessler, the liberal “fact-checker” for the Washington Post, even compiled a list of assertions he says don’t withstand fact-checking, the vast majority of which are by Donald Trump. He urges the moderator to “clip and save.”

It is wholly inappropriate for a moderator to argue with a candidate about facts, and Kessler’s piece illustrates one of the main reasons why.

Mirengoff goes on to describe how Kessler lists “facts” to check that aren’t facts at all, but liberal opinions and interpretations of facts and events, and describes why they’re not equipped to do this fairly in real time. Those things are certainly big problems with fact-checking by moderators in the heat of a debate. What’s more, as Mirengoff adds:

My final point is that contemporaneous fact-checking by the moderator isn’t necessary. If a candidate misstates an important fact during the debate, the other candidate will probably call him or her on it. If a particular voter finds the dispute important, he or she will likely find out which candidate was right. An army of fact-checkers is available to assist the voter in this endeavor.

Even if the candidate who misstates a fact isn’t corrected by his or her opponent, the same army of fact-checkers will have its say once the debate is over. Voters who consider fact-checking valuable and reliable will consult the fact-checkers.

I would add that moderators are not supposed to debate the debater. That’s the job of the debaters themselves.

However, I was surprised that Mirengoff failed to mention one of the main reasons (in my opinion, anyway) that this is being urged this year. One of the reasons, of course (which I believe is implicit in his piece) is that the left and liberals are horrified at the prospect of a Trump presidency, and feel that anything and everything would probably be justified if it would help to prevent that. But the other reason is that in 2012 moderator Candy Crowley turned debater (on Obama’s side) and it worked. It worked to fool many people into believing that what she said was true and what Romney had said was false, and it worked to stop Romney in his tracks when he tried to make an important point about Obama.

In political life, once something is done and the person gets away with it successfully, it is seen as a great tactic to be used again. That “something” may be something that was heretofore thought to be forbidden; now it is seen as perfectly okay and even desirable.

[NOTE: I documented the 2012 Crowley debate incident in great detail on this blog. If you want to refresh your memory, go here.]

Europe and the Sea of Faith

The New Neo Posted on by

rouen

rouenSunset

When I was in college, I took a year-long survey course in art history. We began with a deep dive into Greek and Roman art, and then lingered long and hard on the cathedrals of Europe, particularly the Gothic variety. We were required to learn to tell them apart by their myriad minor variations on the theme, and I found the task exceedingly difficult.

All Gothic cathedrals looked pretty much alike to me.

What I remembered most about those cathedrals was not their differences, but how impressive they all were. What an extraordinary effort it was to build them way back then, and on such a scale! Later, when I visited western Europe and saw some of the cathedrals for myself, the scope of the undertaking involved in designing and constructing them seemed even more impressively stunning, a testament to the extreme importance of the Christian religion in the lives of the people of that time. How other-wordly and inspiring it must have been to gather inside such vast and soaring structures to worship and ponder the mysteries. And it still is, I would imagine, for those who do it.

One of the most famous of the huge Gothic cathedrals in France is in Rouen. It was begun in the 12th Century (on the site of an earlier church) and added to slowly but surely during the 13th and 14th centuries, with repairs made in subsequent centuries for various calamities such as lightning strikes, fires, and bombings. It was the world’s tallest building for four years during the late 1800s, and had its portrait painted repetitively just a few years later by Claude Monet in a series of impressionist works that always looked to me as though the cathedral was melting.

I thought of that cathedral—and those paintings—some time ago when I read the news of the murder of a priest near Rouen by an Islamist terrorist, although the church where he was murdered was not that Rouen Cathedral, but another Catholic church nearby.

The centrality of Christian belief in western Europe has been on a long slow decline for centuries (I chronicled a major event connected with that decline here), with no end in sight. And it struck me, when I heard of the priest’s murder in Rouen, that the intensity of faith today in the Muslim world forms a stark contrast to the decline of faith today in western Europe—and that the latter forms a similar contrast to the powerful faith of the western Europeans who built structures such as Rouen Cathedral.

Which in turn put me in mind of Matthew Arnold’s poem “Dover Beach” (please bear with me; there is a tie-in), which begins with the poet describing, appropriately enough, the beach at Dover. Arnold is widely believed to have started writing the poem on his honeymoon, which took place in 1851, although the poem was not published till 1867.

When the poem begins, it is evening:

The sea is calm to-night.
The tide is full, the moon lies fair
Upon the straits; – on the French coast the light
Gleams and is gone; the cliffs of England stand,
Glimmering and vast, out in the tranquil bay.
Come to the window, sweet is the night-air!

Can you not picture it? I think of it as a summer night, cool after a hot day.

In the next stanza (which I’ve omitted) Arnold describes the sound of the waves upon the beach, and throws in a historic allusion to Sophocles. Until that point the poem is good. But then it veers into greatness:

The Sea of Faith
Was once, too, at the full, and round earth’s shore
Lay like the folds of a bright girdle furl’d.
But now I only hear
Its melancholy, long, withdrawing roar,
Retreating, to the breath
Of the night-wind, down the vast edges drear
And naked shingles of the world.

It’s that “melancholy, long, withdrawing roar,/Retreating,” that gives me a chill and shudder. You can hear the tide going out, and what is it taking away with it?

The last stanza is perhaps the most famous one of all, where Arnold takes his stand for love against the emptiness and meaninglessness he fears is what remains once that wave has retreated:

Ah, love, let us be true
To one another! for the world, which seems
To lie before us like a land of dreams,
So various, so beautiful, so new,
Hath really neither joy, nor love, nor light,
Nor certitude, nor peace, nor help for pain;
And we are here as on a darkling plain
Swept with confused alarms of struggle and flight,
Where ignorant armies clash by night.

Those “ignorant armies” are probably another classical reference:

The metaphor with which the poem ends is most likely an allusion to a passage in Thucydides’s account of the Peloponnesian War (Book 7, 44). He describes an ancient battle that occurred on a similar beach during the Athenian invasion of Sicily. The battle took place at night; the attacking army became disoriented while fighting in the darkness and many of their soldiers inadvertently killed each other.

Another apt metaphor. Another chill down the spine.

Why do I love poetry so much? I love it because, although poems say things we are able to say in other ways, there is no substitute for poetry’s ability to merge emotion and mind and gut cognitively, viscerally, and aesthetically. Paraphrasing a poem can explain the thought. But only a poem can express the poem.

doverBeach-001

The Tulsa shooting and the mind of Officer Shelby

The New Neo Posted on by

Now, that’s a pretty presumptuous title, isn’t it? How can I presume to talk about what was in the mind of Officer Betty Shelby when she shot Terence Crutcher in Tulsa a week ago?

The answer is: of course I don’t know. Of course I am speculating here, and everything I say in this post should be read with that caveat in mind. But my speculation isn’t idle, either; it’s based on statements made by Shelby’s own lawyer and by the police as to her state of mind, as well as the fact situation as reported. For the purposes of this post I am ignoring the statements of the Crutcher family and/or their lawyers, and focusing instead on what information is available from Shelby’s own side and from the police.

Why am I writing this? After all, isn’t it premature, because we don’t know enough? Absolutely. But this particular case grabbed my attention from the start, because it is one of the seemingly more extreme examples of a shooting that appears unjustified. To me, what may have happened in this case has little to do with the other cases that people lump in with it—Ferguson and Charlotte and Zimmerman and the ones I listed in my Legal Insurrection piece and all the other Black Lives Matter causes célé¨bres—although of course they are used in the same way to score political points. But they all have different fact situations that point to different conclusions about exactly what was going on in each.

My interest in the Crutcher case was especially piqued at the outset:

[Shelby] asked Crutcher whether the car belonged to him but got no response, the attorney said. Crutcher began walking toward her with his hands in his pockets. She politely asked Crutcher to take his hands out of his pocket while they were speaking, Wood said.

“He does comply and puts his hands out of his pocket, and then puts his hands up in the air, which she thought was a little bit strange under the circumstances,” he said.

Really? Did it ever occur to her that with all the recent violence he might have been wanting to show her he was completely harmless and cooperative?

In retrospect, that reaction of hers seems even more significant to me. It occurred right at the start of their interaction, when Shelby was trying to piece together what was happening in the strange scene she came upon: a car in the middle of the road, empty but running (some reports say the doors were open, some not; some say she encountered Crutcher before the car, some say it was the other way around). When Shelby talked to Crutcher he was unresponsive, and she had to decide what that behavior of his meant. There were a large number of possibilities, some benign (deaf, distracted, having a health problem) and some not (purposely uncooperative, hiding something).

All along the way, Shelby was trying to make sense of things. All along the way she had choices, and for whatever reason (we don’t know why) she kept choosing the most negative one.

Now, don’t get me wrong. Continue reading →

Undercover Obama; undercover Hillary

The New Neo Posted on by

spy

President Obama used a pseudonym to communicate with Hillary Clinton via email through her private server:

President Barack Obama used a pseudonym in email communications with Hillary Clinton and others, according to FBI records made public Friday.

The disclosure came as the FBI released its second batch of documents from its investigation into Clinton’s private email server during her tenure as secretary of state…

The State Department has refused to make public that and other emails Clinton exchanged with Obama. Lawyers have cited the “presidential communications privilege,” a variation of executive privilege, in order to withhold the messages under the Freedom of Information Act.

The report doesn’t provide more details on the contents of that particular email exchange, but says it took place on June 28, 2012, and had the subject line: “Re: Congratulations.” It may refer to the Supreme Court’s ruling that day upholding a key portion of the Obamacare law.

I wonder what his pseudonym was. More importantly, it’s interesting that Politico managed to write that entire article without referencing the fact that previously Obama had explicitly denied any knowledge of Hillary’s private email system. Well, I guess he can always say it was his alter ego—the pseudonym—who knew about it, not him.

There were some other revelations in the Politico article that gobsmacked me:

[Monica Hanley, a veteran Clinton aide who worked for her in the Senate and at State]…revealed in her FBI interview that she had no idea where a thumb drive she used to store an archive of Clinton’s emails had gone. Hanley searched for the thumb drive, which the FBI described as “something she happened to have laying around the house,” several times but was unable to find it.

The interviews provide more insight into Clinton’s lack of technical acumen. According to the FBI’s Abedin writeup, she “could not use a computer”; Hanley said Clinton had no idea what her own email password was, and had to rely on aides.

There are two possibilities there, I suppose. One is that the whole story—lost thumbdrive, Hillary’s complete computer ignorance—is a lie manufactured for some tactical purpose. Another is that it’s the truth. I’m not sure which is worse.

I’m a bit disorganized myself, and I can imagine carelessly losing or misplacing a thumbdrive. They’re so small, right? But not—I repeat, not a thumbdrive with information of that magnitude. I would store that with extreme care, to say the least.

Like Hillary, I’m in an age range that isn’t exactly up to speed on all the accoutrements of modern life. But computers? Email passwords? I don’t give you a break on not knowing about that sort of stuff unless you’re in the 90+ age range.

I’m not sure how much capacity I retain to be surprised by all of this, but I certainly am disturbed.

Ted Cruz endorses Donald Trump

The New Neo Posted on by

Yes, it happened. Here’ a short excerpt from Cruz’s statement:

This election is unlike any other in our nation’s history. Like many other voters, I have struggled to determine the right course of action in this general election.

In Cleveland, I urged voters, “please, don’t stay home in November. Stand, and speak, and vote your conscience, vote for candidates up and down the ticket whom you trust to defend our freedom and to be faithful to the Constitution.”

After many months of careful consideration, of prayer and searching my own conscience, I have decided that on Election Day, I will vote for the Republican nominee, Donald Trump.

I’ve made this decision for two reasons. First, last year, I promised to support the Republican nominee. And I intend to keep my word.

Second, even though I have had areas of significant disagreement with our nominee, by any measure Hillary Clinton is wholly unacceptable ”” that’s why I have always been #NeverHillary…

Our country is in crisis. Hillary Clinton is manifestly unfit to be president, and her policies would harm millions of Americans. And Donald Trump is the only thing standing in her way.

Why would anyone be surprised or disappointed at this? That’s a rhetorical question, of course; I’m well aware of the reasons. But I don’t share them. I’ve figured, particularly in the last month or two, that this would probably be Cruz’s only possible course of action. I also happen to think that, although politicians always have tactical/strategic aspects for their decisions, and that the same is probably true for Cruz as well, I also happen to think he is one of the most reluctant of reluctant Trump supporters but that he means what he says and that neverHillary finally won him over.

That’s pretty much it. It’s pretty much the way I lean, too, despite my abhorrence and distrust of Donald Trump.

[ADDENDUM: By the way, when Cruz said “vote your conscience” back at the Republican Convention, he meant just that. Take a look at what I wrote about it back then. Also see this.]

Cars, riots, Glenn Reynolds—and the law

The New Neo Posted on by

Glenn Reynolds—known in the blogosphere as Instapundit—is probably one of the most widely read, if not the most widely-read, conservative bloggers. He’s also a law professor at the University of Tennessee. And he’s also (like so many pundits, politicians, celebrities, and just regular folk today) a user of Twitter.

I’ve written before what I think of Twitter, and it’s relevant here:

I don’t use Twitter, and rarely read it. But I certainly check it out now and then, when there’s a tweet in the news that catches my eye. Right from the start Twitter held little interest for me, although a lot of bloggers took to it immediately…

I’ve not only not been drawn to it, but something about it repels me…

…Twitter favors snarky one-liner put-downs and/or bragging. Those of you who like Twitter may say I’m selling it short, but every time I go there, that’s what I see and that’s about all I see.

Reynolds is a smart guy, a very smart guy. Ordinarily he’s a mighty thoughtful and yet straightforward guy, too. But in this case, my best guess is that the medium of Twitter—its atmosphere of pithy snark—encouraged him to say something quickly that was not really what he meant. Here’s what Glenn now has to say about it (I reproduce the whole thing here):

Wednesday night one of my 580,000 tweets blew up. I didn’t live up to my own standards, and I didn’t meet USA TODAY’s standards. For that I apologize, to USA TODAY readers and to my followers on social media.

I was following the riots in Charlotte, against a background of reports of violence. Joe Bruno of WSOC9 interviewed a driver whose truck had been stopped by a mob. Trapped in her cab, she “feared for her life” as her cargo was looted. Then I retweeted a report of mobs “stopping traffic and surrounding vehicles” with the comment, “Run them down.”

Those words can easily be taken to advocate drivers going out of their way to run down protesters. I meant no such thing, and I’m sorry it seemed I did. What I meant is that drivers who feel their lives are in danger from a violent mob should not stop their vehicles. I remember Reginald Denny, a truck driver who was beaten nearly to death by a mob during the 1992 Los Angeles riots. My tweet should have said, “Keep driving,” or “Don’t stop.”

I have always supported peaceful protests, speaking out against police militarization and excessive police violence in my USA TODAY columns, on my website and on Twitter itself. I understand why people misunderstood my tweet and regret that I was not clearer.

Twitter favors simplification of complex issues. Twitter favors punchy one-liners. That appears to have been what happened with Glenn, and all it takes is one time out of thousands and/or millions (in Reynolds’ case, half a million tweets and perhaps that many posts on his blog, too) and people who are out to get you will do their best to get you. We’ve seen that happen time and again.

Reynolds has made his statement and I very much hope the furor now dies down. But the larger question is how to talk about issues that are nothing if not complicated, such as the law of self-defense in difficult situations like a riot.

I tend to write long posts and to be long-winded. Maybe too long-winded. Yes, probably too long-winded. That’s my tendency anyway, and that’s what interests me, and I’m glad I’ve found at least some people (hello, stalwart and patient readers!) who are interested in coming along with me for the ride. Twitter doesn’t favor that, so I don’t use it. But I totally understand that if I did, I might end up saying something I regret, too. Hey, even on this blog I might end up saying something I regret, and probably have now and then.

Yesterday I linked to this post by Andrew Branca at Legal Insurrection on the same topic Glenn was writing about: the law of self-defense when caught in a car surrounded by rioters. Branca was of course writing a post and not a tweet, so he took his time to explain the law of the thing in his usual thorough way. It ordinarily takes a lot of words to explain something like that, which is unfortunate but true. Read the whole thing and the links he provides at the end of you want to know the pros and cons of various actions if you’re unfortunate enough to be caught in a mob that makes you feel threatened.

People often don’t like lawyers, and there are lots of reasons for that. But one of those reasons is that law isn’t simple and explaining law is most definitely not simple. To those not legally inclined it sounds like a bunch of blah-blah-blah claptrap. But it’s not.

I went to law school a long time ago—long time—and I never practiced except as a law interne for a semester. I didn’t think law was for me, although I finished the three years. But I’ve never regretted what I learned there, even though I went to law school when I was extremely young and knew virtually nothing about law when I got there (some would say I didn’t know that much when I got out, either). I learned to appreciate the remarkable and logical (mostly logical) edifice that is the law, the striving to be clear and to be fair and to be thoughtful. I learned to understand that this is sometimes violated, and that it is almost never easy even when everyone concerned is trying his/her best. I learned that one of the reasons legal language tends to be so very wordy is the effort to be clear and to cover all possibilities and exigencies, and how it is never possible to do either.

On yesterday’s thread, commenter “Frog” had this to say:

What, Dear Mr Andrew Branca, great legal guru, are the drivers of those immobilized vehicles supposed to do? Flee their vehicles, thus exposing themselves to the mob? Sit there and await a windshield smash, having no defense? What? Oh, Branca of the Ivory Tower, you did not say, did you?

The lawyers have the luxury of chin-stroking at leisure. And of course debating. What they do.

The victims of this black mob do not have the same pontificating hair-splitting luxury.

No, the potential victims of any mob, black or white, have no such luxury. But as I wrote to Frog in my response:

Do you think he’s telling you what you should do? Do you think he’s telling you what’s right and wrong? He’s not telling you anything of the sort, nor is he suggesting that he’s telling you that.

He’s telling you one thing and one thing only: what the law is. And yes, lawyers do that. Knowing the law””and therefore the possible consequences for their actions””helps people to make informed decisions.

I’m in favor of information. Knowing as much as you can about the law not only tells you the possible consequences of what you do, it tells you what a lot of fairly brilliant minds have thought about what’s reasonable under the circumstances (“reasonable” is a big big word in law). I’d certainly want to know, and I concede that in order to write articles and posts about the law a person needs a bit of chin-stroking leisure. Posts are not ordinarily written while sitting in a car in the middle of a riot (although I suppose tweets could be).

[NOTE: A personal note here, for what it’s worth. I’ve been trapped in a car in a demonstration that felt as though it could easily turn into a very threatening situation. It was a long time ago, I’d say either 1970 or 1971, during the antiwar protest years. Some of these protests were big and angry, although not as angry as the later racial riots (I’ve certainly seen the Reginald Denny beating footage and was horrified by it).

The situation in which I found myself initially was having to halt in gridlocked city traffic. I was the passenger and my boyfriend (later to be husband) was driving his car, a very very small fabric-topped convertible sports car (MG) that probably could have been lifted with both of us in it (our combined weight in those days was barely 250) by just a few people. We didn’t know why the traffic had stopped, and then after a few minutes we saw it coming—a wave of humanity, marching and screaming, coming right at us and washing over us.

I don’t remember what they were saying, but some of it was to us. I recall some of them pounding on the car and looking very angry. I considered our options, but there didn’t seem to be any good ones. I felt completely vulnerable to whatever they would decide to do, which fortunately ended up being limited to shouting and pounding. It took minutes for them to all pass by; it was a big demonstration. I don’t remember seeing any police; I couldn’t see much of anything except the sea of people flowing past us. I don’t remember if my boyfriend tried to drive the car, but I recall that between the crowd and especially the stopped cars all around us there seemed no way to do it even had we wanted to.

It the crowd had gotten physically violent I honestly don’t know what would have happened. But I don’t see how being aware of the law would have harmed me; I would have been happy to have been able to consider my options with some knowledge behind me.]