I’ll give you moderate Muslims—
And brave ones, at that:
The two men on the right are almost certainly too young to remember, but the petals of the “Iraqi rose” used to include many Jews. Some were killed and most were hounded out right after Israel was founded.
I am familiar with the Just War doctrine of the Catholic Church, and its list of required criteria for action. To me, though, it can all too easily fall under the heading of this couplet by Hillaire Belloc, who happened to have been a devout Catholic, although he wasn’t referring to Just War theory in this verse:
“Pale Ebenezer thought it wrong to fight,
But Roaring Bill (who killed him) thought it right.”
If ever there was an argument for a Just War, one would think it would be the fight against ISIS. In addition, there is the added element of persecution against Christians of a type we haven’t seen a great deal of since Christianity’s early days. It’s not much of an imaginative stretch to think that, if ISIS could build a coliseum and throw Christians to the lions, it might just do so, with relish.
So it’s not too much of a surprise that Pope Francis has come close to endorsing war against ISIS. Close, but not quite there. Which is more extraordinary, the fact that he’s come close, or the fact that he still can’t seem to bite the bullet?:
On Iraq, Francis was asked if he approved of the unilateral U.S. airstrikes on militants of the Islamic State who have captured swaths of northern and western Iraq and northeastern Syria and have forced minority Christians and others to either convert to Islam or flee their homes.
“In these cases, where there is an unjust aggression, I can only say that it is licit to stop the unjust aggressor,” Francis said. “I underscore the verb ‘stop.’ I’m not saying ‘bomb’ or ‘make war,’ just ‘stop.’ And the means that can be used to stop them must be evaluated.”
But, he said, in history, such “excuses” to stop an unjust aggression have been used by world powers to justify a “war of conquest” in which an entire people have been taken over.
“One nation alone cannot judge how you stop this, how you stop an unjust aggressor,” he said, apparently referring to the United States. “After World War II, the idea of the United Nations came about: It’s there that you must discuss ‘Is there an unjust aggression? It seems so. How should we stop it?’ Just this. Nothing more.”
The Pope is, of course, a pope. He’s not a head of state in the conventional sense (the Vatican is considered an ecclesiastical state), and he’s certainly not a military man. He is in this world and of it, but his focus is not the practical, it’s the spiritual. As such, he probably believes that Pale Ebenezer’s spiritual strength and prayer can influence Roaring Bill to stay his hand—somehow.
Francis voices the original hope with which the UN was founded. But that hope has been so thwarted and perverted at that august body for so long that it’s hard to see how it can still be maintained, even by the faithful. I understand that the Pope must speak to our better nature, and try to foster its development, but talking about the UN this way seems to be ignoring reality.
Pope Francis has voiced his hopes about violence before, in relation to the recent skirmish between Hamas and Israel:
“Never war, never war. I am thinking, above all, of children who are deprived of the hope of a worthwhile life, a future. Dead children, wounded children, mutilated children, orphaned children, children whose toys are things left over from war, children who don’t know how to smile. Please stop. I ask you with all my heart, it’s time to stop. Stop, please!
I’m not sure whom the Pope was addressing, although I understand (and sympathize with) the sentiment. If his words were a prayer to God to help, I think we can all concur. If it was to Hamas, they will fall on deaf ears and be met with derision. If the Israelis were the intended recipients, and the Pope was asking them to become Pale Ebenezers, Israel’s answer would be that desisting from defending itself would lead to Pale Ebenezer’s fate for its own children.
[NOTE: If anyone is interested in my previous writings on pacifism, please see these.]
According to the preliminary report of an autopsy requested by the Brown family, Michael Brown was shot six times, four in the right arm and two in the head, the last shot killing him. All were fired from the front.
That could end up being revised, but so far the forensic evidence contradicts the reports of several eyewitnesses who reported that at least some shots were fired from behind as Brown was fleeing. One of those witnesses, Dorian Johnson, had reason to lie, since he was Brown’s friend and was present at the time of the convenience store robbery (which Johnson didn’t mention till the police brought it out).
Eyewitness testimony is prized by the public but is often very flawed. It’s not necessary to get into the racial aspects of this case to doubt the reliability of the eyewitnesses: study upon study has demonstrated how poor eyewitness testimony tends to be. Here’s an interesting point about focus that’s relevant to the Brown shooting:
The weapon focus effect suggests that the presence of a weapon narrows a person’s attention, thus affects eyewitness memory. A person focuses on the central detail (for example, the weapon) and loses focus on the peripheral details (for example, the perpetrator’s characteristics). While the weapon is remembered clearly, the memories of the other details of the scene suffer…Another hypothesis is that seeing a weapon might cause an aroused state. In an aroused state, people focus on central details instead of peripheral ones.
That’s not the only focus problem. There’s more:
The testimony of a witness can lose validity due to too many external stimuli, that may affect what was witnessed during the crime, and therefore obstruct memory. For example, if an individual witnesses a car accident on a very public street, there may be too many cues distracting the witness from the main focus. Numerous interfering stimulus inputs may suppress the importance of the stimulus of focus, the accident. This can degrade the memory traces of the event, and diminish the representation of those memories. This is known as the cue-overload principle.
The Brown killing had all those characteristics, which would tend to degrade eyewitness memory even if there were no racial biases or issues involved. Also, the enormous amount of publicity and talk in the media about the event could have its own effect:
…[T]he memory of an eyewitness can become compromised by other information, such that an individual’s memory becomes biased. This can increase eyewitnesses sensitivity to the misinformation effect. Individuals report what they believe to have witnessed at the time of the crime, even though this may be the result of a false memory. These effects can be a result of post-event information.
It would not be the least bit surprising if the testimony of many of the eyewitnesses in this case turned out to be inaccurate. That’s why the forensics are extremely important. A webcam would have been very good, too (that’s been my opinion from the start), but very unfortunately no official video exists. Meanwhile, the demagogues continue their work.
…is condemning the persecu—I mean the prosecution—of Governor Rick Perry.
As a commenter at Althouse wrote: If you’ve lost Jonathan Chait…
In case you’ve forgotten who Jonathan Chait is, he’s a self-confessed Bush-hater par excellence:
I hate President George W. Bush. I think his policies rank him among the worst presidents in U.S. history…I hate him for less substantive reasons, too…I hate the way he walks”“shoulders flexed, elbows splayed out from his sides like a teenage boy feigning machismo. I hate the way he talks”“blustery self-assurance masked by a pseudopopulist twang. I even hate the things that everybody seems to like about him. I hate his lame nickname-bestowing”“ a way to establish one’s social superiority beneath a veneer of chumminess (does anybody give their boss a nickname without his consent?). And, while most people who meet Bush claim to like him, I suspect that, if I got to know him personally, I would hate him even more.
And so Chait’s saying the Rick Perry indictment is a legally unjustified and nakedly political move is just another example of how egregiously bad it must be. And Chait doesn’t pull his punches any more than he did with Bush. The headline of the Chait piece calls it “unbelievably ridiculous,” and here are some quotes:
They say a prosecutor could get a grand jury to indict a ham sandwich, and this always seemed like hyperbole, until Friday night a Texas grand jury announced an indictment of governor Rick Perry. The “crime” for which Perry faces a sentence of 5 to 99 years in prison is vetoing funding for a state agency. The conventions of reporting ”” which treat the fact of an indictment as the primary news, and its merit as a secondary analytic question ”” make it difficult for people reading the news to grasp just how farfetched this indictment is.
Lest you mistake Chait for a Perry admirer, these are his closing sentences:
To describe the indictment as “frivolous” gives it far more credence than it deserves. Perry may not be much smarter than a ham sandwich, but he is exactly as guilty as one.
It sounds as though Chait detests Perry almost as much as he hates Bush, and that’s saying a lot. Therefore it’s astounding and impressive that Chait has turned on the indictment. My guess is that Chait feels free to do so because, although it’s a case of Democrats acting stupidly, they’re Texas Democrats. Maybe Chait’s distaste for Texans overrides his distaste for Republicans?
[NOTE: I agree with many commenters on the comment thread here who point out that Chait, like Axelrod before him, is afraid of backlash to the Perry indictment, especially considering Lehmberg’s bad behavior on the police video. However, note that Axelrod’s criticism of the Perry indictment was pretty thin gruel: it “seems pretty sketchy.” Compare that to Chait’s full-throated, over-the-top criticism, which in terms of enthusiastic creativity is up there with his previous “I hate Bush” column.
In short, Chait didn’t have to hurl himself into it with such vigor. That’s what made me write this post, and it indicates to me that, in addition to his strategic reasons, Chait actually doesn’t like this indictment on the face of it.]
When I was a child I’d periodically become wildly enthusiastic about something I had read or some music I’d heard, and I’d run to show my parents.
“Yes dear, that’s nice,” they’d say absent-mindedly, backing out of the room. I soon learned they did not share many of my interests, and I stopped trying to enlist theirs, sticking instead to enthusiasms we did share (theater, dance).
Even my beloved grandmother, who always had plenty of time for me, was hard-pressed to feign interest when I started reading aloud to her from Forbidden Planet and On the Beach at the age of nine.
Yes, I was an odd child; no doubt about that.
As I grew up, little changed except my audience. I learned to be more discreet; I no longer read aloud to relatives or friends. But every now and then I’d get carried away by something. I remember once, at a small dinner party at a friend’s house, some topic came up about the arts or philosophy or dance or history or something that piqued my interest, and I started talking animatedly about it. When I had finished and came up for air, I noticed a slightly glazed look on the faces of the people around the table. Oops!
Later that night I was discussing it with my then-husband, who said (not unkindly) that although I was not boring, people just didn’t usually want to have deep discussions about stuff like that, they wanted to “keep it light” (no, I was not discussing German philosophy, or death, or anything of that sort).
Much later, I found myself living in a different city, one that had a reputation for being chic and sophisticated and quite urbane. Surely here I’d find a larger group of like-minded people who wanted to talk about the deeper issues. I did have a couple over for dinner once who seemed simpatico in that way, and they were. We talked and talked and talked. They had lived in that city for their entire lives and were very sociable and knew tons of people, so I told them of my dream to get a bunch of interested people together regularly for some scintillating conversation, a sort of salon. Their reply? Fahgetaboutit. There were hardly any people around who’d be interested in that sort of thing.
And so it rested, until I found blogs. The moment I read my very first one I realized I was onto something. Not all blogs, of course; maybe not even most of them. But here, here were my peeps! Here were a bunch of weirdos (sorry folks; I include myself) who liked to jaw-jaw at length about the very sorts of topics I had long been yearning to talk about. What fun!
And so it has continued, most of the time.
The officer who stopped Michael Brown did not do so because he was a suspect in the convenience story robbery, but became suspicious during the course of the exchange with Brown:
[Ferguson Police Chief] Jackson said the officer was aware cigars had been taken in the robbery of a store nearby, but did not know when he encountered Brown and Dorian Johnson that they might be suspects. He stopped them because they were walking in the street, Jackson said.
But Jackson told the Post-Dispatch that the officer, Darren Wilson, saw cigars in Brown’s hand and realized he might be the robber.
It’s not clear whether Wilson did or said anything at that time to alert Brown to his suspicions. There’s no question, however, that Brown knew he had just robbed a store, and would have been understandably reluctant to be taken into custody.
Officer Wilson is a six-year veteran of the force who has no prior disciplinary actions against him. We still don’t know what happened during his exchange with Brown, except that he shot and killed Brown. It is hard to believe, however, that Wilson—who had been interacting on a daily basis with the mostly-black population of Ferguson for many years with no reported incidents of racism or excessive violence—suddenly and for no reason decided on a whim to kill a black and cooperative, non-aggressive 18-year-old who had stolen a bunch of cigars. It is far more likely that Brown, conscious of his own guilt and fearful of getting a police record (and coming off of an incident in the store where he was already throwing his weight around), forcefully resisted arrest, which may have sparked the shooting.
I continue to reserve judgment, however, until the forensic evidence comes in. There’s a lot more to be learned about the facts in this case.
Rick Perry becomes the latest in a long line of Republicans who have been the target of malicious prosecution for political reasons: Scott Walker, Tom DeLay, Ted Stevens. He won’t be the last.
It is no accident whatsoever that it was a Travis County grand jury that indicted Perry on two felony counts for abuse of power. Travis County is essentially Austin, the Berkeley of Texas, a county with a history of such anti-Republican political indictments. As Bryan Preston says:
This indictment is political. Every bit as political as the kangaroo court charges that former District Attorney Ronnie Earle, a Democrat, lodged against numerous Republicans over the years ”” both because that office is politicized, and Travis County is full of guttersnipes and fools.
But that doesn’t mean that the charges will get thrown out. The legal jeopardy to Perry is quite real.
Earle got former Rep. Tom Delay, Republican, convicted on crimes that were not even committed in Travis County, and were not even crimes at the time they were supposedly committed.
Those convictions were eventually thrown out, but not before Earle had totally destroyed Delay’s career and tainted the entire Republican Party ”” which was the goal all along.
Anyone who doesn’t think Democrats play tough, and dirty, is a fool.
Oddly enough, however, this indictment has been questioned by none other than David Axelrod, not known for his Republican-friendly nature:
“Unless he was demonstrably trying to scrap the ethics unit for other than his stated reason, Perry indictment seems pretty sketchy,” Axelrod tweeted.
Alexrod joined Texas’ junior Sen. Ted Cruz on Saturday in giving his support to Perry, while other high-profile lawmakers have largely remained silent on the politically-charge issue.
I highly doubt that Axelrod has suddenly become objective and non-partisan. So his criticism of the charges indicates to me that he thinks there might be some backlash, especially considering the videotape of DA Rosemary Lehmberg, the woman in question who would not resign despite her drunk driving incident and especially her questionable and threatening behavior afterward.
Take a look at this excerpt from a piece by Beutler in TNR about the racial situation in Ferguson, Missouri [emphasis mine]:
You’ve probably seen the statistics by now. Ferguson is about two-thirds black. It’s police force is nearly 100 percent white. Less than a third of its residents are white, but whites hold five of Ferguson’s six city council seats.
When the black community in a city like Ferguson loses faith in its police force, and the police respond by crushing the community’s civil and constitutional rights, it isn’t a stretch to say that the white ruling class has created de facto apartheid. Probably temporarily, perhaps without segregationist intent. But functionally, that’s what it is. They’ve also denied the people they serve the services to which they’re entitled. Ferguson’s police department commands a third of the city’s budget and they are using those resources to provide aggressive disservice to the people who finance that budget.
I almost wrote in the title that Beutler is a de facto dunce. But that would be wrong, because I don’t think words like his are chosen from stupidity, they come from cleverness and a reliance on the readers’ stupidity and/or ignorance. The emotionally-loaded word “apartheid” gets thrown around for a reason, and that reason is to tie a group to the very racist government of South Africa during the latter part of the 20th century.
“Apartheid” has a very specific meaning. It was not just a loose separation or imbalance that came about through custom or choice, it was a legal system that was established by legislation. That was its hallmark, what distinguished it from the de facto racial separations that exist in most countries of the world.
And that legal enshrinement, and the degree to which it was taken, was what inflamed the world against it. The system featured [emphasis mine]:
…racial segregation in South Africa enforced through legislation by the National Party (NP) governments, the ruling party from 1948 to 1994, under which the rights, associations, and movements of the majority black inhabitants were curtailed and Afrikaner minority rule was maintained…
Apartheid as an officially structured policy was introduced following the general election of 1948. Legislation classified inhabitants into four racial groups, “black”, “white”, “coloured”, and “Indian”, with Indian and coloured divided into several sub-classifications, and residential areas were segregated. From 1960 to 1983, 3.5 million non-white South Africans were removed from their homes, and forced into segregated neighbourhoods, in one of the largest mass removals in modern history. Non-white political representation was abolished in 1970, and starting in that year black people were deprived of their citizenship, legally becoming citizens of one of ten tribally based self-governing homelands called bantustans, four of which became nominally independent states.
To throw that word around lightly is an abomination. To use it to refer to the town of Ferguson, where its black citizens can and do vote, and are members of both the city council and the police force (albeit not in numbers nearly commensurate with their percentage of the Ferguson population) is misleading propaganda.
But none other than Jimmy Carter is guilty of the same thing, in Carter’s case regarding Israel. His use of the word “apartheid” has been rationalized thusly by Carter’s defenders:
And [Carter’s] use of the word apartheid is not only morally valid; it is essential, because it shakes the moral stupor that allows many liberals to rationalize away the daily, grinding horror being inflicted on Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza”.
In other words: we liberals hold the moral high ground, and so we are morally justified in using words incorrectly for the purpose of creating propaganda that inflames passions in the desired direction. Our ends justify the means.
…that ISIS is looking to cross our unsecured southern border? And that it will easily succeed?
I keep hearing that Obama has checked out and is no longer interested in being president.
But was he ever interested in the work of being president? I don’t think so. From the very start, what interested him was giving speeches and campaigning. For the rest, he truly believed that just being his glorious self would somehow magically cause all the things he wanted to happen to actually occur, with a minimum of effort.
And although that sounds rather deluded, in a sense it was reality-based in his case. Isn’t that pretty much how his life had gone up till now?
Obama never was very engaged with the work of government, although much of his career has been spent in government. As president, even his signature “accomplishment” early in his administration, Obamacare, was designed and pushed mostly by others (Pelosi, for example), who did the heavy lifting for him.
Obama is used to adulation and feeds off it, and when the adulation stops he’s really not very interested in going on with the activity. Campaigning and elections are tailor-made for a personality such as his. They feature speeches and promises and debates (words) rather than the need to work with others and accomplish something concrete. The main activity is travel—constant movement—and speaking before adoring crowds.
Most important of all, they are time-limited and have an easily-defined and perceived payoff—the election results, which Obama has almost always (with the single exception of his run for Congress to unseat Bobby Rush) won handily. Campaigns last about a year or a little more, and then the candidate gets his/her reward. It is a relative sprint compared to the longer-distance race that is a presidency, especially a two-term presidency.
Finally, we know that Obama is easily bored. No less an expert on Obama than Valerie Jarrett has said so, in the strongest possible terms: “He’s been bored to death his whole life. He’s just too talented to do what ordinary people do.” That, from the woman who (except for Michelle) probably knows him best and is closest to him.
So, no surprise. Obama hasn’t checked out because he never really, completely, checked in.
The Ferguson police have released this video of a convenience store robbery in which Michael Brown was suspected to have been the perpetrator. It occurred shortly before the fatal shooting.
Dorian Johnson, the young man who was with Brown when he was killed, has admitted “that he and Brown went to the store and ‘that he did take cigarillos,'” according to his lawyer. The video shows a large man, alleged to have been Brown, “forcefully” pushing away a smaller man who had gotten in his way:
Brown’s uncle, Bernard Ewing, questioned whether Wilson [the officer who fired the fatal shot] really believed Brown was a suspect. He noted Johnson’s account that the officer told the two young men to get out of the street and onto the sidewalk, and that Brown had his hands up when he was shot.
“If he’s a robbery suspect, they would have had the lights on,” Ewing said. “If you rob somebody, you would tell them, ‘Get on the ground’ or something, not, ‘Get off the sidewalk.'”
“It still doesn’t justify shooting him when he puts his hands up,” he added. “You still don’t shoot him in the face.”
And that last sentence, by the way, is true—if that’s what actually happened. We really don’t know.
As I’ve thought from the start, the forensic evidence of how Brown was shot (from front or back, close or far) will be telling.
The officer who shot him sustained facial injuries from the scuffle, according to the police department.
If the video of the store robbery was actually of Brown, it could certainly explain why he might have been forcibly resisting arrest when stopped by the police. It doesn’t prove that was the case, of course, but it would provide a motive for his alleged aggressiveness.
Robin Williams’s widow has announced that he had recently been diagnosed as having Parkinson’s, although the disease was in its early stages.
Parkinson’s is a nasty progressive illness with many many manifestations. It can be treated, but it can’t be cured, and it tends to worsen over time even with treatment, although there’s a lot of variation in severity. Bu think Michael J. Fox, whose attitude can’t be beat but who has become more symptomatic as time has passed.
One of the little known manifestations of Parkinson’s is that patients are commonly depressed, and it is generally thought that much of the depression is the result of the brain changes of Parkinson’s, although it’s hard to know for sure:
For people with depression and Parkinson’s disease, each illness can make symptoms of the other worse. For example, people with both illnesses tend to have more movement problems and greater levels of anxiety than those who have just depression or Parkinson’s disease. Compared with people who are depressed but do not have Parkinson’s, people who have both illnesses may have lower rates of sadness and guilt, but greater problems with concentration. One recent brain imaging study also suggests that people with Parkinson’s disease may have an unusually high number of reuptake pumps for the brain chemical messenger serotonin. Serotonin helps regulate mood, but overactive pumps reduce serotonin levels, possibly leading to depressive symptoms in some people with Parkinson’s disease.
Although people can react to a diagnosis by becoming depressed, the depression in Parkinson’s often appears to precede the diagnosis of the neurological disorder:
The relation between depression and the temporal course of the motor symptoms of PD has been studied in different ways. Two well conducted studies have addressed the idea that psychiatric symptoms (particularly depression and anxiety) may precede motor symptoms of PD by a number of years (as often they do in Huntington’s disease). These studies used a case”“control methodology and found that the odds ratio for a previous history of depression in the PD cases was around 2 compared to controls. The average time between onset of depressive symptoms and motor symptoms was around six years, which correlates well with positron emission tomography (PET) studies suggesting that the onset of the disease process may predate motor symptoms by the same time period.
To me that indicates a physiological basis for many cases of depression in Parkinson’s patients. There’s really no way to tell about Robin Williams, of course. But it definitely could have been a factor.