Meanwhile, King Obama…

The New Neo Posted on by

…grants audiences to his supplicants:

The go-it-alone approach has left the [Obama] administration ”” which claims to be the most transparent in United States history ”” essentially making policy from the White House, replacing congressional hearings and floor debates with closed meetings for invited constituencies.

”‹We don’t hear much lately about the administration’s planned executive action on immigration “reform,” but rest assured it is continuing apace. Along with Obamacare it is the cornerstone, the central goal, of Obama’s transformative leftist domestic policy.

According to Republican Jeff Sessions:

It is chilling to consider now that these groups, frustrated in their aims by our constitutional system of government, are plotting with the Obama administration to collect their spoils through executive fiat.

The opposition can challenge this through legal means after the fact (because an impeachment and conviction of Obama is politically impossible at the moment), and the delay in Obama’s announcement of action on immigration has come mainly from the fact that lawyers have been engaged in attempting to craft a move that will be able to withstand a legal challenge by Republicans.

If you look at the comments to the article in the NY Times, you’ll see many people defending the president’s action with statements such as this one, “Thank you President Obama for having the guts to stand up to our Do-Nothing Congress.” If you ever wondered how tyrants get away with what they do, wonder no more. “The ends justifies the means” is a principle in which many people believe, as long as the ends are their own desired ends, or the ends they’ve been told to think are good ones.

Question for the Ferguson protestors: when is an officer allowed to defend him/herself with the use of deadly force?

The New Neo Posted on by

Sometimes I think the answer is “never, unless the victim of the shooting is white.” The idea is that white police should err on the side of their own martyrdom if the victim is black.

There is no question that police sometimes act rashly and wrongly, killing people (black or white) who are not threats to them and whose actions have not justified the use of deadly force by the officer. When it has been determined that this has happened, the officer should be penalized severely.

But when a white officer kills a black person, the automatic and immediate assumption these days (without waiting for an investigation) seems to be that the white officer is guilty and the black person is innocent. Innocent, that is, no matter what the evidence is that the dead person had just committed a crime, or had assaulted the officer. And the white officer is guilty of a hate crime no matter if his/her prior record regarding racial matters has been exemplary, and there is not a scintilla of evidence of that person’s having harbored racist thoughts and certainly not of ever acting on them.

Evidence, you say? What’s reliable evidence? The distrust of the police among many people in many communities, especially black communities but not limited to them, is that evidence is routinely manufactured by the police. This came to awareness especially during the O.J. Simpson trial, when many black members of the jury, as well as much of the black public, discounted evidence in the trial because they believed that O.J. was being framed. Sometimes, of course, it is even true; but how often?

This type of thinking was also brought home to me in connection with the Martin/Zimmerman case, when I read comments to the effect that George Zimmerman (who was a quasi-security-officer rather than a policeman, not white but a “white Hispanic”) had faked his head injuries by banging his own head on the pavement after killing Trayvon Martin.

If people believe that sort of thing, there is no evidence that would convince them of that person’s innocence. Each fact can be explained or rationalized away, if the will to do so is strong enough.

So if it turns out in the Michael Brown case that stories such as this one are true, and Darren Wilson suffered serious facial injuries at the hands of Michael Brown before shooting him, it will not convince those who think Wilson guilty of murder that the killing of Brown was a justified use of deadly force. The arguments will kick in again: Wilson faked his own injuries, the police are lying about the injuries, and/or Wilson shouldn’t have shot Brown despite the injuries but should have fought it out with fists like a man (despite the size disparity or the fact that Brown might have been going after his gun).

The Missouri law (and laws of many other states) on police use of deadly force is pretty clear, however: officers are allowed to use deadly force in subduing an unarmed person under certain circumstances.

Here are the relevant portions of the Missouri statute:

A law enforcement officer in effecting an arrest or in preventing an escape from custody is justified in using deadly force only…

(2) When he reasonably believes that such use of deadly force is immediately necessary to effect the arrest and also reasonably believes that the person to be arrested

(a) Has committed or attempted to commit a felony; or

(b) Is attempting to escape by use of a deadly weapon; or

(c) May otherwise endanger life or inflict serious physical injury unless arrested without delay.

Another way to put it, based on SCOTUS rulings, is that “police officers are allowed to use deadly force against a fleeing felon only if they have reason to believe the felon is dangerous.”

We don’t yet have enough facts about the Brown-Wilson confrontation to know whether their interaction justified Wilson’s use of deadly force under this statute. But there’s no question that it may indeed have been justified under it by Brown’s purported assault on Wilson causing facial injury (a felony), his alleged (and almost successful) attempt to get his weapon, and his supposed run towards the officer in the face of warnings. These acts would be indicative of his continued dangerousness. And if Brown indeed was coming towards Wilson with aggressive intent during his final run, he wasn’t “a fleeing felon” at all, he was in the midst of an intended assault on Wilson.

But my guess is that even if all of those things ultimately are proven, the protestors still will consider Brown an innocent and Wilson a guilty racist. There’s also little doubt in my mind that if both men had been white, the incident would have received some local coverage and not much else. I’m also fairly sure that both men might have been white under a similar scenario, because it is hardly unheard of for white men to commit robberies and resist arrest, or for white police to kill white suspects in shootings that are later disputed.

[ADDENDUM: Here’s a poll that indicates racial differences in the trust people place in police investigations of incidents such as the Brown killing:

The poll also finds that blacks have little confidence in the investigations into the shooting.

Seventy-six percent of blacks say they are not confident in the investigations, with 18 percent expressing confidence in the probes.

Fifty-two percent of whites, though, have confidence, with 33 percent saying they have little or none.

Not really a high level of trust in the police investigations for either race, is it?]

[ADDENDUM II: Then there are situations such as this this just-breaking story, which appears to be a case of “suicide by cop” in nearby St. Louis. Neither the race of the man who was killed nor the police who shot him has been announced yet. If it never is announced, I would guess they are either all black or all white.]

You want moderate Muslims?

The New Neo Posted on by

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.

On ISIS: even the Pope says “maybe”

The New Neo Posted on by

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.]

The Michael Brown case: eyewitnesses and the forensic evidence

The New Neo Posted on by

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.

Surprisingly, Jonathan Chait…

The New Neo Posted on by

…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.]

Why I blog

The New Neo Posted on by

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.

Michael Brown case update

The New Neo Posted on by

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 indicted

The New Neo Posted on by

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.

And Brian Beutler and his ilk are de facto rabble rousers

The New Neo Posted on by

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.

Obama: checked out

The New Neo Posted on by

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.