Month: December 2006

[Andrew]

The very political pregnancy of Mary Cheney – the cover-essay in this week’s New Republic, by yours truly.

Ballard, Washington, 4 pm.

[Alex]

In Georgia, a seventeen year old boy has been sentenced to ten years imprisonment for the heinous crime of a spot of consensual oral sex with a 15 year old girl.

Eugene Volokh notes that the Georgia Supreme Court may have had no choice but to uphold this appalling sentence since:

1. The age of consent in Georgia is 16.

2. In 2006, the Georgia Legislature amended the statute to provide that oral sex between an under-18-year-old and a 13-to-15-year-old is only a misdemeanor, with a maximum penalty of a year in jail. This revised statute would have thus made the defendant’s conduct a misdemeanor had he committed his crime after the statute’s enactment, but the statute expressly provided that it wasn’t retroactive.

3. Even at the time the act occurred, genital sex between an under-18-year-old and a 14-or-15-year-old was also a misdemeanor.

     4. This defendant had no criminal record that would justify an especially long sentence.

The presiding judge argued he had to lock the boy up for a decade without the prospect of parole:

"…while I am very sympathetic to Wilson’s argument regarding the injustice of sentencing this promising young man with good grades and no criminal history to ten years in prison without parole and a lifetime registration as a sexual offender because he engaged in consensual oral sex with a 15-year-old victim only two years his junior, this Court is bound by the Legislature’s determination that young persons in Wilson’s situation are not entitled to the misdemeanor treatment now accorded to identical behavior…"

A decade for a consensual "act of oral sodomy"? I suppose the lad’s lucky he isn’t being castrated.   

[Clive]

Here’s a little festive series. Every Christmas, the newspapers and mags do their round-ups of the best new books. But what about titles from the past that people have either just discovered or re-read?  My "old" choice, by a long way, would be Norman Lewis’s "Naples ’44", an account of his experiences as a British Army intelligence officer in WW2.  I galloped through it this summer after seeing it mentioned in a Washington Post article about the aftermath of the Iraq war. I honestly can’t recommend Lewis’s book highly enough. It’s a truly magical piece of work, tinged with tragedy and absurdity, yet full of beauty amidst the chaos.

I’ve been asking my fellow-bloggers for their nominations.  First off is the writer, Susan Hill (left), author of the novel which inspired that long-running West End hit, "The Woman In Black". She has one of the most popular lit-blogs around, and is planning a "virtual" literary festival in the New Year.

"In 1924 Virginia and Leonard Woolf, at their Hogarth Press, published a novel which is a masterpiece, as great a novel, I dare suggest, as any of Virginia’s own. It is called "The Rector’s Daughter", its author was a young woman called F.M. Mayor and I have re-read it often and every, every time,  it comes up fresh and its greatness astonishes. It speaks the poignant, unbearably harsh truth about love ‚Äì the love between parent and child which may destroy a future; and the unspoken passion of a spinster for a man who suddenly becomes silly with infatuation for someone younger and quite unsuitable. Painful beyond bearing, acutely imagined and immaculately written, F.M. Mayor`s masterpiece is as impressive now as when VW took it on.  It is out of print again and I plan to re-publish it. It is too great a novel to be unavailable."

[Andrew]

I lay out the historical analogy for the Middle East. I hope I’m wrong.

[Alex]

It’s become a cliche to observe that some of the best writing in the UK press can be found on the obituary pages. Frank Johnson, the brilliant Daily Telegraph parliamentary sketch writer, died last week. Here’s how the Guardian obit begins:

The former Spectator editor and conservative columnist Frank Johnson, who has died aged 63 of cancer, will be remembered by lovers of British journalism for his claim that the most memorable thing that happened to him was when Maria Callas stuck her nipple into his left eye.

I dare you not to read the rest to find out more.

[Alex]

Michael Gerson, George W Bush’s former speechwriter, has what I believe is known as a "clarifying" article at another weekly news magazine. If you believe in limited-government you are, apparently, a "fundamentalist".

Gerson, like many big-government and left-wing types seems to believe that all small government conservatives are libertarians and all libertarians are swivel-eyed loons. Sign me up for that then. But a belief in the ineffable goodness and efficiency of government is every bit as ideological an attitude as thinking markets can provide a better way. It’s not just a belief in free markets per se that persuades libertarians, it’s that markets can also lead to better outcomes. In other words, there’s a happy marriage between principle and pragmatism.

Gerson warns the Republican party that giving in to the limited-government types will lead to electoral disaster for the party. It can choose between "purity" and "power" but it can’t have both. In this he may be right: it’s a sad truth that any quasi-libertarian approach to politics has a very limited appeal (and that’s in the US – the outlook for libertarianism in Britain is woefully bleak).

The oft-cited Cato Institute study that reported that 13% of the electorate might be termed "libertarian-minded" struck me as being simultaneously a depressingly small and a vastly over-stated figure: the former becuase I wish there were more people who could properly be considered libertarians, the latter becuase I don’t believe anything like 13% of the electorate actually are libertarian-minded.

It’s unfortunate that people like big government. There is only limited demand for limited government. Which is why, I’m afraid, Brink Lindsey’s semi-famous "Liberaltarian" essay proposing a grand alliance between liberals and libertarians is unlikely to prove more than an interesting intellectual exercise.

Yes, as Gerson makes clear, the Republican party is a cold house for libertarians right now. But Democrats aren’t likely to offer any greater comfort. Sure, they may be on the good guys’ side vis a vis certain social issues and, say, farm subsidies but then there’s stuff like trade where Democrats are even keener than Republicans to make companies pay bribes for the privilege of selling their goods. A protection racket is a protection racket whether it’s run by the mob or by government.

Temperamentally, of course, this suits many libertarians fine. As the old saw puts it, corralling libertarians is akin to herding armed cats. They wouldn’t be happy being part of any mass movement.
In this week’s New Republic Jon Chait offers a few brutal home truths:

[Some libertarians like to] stress that President Bush’s share of the libertarian vote dropped precipitously between 2000 and 2004. But, during that time, Bush’s total share of the vote rose by almost 3 percent. So, however many voters were turned off by the prescription-drug bill or the Patriot Act, many more were turned on. This demonstrates the obvious (to nonlibertarians, anyway) point that wooing a small bloc with unpopular views is not a sound political strategy. Likewise, if Democrats were to denounce psychiatry and quote endlessly from the works of L. Ron Hubbard, they could jack up their share of the Scientologist vote, but it probably wouldn’t help their overall popularity.

It would be lovely to think Chait is wrong here, but I don’t think he is. The entire drift of contemporary politics – on both the right and the left – is away from classical liberal values.

So it’s yet another case of "O tempora, o mores" and all the rest of it.

[Daniel]

I’m just reading Neal Gabler’s excellent new biography of Walt Disney. And here is Gabler in the LA Times considering Disney’s reputation on the 40th anniversary of his death.

His piece includes this extraordinary comment from the critic Richard Schickel who:

called him in his seminal book "The Disney Version," the "rallying point for the subliterates of our society"

This ridiculous comment reminds me that when Baskin Robbins first came to London I stood in the shop for several minutes trying to choose the correct ice cream. After a while the man behind the counter exclaimed:

For goodness sake it’s only a bleedin’ ice cream

[Daniel]

I’ve just learned from Drudge that:

Opponents of hardline President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad took an early lead in key races in Iran’s local elections

which is good to know, since I didn’t stay up for the results programme.

Apparently Government officials were quick

to praise the turnout, saying it would send a strong message to the West that Iran is a democracy

which at least shows they are keeping pace with the latest Western techniques in the provision of lame election excuses.

However, Harry’s Place, the first place I look for stories on Islamicism, undercuts this claim with this story:

Iranian student activists who staged an angry protest against President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad last week have gone into hiding in fear for their lives after his supporters threatened them with revenge.

The whole Guardian piece on which this post is based also includes this:

The university authorities’ contentious use of the disciplinary code was said to be a trigger for last week’s protest. About 70 students have been suspended and threatened with expulsion for various political activities, including writing articles critical of the government.

Last month, the authorities demolished two building belonging to the Islamic students’ committee – a moderate grouping representing diverse opinions. An elected student body was also disbanded. Women students have been told to wear conservative dress and remove any makeup.

[Alex]

Among the unfortunate aspects of today’s New York Times splash is that it’s hard to be surprised by the fact that a US citizen was detained for three months without charge in Iraq, despite being an FBI informer. If that’s how Donald Vance, a Navy veteran working as a contractor in Baghdad, was treated, well, how sensitively do you think we’re dealing with the local population?

A spokeswoman for the Pentagon’s detention operations in Iraq, First Lt. Lea Ann Fracasso, said in written answers to questions that the men had been “treated fair and humanely,” and that there was no record of either man complaining about their treatment.

She said officials did not reach Mr. Vance’s contact at the F.B.I. until he had been in custody for three weeks. Even so, she said, officials determined that he “posed a threat” and decided to continue holding him. He was released two months later, Lieutenant Fracasso said, based on a “subsequent re-examination of his case,” and his stated plans to leave Iraq.