Month: April 2007

[Megan] There are a lot of people asking why those celebrating the release of the Duke Lacrosse players weren’t so excited about various other innocent guys who were let off after actually spending years of their lives in jail . . . poor black men, often accused of raping white women. To some extent, this is a fair point. But only to some extent. After all, the reason these guys got so much publicity in the first place is that they were white rich men accused of raping a poor black woman. That’s also, as far as I can tell, why Mr Nifong was so eager to railroad them. Had they been black men, the charges might well never have been brought, or quietly dismissed when the DNA didn’t turn out.

The real issue, I think, is not the publicity, or that we care about white people more, but that it has become very, very clear that having a good lawyer really, really matters. In this case, the victim was sufficiently unhinged, and the DNA sufficiently strong, that it probably would have been dismissed anyway; but there remains the awful, and not altogether unlikely, possibility that had they been poor (white or black) these boys would have gone to jail for a crime that pretty clearly didn’t happen. Inexperienced and overworked public defenders are no substitute for a good trial attorney. Attorney incompetence seems to be the main culprit in almost all cases where someone actually innocent goes to jail. This is intolerable. But no one wants to put real money into the public defender system.

[Megan] Yesterday I attended the GEL conference, sponsored by Creative Good, a small consulting firm that specialises in customer experience. I highly recommend the conference (registration for next year is starting now!), but it’s very difficult to explain. Basically, it’s just a series of presenters who deliver … an experience. Almost every one was brilliant, and there were no bad ones. Seriously, sign up. Just about everyone who’s ever attended the thing agrees that it’s an amazing, amazing day.

This guy, for instance, makes screensavers. Okay, yawn. No, actually, it’s fascinating. The things he programs rely on a few simple rules  to create amazingly complicated emergent patterns. It’s fractals in  action. The neatest thing he showed us was his new project, the Whitney Music Box, which combines Fibonacci sequences with harmonics. Each of the objects on the screen has its own tone, which goes off as it crosses a horizontal line. The result is emergent audio, as well as visual, patterns. At the end, he grouped us by birthdays, assigned us each a screen object, and had us make the sound as it crossed the line, which sounds dorky, in a hippie summer-camp kind of way, but in fact was really, really neat. Check out the site. It’s a great way to waste a Saturday morning.

[Megan] Quote of the day, from the ever-brilliant Alex Massie:

I’m far from unsympathetic to sensible proposals that might make it harder for the wrong sort of people to purchase guns, but the notion that gun legislation should be modeled on the sort of panicked, knee-jerk, idiocy that has become de rigeur at airports is not an idea, I think, that should be pursued. There may be a virtue in creating the impression of greater security at the expense of convenience and comfort but it’s far from clear that that is, in fact, the case.

Although I’d argue that it’s completely clear to me that most of the screening is useless flappery designed to give the appearance of security without the substance. I mean, I realise that as long as terrorists can clip their nails on a plane, America cannot really call itself free, but still . . .

[Megan] The New York Times has a piece on the new birth control pills that make you skip your period entirely. For medical reasons, I can’t take birth control pills, so the question is academic for me, but I do have friends who have thought about taking them. What I find fascinating about this piece is that the New York Times reporters found any number of granola types to give quotes like "I just feel like there’s a reason you’re getting it", and explore the allegedly complicated relationship women have with their periods. (In my experience, the relationship isn’t that complicated:  women think it sucks weasels, except for the alternatives, which are worse.) Yet they didn’t find anyone to mention the obvious reason for not taking the thing, cited by all the women I know as the dominant concern: getting your period tells you you’re not pregnant. 

No one wants to end up four months gone and contemplating a late-term abortion; leaving aside the moral issues, and even the difficulties of obtaining an abortion after the first trimester, the surgery becomes much more complicated and risky as the pregnancy advances. Nor, if they think they’d keep the baby, do they want to be suddenly scrambling to arrange their lives around a new baby in four months. But the New York Times tucks this point into a half sentence, while nattering on endlessly about side issues.

[Reihan] John Robb of Global Guerrillas has written the most important book of the year, Brave New War.  You can find an excerpt here, and a truly brilliant  extrapolation of present-day security trends into the future here.  I don’t agree with everything Robb has to say, but I do think serious thinkers about terrorism and war need to reckon with is very powerful and persuasive arguments.  I would absolutely to review this book, and hopefully I’ll get a chance to do so.

[Reihan] When you read China’s Secret Files, you get a very clear picture of how carefully and methodically, and successfully, the leadership of the Chinese Communist Party reproduces itself.  Planning for the transition to the so-called Fourth Generation began literally decades ago.  Young cadres were singled out for managerial prowess, and they were advanced ahead of more senior colleagues.  Favoritism and cronyism played a role in the subsequent jockeying for power, to be sure, and there were many petty rivalries.  And yet there’s no denying that those who eventually made it to the top are, without exception, shrewd, smart, and impressive.  The contrast with our own executive branch is not encouraging.  So when the Chinese leadership starts talking about "democracy," you can rest assured that they’ve given the subject a lot of careful consideration. 

China’s Secret Files describes in vivid detail how Li Ruihuan, a member of the Third Generation and a prominent liberal, was outmaneuvered in his effort to remain remain in power.  Of course, Li was a "liberal" only by the standards of the CCP.  He believed in the supremacy of the CCP, and in a broadly authoritarian political system.  But because he was concerned first and foremost with Party corruption, he advocated "external checks" on Party members, including competitive elections up to the provincial level. Lu Dingyi argued in a similar vein, and now it seems his once-outré notions are getting a respectful hearing.

He adds that the party cannot continue to act as both “player and referee” when it comes to corruption. The referee role belongs to the public, he said, and is “a basic function of democracy.”

There you have it: a perfectly pragmatic, anodyne case for a radical break with the past.    In my view, some kind of "managed democracy" is the likely result.  (This is one of the scenarios described in Bruce Gilley’s brilliant China’s Democratic Future, a book I can’t recommend enough.)   

For those of you who believe Russia’s "managed democracy" has been an unmitigated disaster, it’s worth contemplating some of the uglier alternatives.  (Check out this article in BusinessWeek on "Russia’s New Deal.")  Perry Anderson, no fan of Putin, offered a balanced interpretation in the LRB in late January.  I found this particularly interesting

A sense of the sheer desolation of the demographic scene is given by the plight of women – more protected from the catastrophe than men – in contemporary Russia. Virtually half of them are single. In the latest survey, out of every 1000 Russian women, 175 have never been married, 180 are widows and 110 are divorcees, living on their own. Such is the solitude of those who, relatively speaking, are the survivors. There are now 15 per cent more women alive in this society than men.

When you consider that China has the opposite problem, of a large population of surplus males or "bare branches," consider that the Chinese future could be darker, more violent, more revanchist than Russia’s quite smooth post-communist transition.     I think we can agree that a basically peaceful managed Chinese democracy would be far preferable to an aggressive and xenophobic unmanaged Chinese democracy.

Is this a false choice?  Well, I certainly hope so.

PS- For a more breathless and provocative interpretation of China’s future, try Joshua Cooper Ramo’s The Beijing Consensus.  I don’t agree with this product or service, but I do endorse it as worth your time.

[Ross] Rick Perlstein, the author of one of the best political histories I’ve ever read (which is unaccountably out of print), has started his own blog, which promises to be interesting and irritating in equal measure. Here’s a case where it’s the latter:

Last year I attended a major conference of conservative intellectuals and activists at Princeton University as the token liberal. There I heard Richard Land of the Southern Baptist Convention say that the Democratic Party ostracizes all pro-life Democrats. Reflecting on the pro-life Democrat who happened to hold the obscure position of Senate minority leader, I finally realized I’d met, socialized with, interviewed, and debated enough conservative Republicans to come to a firm conclusion: They could be divided into two groups–those who had lied or stonewalled to my face, and those who hadn’t…yet.

The ostracization of pro-life Dems is sometimes overblown by conservatives, I agree. However, so is the notion that Harry Reid is pro-life in any politically meaningful sense. And Perlstein might have picked a better time to cite the Senate Majority Leader as an example of the supposed Democratic big tent than a week in which Reid appeared to acknowledge that he only voted for the partial-birth abortion ban because he expected Sandra Day O’Connor to be there to overturn it. True, he has since backpedaled and claimed he didn’t mean it, but I think the fact that he felt the need to say what he said (that the abortion decision made him wish O’Connor were on the Court) tells you everything you need to know about how well pro-lifers fit into the contemporary Democratic Party.

It’s 4.20 pm on April 20. Time to pay some serious respect:

[Ross] So Harry Reid announced that he thinks the war in Iraq is "lost," prompting general outrage on the right – capped off by Mark Levin’s call for Reid’s resignation:

His legislative efforts to starve our armed forces in the middle of a war are as contemptible as anything I’ve witnessed in my 25 years in Washington. And yesterday he made a statement that was so disgraceful and brazen that it could have been uttered by Tokyo Rose during World War II or Jane Fonda during the Vietnam War. The difference, of course, is that Reid is the highest ranking Democrat in the United States Senate.

So, Reid announces to our brave volunteers that their country is sending them to a lost war. And he announces to our enemy that victory is within their reach — just keep up the killing a little longer . . .

Rather than join the chorus demanding Gonzales’s resignation, let me be the first to demand Reid’s resignation. And let’s see how many pundits, conservative and otherwise, will join me.

Here’s my question: Is there any imaginable point in any imaginable conflict where Mark Levin would admit that the United States had lost a war? I don’t mean to be flip, and I say this as someone who generally thinks that the U.S. hasn’t necessarily lost in Iraq; we probably have, but the outcome is still sufficiently in doubt and the stakes sufficiently high that I want to give the "surge," however ineffectual it may prove (or may already be proving), at least a Tom Friedmanesque six months to work. But even allowing that Reid shouldn’t have said what he said, it’s still the case that the United States can lose wars, like any world power; that we may well lose this one (in some sense, at least); and that at some point, in this struggle or another, some American politician will say "we’ve lost the war" and be entirely correct. Given this reality, I wish Levin (and many of his fellow "till the last dog dies" Iraq War backers) would clarify whether there’s any situation in which they would greet a U.S. defeat abroad with any response save a rote invocation of the stab-in-the-back narrative.

Rogers, Arkansas, 9 am.