Month: September 2009

Exemplified.

Radley Balko calls this essay “one of the more moving blog posts I’ve read in a long time.” Classically Liberal writes:

[Sex crime] laws are not so much protecting children from predators as they are turning them into predators. Look at this chart. Individuals who are legally defined as sex offenders. When you look at the ages of the offenders you see that 14-year-olds are apparently the most sexually  dangerous group in America. The rate declines from there, but throughout adolescence the law is far more likely to deem kids as offenders. You may imagine the dirty old man down the street. But with age people are less likely to “offend”. One reason is that they are more mature. But another reason is clear. Once you reach a certain age, having sex with people your own age is normally not considered a crime. The explosion of “youthful sex offenders” is not the result of our kids becoming perverts. It is the result of the law criminalizing what is a normal part of growing up.

These kids are criminals, not necessarily because they violated the life, liberty or property of another person. They are criminals because the politicians defined them as criminals. These damned “family values” conservatives, and compassionate feminist Leftists, who banded together to “save the children,” turned America’s kids into sex offenders by fiat. And they feel good about it. They are satisfied by it and only wish more had been rounded up earlier. The Left wants everyone in therapy and under the perpetual care of the state, and the Right wants everyone in prison, or in fear of the law, and under the thumb of the police. And that is what is happening.

CL details some youthful indiscretions deemed “criminal”:

It takes so little for this happen to a child. A girl in school has oral sex with a boy in school. She becomes a sex offender for the rest of her life. Streaking a school event, as a practical joke, becomes a sex crime in the new America. Two kids “moon” a passerby and are incarcerated in jail as sex offenders, where they may well learn a lesson or two about rape. A teenager, who takes a sexy of photo of him, or herself, is paraded around the community as a “child pornographer” for the rest of his or her life. Two kids in the back seat of a car have fumbling sex. The law says one is an offender because the other is a “victim.” One week later, a birthday passes, and it is no longer a crime. One week’s difference and a life is ruined. In other cases an act that is legal on Monday is illegal on Tuesday because the older of the two turned one year older. That becomes enough to qualify him, or her, as an offender.

The Economist recently ran a must-read editorial on the broader insanity of America’s sex offender laws.

Jerry Coyne responds with his customary dismissive sweep to my post (followed up here) on theodicy. Coyne:

When a tsunami sweeps away a bunch of Indonesians, when a baby dies of leukemia, when Jews were driven into the gas chambers of Auschwitz: how, exactly, are those ways of “letting go to God”?  Or of “recognizing one’s own mortality and limits”?  This is intellectual nonsense.  These are words without meaning. And they are insulting and infuriating to anybody with a brain.

I wonder what facts would make Sullivan find the argument convincing?  It can’t be the existence of yet more innocent people suffering needlessly, because, Lord knows, we’ve already seen enough of that.  In fact, I doubt that there is any evidence that would convince Sullivan that there’s a problem, which is why he has no intellectual credibility on the issue of faith. “His faith teaches him” means, of course, that somebody told him that suffering was part of God’s plan, and that’s why he believes it. For someone who’s supposedly an intellectual, Sullivan shows a distressing tendency to accept authority and avoid thinking for himself.

I wonder how much of my writing Coyne has ever read, how much of my wrestling with doctrine and theology and faith he has perused before he dismisses one side of an ancient debate as “insulting to anyone with a brain”. Obviously, my case of letting go to God reflects a Christian understanding of what one’s response to suffering could be. This does not deny suffering, or its hideous injustices, or the fact that so many in the animal world suffer without any such relief or transcendence.

For me, the unique human capacity to somehow rise above such suffering, while experiencing it as vividly as any animal, is evidence of God’s love for us (and the divine spark within us), while it cannot, of course, resolve the ultimate mystery of why we are here at all in a fallen, mortal world. This Christian response to suffering merely offers a way in which to transcend this veil of tears a little. No one is saying this is easy or should not provoke bouts of Job-like anger or despair or isn’t at some level incomprehensible. The Gospels, in one of their many internal literal contradictions, have Jesus’ last words on the cross as both a despairing, “My God! My God! Why have you forsaken me?” and a letting go: “It is accomplished.” If you see this as less a literal error than a metaphorical truth (i.e. if you are not a fundamentalist), you realize that God’s only son experienced despair of this kind as well. And resolution.

My own reconciliation with this came not from authority, but from experience. I lived through a plague which killed my dearest friend and countless others I knew and loved. I was brought at one point to total collapse and a moment of such profound doubt in the goodness of God that it makes me shudder still. But God lifted me into a new life in a way I still do not understand but that I know as deeply and as irrevocably as I know anything.

If this testimony is infuriating to anyone with a brain, then I am sorry. It is the truth as I experienced it. It is the truth as I experience it still.

This was the SWAT team that treated a few gay men dancing in their underwear in a leather bar as a threat on a par with street gangs. They have a history:

Kathryn Johnston (June 26, 1914 – November 21, 2006)[1] was an elderly Atlanta, Georgia woman who was shot by three undercover police officers in her home on Neal Street in northwest Atlanta on November 21, 2006, where she had lived for 17 years. She fired a warning shot into the ceiling after officers pried off burglar bars and broke down her door using a no knock warrant. None of the officers were injured by her gunfire, but Johnston was killed by the officers. After the officers shot Johnston, they left her handcuffed on the floor while she bled to death, and then planted marijuana from their patrol car in her basement to try to help justify the shooting.

Ackerman does the heavy lifting:

The sun rose today and its gravitational force kept the planet twisting around it through the void, so naturally Fred and Kim Kagan, the neoconservative wing of counterinsurgency, have put out a call for between 40,000 and 45,000 additional troops to be sent to Afghanistan in the next year …

And where does that massive influx of troops come from? Their answer is a non-answer:

It’s difficult to understand how the Kagans think there are 40,000 – 45,000 U.S. troops available for deployment — the Pentagon doesn’t think the Army can deploy a single additional combat brigade to Afghanistan in the next six months — and the report is silent on whether to increase the pace of withdrawal from Iraq (formerly a Kagan no-no); whether to decrease the time in between deployments, which the Army and the Secretary of Defense will resist after having to do it to sustain the 2007 Iraq troop surge; or whether to … I don’t know. They just want the politically treacherous 40,000-45,000 troop increase, and now the GOP will have a troop figure to say Afghanistan requires if Obama doesn’t provide such a ginormous increase. (They also back the consensus call for speeding up the development and deployment of Afghan security forces.)

What is the point of arguing for a strategy that simply cannot be done? My suspicion is that, like most neocon projects of the recent past, this is not an actual strategy for resolving the problem. It's a domestic political move designed to set up Republican cries of "retreat!" and "surrender!" if the president decides that pulling an LBJ on Afghanistan isn't a good idea. The way the McChrystal report was leaked also suggests a domestic political strategy of bouncing Obama into a deeper, longer war (on top of the eight years already invested).

"By the end of the Clinton administration, I was content to celebrate the triumph of conservatism as I understood it, and had no desire for other than incremental changes in the economic and social structure of the United States. I saw no need for the estate tax to be abolished, marginal personal-income tax rates further reduced, the government shrunk, pragmatism in constitutional law jettisoned in favor of “originalism,” the rights of gun owners enlarged, our military posture strengthened, the rise of homosexual rights resisted, or the role of religion in the public sphere expanded. All these became causes embraced by the new conservatism that crested with the reelection of Bush in 2004," – Richard Posner, channeling my own thoughts uncannily.

And this is why David Brooks' encomium to Irving Kristol today does not convince me. If Irving Kristol had remained a real empirical skeptic, as Brooks claims Kristol was throughout, he would have resisted the transformation of conservatism into a religious cult and a neo-imperial movement. But he did neither.

He actually celebrated the cooptation of conservatism by religious fanaticism, refusing to make any enemies on his right, as his empirical critique of the welfare state morphed into the idolatry of Reagan, the collapse of any serious interest in actually governing, the enabling of massive, destabilizing debt, and unwavering support for Israel's long assisted suicide. 

Yes, there was an affect of laconic disinterestedness. But it was an affect, like his even more radical son's urbane gussying up of know-nothing violence and fiscal recklessness. The gimmick of the Kristols was to wrap a Trotskyite mentality in a world-weary, bourgeois gauze. It enabled them to evade any responsibility for their grotesque errors, errors which led to the deaths and torture of countless people, and the bankrupting of America, while pretending to be reasonable and empirical intellectuals.

The urbane patina of moderation was, in other words, a lie. You know: one of those many lies that the Kristols believe are good for the rest of us.

“Our women are hot,” – Jason Mattera, Young Americans for Freedom spokesman, arguing for the conservative cause at the Value Voters Summit.

Michael Lind did not get sucked in to the Iraq consensus as I did. He’s far more liberal than I am, but his understanding of the deep fissures within the modern conservative movement is hard to beat.

Ambers explains what happened to Obama when the McChrystal report was leaked. The core problem with the counter-insurgency model is the lack of any credible Afghan government to do the counter-insurgency for. There are no great options, but Biden is surely onto something with this alternative strategy:

Removing the incentives for the Taliban to be radicalized and destroying the leadership of Al Qaeda — basically, bribing people and killing people, and doing so indefinitely, but with irregular and special operations forces — is the alternative. The Biden alternative focuses on the intricate connections between India, Pakistan and Afghanistan. Briefly put, Pakistan facilitates the Taliban and various insurgencies in Afghanistan because it preserves the option of living space to the north — part of the grand goal of turning Pakistan into a haven for Islam. Kashmir's fate is crucial to this dynamic. But India won't talk about Kashmir; Pakistan won't — can't — truly cut off ties with the Taliban until Kashmir is dealt with — and the U.S seems to have no leverage whatsoever.