Month: August 2010

by Conor Friedersdorf

Graeme Wood's piece on replacing jails with electronic monitoring of convicts is well worth a read. He tested out a tracking anklet himself:

Devices such as the one I wore on my leg already allow tens of thousands of convicts to walk the streets relatively freely, impeded only by the knowledge that if they loiter by a schoolyard, say, or near the house of the ex-girlfriend they threatened, or on a street corner known for its crack trade, the law will come to find them. Compared with incarceration, the cost of such surveillance is minuscule—mere dollars per day—and monitoring has few of the hardening effects of time behind bars. Nor do all the innovations being developed depend on technology. Similar efforts to control criminals in the wild are under way in pilot programs that demand adherence to onerous parole guidelines, such as frequent, random drug testing, and that provide for immediate punishment if the parolees fail. The result is the same: convicts who might once have been in prison now walk among us unrecognized—like pod people, or Canadians.

There are, of course, many thousands of dangerous felons who can’t be trusted on the loose. But if we extended this form of enhanced, supervised release even to just the nonviolent offenders currently behind bars, we would empty half our prison beds in one swoop. Inevitably, some of those released would take the pruning-shears route. And some would offend again. But then, so too do those convicts released at the end of their brutal, hardening sentences under our current system. And even accepting a certain failure rate, by nearly any measure such “prisons without bars” would represent a giant step forward for justice, criminal rehabilitation, and society.

Read the rest here.

by Patrick Appel

Ta-Nehisi is out in the woods working on a writing project:

There's a great jazz pianist up here with whom I have shared meals and talked often. The first day we met he informed me that the essence of our work was learning to get out of our own fucking way. I am learning that out here–how to get out of my own fucking way–and really listen to what I care about, what I truly ache to say. I do not ache to edit, in real-time, the collected speeches of Barack Obama.

Part one here.

by Chris Bodenner

"It's an atrocity that they would take a young man with honorable intentions who served his country and lie about how he died to promote a war, to use him as a propaganda tool. … He was a human being. By putting this kind of saintly quality to him, you're taking away the struggle of being a human being," – Mary Tillman, speaking about her son in the upcoming documentary.

by Conor Friedersdorf

Rob Long is an enormously entertaining writer whose provocations I've enjoyed a lot lately. I've got to disagree, however, with this post, titled "All You Need to Read Is…"

The payoff: "Instapundit, pretty much." I say that as a longtime Instapundit reader. "Glenn Reynolds is a terrific writer: eloquent, witty, pared down to the word," says Rob Long, and I agree. In the past, I've interviewed him, recommended his book, An Army of Davids, and enjoyed numerous of his articles. The problem is Rob's next statement: "If you get all of your news from his site, trust me: you're getting all the news."

In a way, this is a quibble. Mr. Long is being hyperbolic. He doesn't actually rely on Instapundit for all his news, he's just remarking on the impressive breadth of subjects that blog covers. Still, it's worth pointing out that the coverage is filtered through the worldview of Glenn Reynolds, and that as a result certain narratives are unlikely to be upset. It would be reasonably easy for a person to read Instapundit, click through to several links each day, and never have their "conservo-libertarian except for foreign policy" worldview challenged. Especially since there are more partisan zingers and one-liners aimed at rhetorical point-scoring than there used to be. Unless I am mistaken, it is not a blog that aspires to be a fair and balanced look at the world.

It is nevertheless a perfectly defensible enterprise, and one I continue to find worth scrolling through a couple times a week, despite what I regard as its shortcomings.  But it isn't a substitute for wide reading anymore than any other one man blog.

Conceding my bias on this matter, I think The Daily Dish does a much better job (than Instapundit and most every other blog) at prominently highlighting dissents, and I'd certainly never recommend that anyone get their news exclusively from this site. (For one thing, Instapundit has us beat on the actually very important disaster preparedness beat, among others.) A strength of the blogosphere is that readers can engage news and commentary through the lens of a personality they trust. Inescapably, you're also subject to the blind spots of your favorite bloggers.

Don't rely on any of us too exclusively.

by Patrick Appel

Ambinder answers:

38 percent of Americans in 2006 said they would never vote for a Muslim for president, just about the number who said they would never vote for a gay person. In December of 2004, Cornell released a survey showing that half of Americans consciously told a pollster that they would favor a curtailment of civil rights for Muslims. About 40 percent of Republicans had explicitly anti-Muslim views in the survey.

What's fascinating — and disturbing — about prejudice against Muslims is that it is not driven by the same factors that have marginalized immigrants and minorities in the past. There are no economic incentives to push Muslims to the outside; there is an instinctive mistrust of Islam within evangelical Christianity and a very persistent post 9/11 ideological gulf between average and elite Americans. As of 2010, 43 percent of Americans admitted feeling bias against Muslims.

by Chris Bodenner

A reader writes:

One of the oddest things things about the tenure debate in America is that it completely ignores the clear comparison-condition: Britain. For a couple decades, Britain has not had tenure for most academics, who  are now on "permanent" contracts that can be terminated at department heads' discretion at any time. The result? Not an explosion of creativity.

I have had the opportunity of being faculty in both the USA and Britain, and the things I saw at a top university in England were chilling.

For example, one mid-career faculty member (Senior Lecturer) was given ultimatums that she had to change her research area to a more mainstream area or she would be fired (she did change); another was fired from his university for publishing too many books explaining science to the general public. Beam writes that American tenure disincentivizes junior researchers from do groundbreaking research, but why does giving academic freedom to *no one* improve incentives for anyone?

One lesser-known dimension of academic is participating in emerging research areas that most people have never heard of. This freedom is not as newsworthy as the freedom to say things that the powers that be don't want to hear, but it may be just as important for a country's long-term scientific health. Pick an arbitrary research area that has emerged in the last 5-10 years, and which is not known by the public. You'll find that the UK is almost invariably badly underrepresented, compared to smaller countries with true tenure (Canada and Spain, for example).

The reward of tenure is a major incentive for faculty. Top academics have a choice of what country they want to work in. I've gotten offers in Germany, Australia, and Ireland, for instance, and I'm still quite junior. Why would a top scientist choose a job without security when most countries maintain tenure? Getting rid of tenure will lose superstars and leadership in emerging areas. It's probably the most powerful step that America could take to make sure it loses its scientific leadership.

by Patrick Appel

Bernstein says the Park 51 controversy doesn't matter:

It's not going to affect elections, it's not substantively important, and to the extent it's symbolically important…well, let's just say it's not symbolically important as a stand-alone issue in any significant way (at best, it's what Kevin Drum says, one straw — so shouldn't we pay more attention to all that other straw?).  I'm sorry to be a stick in the mud about it, but it just isn't actually a big story no matter how much it gets hyped.  Okay?

Ezra Klein is on the same page. Andrew Sprung dissents:

I think the Republicans completely repudiating Bush's efforts to differentiate Islam from Islamism is significant. I think Palin's success in bringing another poisonous meme to the eruption point is significant. I think that waves of hysterical demagoguery that hit fever pitch are significant. And I think that, as with torture, when it comes to defense of civil liberties leaders have to be better than the rest of us, because majorities will sell those liberties without a twitch for a modicum of relief from rage or fear. When one of our two major parties goes all out demonizing an entire religion and works assiduously to interfere with a local government's approval of a religious institution to be built on private property, that's dangerous.

Bernstein responds:

I'm not saying that anti-Muslim bigotry isn't important; I absolutely think it is. I guess I don't see this particular kerfuffle as nearly as much of a turning point, or whatever, as some of you do. I don't know…Yes, George W. Bush said some good things about tolerance and all in 2001-2002, but I think that there was quite a bit of bigoted stuff coming from the usual suspects even back then, and certainly by mid-decade. IIRC, Muslims became a solid Dem voting block by 2006, maybe by 2004 (but not in 2000), in large part because one party (Bush notwithstanding) was far more likely to use conflate Islam and terrorism a whole lot more than the other was. Someone can check my memory on that, but at any rate, I just don't see this event as looming very large within the general story of civil rights and civil liberties. I mean, we've basically had conservatives saying for the last couple of years that all Muslims should be tortured and that American Muslims shouldn't have any Constitutional protections within the criminal justice system; is this really a significant step after that?

by Patrick Appel

A reader writes:

People who think TED is a new Harvard must have had an experience at Harvard that was very different from mine.  Some of the things I learned came from lectures/class, but 75% or more came from hanging out with friends and acquaintances in the residential houses, and being painlessly exposed to threads of manifold disciplines while eating, drinking, smoking various things, and chasing objets d'amours.  When TED can get drunk and stoned and need me to hold him up, undress him, and put him to bed, while he questions his orientation and talks about how everything is ultimately about math, or about biology, or about linguistics, let me know.

by Conor Friedersdorf

Annie Lowrey reports on the recession and its impact on suicides:

During the Great Depression, the suicide rate increased about 20 percent, from 14 to 17 per 100,000 people. The Asian economic crisis in 1997 led to an estimated 10,400 additional suicides in Japan, Hong Kong and Korea, with suicides spiking more than 40 percent among some demographic groups. But such statistics can mislead, social scientists say. Joblessness does not cause suicide. Rather, it correlates: Depressed persons tend to lose their jobs due to poor work performance, and a few also commit suicide. Jobless people tend to turn to alcohol, worsening their depression, and increasing the chances that they harm themselves. Still, academic studies show that suicide rates tend to move with the unemployment rate. Researchers in New Zealand found that the unemployed were up to three times as likely to commit suicide, with middle-aged men the most likely.

So how many suicides are associated with the recession? Nobody knows, not yet. The statistics lag about three years, so the official Center for Disease Control numbers still predate the financial crisis. Right now, therefore, the reports remain anecdotal. But looking at individual counties’ or cities’ data, there are ominous signs of a real spike. Some counties show no change. Others show dramatic climbs. In rural Elkhart County, Ind., where the unemployment rate is 13.7 percent, there were nearly 40 percent more suicides in 2009 than in a normal year. In Macomb County, Mich., where the unemployment rate is also 13.7 percent, an average of 81 people per year committed suicide between 1979 and 2006. That climbed to 104 in 2008 and to more than 180 in 2009.

The suicide prevention hotlines also show signs of stress.

Here's one to call if you need help.