Affirmative Action For Stupid Rich Kids

The Times brings us a moment in Yale history from the turbulent 60's, when legacy enrollment of the incoming freshman class was slightly reduced - to 12%:

The reaction of the alumni was swift and furious. By the end of 1966, the alumni were in open revolt, and Yale's alumni board hastily formed a special committee to investigate the matter. In 1967, William F. Buckley, an alumnus then running an insurgent campaign for a seat on the Yale Corporation, declared that Yale had ceased to be the "kind of place where your family goes for generations" and had been transformed into an institution where "the son of an alumnus, who goes to a private preparatory school, now has less chance of getting in than some boy from P.S. 109 somewhere."

The alumni backlash was apparently enough to scare Harvard and Princeton away from trying a similar experiment - and the author notes, "Recently, both Harvard and Princeton have admitted legacy applicants at a rate more than triple that of non-legacy applicants.".

A Model of Democracy

Today's London Guardian recounts Bush's claims on the magic of democracy:

For the big Bush idea, earnestly repeated on stump after stump, is to make our world safer and happier by making it more democratic. One person, one grin. And those of us who've spent decades immersed in American politics can see much general, good-hearted sense in that. Democratic nations (at least until last year) tend not to go to war without good reason. Ordinary voting people, left to themselves, are the wisest arbiters we have. Relative freedom works better than autocracy or religious zealotry.

So take the president at his word. Let Iraq, Iran, Syria, Afghanistan and the rest import their ballot boxes and train their single transferable mullahs. Let's gently squeeze aside the leftover colonels, manipulative ayatollahs and corrupt monarchies. Farewell, Mubarak, Assad and (yes!) the House of Saud. Let's give democracy its chance. It may be a stance too interventionist, a panacea too pre-emptive, but at least the theory has benign resonance. Baghdad and Kabul, over the next few months, have great trails to blaze.

The column then brings us a muckrake-by-muckrake account of the U.S. election - and asks,

This, Bush says, is his last election. This is his last chance to show us how it's done. With soft-money ads and surrogate slurs and grotesque simplifications cooked in political hothouses? Is that the way? Is that what Cuba and Libya, not to mention the rest of us, have to look forward to?

Spreadsheet People

Yesterday, David Brooks brought us a typical example of his analytical skills.

There are two sorts of people in the information-age elite, spreadsheet people and paragraph people. Spreadsheet people work with numbers, wear loafers and support Republicans. Paragraph people work with prose, don't shine their shoes as often as they should and back Democrats.

He then proceeds to compare scuffy-shoed liberal professors and reporters with wing-tipped conservative CEO's. He does show a modicum of sense by adding near the end of his piece,

It should be added that not everybody fits predictably into the political camp indicated by a profession. I myself am thinking of founding the Class Traitors Association, made up of conservative writers, liberal accountants and other people so filled with self-loathing that they ally politically with social and cultural rivals.

So many responses are possible - most which come to my mind are sarcastic. "Perhaps, Mr. Brooks, you should rephrase that a bit. It's not paragraphs versus spreadsheets - its ideas versus cash. If you are concerned with thoughts and ideas, you are probably a Democrat; if your world revolves around amassing personal wealth, you are probably a Republican." Or perhaps we should call it "Egalitarianism versus greed. Those who take less-paid helping professions to give back to the community are more likely to be Democrats; Those who wish to bleed the country dry for personal gain are more likely to be Republicans." Silly, sweeping generalizations, sure - but those are the primary tools Mr. Brooks uses in his trade.

Or perhaps we could look at it more simply - his conclusion is just a bit off. Brooks tells us that paragraphs are a Democrat thing. It's not that he's a "class traitor" - as people who attempt to read his columns can attest, the problem is that he isn't a "paragraph person" - he's a lousy columnist. Maybe he should take up accounting.

Darfur

So Colin Powell says it's genocide, and the Bush Administration hasn't sent anybody out to backtrack or say that Powell's position isn't the official position of the Administration.... Now what?

The Neo-Cons & Chechnya

Yesterday's Guardian brought us the claim that the Neo-Cons advocate against Russia in the Chechnya conflict, and turn a very blind eye toward Chechen terrorism:

This harshness towards Putin is perhaps explained by the fact that, in the US, the leading group which pleads the Chechen cause is the American Committee for Peace in Chechnya (ACPC). The list of the self-styled "distinguished Americans" who are its members is a rollcall of the most prominent neoconservatives who so enthusastically support the "war on terror".

* * *

The ACPC heavily promotes the idea that the Chechen rebellion shows the undemocratic nature of Putin's Russia, and cultivates support for the Chechen cause by emphasising the seriousness of human rights violations in the tiny Caucasian republic. It compares the Chechen crisis to those other fashionable "Muslim" causes, Bosnia and Kosovo - implying that only international intervention in the Caucasus can stabilise the situation there.

* * *

Although the White House issued a condemnation of the Beslan hostage-takers, its official view remains that the Chechen conflict must be solved politically. According to ACPC member Charles Fairbanks of Johns Hopkins University, US pressure will now increase on Moscow to achieve a political, rather than military, solution - in other words to negotiate with terrorists, a policy the US resolutely rejects elsewhere.

Some people will take any opportunity to bash the "neo-cons", or exaggerate their position, so I viewed the piece with a jaundiced eye.

But today, leading neo-con Daniel Pipes shared his views in the Times:

The terrorist attack in Beslan in Russia's North Caucasus was not only bloody but viciously sadistic: the children taken hostage by pro-Chechen terrorists were denied food and drink and even forbidden to go to the bathroom, then massacred when the siege was broken. It is proper for the civilized world to express outrage and feel solidarity with the Russian people. But to say this is not necessarily to agree with those - including President Bush and President Vladimir Putin of Russia - who would equate the massacre with the 9/11 attacks and Islamic terrorism in general.

Um... excuse me? (Note his use of the infamous "but" clause, used habitually by the defenders of terrorism - "This incident is indefensible, but....") Perhaps he'll explain that....

Terrorism is a means to an end: it can be employed for limited ends as well as for unlimited destructiveness. The terrorists who blew up the train station in Madrid just before the Spanish election this year had a specific goal in mind: to compel the withdrawal of Spanish troops from Iraq. The Chechen case is, in some respects, analogous. A small group of Muslim people, the Chechens have been battling their Russian conquerors for centuries.

An - so Chechen terrorism, involving massacre of children, is understandable and excusable because... in the mind of Pipes it's like Israel-Palestine? How do people like Pipes not choke on their own words when they advance such wildly hypocritical, internally inconsistent positions - and stand as apologists for one of history's worst terrorist attacks on a civilian target?

It's All About Power (and Money)

As Anne Applebaum's column indicates, it is very easy to assume that other people share your values and goals, and thus that grotesque acts of terrorism are always counterporductive. But the mere fact that terrorist acts set back the political cause of a majority of the people that a terrorist group ostensibly represents does not mean that the cause of the group itself has been set back at all. You can be quite sure that the terrorist organizations don't think so - they believe that they are acting rationally.

In relation to the Chechnyan terrorists, Applebaum claims,

Little is known about their stated aims, which allegedly included independence for the Russian republic of Chechnya, withdrawal of Russian troops from Chechnya, and an end to the nearly 10 years of brutal Russian-Chechen conflict in Chechnya. The only certainty is that they will achieve none of them.

What if their primary purpose is to prevent any compromise? That is, they want to interrupt political negotiations that might give "their side" less than they want? What if it's about power (or power and money) - with the terrorist groups recognizing that if a political resolution is achieved they will be frozen out of the peace deal (and resulting government structure)? What if they want to trigger a disproportionate Russian response against Chechen civilians - thereby hardening the attitudes of the Chechen people and helping to recruit new converts to their brand of "resistance"? Which of those ends is not advanced by this type of atrocity? Applebaum herself contends that decreased sympathy for the Chechen cause, resulting from terrorism, will result in less pressure on Russia to reach a political compromise, and that Putin is already discarding the notion that he should be attempting to negotiate:

Notice here that Putin draws no distinction between the terrorists of Beslan and legitimate, independent Chechen leaders, or even the Chechen nation as a whole. When he launched the second invasion of Chechnya in 1999, he called the attack a "counter-terrorist operation in the northern Caucasus." The foreign spokesman of the former Chechen government wrote yesterday that "with hindsight" he now sees that Putin used this kind of language to discredit the idea of Chechen autonomy, and to link the Chechen rebels firmly with al Qaeda and Osama bin Laden. The Beslan terrorists have now helped the Russian president complete that process.

Applebaum then proceeds to do pretty much what she criticizes in Putin:

Decades' worth of PLO terrorist attacks on crippled tourists and Olympic athletes achieved far less for the Palestinian people than television pictures of Palestinian children protesting in the streets. Even more was achieved, or almost achieved, when the Palestinians briefly ceased to use terrorism in the 1990s. By contrast, the resumption of Palestinian terrorism, and particularly the suicide bombing campaign, has led to a profound change of heart, a hardening of positions and, as in Russia, a much larger population of Israelis who assume that all Palestinians, whatever their views or background or grievances, are would-be terrorists.

Yet the resurgent terrorism was not from the PLO, which was transformed into the "Palestinian National Authority". It was from groups like Hamas, which opposed the political process, and which knew that Israeli "retaliation" for their acts would weaken the political process and the Palestinian Authority in their favor. And now we have a situation where the two parties responsible for ratcheting up the violence to the present appalling levels - Hamas and Sharon's Likud Party - have more power and "street credibility" than ever, while Arafat and the Palestinian Authority have been marginalized.

Can they deliver "peace"? What should make me think that they care? What should make me think they even include "peace" in their organizational goals?

What to make of this....

Not that I want to post more ambiguous pictures of Republicans, but... is this what Bush was warning us about, you know, if we let those "liberal judges" and their "anything goes" attitudes have their way?

Guess the Conflict

I guess in most asymmetric conflicts, as this speaker is on the weak side, he would be described as a "moderate" or a "member of the political wing".

When [War President] unleashed the dogs of war on [our nation] in order to occupy it for a second time, he christened his attack a "counter-terrorist operation in the northern [territory]. Many of us did not realise the significance of that then. Now, with hindsight, we can see that the idea was to discredit the very notion of statehood for [our nation]. While a minority of [our people] regarded [War President's] onslaught against us as justified, the majority of the nation has kept faith with its elected president....

You could write this stuff in advance.

That particular paragraph is from an essay on Chechnya, which I guess is the hot conflict right now for permitting "moderates" to speak in response to Russia's claims. He concludes,

[War President] is keen to get the international community to see the situation in [our nation] as part of the war on international terror. He hopes the outside world will leave him alone to inflict his regime of terror on [our people]. The international community knows that the situation in [our nation] is quite different, so why does no one intervene? We are keen to participate in mediation to bring an end to this dreadful situation for [our people]. We call on the international community to step in and help bring peace to both [our land] and [theirs].

Dang. I've never heard anything like that before....

How To Achieve Freedom & Justice

Leaving It To Your Imagination

The following picture of a Republican conventioneer shall, um, live in infamy?

"Swift Boating" As A Verb

Today, Maureen Dowd uses the concept of "Swift Boating" as a verb:

The president distorted the columnist's dispatch. The "moral crisis" and failure she described were in the British and French sectors. She reported that the Americans were doing better because of their policy to "encourage initiative and develop self-government." She wanted the U.S. to commit more troops and stay the course - not cut and run.

Mr. Bush Swift-boated her.

I would like to see that added to the vernacular:

Swift-Boating: A pattern of venal and mendacious conduct calculated to create a public impression that the target's documented history of courage and honesty instead reflects cowardice and dishonesty.

Saving the Heathens

A novel approach?

Asymmetrical Warfare

Go for the headlines. Grab a soft target, full of civilians - hundreds, or better yet thousands. Wait for the media to arrive. Let it be known that your hostages are suffering horribly, and refuse any assistance. When the inevitable police raid comes, kill as many hostages as you can.

That, apparently, is the new mode for the Chechen separatists who, completely unable to face Russian forces on the battlefield, now use a wide range of terrorist tools against the Russian people. Airplane bombings, truck bombings, suicide bombings, and from time to time (because all of that is apparently now mundane) a mass hostage-taking guaranteed to become a bloodbath.

When George Bush lies about progress in the "war on terror", or reverses (with no one in the media batting an eye, let alone accusing him of "flip-flopping") his accidental confession that you can't actually win a "war on terror", I can't imagine that he doesn't know what he is doing. Rumors to the contrary aside, he can't possibly be that stupid. He's pitching an absurd line of propaganda that, shamefully, our media puffs and conflates into a psuedo-reality. Why? Perhaps the truth won't sell newspapers. Perhaps the people who compose our media suffer the same sort of cognitive dissonance Bush wishes to create in the voting public - even if at some level they know it is a load of crap, they aren't comfortable thinking about the alternative. Maybe it's "too hard to explain".

This, however, seems to be the new face of asymmetric warfare. Putin falsely declared his own "war on terror" five years ago, to partially justify his invasion of Chechnya. Since that time, Russia has used absolutely atrocious tactics to try to end that conflict on terms they deem favorable, and with each new Russian atrocity (all's fair, after all, in a "war on terror") terrorism has increased.

Of course, this phenomenon is not isolated to that conflict - it is more that the Chechen terrorists have been willing and able to take on some major civilian targets in Russia, whereas in most conflicts the terrorists are either fighting in their own lands or are unable to reach the softest targets in their enemy's land. Perhaps in the past, and perhaps with some terrorist groups, there's also an element of being "unwilling" to engage in such acts, but I sense that any such "scruples" are fading.

Atrocities, whether committed by the military power or by the terrorists, are used by each side to paint the other as pure evil - under the rationale that "anything goes" when you're fighting evil. And that self-justification is usually punctuated with, "... so we have no choice." And so each side ratchets up the amount of violence and misery it is willing to inflict on the other side's civilians and innocent bystanders - because there is "no choice". Until it becomes okay to bomb a densely populated civilian neighborhood in the hope of assassinating a single suspected terrorist leader, or okay to send suicide bombers into a public stadium or to take hostage the entire student body of a large school with every intention that the end-result include mass casualties.

Ask the side of the military power what they think of the latest military atrocity, and you'll hear those same rationalizations... "We're good; they're evil", "We had no choice", "We weren't trying to kill civilians, so it was a purely military mission", "They brought it on themselves", "There are no civilians on their side - they're all terrorists". Ask the civilian population targeted by that military and, as the conflict escalates, you will find fewer people willing to speak out against the terrorism, save perhaps in the form of, "I oppose the terrorism, but...." Followed by "We're good; they're evil", "We have no choice", "We can't reach military targets, and really - given what they're doing - they're all legitimate targets". And so it goes on, ever more violent, with peace becoming more remote with every new "military operation" or terrorist bombing.

Meanwhile, don't expect Bush to speak about the significant increase in U.S. military deaths and injuries in Iraq this past month. Don't expect him to speak about the increased use of terrorist tactics against coalition forces, foreign civilians, or the interim government. Because, after all, "we're winning".

Only Two Debates?

They're testing the waters....

GOP strategist Scott Reed was quoted by the Reuter news agency this week as saying the Bush camp's position is that "two debates are sufficient and will not dominate the entire fall schedule."

And I suppose we're supposed to believe that it's not because Bush is scared? Kerry may seem stiff, but he's no Al Gore.

A Coalition of the Very Willing

The Washington Post today describes how Hollinger International was looted from the inside by an international coalition of the wretchedly corrupt. (Is trying to get government action on this type of corporate misconduct tantamount to casting Perle before swine?)

Where's Colin Powell

He's keeping an awfully low profile these days. Perhaps it's that, if asked about GW, or GW's line on the Swift Boat Liars, there isn't enough compazine in the world to help him keep his lunch down....

Crime and Justice Silliness from USA Today

Surprised?

Today's USA Today argues in the context of criminal justice, "Shame works, so use it". The article later admits, "Its effectiveness hasn't been measured statistically, but anecdotal evidence gives a sense of its deterrent effect on wrongdoers susceptible to embarrassment." That's the "Readers Digest" style of analysis - a persistent preference for the anecdotal over the empirical.

USA Today's anecdotes include the following:

* Men who solicit prostitutes may find their names on Web sites or even billboards in several cities. La Mesa, Calif., noted a decline in street prostitution after "johns" were publicly named.

(You don't have to be very bright to realize that neither prostitites nor "johns" have disappeared from California - they are simply being more discreet or are choosing other venues.)

* Men who miss child-support payments had their photos displayed in Boston subways and on buses.

(But no claim is made that this had any effect on payment.)

* People convicted of drunken driving often have to display license plates announcing that fact.

(But no claim is made that fewer people are either arrested or convicted of drunk driving as a result.)

* A drug offender in Florida had to place an ad in the local newspaper: "I purchased drugs with my two kids in the car."

(But no claim is made that, even with this individual drug offender, that the "shaming" inspired a break from addiction.)

* Ten states post the names of tax delinquents on public Web sites.

(But no claim is made that the postings have inspired payment.)

* In cases of corporate wrongdoing, some judges have demanded that CEOs appear in open court to explain their companies' actions.

(But no claim is made that this has improved corporate conduct.)

Wow. What a compelling set of anecdotes.... (They could also have made note of sex offender lists, sometimes available over the Internet, again with no apparent impact on the rate of sex crimes.)

So we have an unsupported argument in favor of "shaming" - there is no empirical evidence that it works, the anecdotal "evidence" reflects only that it is sometimes used, but "it feels good". Similar arguments have been made in favor of public flogging.

But such arguments, in my opinion, are made by people who have no real clue what they are talking about. They need to spend a few weeks in a district court, watching arraignments, preliminary examinations, and plea hearings for misdemeanor cases. They need to see the rogues gallery of people, picked up the night before for a range of petty offenses, yukking it up in the jury box as they await their turn before the judge. They might note an occasional person who looks mortified, perhaps tearful, sitting among those people, desperately hoping not to be noticed. That person already feels shame. That's the type of person not likely to pay a return visit to the court. But that person is also very much the exception. The people sitting around him, for the most part, have been there before and will be there again.

Shame them? Get real. The street fashion of "baggy pants" emerged not from the "shame" of incarceration, but from a desire to emulate prison garb. In some circles, incarceration is a mark of manhood. Prison tattoos are not accidentally distinct - they are deliberately calculated to send the message to the ex-prisoner's peers "I was in prison" and in some cases "and I killed somebody while I was there".

And let's not forget - most crimes, even petty ones, are committed by people who know better, and don't want to face the existing penalties, but have no intention of being caught. Truly, who does USA Today believe will be affected by the petty type of "shaming" under discussion? Who, presently inclined to commit a crime, will decide, "Jail and a huge fine, even being on a county work crew picking up garbage along the highway, and having my name in the newspaper's "Police Beat", I can handle, but being on a website or having to wear an embarrassing sandwich board for eight hours? That's just too much."

And do I really have to comment on this?

Let the punishment fit the crime. The saying originated with Gilbert and Sullivan in The Mikado in 1885, but it's still stirring non-fictional creativity today.

That's right, folks... the first notion of lex talionis came from a comic opera in 1885....

My Heart Bleeds....

Poor Ken Lay. Even the President is ganging up on him.

Surprise, Surprise....

After accidentally telling the truth, President Bush has quickly recanted.

So, anybody care to venture a guess as to when we will "win" the "war on terror" - that is, when "terror" will cease to exist as a possible state of mind? [Insert Eyeroll Here]

Straight Talk

Today, Richard Cohen explains that if only John Kerry would be more candid, in the manner of John McCain, he might do as well against Bush as McCain did four years ago. Well, he might have said that had he remembered how well McCain's candor worked for him at the polls, as opposed to in person....