There’s an interesting article in Newsweek on Republicans supporting Obama. These are not people who are angry that it appears the nomination will not go to someone who is regarded as soundly conservative. They are inspired by Barack Obama.
Tag: Politics
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Emotions, Momentum Shifts, and Margins of Error
This CQPolitics article is a good read on New Hampshire, I think. Along with emotions, one needs to remember that polls come with margins of error [Wikipedia], and that even those are within a certain confidence percentage.
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Disaster Relief, Rich and Poor
A couple days ago I was getting my hair cut and the TV was showing scenes from the [tag]California fires[/tag]. People were commenting on the apparently high value of the houses they were seeing. One man was noting that he hadn’t seen any houses worth less than a million dollars. (We should nominate him for tax assessor somewhere! I actually have no idea of the value of the homes shown, nor do I know how representative the ones on TV were of the entire fire area.) Another suggested that we take a collection to take them some Dom Perignon, since they obviously wouldn’t accept bottled water.
The key theme was the difference in the response to fires in California and the response to Hurricane Katrina, and Ivan and Dennis in the two years before. The consensus of the barber shop was that because the Californians were rich, they were getting better treatment that us poor folks here on the gulf coast.
Now I do believe that there is a tendency to forget the poor, and that our perceptions impact the energy and efficiency of our responses. Any such differences should be corrected. I was pretty critical of government response at various levels at the time of Katrina.
At the same time, I think we should consider some things carefully before we throw stones–or bottles of Dom Perignon.
- California is not Louisiana and Governor Schwarzenegger is not Governor Blanco. I don’t mean to put down the state of Louisiana, and I’m pretty sure I’ve made an equal number of snide remarks about California, but it appears California is acting more quickly and more effectively. This is subject to correction in time, but that’s what it looks like right now, and no, I’m not a Republican.
- Rich peoples’ houses burn just as nicely as poor peoples’ houses, or they drown, or tornadoes chew them up. It’s pretty silly to criticize people for being prepared.
- A fire is not a hurricane. There is a great difference in the accessibility of disaster areas in California.
- There are many more large communities that are not themselves under disaster conditions. That makes a big difference in evacuation distances and places to house people temporarily as well as in support supplies. When Katrina came through I was on the outer edge, in tropical storm winds, and I live in Pensacola, FL. Take a look at the map. There was nowhere along that stretch of the gulf coast to which one could evacuate. It was north, north, north.
- We hoped–at least I hoped–that criticisms following Katrina would be constructive and would result in better responses to future disasters. Is it right to complain if people respond more effectively to a new disaster?
(For what it’s worth, while I was writing this I saw Governor-Elect Bobby Jindal commenting on the need to get free enterprise growing in New Orleans. More power to him in that effort.)
I in no way intend to excuse the failures during Hurricane Katrina, nor do I ever excuse treating the poor as second class citizens. But it is also inappropriate to treat the rich with less compassion, or to look down on the well prepared. Be envious, yes, just envious enough to make better preparations next time.
There will presumably be lessons to learn from this disaster, but good disaster response is something to be celebrated.
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Different When WE Do It
As I’ve watched the debates about various aspects of our behavior as a nation (the United States), I am very concerned with the way we seem to be able to rationalize things that normally would be totally unacceptable. The same action can be acceptable when we do it and a gross violation of justice when done by someone else. Something that is acceptable done to another person is a horrible violation of our rights if it is done to us.
Here are just a few stray thoughts . . .
When we grab terrorists and torture them, we are just protecting ourselves. When Russia does it in Chechnya, it’s a human rights violation.
When we arrest someone without a warrant it’s a necessary part of defending ourselves against terrorism. When someone else does it, it’s an abuse of power.
When we invade a country it’s preemptive defense; when someone else does it it’s naked aggression.
This extends to our personal lives. As a nation we have a low view of congress, but we generally have a favorable view of our own congressman. We like it when our congressman brings home the pork; all those other congressmen ought to stop! We dislike attorneys as a profession, but we generally like our own attorney–at least as long as he wins.
The other guy’s defense attorney is a sleaze who is prostituting himself to get a criminal off; our attorney is just using the best possible strategy to see to it that we get a just result.
When we consider the justification–or more likely rationalization–for some of the things we are doing in the war on terror, we need to ask ourselves how we would react if some other country, or some other person, did the same things. I think we would find it much harder to justify these actions when done by others than when we do them.
There is, of course, the argument that we must do these things in order to survive. But let me ask this: If I survive by lowering myself to the point of torturing someone else, just who is it that survived? Do I want to be that person?
Who would Jesus torture?
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A Reason Not to Vote for Huckabee
Well, I wasn’t going to vote for [tag]Mike Huckabee[/tag] anyhow, and since I’m not Republican he’d have to get the Republican nomination before it would get on my horizon, but still here’s another reason:
Chuck Norris has endorsed him.
I last mentioned Chuck Norris in my post Sneaking God into Public Schools.
On the other hand, [tag]Fred Thompson[/tag] gave what I regard as a good, thoughtful response to a question about Terri Schiavo. In general, many of the things that the media is complaining about with regard to Thompson, I regard as positives. Again, not being a Republican, I don’t have a dog in that hunt, but it’s nice to hear some thoughtful, nuanced answers. The media prefers sound bites, but the voters–and thus viewers, readers, and listeners–should demand better.
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Burma/Myanmar Reminder
On October 4, 2007 I participated in Free Burma Day by posting just a banner reading Free Burma and nothing else all day.
I received an e-mail today from the U. S. Campaign for Burma, asking that we not forget what’s going on there. They mentioned several avenues for action, one of which works well for me–posting a blog entry reminding people of the situation. Very often our attention span for issues like this runs in days and weeks when actual reform requires months or years. Let’s keep paying attention.
Check out the U. S. Campaign for Burma web site if you’re in the United States, or find organizations in your country to support.
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Lawmakers Apologize
. . . and well they should. MSNBC has the story.
One interesting paragraph was this one:
Legal experts say the case shows the United States has violated a 1998 law that specifically prohibits the government from turning a suspect over to a foreign country where the suspect might be tortured. U.S. authorities say they do not turn over suspects to other countries without diplomatic assurances that they will not be tortured.
He was turned over to Syria. On what basis did someone in our government believe a diplomatic assurance from the Syrians that he wouldn’t be tortured? Is it because Syria has never been known to lie before? They’re on our list of states supporting terrorism! Yet we are, of course, going to continue this practice because it is so valuable–we are assured–in fighting terrorism.
And here is what one Republican congressman said:
“Yes, we should be ashamed” of what happened in the Arar case, Rohrabacher said. “That is no excuse to end a program which has protected the lives of hundreds of thousands if not millions of Americans. … We are at war. Mistakes happen. People die.”
Mistakes happen? Well, yes they do. If we had arrested and questioned him, but studied the situation carefully before we turned him over to Syria, we could presumably have avoided this mistake. The problem is that we are getting calloused about charges of [tag]torture[/tag]. After all, there are those in our own government who will defend the practice. [sarcasm]Perhaps someone sent him to Syria for his own protection.[/sarcasm]
At least the Canadian government is doing the right thing now by apologizing and compensating the man.
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Agreement on Spying
I sometimes wonder precisely what the purpose was of electing a Democrat-led congress, considering their track record. I’ve gotten a couple of notes from the ACLU on this, and also got it from the Washington Post today.
My problem here is not that [tag]surveillance[/tag] does not need to occur in some cases. Rather, my question is how, even with emergency powers to get surveillance going immediately at need, it should be seen as soft on terrorism to require warrants to spy on U. S. citizens? You have a secret court to oversee this, but they would rather not even have them involved, and they certainly don’t want to go to an ordinary judge.
If the problem was their ability to respond quickly, then I would have sympathy. They need to be able to respond quickly. But the law provides that they must get approval within a certain period of time. That is a good idea. It’s accountability. The rhetoric of the administration does not sound to me like that of people zealously carrying out their tasks and being held back by the law. Rather, it sounds like people who don’t want accountability no matter when in the process it occurs.
When we connect this with problems already identified in various agencies using their new powers, the questions become even greater.
How much freedom do we want to give up in the name of fighting terror, especially when giving up that freedom does not actually help the battle against terror?
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Stupidity and Lack of Accountability in Enforcement
Because I’ve been blogging lately about how law enforcement can get out of hand and start to look very much like [tag]terrorism[/tag] itself when it is not accountable, I want to call attention to a couple of incidents in which I found at Aetiology (Mail harmless bacteria, go to jail). You can find further information at Effect Measure.
In these cases minor errors on the part of individuals involved in research got blown way out of proportion, and yet the authorities can’t simply back off. They have to find someone to blame, thus justifying all of their time and expense.
But I think there’s something else at work here. Back in 1985, shortly I first established a computer BBS system (The Wind Dragon Inn, in Bellevue, NE), with a majestic 20 MB HD and 1200 bps modem, I got a call from an FBI agent. She was investigating a case of credit card fraud, and the individual charged with fraud had called my BBS. I’m not sure what the precise connection was, whether he had charged the call to a stolen card, or whether there was some other fraud involved.
The agent asked me what I sold–nothing. Then she wondered why people would call that number. I explained that they would connect to the BBS and exchange messages or download public domain software. I was unworried because I was fanatical about only having legitimate software available for download. She asked once again then whether it was possible I had been defrauded. I said, no, it wasn’t, because there was no money being exchanged over the BBS at all.
I thought that was it, but then she asked the question. “What exactly is a computer bulletin board?”
For the next half hour I discussed how bulletin boards functioned, what people did with them, how e-mail (such as it was) was handled in those wondrous FidoNet days. She thanked me profusely for taking the time to help her out. Her bosses had dumped the case on her and she had no background for it.
I thought that was a minor case due to the newness of the computer industry, but the more I see the more I suspect that there is a great deal of ignorance driving enforcement in very technical areas. People are evaluating risks who do not have the basic knowledge needed. I’m sure there are experts around somewhere, but I suspect that such overreactions do not come from people who truly understand what they are dealing with, but rather with people whose training amounts to concentrated seminars on the general outlines.
True accountability for law enforcement should involved persons who are intimately familiar with the standards and dangers of the particular fields, whatever those are. We see too many appointments in government much like the ones in FEMA (not to mention other agencies) at the time of Katrina, in which government officials who didn’t even have a fig-leaf worth of knowledge were trying to run the relief effort with predictable results.
Respect for law enforcement is good. People who deserve respect welcome accountability.