Berenstain Bears

I grew up on the Berenstain Bears








Godspeed, Stan.

criminal justice

Quick Thought; fatal damage to our justice system

The Times has a story out today about Steven Avery. The man was released, after 18 years in prison, because DNA evidence showed he was wrongly convicted. Last week he was charged with murder.

The Times reports that this series of events may spell trouble for groups, such as the Innocence Project, that seek to verify convictions with DNA evidence. What strikes me is this tagline to the column, on the front page of the web site:

Steven Avery has left all who championed his cause facing the uncomfortable consequences of their success.

Allow me to submit that the sentiment represented in that sentence does violent harm to our system of criminal law.

A trial in criminal court is about the crime that the defendant is convicted of doing. It is not a referendum on the person. And to the extent we allow the trial to lean towards the latter, we further pervert the fairness and nobility of our justice system.

A criminal trial rests firmly as a pursuit of the facts leading to and within the crime. Imagine the alternative: we lock people up because we do not like them. Maybe they are social outcasts; maybe they appear dangerous; maybe they spoke out too much against a prominent figure. Our system works because it stubbornly demands precision and caution in its process.

The Times tagline turns all this on its head. The subtext suggests that allowing people like Avery to walk, upon a finding of innocence in this case, only allows him to commit a crime elsewhere.

Think about that...this man will commit another crime, so what if he didn't do it this time, you know he'll just do something when he gets out...let's keep him locked up.

That is not the country I live in.

prewar

This is the most important article in the debate on prewar intellegence.

I often assert that reasonable people can differ on points of debate. But, on the question of whether the Administration and Congress looked at the same intellegence before the Iraq war...as if they all hunkered around the table and agreed on the path to war based on the information laying below each of them...there is no debate. That claim is false.

Even though the claim keeps being asserted by our President and Vice President and all the spinsters on down.

Read here.

thucydides

Thucydides, on the degeneration of society wrought by war.
These words discuss the general loss of civil discussion caused by entering into war. I would extend that into a figurative war...wherein the purpose of debate becomes only to achieve a victory over the other party.

Or, perhaps, we can think of the "war," that has the below enumerated effects on social rhetoric, as the elongated and ultimately quietly mummering wars that we have lived under for decades...the cold war ,the war on drugs, the culture war, the war on terrorism effected under Bush I, the war on terror began after September 11 2001. In this respect, there has always been something to which rhetoricians can point and accuse the other side as not uniting against, not defeating, not being patriotic against what is purportedly a known enemy. This object of war, then, becomes a flexible straw thing upon which base rhetoric is hanged. Read Thucydides, speaking of public deliberation in Athens during the war with Sparta (it lasted 30 years):

Practically the whole of the Hellenic world was convulsed, with rival parties in every state--democratic leaders trying to bring in the Athenians, and oligarchs trying to bring in the Spartans...To fit in with the change of events, words, too, had to change their unsual meanings. What used to be described as a thoughtless act of aggression was now regarded as the courage one would expect to find in a party member; to think of the future and wait was merely another way of saying one was a coward; any idea of moderation was just an attempt to disguise one's unmanly character; ability to understand a question from all sides meant that one was totally unfitted for action. Fanatical enthusiasm was the mark of a real man, and to plot against an enemy behind his back was perfectly legitimate self-defense. Anyone who held violent opinions could always be trusted, and anyone who objected to them became a suspect....As a result...there was a general deterioration of character thoughout the Greek world. The plain way of looking at things, which is so much the mark of a noble nature, was regarded as a ridiculous quality and soon ceased to exist. Society became divided into camps in which no man trsted his fellow.

Words had to change. I take away, from this, that war (amongst other things, I'd argue) causes defensiveness and the loss of a willingness to be vulnerable. This lesson, really, isn't new. The more defensive we become, the more closed and harsh our rhetoric gets. To get anywhere in public discussion, we need vulnerability.

Another historic note, jumping forward a few centuries from Thucydides: Early Christians, of course, considered themselves Jewish. And Judaism, in the first century, had a great deal of sects. It was only after Rome really closed in that Judaism tightened up and what would become known as Christian belief was no longer allowed within the fold. I find something similar, here. The closing off resulting from a defensive posture.

Lily's Reflections on Environmental Catastrophe

Reflections on Moral Responsibility for the Destruction of the Environment
(Lily)

It's official: the Arctic ice cap is melting at a rate of 8% per decade. At that rate, there will be no ice at all during the summer of 2060 -- well within the expected lifetime of many OR readers. A cursory survey of other recent environmental statistics reveals additional frightening numbers: In 2004, America's beaches alone experienced nearly 20,000 pollution-related closings and advisories. In the past 50 years, 90% of the oceans' largest fish -- such as sharks, swordfish, tuna, marlin -- have disappeared. And although the underlying causal elements are unclear, no one can doubt that Atlantic hurricanes are increasing in number and ferocity. This list could go on.

When human-induced tragedies occur, whether the ultimate harm is borne by other humans or by the environment, moral responsibility can be hard to assign. And the repercussions of assigning it can resonate for generations -- as, for example, certain elements of modern day German and Japanese culture still struggle to incorporate into their national consciousness the role that their countries -- and their citizens -- played in World War II. America, especially the South (where Andrew, Mike and I call home) is, to this day, still reeling from the legacy of legalized slavery that officially ended almost 150 years ago. The problem of where to place the blame for massive tragedy of any scale is compelling; even more compelling, to me, is the question of who can prevent that type of tragedy before it ever happens, and how.

The need is for a shift from a vague sense of collective societal responsibility for disaster, to a sense of individual responsibility: we need -- I need! -- to make a more direct connection between (for example) the decision about how to get to work in the morning and the issue of whether, 55 years from now, there will be ice in the Arctic. I know there's a lot that's been written about the economics of this, the problem of waste and depleting collective resources, and would be delighted if someone more educated than I am in these matters would chime in on that stuff. What I wanted to mention was more from a philosophical standpoint: the concept of role responsibility.

This is a concept that I first read about in Dr. David H. Jones's book called Moral Responsibility for the Holocaust (Rowman & Littlefield, 1999). To quote Dr. Jones, "The main idea contained in the concept of role responsibility is that a person assumes certain duties by virtue of occupying a social role or position, whether or not the duties are formally defined." (p. 27) For example, a ship captain, by virtue of his position, bears the role responsibility of ensuring the safety of those aboard his ship. Studies done of individuals who helped people escape certain death in Germany during the years of the Holocaust describe a similar phenomenon to the ship captain's sense of duty: those rescuers saw it as their duty -- by virtue of their position -- to save refugees from the hunters of the Third Reich. Thus their courageous protest against mass tragedy was the assumption of individual responsibility.

Importantly for the present discussion, Dr. Jones notes that while "most concepts of moral and legal responsibility . . . involve retroactive responsibility for a past act or omission," the concept of role responsibility "involves prospective responsibility for future acts and omissions." (p. 26) Right now, we are poised to prevent future bad acts and omissions that would destroy our last wild places. So, my challenge is this: somehow we must find a way to envision ourselves as bearing the responsibility to not only live lightly upon the earth but also to take active steps -- as individuals -- to save the earth. Only if we feel personally the weight of this great duty, and feel that something about our position as citizens in the most affluent and powerful country in a world whose human population size has exploded, requires us to act -- only then will we really be motivated to do something about that polar ice cap, and the disappearance of all those big fish. Is the best way to do this through governmental regulation? In part, but we have got to -- I have got to -- take individual responsibility too.