It’s a famous Albert Einstein quote. http://www.brainyquote.com/quotes/quotes/a/alberteins133991.html

in·san·i·ty
/inˈsanitē/
Noun
1.The state of being seriously mentally ill; madness.
2.Extreme foolishness or irrationality.

Just wanted to clear that up. Again, I apologize for being so late with this fact, but I just found your blogs (old and new) and thought that should be straitened out.

Partly because it says “A well-trained, well-handled detection dog can do remarkable things. We know it because of science.” which is just a good argument.

But then this is for making sad “With a pretty good dog, but a largely innocent population, a dog alert will signal drugs only about 16 percent of the time.”

Re: the definition of heckling given above — “interrupt (a public speaker) with derisive or aggressive comments or abuse.”” The public speaker in question was not interrupted: he asked a question and was answered. The answer was not derisive, aggressive nor abusive.

Mr. Zamma, you deleted the Heslin testimony video that I posted on ARC. The one that shows that the incident in Hartford, if you can call it that, can hardly be characterized as “heckling.” You also deleted the comments of other people who didn’t care for your deceit.

Even your compadres at the hard-liberal Daily Kos, to their credit, called the widespread accusation of heckling deplorable and “spectacularly biased.”

Anyway, the raw video (above), not cut and diced for effect, lets everyone see exactly what transpired, without the attempted hanky-panky of fearful wannabe gatekeepers like yourself. That’s all I wanted.

More: http://www.nationalmemo.com/gun-extremists-heckle-father-of-newtown-victim/#.UQnDvZHQ_2w.facebook

Here’s a recent example of one of these lugubrious displays, from Atlanta: http://www.11alive.com/news/article/270773/3/Passion-2013-tackles-sex-trafficking-slavery As West points out, this isn’t about the victims of tragedy, whether real (as at Sandy Hook) or imaginary (as in “sex trafficking”); it’s about the people who have big rallies and go on TV to show how much they “care”.

I have trouble understanding the urge to create memorials like this. Whatever those children were — or could have been — had nothing to do with how or why they died. I can understand that their friends and families have suffered a loss and want a memorial, but the idea of a group memorial makes me very uncomfortable. The only thing that links their deaths together is that they were all killed by the same guy. So when you create a group memorial, are you creating a memorial for their loss, or are you creating a monument to their killer?

I readily concede the point, and you’re right to raise it. I think that rape victims at least have the court of public opinion massively on their side — after all, what dimwit would ever defend a sex offender? [Raises hand.] I’ve done it a couple of times. Well, not so much defend them, as raise a few issues that are sometimes overlooked in our rush to judgement.

It seems to me that the injustices done to rape victims whose violators never see the inside of a jail cell are not undone by allowing injustices against boys such as the ones in examples like these.

Don’t worry about wording it clumsily. I think that makes two of us, and I may be guilty of it to a greater degree. I really didn’t want to be dismissive of a rape victim’s plight.

One quick clarification. I didn’t say that the Steubenville case was pretty much the equivalent of the first two examples I gave (the ones right after the first bullet point). Something much darker and more disturbing went on that night. My main point was — and I think you got it — that the emotional nature of any sexual assault leads us to condemn in black-and-white terms, and demand sentences to match, as if all forms of rape are carried out with the same severity of violence. I think we’ve gone overboard with that, and I’d like us to make an effort to detect at least a few shades of gray between the black and the white.

I get that the case isn’t at all as clear-cut as I thought, but what *is* clear enough certainly made the way you phrased it a very incomplete story that, although from your response it’s clear you didn’t intend it, appears to at least to some extent trivialise what’s gone on. I think you’re absolutely right to want to let the whole truth come out through the proper legal process: however, you *can* do that without appearing dismissive of it. While it’s true that the way you described it did happen as part of the rape, it’s by no means a full enough picture – like focusing on the sea swells in a hurricane but omitting any mention of the wind. It does the whole picture a disservice, even if the picture’s kinda blurry.

I’m really clutching at words here – can’t seem to get my thoughts down coherently, and it’s *really* frustrating ’cause I know this could all be much more concise and, frankly, better argued – but I hope I’ve managed to at least get the gist of it across. I can’t argue that it’s as simple as I’d thought, but I still think the way you described the case is massively downplaying its seriousness. I even agree with your thoughts about having sons getting into trouble for misguided drunken groping – it’s just that this case doesn’t fit that description, or rather, it does, but it also vastly exceeds it and hurts the point you were making by doing so.

And as far as acts lumped in with rape that aren’t really rape, your two examples are just the tip of the iceberg. Israel now has something called “rape by fraud,” whereby just about any lie you tell a woman to get her to say yes, even if it’s about some irrelevant fact like your own religion or ethnicity. This must not spread.

Thanks for your response.

The young men in question behaved like absolute pigs. On that we can agree.

The lengthiest and probably most authoritative account I’ve read of the Steubenville case was published in the New York Times, in a 5,700-word investigative story by Juliet Macur and Nate Schweber. See the second link in my post.

Their article doesn’t fully support your notion that “everything that’s been made public about this case appears to show that the girl was dragged across town half-naked in a drunken (possibly drugged) stupor, repeatedly raped, filmed and photographed, and then urinated on.” It does leave the door open to the possibility that that’s what happened.

Let me unpack it. I’ve seen the “dragged all over town” and “urinated upon” charges blogged and Facebooked, but the closest thing we have to a national newspaper of record is cautious and doesn’t report those allegations as facts. Of course, that may change as the case unfolds. My post was about dispensing justice dispassionately, about not getting whipped up in a maelstrom of (so far) unproven allegations and hearsay. So I tried to stick with what’s uncontested.

I’m uncomfortable with your phrase “appears to show.”

The kidnapping charges initially brought by the DA’s office were dropped, so I’m not sure how relevant it is, at least from a legal point of view, that the girl was allegedly “dragged all over town.”

Like you, I’ve read that one of the lowlifes who witnessed the attack dared bystanders to pee on the girl, but the Times does not say that anyone actually did.

That the jocks, as you say, “repeatedly raped” the girl seems intended to imply that they fucked her (I know that fingering her against her wishes is rape too), but if the Times is to be believed, all we know for fairly certain is that at least one and possible more of those present grabbed her and penetrated her vagina with their fingers.

Again, it’s possible that it went down as you say it did. The truth will come out, most likely. I can wait for it.

Your article, overall, is sensible in that it recognises that we shouldn’t be using the harshest possible punishment every single time, but it’s completely let down by that appalling section.

Erik:

Indeed. Just as many rapes go unreported, so too are there many reported rapes that did not occur. Both are common enough that they ought to be areas of concern.

The FBI’s official statistics are that eight percent of all reported rapes are “unfounded” (which appears to not necessarily be the same as “made up” or “false”). That would put the number of unfounded rape accusations in the U.S. at more than 6,700 annually. Other stats I’ve seen about unfounded rape allegations range as high as 40-plus percent (a number probably to be dismissed due to small sample size and questionable methodology) and as low as three percent.

Whatever the case, thousands of innocent men are behind bars and / or have a permanent criminal record (branded as sex offenders for life), so I wouldn’t say it’s not a common phenomenon.

By the way, I did not say that penalties for rape are the same across the board, no matter the nature of the case. I merely stated that all three examples are legally rape (and that we’d better not be applying the most severe sentence to each and every one, as some people are advocating).

But automatic capital punishment is problematic even in non-statutory acts. I remember years ago hearing of a case out of Texas. A woman recanted her claim that a man had raped her (self-professed guilty conscience), but only after something like 15 years had passed. I don’t think this is all that common a situation, but I have no iea how often it happens. With capital punishment, what do you if it turns out that you have a rare case of a completely false accusation? Bring the innocent guy back to life?

I’d be willing to bet the unions would howl bloody murder if slaves were to replace their janitors and street sweepers. I’d also be willing to bet that all these slaves would learn pretty quickly how to do minimum work for minimum pay, just as I did so many years ago. And lastly, I have no doubt that the well-connected kids would somehow not be doing the really menial jobs.

Aside from the slavery bit and the corruption and everything else, he is so inconsistent and naive that I wonder how he can even get by day to day.

My apologies for typos. I’m still getting used to this touchscreen.

That’s not to say that there isn’t a draft. The military has a stop-loss measure which forces personnel back into multiple tours of duty. But you cannot draft civilians for for “resource wars” or “wars of choice”. Only mercenaries, or what are euphamistically caused “volunteers” will do. They learned that little lesson from Vietnam.

Also, you are incorrect about the military’s intentions. The last thing they want is a conscripted or drafted fighhting force, because if that happens, wars would become unpopular, and the military would lose most of its funding and reason to be.

This is not to say that the homeless deserve to suffer. It is to say that the rest of us deserve not to be bothered, and that the homeless are not our problem.

Certainly a state or country which wasn’t so overregulated or taxed to support a huge welfare state would have a lot more jobs available.

For example, if I was POTUS, one of my first acts would be to place every single member of the legislature, past & current, who has voted for the Patriot Act & it’s ilk, on the Terrorist Watch/No-Fly Lists, & keep them there until they repeal such crap (no more travel, goodbye security clearances, etc).

Like I said downthread (man, I HATE threaded comments!), I’m damned sick and tired of the attitude “Lets pretend it’s libertopia already, and make laws accordingly.” So, the law now effectively makes it impossible to buy decent health insurance on your own — you have to get it through your employer or don’t have it at all — yet even under these warped circumstances, “freedom” means that employers should have the right to pry into their employees’ medical records, and make decisions regarding employees’ medical care. And if that means Sandra Fluke’s friend loses her ovary, because medical treatment for ovarian cysts hurts her employer’s widdle weligious sensibilities — let freedom ring! The system works as advertised!

I’m imagining today’s libertarian-utopians circa 1850: “Yeah, in libertopia, divorce will be legal, and wives will be free to leave abusive husbands. Until then, though, it would be antithetical to freedom if we pass laws telling men they can’t beat their wives. We can’t let the government interfere with the family! Men NEED the freedom to manage their households as they see fit, and women still have the freedom to just say no to a marriage proposal from an abuser.”

I don’t find the issue of religious freedom to be disingenuous, though I DO think the rhetoric about a “war on religion” to be rather overheated and hyperbolic. Also, it’s puzzling to me that some people seem to be attributing reactions to Fluke to libertarians, when it seems to me to be largely conservative in nature. Not that libertarians COULDN’T be reacting in poor form as well, but to blame libertarians for the backlash against Fluke seems disingenuous, when the only libertarian views on the subject that I’ve read are much more about the nature of her arguments than about the women herself.

I’d go a step further and say “libertarians need to quit pretending it’s already libertopia when discussing current policy.” Consider the libertarians who say they oppose gay marriage because they think government should get out of the marriage business altogether; meanwhile, they’re willing to stick with the status quo “straight people can marry and get all these government benefits that wouldn’t exist in libertopia,” and believe extending these privileges to gays too would be a step backwards, freedom-wise.

Their arguments such as “Gay couples shouldn’t be getting government privileges” would be a valid anti-gay marriage argument if we lived in libertopia, where NO couples got special government bennies and gays were trying to make themselves the exception to that rule. But in our world, our real, utterly non-libertopian world, where such privileges are already doled out to everyone EXCEPT gays, such arguments reek of utter cluelessness at best, rank bigotry at worst.

And so do the arguments about how health insurance shouldn’t pay to treat ovarian cysts with birth-control pills because that’s not how things work in libertopia. Well, we don’t live in libertopia. We live in a world where I might be obligated by law to buy a particular type of insurance policy whether I need it or not. We live in a world where the government tweaked the tax codes so that my boss can buy me insurance far more cheaply than I can buy that same insurance for myself. We live in a world where my underinsured self can easily afford various generic medicines, but have trouble affording the legally mandated doctor visit I need to get legal permission to buy those generic medicines without being arrested and imprisoned.

In libertopia I wouldn’t need help paying for medicine, because in libertopia getting permission to buy that medicine wouldn’t cost upwards of fifty times as much as the cost of the medicine itself. In libertopia I wouldn’t be so dependent on employer largesse to get a decent insurance policy.

And I do find it disconcerting, that in the world we actually live in, so many libertarians believe the lesser of two evils is protecting the religious sensibilities of the employer over the medical needs of all their (female) employees. The law requires expensive doctor visits for permission to take hormone pills with contraceptive benefits, but meanwhile the best way to deal with that is to let employers refuse to allow their employees’ insurance policies to cover those mandated doctor visits. In libertopia it’s fine for employers to demand intimate details about their employees’ medical records and sex lives, therefore it’s fine for employers to do that here. Et cetera.

I think libertarians need to think more about minimizing the damage when planning the order in which to dismantle the government. Deregulation of the airline industry has been a shining success. Deregulation of banking blew up in our faces a few years ago when banks were freed to do crazy things, but were still backed by the implicit too-big-to-fail guarantee. In Libertopia, in might make sense to remove the laws that prevent employers from poking their noses into our medical status and personal life, but the way things are now, that’s would probably do more harm than good.

No libertarian justifies a law like that. Of course, in libertopia, the employer could make it a condition of employment. Then again, in libertopia, there would generally be no connection between employment and health insurance.

Also, there are plenty of prescription drugs that have a copay. Like almost all of them. Mandatory lack of copay for any drug sends up a huge red flag that someone is gaming the system.

My insurance also doesn’t pay for advil or tylenol. Does that mean there is a War on Headaches? If insurance doesn’t cover lactaid milk, is it a war on the lactose intolerant? I can’t eat wheat — should I demand everyone buy me rice crackers?

Buying Advil, Tylenol, lactaid milk or rice crackers does not require you to first visit a doctor to get the written permission necessary to own such things without fear of legal penalty. I currently do not have real health insurance; I can afford to take naproxen whenever I need to, but that;’s only because I’m not required to also buy permission from a doctor.

Also, there are no legal bills before any state legislatures specifically granting employers the right to demand their employees explain and justify their use of advil or rice crackers. There is just such a bill regarding hormone pills (side effects include birth control), in Arizona.

If true libertarian freedom requires codifying into law an employer’s right to peer into every aspect of an employee’s physical condition and personal life, then true libertarian freedom can go fuck itself with the taxpayer-subsidized dildo it pretends Sandra Fluke actually demanded.

As for birth control, you’re right that most libertarians don’t oppose it (for reasonable values of “libertarian”), but to a lot of progressives and moderates, libertarianism is part of right-wing conservatism, and some of those people certainly do oppose birth control. We know the difference, but we should probably make sure progressives and moderates can see the difference too. For better or worse, we should be prepared to defend against the accusations that libertarianism is a smokescreen for a less egalitarian agenda.

That’s a really good way to put it. And the backlash makes it hard to have a civil conversation about the issues that concern us. It’s easy to get drowned out, or worse, drawn in.

I think there is a certain expectation of health insurance being for certain things — not for just a routine oil change, as you said above.

But yes, the real issue is with the mandate and minimum requirements from the government, I no longer get to choose what I want. I have to cover what everyone wants. Only I really odn’t have that choice now — I get to choose what my employer chooses.

I wish there was just a free and open market for insurance. I’d pick one that doesn’t cover services I would never use. (Such as alternative medicine nonsense….)

Libertarians who oppose gun registration dont do it just because it may lead to confiscation…the registration itself is a violation of our rights.

Libertarians who oppose mandatory birth control coverage arent doing it because they oppose birth control, but because they favor religious freedom.

What they do have in common is that in both cases the first step is itself a violation of rights, there really isnt a slippery slope argument necessary (and I dont think it exists in the latter case at all).

This talk about “reprehensible” and “hideous” is lunatic stuff. Or just simpleminded – people who think something “causes” someone to commit suicide.

People will come to their senses but meanwhile lets all tell our kids to avoid gay people like the plague. Don’t talk about them and don’t talk to them. Don’t friend them on facebook. Gay people can do anything, no matter how vicious and cruel, including bullying everyone in the dorm with gay rumors. They are immune from the law about “bias” and “hate.” But their delicate feelings are so protected by the politicians that you can end up facing a prison sentence for telling a private joke about one of them.

For serious hate crimes like say a lynching, that’s when I really disagree with the hate crime statutes. Suppose two idiots from Texas tie someone to the back of their pickup and drag him down the highway for a few miles. What should their punishment be? How much extra punishment do they deserve if the guy they dragged was of a race they didn’t like? Can you honestly say this extra punishment is deserved more here than if they had dragged someone’s 4 yr old daughter (who was of the same race)?

Now I have no problems with the lawyers from both sides arguing about the circumstances of this crime and repercussions at a sentencing hearing. However I’d disagree with any additional criminal statutes here.

I would say the instruction had to be given, but was effectively useless. It may never have been spoken aloud during deliberations, but I don’t think one can honestly say it didn’t color their individual reasoning.

Fell or jumped, he wouldn’t have been there but for the bias motivated invasion of privacy, or what he should have known would have been interpreted as a bias motivated invasion of privacy.

I could also make an argument from consequences. The consequences of a “hate crime” assault go beyond the immediate victim and affect entire groups. A lynching wasn’t just an attack on a particular Black person but an attack on Black people as a whole. It’s also akin to why it’s more serious to kill a police officer or a crime witness than a regular joe because it’s seen as an attack on the justice system as a whole, not just on that individual.

Finally I just want to reiterate that I don’t think thoughts or speech should be illegal, but they have the potential make certain crimes worse than they would have been in their absence.

With Hate Crimes the underlying actions itself are already illegal. Why those actions were taken doesn’t need a separate criminal statute. If the prosecutor wants to argue at sentencing that because of the perps views/prior actions he is more likely to repeat his actions and should receive a lengthier sentence he can already do that. If the maximum allowable sentence for that particular crime isn’t long enough to suit what the extra hate crime conviction brings, then I suspect there would be other injustices going on for particularly brutal crimes against someone who isn’t seen as one of the selected minority classes.

That said, I think you make good points about prosecution being unlikely if he hadn’t committed suicide, and that the purpose of the prosecution was a symbolic victory. It’s clear that while Ravi’s actions may have been the straw that broke the camel’s back, there was likely a long series anti-gay experiences that led up to Clementi’s final act. By punishing Ravi, those people who bullied Clementi along the way escape culpability. Ravi is just one part of a huge system that mistreats gay kids.