Just for Fun Friday: When She Broke English

Yesterday, a wonderful and awful thing happened: this piece of overwrought high middle school scribbling was published over at Thought Catalog. It's not just that it's bad -- it's that it is so terrible that one has to wonder if it's actually satirical commentary on the state of American education. A sample:

When she closed her eyes sometimes she could smell him, his pungent body odor, the way she possessed it when their blushing bodies rubbed together in awkward embrace, her soft fleshy thigh against his, his flushed chest against her beating breast. She remembered most the heavy weight of his naked body when he shuddered against her, relaxed his muscles, and eased into her torso, those rare moments where the whole world fell away and they became nothing more than each other, an ugly fleshy mass of hair and limbs that was her primal perfection. Then they would sit for hours, nude, absorbed in nothingness, and those were the moments she loved best. She would feed him cheese on crackers and he would turn to her with an expression of complete surprise; it was in those moments that it seemed like he had only just laid his eyes on her for the first time, and while he was momentarily absorbed in a rapt wonderment she would gorge herself on his love.

The unintended consequences of abstinence only sex ed: torso sex. With cheese and crackers.

I could go on for hours, but you really should just read it in its entirety. Additionally, I highly recommend the dramatic reading of this literary monstrosity, as performed by Ms. Emily Crockett:



Remember kids: don't play Mad Libs with a thesaurus. It's not a toy.

Have a good weekend!

bellum medicamenti delenda est

A Belated Response to Tim Lee and American Free Enterprise v. Bennett

I've been traveling the past three weekends and thus been too busy during the week to keep up with all my reading. I only just read my friend Tim Lee's  take on Arizona Free Enterprise v. Bennett, the most recent campaign finance case before SCOTUS. I respectfully disagree with him and would like to explain why here.

Some set-up to Tim's argument:

Let’s start by reviewing the broader campaign finance debate, and especially the arguments in Citizens United. Advocates of regulation argued that “independent expenditures”—that is spending on political speech by people unconnected to any campaign—were a grave threat to the integrity of the democratic process. They warned that a wealthy interest group could walk into the offices of a member of Congress and threaten that if the member didn’t vote the way the group wanted, the group would pour millions of dollars into negative ads in the member’s district. Faced with a threat to his political survival, the member will be forced to do what the interest group wants.

First Amendment zealots like me had two responses. First, running ads praising or criticizing a candidate in the weeks before an election is precisely the kind of “core” political speech the First Amendment is supposed to protect. Therefore, we’d better have an extremely solid reason for restricting such speech.

Second: if it were really true that elections were decided based on which candidate had the most spent on his behalf, this would be a pretty strong argument for regulating independent expenditures. But fortunately, voters are not mindless automatons. They evaluate the messages being presented to them and compare them with elected officials’ records in office. An incumbent with a good record will find his ads reach a receptive audience. Conversely, an interest group whose agenda is broadly unpopular with voters is going to have a harder time using ads to reduce the candidate’s poll numbers.

Relatedly, as Meg Whitman recently learned, advertising dollars are subject to diminishing returns. If the average voter sees candidate A’s ad 10 times and candidate B’ ad only once, that’s likely to give candidate A a sizable advantage. But if the average voter sees candidate A’s ad 1000 times and candidate B’s ad only 100 times, the gap is unlikely to matter. Indeed, some voters might get so tired of seeing candidate A’s ads that they vote for candidate B out of spite.

I'm with him all the way up to the Whitman reference. Whitman's doomed gubernatorial run was plagued with more problems than money could solve--and she didn't have the advantage of name recognition that a former governor (and governor's son) has. Add to that, she was a Republican following an unpopular Republican governor in the midst of a national and state-wide budget calamities...in a famously Democrat-friendly state. Furthermore, as such a visible candidate of one of the most important states in the Union, she was targeted by powerful and experienced advocacy and activist groups who knew how to spend money more wisely than her campaign did. In short, that a lot of money didn't help her doesn't mean the general ability to spend it freely is not important to a candidacy or idea.

Regardless, the Whitman example is one of a predominantly self-financed campaign and doesn't address the role of fundraising in a political campaign. In a campaign, money acts as more than just candidate's speech--it is a signal of political viability of the candidate and, more importantly, is the material product of the speech of his donors. Ron Paul has shown that fundraising doesn't guarantee electoral victory--but it is very effective if you're trying to get a particular message out to people who haven't been exposed to it. Ron Paul made a national name for himself in large part because of the money he raised and then the use of that money on the campaign. A publicly balanced system neutralizes the power of those donations.

People who donated to Ron Paul didn't want to give Sam Brownback or Mike Huckabee a platform: they wanted to say that the Paul brand of limited government is something they supported and wanted explicated to a wider audience. Matching funds, the issue in the present case, would neuter the voices of those people in favor of the status quo in the name of "more speech."(N.B.: I'm using a national figure for illustrative purposes. The AZ state law never would have effected national office.)

Take a more local hypothetical: say there is an open at-large county council seat. There is one private candidate who supports allowing medical cannabis dispensaries in the county and three public candidates who expressly do not. Under the matching funds provision, if Candidate A is supported by people who really want to license a dispensary, public financing triples his opposition without candidates B, C, and D lifting a finger to solicit it. It isn't as if Candidate A was going to have an easy go of it anyway, but now any decided advantage he may have had as a fundraiser is eliminated. As a county council seat, the media deluge that is commonplace to the governorship of California or the United States presidency is absolutely not going to occur so he is unlikely to experience the diminishing returns Tim referenced in Whitman's race--and Candidate A is battling against three times the competition she was. Adding insult to injury, B,C, and D are each using the money he campaigned for against him. Ironically, those who oppose his plan can donate to his campaign to effectively triple their money in opposition. (I fully grant that candidate A could win because the anti-cannabis vote is divided, but in this hypothetical it's certainly not an assumption that he would.)

As this demonstrates, matching funds are as likely, if not more so, to support the status quo--in a voting system that already overwhelmingly favors incumbents. Moreover, the use of matching funds is just another way the state can decide who gets to say what in an election. (Most of the electoral systems in the country have been set up to protect the duopoly of the major parties by crowding out third party or independent challengers, but that's another entire blogpost in itself.) It's hard to understand how a libertarian--or even a liberaltarian--could think of this as liberty-friendly.

And then we get to the constitutionality of the matter--which Tim concedes, sort of:

Obviously, a candidate isn’t going to want his opponent to get a larger public subsidy, and so at the margin it does provide some disincentive to campaign spending.

[...]

Here [unlike Citizens United], the “punishment” is much more indirect and indeed its status as a punishment is somewhat speculative. So First Amendment scrutiny is called for, but the justification probably doesn’t need to be as compelling as you’d need to justify direct censorship.

Government providing "some disincentive" to exercising free speech is akin to saying a man got a woman "a little pregnant."

If we're talking about a marginal candidate--or, more to the point, a candidate with heretofore marginalized ideas who has managed to earn the respect, trust, and money of enough supporters who want to give him a platform--that disincentive can prove most chilling. If every dollar given to Ron Paul is a government dollar to each of three or more mainstream candidates when spent, the mainstream candidates are granted government support to further marginalize him. If Paul supporters understand that their donations will trigger 1:1 financing to each member of the field of GOP candidates, their incentive to support him is greatly diminished. That is a chill on expressly political speech and thus cannot withstand the strict scrutiny test required for acceptable regulation of speech at any level of government.

Tim continues:

Second, the degree to which having your opponent subsidized will be perceived as a “punishment” greatly depends on the circumstances. If the privately candidate is handsome and charismatic with an impressive record, while the publicly-financed incumbent is a politically tone-deaf hack with a long record of corruption and incompetence, then the challenger might welcome his opponent having more money to spend putting his ugly mug on TV. Similarly, if an independent organization is running ads in order to get candidates to talk more about its pet issue, it might not care at all about whether its spending causes certain candidates to get more money in the process.

A donation to a candidate is a private individual's voice of positive support for a particular person. Matching that donation with public money changes the effect of that donation to supporting political speech generally--or, at least, speech among the state-approved candidates. Such a change perverts the essential component of that speech: explicit support with intent to provide material advantage.

Tim concludes:

Finally, the state’s interest in reducing corruption seems pretty compelling. Not compelling enough to justify censorship, but strong enough to justify a system of subsidies that creates a mild disincentive to private spending on political speech.

For actual political corruption, we have a justice system. A nebulous 'appearance of corruption' (as noted in the parties' briefs and page 26 of the majority opinion) is not a compelling justification to chill the speech of political contributors or candidates.

I understand and agree with Tim's underlying principle: more speech--and specifically more free speech--is a good thing. But the present case isn't free speech: it is a state-sanctioned balance of speech that comes at the direct cost of individual speech. Individual political contributions are not value-neutral and their use by a candidate should not render them such by way of matching funds to the candidates' opponents. Such distortion of political speech by government action is bad policy and wholly incompatible with the First Amendment.

bellum medicamenti delenda est

Quote of the Day

While cover [sic] for the receptionist at my work, I have seen a lot. The blacks come in not even dressed to work, they list felony's [sic] on the applications and some do not look like they really want to work. The hispanics - come in with tatoos [sic] all ...exposed, scary, do not speak english, have a rap sheet, and even put they just got out of jail on application [sic]. I do feel bad for them because they do not realize that their past will haunt them forever and the way they present themselves has a lot to do with it. I have some black and hispanic co-workers who have family's [sic] and care about their jobs. But some you just cannot help.

Cindy Taylor, facebook commenter on this Daily Caller post on black unemployment, entitled "Black unemployment: racism or personal responsibilty?" [sic]



I wonder if simplistic views on race are correlated with bad grammar. I kid, of course, but the piece itself reads like a high school sociology project and is as illuminating as a flashlight is to a blind man.

UPDATE: The Daily Caller has removed the facebook thread I linked to. (sad face.) If reading I-know-a-black-guy expert opinions from people who prefer to remain anonymous is your thing, you can follow the story comments here. So far, the post has 127 facebook likes. SMH

Mood Music Monday

100 years ago today, Robert Johnson was born. Perhaps the greatest blues man to ever live, he died at age 27--allegedly the victim of poisoned whiskey.

Anyway, happy birthday Mr. Johnson.




Hat tip to Jon Meyers for the link.

bellum medicamenti delenda est

Just for Fun Friday: S*** My Students Write

In the early days of the mass interwebs--ie, the mid-90s--there were a lot chain emails that got forwarded into everyone's inbox. If you're like me and have older friends and family members, you probably still get them now and again--I just hope yours don't include insane conspiracy theories about Obama or how the Mexicans are invading to take arr jerbs. Anyway, one of the emails that would get forwarded pretty frequently was a list of horribly written or otherwise hilarious excerpts from student tests or papers.

It turns out, someone finally decided to make this a Tumblr, called Shit My Students Write.

One of my favorites:

Keeping it real with that birth thing.

Before, women were multifunctioning objects around the house that could do that birth thing but now women are running corporations and writing great literature all the while still doing that birth thing.

Yes, yes, it's sad that kids today don't have the language skills they should. But having been a teaching assistant in a foreign policy class meant for upperclassmen and thus seen my share of terrible writing and attempted academic bullshittery, it's something you just have to laugh at.

Say goodbye to your afternoon productivity.

NSLs and You

The lastest video from Cato's multimedia department deals with National Security Letters and the egregious lengths the FBI has gone through (and probably continues to) to exercise unprecedented administrative subpoena power. The subsequent gag orders to render them unchallengeable is maddening.




That these letters exist is problematic in itself; that the documented, widespread abuse of them went generally unnoticed outside of the Beltway (and the telecommunications industry) is scandalous.

bellum medicamenti delenda est

Are Justice and Vengeance Compatible?

As my Mood Music Monday made clear, as well as my several tweets after bin Laden's death was confirmed Sunday night, I'm glad he's dead. Not jubilant, not ecstatic, not giddy--just glad.

Like most Americans who were adults or close to it ten years ago, I immediately thought back what September 11, 2001 felt like...and how awful it was.

I worked nights and actually went to bed around 7 AM that morning, having just received a used computer from one of my cousins in California that weekend and been tooling around on it til I couldn't keep my eyes open. My then-girlfriend and I were asleep when it all went down and, as usual, we turned the phone off in our upstairs bedroom so that random phone calls wouldn't disturb us while we slept. She got up to walk the dog early that afternoon and said 'Heff left several messages on the answering machine. He said just turn on the television...any channel.'

So curious and confused, I groggily obliged and saw B-roll of one of the smoking towers. I started reading the scroll at the bottom of the page. I thought to myself "Oh, so a plane hit a skyscraper. That's sad, but hardly...OH MY GOD."

We sat in stunned shock as the news went through everything that they knew to that point. The rest of the afternoon is just a fog, really. I went in to my restaurant job to see my friends--it was my day off--and everything in town was eerily quiet on the way in. We talked a bit, and then I left to go home and try to wrap my head around all of it. I remember an enveloping dazed numbness--sort of like a concussion.

That night, my girlfriend and I went to her job--she was a bartender at the 'Townie' bar down the street from my job. It's your typical Midwestern bar--country music dominated the jukebox, regular karaoke nights similarly dominated by country songs; it was staffed by flirty, sassy women and patronized by restaurant workers and good ol' boys. While I'm sure other songs came on, all I remember is Lee Greenwood's "God Bless the USA" and Bruce Springsteen's anti-war classic "Born in the USA." People were singing and crying and just plain angry. There were several vets there that night as well as some guys who knew they were going to get a call very soon from their Reserve battalions. Others, I'm sure, signed up the next day. War--and much more death--was imminent.

So I stood at the end of the bar, talking to a lot of the old men standing around, and I heard racist invective that made the hair on the back of my neck stand up. I understand the rage and pain of that day--I felt it too--but mine was focused on the Taliban and al Qaeda, not Arabs generally. The hatred and contempt that so many felt made me fear for every Arab (and Arab-looking) person in America. They talked about the Muslims like animals--like vermin that had to be exterminated. The old men weren't talking genocide per se, but it was clear to them that Arabs and Muslims had to pay for what so very few of them believed and what just a handful of them did.

Don't get me wrong, I wanted it to rain unholy hell down upon Afghanistan. I wanted Chuck Norris Delta Force-style action where our guys swoop in and kill every 'bad guy' they see by any means necessary. Guns, knives, garrote, whatever. There was (apparently unrelated) fighting going on in Kabul that night, if I recall correctly, and we all watched hoping the explosions and small arms fire we saw were Americans going in and exacting righteous vengeance upon our enemies. It wasn't, but 'Death to the terrorists, dammit!'

But when I heard the words of the old men at the bar--and some of the younger ones too--I snapped out of the numb anger and thought "Oh, God. What is going to happen? How many are going to die?" I thought of our soldiers. I thought of Afghan civilians. And I feared so much for Arab Americans. I spoke up, briefly, countering with the absurdity of blaming white Christians for McVeigh and Nichols. Unsurprisingly, they were not persuaded.

Fast forward: Years later, a friend pointed out to me Glenn Beck's "9/12 Project"--to recapture the common cause and American unity that 9/11 had elicited. People tend to remember the touching photos, the crying embraces, and that New Yorkers actually acted like civilized people in public. (I kid.) Long forgotten by so many was the unfiltered hate and rage; that innocent people were yelled at, spit on, beaten up, and that their houses and mosques were damaged or defaced in the days following the attacks for acts that affected them as deeply as any other American. The vile, hateful bloodlust that sprang up in so many of us was like nothing I'd experienced before, nor would I like to feel again.

But when I heard the news Sunday night, I smiled and was happy that OBL was dead. My reaction was part relief,  part vengeance, and part justice. I was relieved that while terror will survive him, he personally will no longer be responsible; our national bogeyman is dead. The vengeance, I think, is just a natural albeit unpleasant side to me (and many other people). I don't think vengeance makes good policy, but neither will I deny the feeling when the two coincide. And yes, it was wholly justified to kill him, whether he put up a fight or not.

Now, you may ask, how is a committed libertarian, wary of state power and a proponent of due process, backing this? Because in this extraordinary case, post-mortem desire for incarceration and trial confuse procedure for justice.

Procedure is important when administering criminal law. Procedure is important when determining guilt or innocence, or severity of punishment. Procedure, as used in the Nuremberg trials--which, I think were important despite their many flaws--is important when trying to rebuild a nation state and separate the punishment of criminals from perceived retribution upon an entire citizenry. Procedure is important to keep the enforcers of policy in check: for all those held in Guantanamo, Bagram, and whatever black sites the CIA still have running, and I will continue to call for that. But let's not pretend that putting OBL in a courtroom in order to show all of his videos inciting death to America and claiming responsibility for murders, financing terror here and around the world, and organizing the training of murderers--to all of which there is no substantive contested fact from any quarter--would amount in "more" justice than he got on Sunday.

I am not swayed by the arguments that his capture and trial would be too dangerous for American courts. I surely would not be against a trial, had it worked out that way--but he was a figurehead and titular leader of a terrorist organization and, as such, is a legitimate military target. That the government used a SEAL team instead of a cruise missile--sparing the lives of 17 others or so who were in his compound--is hardly a miscarriage of justice.

Does this mean that others should get similar treatment? Not really. OBL was a titular figure of the highest order, unambiguously guilty of acts and war and terror against the United States, and a strategic target. On the other hand, Anwar al-Awlaki should be taken alive, if at all possible, to guarantee his due process rights, no matter how despicable he is. The breadth of his crimes are not widely known--indeed, they are classified--and his citizenship is a legal protection that must be respected until or unless he resists capture in a manner that imminently threatens the life of his would-be captors or others. That the administration has marked him for death by saying, essentially, "trust us, he's a bad guy" is not remotely satisfactory to subvert his constitutional rights.

So yes, I'm glad Osama bin Laden is dead--as a policy and personal matter. I don't think it's cause to "celebrate"--indeed, a very serious reassessment of our policy, both our presence in Afghanistan and our support of Pakistan should be in the forefront of our minds--but neither do I think it's appropriate to complain about some fictional justice for OBL lost. He is dead, and that is not a bad thing. It was vengeance. And it was justice.


bellum medicamenti delenda est