Asking the Wrong Questions

These death penalty essays have me fired up.

At the beginning of this one there's a little excerpted quote, I don't even know if it's going to be from the upcoming article, but here it is: "How is executing Karla Faye Tucker by lethal injection any more cruel than the way she used a pick-ax to viciously butcher two people to death?" The answer is, obviously, why in the world should that be the standard? This is why I love this quote from Governor Mike Morris from the movie The Ides of March, when given the Dukakis death penalty question in a Presidential debate. He says that, were his wife raped and murdered, he himself would want very much to find the person who did it and kill them, but society as a whole acting through the government must be better than that. The argument espoused by the question in my reading seems to start by admitting that the death penalty is cruel, but then claiming that, because other people have done things that are even more cruel, it's okay for the state to behave cruelly itself. That's certainly a weird claim to make given our Eighth Amendment, which prohibits cruel and unusual punishment, not punishment crueler than anything the criminal in question ever did.

Also, It Isn't and Shouldn't Be About Trust

What does it mean to say that you "trust" someone or something? Well, one thing it could mean is that you have a very high estimate of the probability that they will perform well in a given situation; for instance, I might say that I trust Tiger Woods to sink a three-foot putt on the 72nd hole of a major to win by one stroke. Or I might say that I trust someone with my life; what I mean is clearly that I expect their behavior to be of a high enough quality that my life will be adequately protected. In this context, the opposite of trusting someone is to simply not trust that same someone, to not believe that they'll perform up to snuff. I wouldn't trust Chin-lung Hu to get the winning base hit in the 9th inning of Game 7 of the World Series.

There's another sense of the word, though.

No, Conservatives Do Not Inherently Distrust Government

In another article I'm reading about the death penalty, I find the following passage (not directly about capital punishment):

"Conservatives have a supremely validated suspicion about government in all of its branches. It is almost an instinct of conservatives to distrust the wisdom of government, and therefore to limit its powers."

People say this a lot. I've seen this idea advanced recently by people arguing that conservatives ought to like Matt Yglesias' new book, The Rent is Too Damn High, since his main argument is that we should relax local land-use regulations. After all, it's deregulation! And we all know that conservatives like deregulation, and individual liberty, and restrictions on Big Government in all its guises. Right?

Well, wrong. Or, at the very least, unsupported. Conservatives like to say that this is what's motivating them, and in popular culture people generally just accept them at their word. Or perhaps they point out that they then behave in hypocritical ways by not supporting various things that are liberty-enhancing or government-limiting, or by supporting things that are liberty-restricting etc. But they don't then question the fundamental, almost definitional claim that "conservative" equates to "distrustful of government."

Death Is Not Exile

I am currently in the deeply unfortunate position of having to read yet another piece of writing by Ernest Van Den Haag, prominent twentieth-century death penalty advocate and adversary of my grandfather, Charles L. Black Jr., in that debate. Now, there's a lot to dislike about the article, starting with the fact that every single moral claim he makes is vicious and wrong. But I find this an interesting passage:

"Capital punishment, a deliberate expulsion from human society, is meant to add deserved moral ignominy to death. This irks some abolitionists, who feel that nobody should be blamed for whatever he does. But murder deserves blame."

He goes on to argue that death is inevitable, while torture is not, so while we (justly in his view) have stopped torturing people as punishment, the mere act of changing the circumstances of their death to be more emphatically ignoble is perfectly okay. But, see what he does there? "A deliberate expulsion from human society." That's an awfully genteel way to describe killing, isn't it?

Of course, I assume that by using the phrase "human society" he means to imply that, when we kill these evildoers, they depart human society and arrive in the supernatural world, presumably in hell. And if you adopt a worldview with an afterlife, or even a judgmental afterlife with a heaven/hell distinction, then Van Den Haag's "exile" frame makes perfect sense. When you execute someone, after all, the only thing that happens is that they shift from one form of existence to another. That's not so different from exile from, say, Athens, or exile to the Australian penal colony. And it does make a lot of sense to suggest that, if you violate the moral laws of human society badly enough, that society is justified in exiling you. Given that there isn't any substantial portion of the earth that's used as a penal colony these days, and also no other planets we can send people to, the only method of exile would be death.

But if, instead, you assume that what probably happens when you die is that you simply vanish, that your consciousness and your personality and your everything are just snuffed out of existence, then we're not talking about some kind of metaphysical exile. Death is still inevitable, but if the only thing waiting on the other side of death is a vast gaping nothingness, then anything which hastens death by even the tiniest little bit becomes too severe a punishment to comprehend. Now, that statement by itself doesn't establish that such a punishment might not be deserved in some cases, although I also think that. But I can't help feeling like this rhetoric of treating death as exile, rather than as total extinguishing of every facet of existence, contributes to the willingness, nay, eagerness of the religious element of our society in particular for state-sponsored killing.

Rory McIlroy ≠ Tiger Woods

Not yet, anyway.

McIlroy just won the Honda Classic in convincing fashion, with a charging Tiger Woods running out of holes and thus coming up two strokes short in his comeback bid. As Rory was finishing up his victory, as this tournament is at a very prominently Jack Nicklaus-designed course and Jack had been in the broadcast booth earlier, Johnny Miller mused about whether we might one day watch McIlroy mount a serious challenge to Jack's record of 18 major championship victories. More broadly, the day was in large part a comparison between the greatest player of the generation whose era is currently fading and the (anticipated) greatest player of the generation whose era is currently just beginning. But I think it's worth pointing out that, although Rory McIlroy appears to be a very good player and although when he's playing well he looks like he's playing about as well as anyone, that he's not Tiger Woods. He's not even Tiger Woods at the equivalent stages of their careers.

Whither the Causal Arrow?

Fangraphs has produced, based on "crowdsourcing" a.k.a. a survey of their readers, a ranking of all 30 Major League Baseball teams' television announcing crews. Notably, the Mets team of Gary Cohen, Keith Hernandez, and Ron Darling, plus Ralph Kiner and Kevin Burkhardt, finished second. One would be tempted to mind that they're not first, except that the #1 spot was reserved for Vin Scully. No complaints there. But here's the interesting thing, aside from the fact that the Mets are awesome and the Yankees, ranked #22, suck: the rankings are decomposed into "charisma" and "analysis" factors, but these two scores were extremely well correlated. Extremely well as in R-squared value of 0.88. The scales were out of five points, and the biggest gap between the two sides of the ranking was 0.6 points, despite the gap of well over 2 points between the best rankings and the worst rankings. So clearly people aren't really separately evaluating charisma and analysis, or if they are, then those two factors must not really be two separate factors.

Their explanation is that, the more charismatic a broadcast crew is, the more forgiving we're willing to be about their analysis. Or perhaps we just don't care about good analysis so long as we've got charisma to enjoy. But I think it's much more likely that the link runs the other way, at least in large part. The number one thing that makes me find a certain announcer or broadcast team unpleasant to watch is poor analysis. An enormous part of the reason why Gary, Keith, and Ron are so brilliant an announcing crew is that they are such insightful baseball analysts. Now, sure, they're also a colorful bunch of characters, and that's part of the fun, too. But if they were just as colorful but complete idiots when it came to talking about the substance of the game, I don't think I could stand them. Poor analysis, in other words, places a very low ceiling on how charismatic you can find a broadcast team to be.

Also, Gary, Keith, and Ron are awesome.

Not Good Enough

Yesterday, Mitt Romney said, of Rush Limbaugh's despicable comments about Sandra Fluke, that they were "not the language I would have used." Today, Limbaugh himself issued an "apology," again for his choice of words. Meanwhile, the better part of the outrage I've been seeing about Limbaugh's comments themselves has been about his use of the word "slut." That's not the point. I'm not saying it wasn't offensive of him to use that word, because it was. What I am saying is that focusing on that particular word, on that quirk of language, means you miss the actual content of what Limbaugh said.

WARNING: The following post both refers to some extremely vile attitudes that were expressed by Rush Limbaugh recently, and gets quite heated in condemning them and the mindset they represent.