(in)justice

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It’s Perfectly Simple

July 10, 2008 | 1 comment

UPDATE – March 9, 2009: OK, see, there was this site called criticsrant.com. Key word there is “was,” because the site appears to be kaput, at least for now (try the link below this if you want to double-check). Anyway, it had a feature where you could type in the your blog’s URL and it would assess its readability assign it a school-level classification, complete with a badge that you could embed displaying the result. C&B was declared to be Junior High School-level reading, hence my one-liner at the end of this post.

If you never got to see it, sorry about that. Believe me, it was wryly hilarious.

Blog Readability Test

That’s it – I am through with dumbing it down for you people. ;-)


C&B Smackdown: Justice vs. Compassion

June 11, 2008 | 5 comments

So I was goofing off and taking silly quizzes on the web when suddenly I came across a question that wasn’t so silly. It went a little something like this:

If you had to make an important decision about something that would affect others, which of these factors would you consider most strongly?

  • Justice
  • Compassion
  • Practicality
  • Self-interest

I sat here for about 5 whole minutes mentally kicking this one around. I immediately eliminated Self-interest – it’s a perfectly worthwhile answer, but given that my judgment is going to carry repercussions for many others it automatically feels least important to me. In the broader scheme of things I’m not sure that this tendency is such a plus; it’s often been suggested to me that I am by nature too unselfish for my own good… but I digress.

justice vs. compassion fight posterAfter another minute or two I eliminated Practicality. A course of action, I reasoned, shouldn’t be considered more right because it’s the easiest or most practical way to go. Here again, I like my decision but readily admit it as evidence that I’m a lousy capitalist.

I finally settled on Compassion, mainly because I’m a big fan of it. If you’re surprised, hear me out.

Justice seems like the obvious answer. Everyone loves Justice, me included, but the problem is that no two people’s notions of Justice are quite the same. For only one example, If you’re deciding what to do with a confessed murderer, the victim’s family is most likely going to have a different idea of justice than the murderer’s mother would have. This, of course, is a single specific example, not necessarily correlative to the hypothetical decision I’d be making.
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Mukasey: Don’t Know Much About Waterboarding

January 30, 2008 | 3 comments

Memo to Sen. Dianne Feinstein: thanks a whole big bundle.

Too well I recall the morning last November when I read your stated intention to vote in favor of confirming Michael Mukasey as U.S. Attorney General. It made what would have been a pleasant breakfast at a local café go down quite a bit less easily. I narrowly averted embarrassment, because your characterizations of Judge Mukasey as independent-minded and repulsed by the idea of torture were such stuff as spit-takes are made on. I couldn’t believe that you, my home state’s senior senator, had watched the same confirmation hearings as I had and not come away similarly disgusted at Mukasey’s craven dodging of the torture issue.

Your op-ed included a desire to see Judge Mukasey come before the senate panel again to have another chat about the whole Dick Cheney/Jack Bauer-iziation of American justice thing. Well, who’s back on the Hill today but your guy Mike the AG, front and center, talking waterboarding and destroyed CIA interrogation tapes. You must’ve been geeked, armed with a bucket of popcorn and ready to see The Muke torque up and bring the outrage, huh?

There are times when a mere “I told you so” doesn’t seem to cover it.
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Spit take-inducing Headline of the Day

August 9, 2007 | 1 comment

Put down that cup of coffee, unless you like a mess. Courtesy of TPM Muckraker:

Gitmo to Stay Open as Human Rights Sanctuary

Turns out it’s more than just a catchy headline. The story is that the good ol’ Bush administration wants to slim down the prisoner headcount at Gitmo from the current 360 to 150. So good news for 210 wrongfully-imprisoned and even-more-wrongfully tortured detainees? Actually, no. We’ve still got one more level of wrongful to go: there’s nowhere to drop them off. Their home countries and all of the possible foster-home states that have been asked either won’t take them, or won’t take them without promising not to torture or kill them. So they get to stay in Guantánamo, where their human rights will be, uh, protected.

I wonder if they’d take any consolation in not being among the other 150 prisoners – the ones the Bush DoD doesn’t want to get rid of. Of those 150, Bush & Co. have selected 80 finalists whom they want to [beverages down again...] charge with war crimes. I shit you not. The Bush administration, having exempted itself from international accords and the U.S. Constitution in order to avoid being charged with war crimes, is gearing up to charge some of the victims of its war crimes with war crimes. Yes, some of them are surely guilty of war crimes, but we’ll never really know with the kangaroo-court military tribunals that will try them.

What about the 50 semi-finalists? The Bush junta says that they’re too dangerous to release from Gitmo, but not bad enough to put on trial. Um… I have nothing to add to this point. I guess my disgust has reached critical mass, at least for the moment.

The thing that’s saddening me the most right now is that after 6+ years of Bush, this level of absurdity doesn’t even seem unusual anymore. It’s like a ghastly, global-scale version of one of the “Cowboys and Indians” games I participated in during my single-digit years: the ones where the biggest kids make up the rules as they go along, and their manipulations become more and more illogical until chaos and disillusionment set in and the game collapses.

Would that I could just say “I’m not playing anymore,” quit the so-called war on terror and walk home.


Here Lies Lay

July 5, 2006 | 4 comments

Convicted former Chairman of Enron Kenneth Lay has died of an apparent heart attack.

Damn. Damn, damn, damn. I really wanted to see him go to jail.

OK, I’m a callous bastard, and I should think of his family – they’ve lost a loved one. And I feel bad for them. I do. They have my honest sympathy for their loss. The thing is, they’ll eventually get through their grieving process, recover, and move on, like any other family does when it loses someone. Unlike any other family, Lay’s heirs will move on in a level of comfort that is owed in part to the suffering of ex-Enron shareholders and employees whom the late Mr. Lay is responsible for fucking over.

All the former Enron foot soldiers who did nothing wrong have to move on, too: without their jobs, without the retirement safety nets they had earned, without vacation homes in Snowmass. Now, they may very well also have to do without the comfort of Kenny Boy paying for what he did:

…Lay’s death likely means his conviction will be vacated and it will be as if he were never charged… Lay had not been sentenced and the appeal process had barely started. [According to legal specialists,] that means a final judgment has not been issued and the conviction will be set aside… what is not clear, however, is if the government’s efforts to seize money and assets from Lay can continue… since it is seen as a measure meant to punish the defendant… the government could file a motion for forfeiture as a civil proceeding, however, meaning it would be an attempt to seize assets from Lay’s estate.

Bad enough that the victims are denied the comfort of seeing Lay go to prison, but their civil claim may end with their being stiffed by a stiff. It’s the kind of circumstance that one suspects will cause an uptick in atheism.

Jeff Skilling better stay healthy. I hope they have him on an exercise regimen, with a square diet and weekly physicals. Long live Jeff Skilling.


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