Crime and Punishment

Learning details of the crimes perpetrated by the Golden State Killer and Rapist in the wake of last week's arrest of a suspect, my anti-capital punishment reflexes have been put to the test.  The crimes were vile; the killer, an extremely degenerate sadist.  The numbers by themselves are horrendous: at least 12 murders, more than 50 rapes, over 100 burglaries mostly perpetrated over the decade from 1976 to 1986.  The nature of many of the burglaries reveals the baseness of the killer's modus operandi, which was to inflict as much damage and terror as he could wring from his victims and their families during and after his attacks.  This paragraph from the Wikipedia article gives a flavor:

The offender at times spent hours in the home, ransacking closets and drawers, eating food in the kitchen, drinking beer, raping the female again, or returning to utter more threats to the victims. In some instances, the victims believed he had left their home and began to move, but he then "jump[ed] from the darkness". The offender typically stole items from the victims as well, often selecting personal objects and items of minimal monetary value, although he stole cash and firearms also. The offender would eventually leave in a stealthy fashion, and victims were usually unsure as to whether or not he had left at all. He was believed to escape on foot through a series of yards and then use a bicycle to travel home or to a car. He also made extensive use of parks, schoolyards, creek beds, and other open spaces that allowed him to stay off the street.

Leading up to an attack, he would stalk his victims-- apparently strangers chosen merely from prolonged surveillance of neighborhoods and areas with features he preferred such as wooded abutments that he could use for access and escape --  and prepare his crimes sometimes for months. He relished his victims learning the scope of knowledge he had acquired about them, occasionally calling them sometimes years after the fact to remind them of their encounter with him.  It was the lengths of his preparation that led some investigators to guess correctly that he was or had been a police officer.  Profiling and victim's descriptions had only gotten the investigation so far (did you know that many of his victims reported he had a smaller than average penis?). But it was DNA that id'ed him this past week, giving investigators and victims the hope that they may have actually finally got their man in suspect Joseph James deAngelo.*

As I say, the more I've learned about the crimes, the greater the challenge to my highest ideals about justice.  The death penalty is legal in California but has rarely been carried out since 1972 when it was temporarily abolished as unconstitutional.  Although the penalty was reinstated by voters within months, the state has not executed a prisoner since 2006.  But if there is a case for the death penalty, this man's crimes could just be it.  I can in fact imagine and by proxy enjoy the pleasure and relief of the victims in seeking to return any measure of what was perpetrated on them to their transgressor.  Surely death would be too good for him.  I can for instance imagine the catharsis of conducting the trial with the defendant seated in court with electric cables hooked up to various parts of his body*,  through which his victims could administer jolts at will for every smirk, rolled eyeball  and sigh-- or just for the hell of it.   But for me, the key word is justice, which does inspire me to get my head on straight.

I have two overarching objections to the death penalty, and 2 reasons to prefer permanent incarceration as an alternative.  My first objection alone could be considered adequate: What if the verdict is wrong?  If so, the death penalty is an irreversible mistake on the state's behalf.  What could be more cruel and unusual than for the state to kill the wrong person?  From experience, we've learned that justice is rarely perfect. It convicts the innocent and acquits the guilty.  It is only as good as its practitioners, who have repeatedly been shown to be, as a class, less than ideal.

But in these days of DNA testing and other forensics, and given that in spite of the problems, justice still does occasionally manage to get done, there could still be cases where a conviction is nearly unanimously agreed to be correct, and this could well be one.   Thus, my second objection: if premeditated killing is a crime, the state should not engage in it.  If you do not trust the state to collect taxes, wage wars, pass laws and regulations (and for many reasons in this muddled age of what government is you should not), then it makes no sense to trust the state with premeditated murder.  To illustrate why states should not be entrusted to be impartial (let alone competent) in the administration of this responsibility, one need only look at statistics on race of those executed.  As the US General Accounting Office's own study has shown, "In 82% of the studies [reviewed], race of the victim was found to influence the likelihood of being charged with capital murder or receiving the death penalty, i.e., those who murdered whites were found more likely to be sentenced to death than those who murdered blacks."  Why would we want to irrevocably imbue any such flawed and capricious entity with the power to kill with impunity-- which is after all a power that we must necessarily grant to it over ourselves?

Compared to my objections to death, my reasons for preferring life are optimistic and idealistic.  The first is my belief that true justice must include the possibility that the guilty can be brought to remorse.  For me this is the essence and ideal of justice, that the perpetrators of crimes against fellow humans can come-- perhaps through empathy training or therapy-- to see the errors of their ways, to see their victims for who they are and not merely as pesky wills to be overcome in getting what they want.   In this way, those justly sentenced to life can properly take part in rehabilitating themselves for as long as they live, which may be as long as it takes for remorse to be achieved.  It could be objected that this is a naive hope. No one knows of a way to bring anything like this about for every shade of narcissistic sociopath, or for those perpetrators who perceive themselves to be victims entitled to reparations from strangers.  Yes, that may be true today.  Can anyone say that there will not be advances in our understanding of how to bring about empathy in a remorseless heart or otherwise reform it tomorrow? 

Which brings me to my second reason for preferring a life sentence: it affords us the opportunity to try to understand the motivations of those who perpetrate the most heinous acts toward prevention of further crimes.  The pursuit of this understanding should be practiced fearlessly.  I suspect true understanding of what brings the mostly male perpetrators of the worst crimes to these behaviors is not pursued because of the threat its exposure could pose to dearly held values about masculinity and power*.  It could also implicate social structures that are in need of restructuring and obstacles to success that are in need of removal.  What if violent random crime could demonstrably be reduced by increasing advantages to the most desperate, or by ensuring returning veterans get proper support and treatment for PTSD, or by sensible regulation of gun sales?  We have somehow "decided" as a nation that "killing the irredeemable" is worth it in hopes that others may be deterred by it; can we not decide that understanding why such crimes occur in hopes of preventing them is as worthy of pursuit?  I propose that part of a life sentence should be mandatory subjection of the convicted to ongoing research that is well designed and peer reviewed by accredited experts in a broad range of fields, from criminology to various disciplines of psychology to jurisprudence to sociology, and that this research be made available for pubic policy discussion.  To my first point, a remorseful and reformed subject would be an asset to any such investigation.

I'll grant you that my notions of justice may not be to everyone's taste.  I imagine the spectrum of opinions on what justice is for those who might still believe in it run from eye-for-an-eye vengeance, revenge and extraction of satisfaction from the corpses of those deemed to be society's enemies to pie-in-the-sky pleasing notions of rehabilitation and redemption in this lifetime for all, especially for those most in want of it.  I've also lived long enough to know that social idealism has been declared an enemy of our corporate hierarchy and has taken a tarnishing from public relations firms and think tanks (and often from ourselves via lessons we've absorbed from the masters), so chances are if you've made it this far you're fighting a smirk for each mention of the word ideal.  I myself can hardly imagine America returning to a state in which policy is enacted and executed toward an end of improvement of both society and of the lots of people in it, no matter how demonstrably low they may have fallen or how far from adequately cared for they've been from the start.

I wish I had a "however" to follow that sentence with.  Instead, I admit my belief in the prospects for sane constructive justice procedures and a penal system that does more than make money for corporate profiteers or exact revenge regardless of the quality of the verdict or the effectiveness of the act as a deterrent is dim.   But it's not yet illegal to hope for something better.

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* Did I mention the unusually small penis?

Slow change

Music for all time from the Blue Note album Now! by LA's late, great Bobby Hutcherson.  

The personnel:

Bobby Hutcherson - vibes
Harold Land - tenor saxophone
Stanley Cowell - piano, electric piano
Wally Richardson - guitar
Herbie Lewis - bass
Joe Chambers - drums
Candido Camero - congas, bongo
Gene McDaniels - lead vocals
Eileen Gilbert, Christine Spencer, Maeretha Stewart - backing vocals

Gene McDaniels (who also went professionally by his full name, Eugene Booker McDaniels) has a co-writing credit with Bobby Hutcherson for the lyrics*:

Free soul soul free touch me feel you change
Locked door lost key touch me heal you change
Free soul soul free touch me free me
Catch the spiral falling upward
God is watching, God is dying, slow change

Here's footage of McDaniels from an earlier stage in his career with his hit Point of No Return on the syndicated musical variety program Hollywood a Go Go.

McDaniels' record was by many accounts the last song playing on the Dallas Radio station K-LIF before news reports of President Kennedy's assassination interrupted the programming.  A somewhat eerily appropriate coincidence, if true.  

As if that wasn't enough immortality, Gene McDaniels also wrote Roberta Flack's attention-grabbing grand entrance on the music scene, the amazing first track on the first side of her first album, First Take, Compared to What:

(He also wrote Flack's Feel Like Makin' Love.) (Not Bad Company's.)

At the end of a full life that makes for lively reading on Wikipedia, McDaniels spent the rest of his days living a self-described hermit's life in Kittery, Maine, where he made YouTube videos on various subjects, including the below about Les McCann and Eddie Harris's orginal version of the Roberta Flack cover of the above:

For even more McDaniels lore from an aficionado, go here.

[Update August 2018:] And finally, this late addition:

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* More than half the time I hear "song" where the lyrics have "soul", but I'm going with the web consensus on this because it makes poetic sense and I sometimes hear it too.

Déja vu

The trouble starts here: Viktor Orbán (Attila Kisbenedek/AFP via Getty Images)

If you think we've got problems in the US (and we do), you may need to invent a word for what Hungary's got.  A week ago, to no one's surprise, Hungary's morphing-into-a-dictator Viktor Orbán won his 3rd consecutive election by a landslide in a process that observers have called "Free but not entirely fair". The victory gives Orbán's Fidesz party and its allies two-thirds control over Parliament, and the ability to change the constitution to further cement its hold on the country.  According to the New York Times, Fidesz and its allies won 49% of the vote in a 50% turnout  -- "roughly the same as the seven largest opposition parties combined."  However, the Party "had used the resources of the state on a very large scale to bolster its chances of winning."

“Voters had a wide range of political options, but intimidating and xenophobic rhetoric, media bias, and opaque campaign financing constricted the space for genuine political debate,” said Douglas Wake, the head of the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe, or O.S.C.E., mission in Hungary.

“The ubiquitous overlap between government information and ruling coalition campaigns, and other abuses of administrative resources blurred the line between state and party,” he said.

Having gotten much traction from his boldly unwelcoming stance on immigration in the European crisis of 2015, Orbán has turned in recent years to worrying his countrymen about the threat of George Soros and to encouraging paranoia about the intentions toward Hungary's ability for self-determination of the more Westerly members of the EU, also apparently to his advantage.  Not content to stop there, allies of Orbán had even ventured in recent weeks to risk alienating the Roma faction of their base with disparaging comments, traditionally the purview of their biggest rival the Jobbik party which came in second.   It does not seem to have hurt the outcome.  The parallels with the last American election are interesting, but if anything, the resonance of xenophobia with sizeable enough segments of the Hungarian population may be more accute due to Hungary's uniqueness in the center of an "Indo-European" Europe, a poignant precariousness which as one writer recently suggested may go some way toward explaining the affinity Hungarian politicians often express for Native Americans.

The billboard reads: Don't let Soros have the last laugh (NPR)

Regardless of the reason for voter susceptibility to Orbán's scary stories, Fidesz's delivery system of choice for its propaganda has traditionally been omnipresent placards. Yet while those have been effective, the main factor in Fidesz' success has undoubtedly been the silencing of media opposition, largely through the purchase and shuttering of independent news outlets by Orbán allies, and otherwise by depriving them of government advertising -- an important source of revenue.  The latest victim of this tactic has been the 80 year old center right Magyar Nemzet newspaper-- owned in recent years by former Orbán ally turned enemy,  Lajos Simiscka-- which closed within days of Orbán's victory.  Days afterward, the English language online news portal Budapest Beacon likewise voluntarily closed.  Its signoff statement is instructive reading on the Hungarian situation.

Bernadett Szabo/Reuters

In another parallel with the American election, tens of thousands of anti-Orbán protesters took to the streets across Hungary on Saturday, with promises of future events.

To any Hungarians reading this: Őszinte részvétem from one who has been in a similar place not too long ago (and face it still is).

Asking 4 a Friend

From Anna Burch:

The video (created by Mike Vargas) is from Walter Lantz's 1938 Oedipal horror story Boy Meets Dog.  The audio has a slow start but it's intentional and the wait is rewarded.

Talk to me

Take a look at this exchange between Ezra Klein and serial conversationalist Sam Harris regarding the topics occasioned by Harris' April 2017 rap session with conservative policy analyst Charles Murray in which Murray's thesis on the subject of Race and IQ, expressed most famously in his 1994 book  The Bell Curve (co-authored with psychologist Richard Herrnstein) was championed by Harris.  (Start here for background or here.  You can listen to the podcast of Klein and Harris' conversation on Harris's site;  Klein's Vox site has both the podcast and a transcript from which the below was taken.):

Sam Harris: I’m in the, once again, having the bewildering experience of agreeing with virtually everything you said there, and yet it has basically no relevance to what I view as our underlying disagreement.

 Ezra Klein: You have that bewildering experience because you don’t realize when you keep saying that everybody else is thinking tribally, but you’re not, that that is our disagreement.

Sam Harris: Well, no, because I know I’m not thinking tribally —

Ezra Klein: Well, that is our disagreement.

Sam Harris: In this respect because, no, because I share your political biases there. I would line up with you completely. If I gave into my bias, my social bias I would become, I can’t tell you what a relief it would be to recognize that Nisbett and Turkheimer are reasoning better than anyone else in this field. I can’t tell you what a relief it would be to realize that Gould’s book, The Mismeasure of Man, was right on the money.

Ezra Klein: I don’t think it would be a relief to you at all. Because .. right at the beginning of all this with Murray you said, you look at Murray and you see what happens to you. You were completely straightforward about that, that you look at what happens to him and you see what happens to you... 

Sam Harris: It’s not tribalism. This is an experience of talking about ideas in public.

Ezra Klein: ... I think that your core identity in this is as someone who feels you get treated unfairly by politically correct mobs and —

Sam Harris: That is not identity politics. That is my experience as a public intellectual trying to talk about ideas.

Ezra Klein: That is what folks from the dominant group get to do. They get to say, my thing isn’t identity politics, only yours is. I will tell you, Sam, when people who do not look like you hear you telling them that this is just identity politics, they don’t think, “God he’s right. That is just identity politics.” They think this is my experience and you don’t understand it. You just said it’s your experience and they don’t understand it.

You would be forgiven for thinking that the "conversation" was really two alternating monologues.  Sam Harris, if not exactly making the airtight case for the vaunted science behind Charles Murray's policy projects, was ostensibly defending hypothetical dangerous truths from hypothetical political correctness.  Ezra Klein was both laying out Murray's stated agenda in presenting the science, and making the case for why political and historical perspectives should not be excluded from consideration on the topic.

I'm not a fan of political correctness that reflexively shuts down conversation (whether from the right,  left or middle), but I see none here. I happen to agree with Ezra Klein that the uses for this particular avenue of scientific exploration cannot be separated from the science-- and that it is "not even right" to engage in a discussion about the intelligence of a 'race' while scrubbing the conversation of history, or discounting or disallowing voices of concern from African Americans, Latinos and the traditionally disadvantaged in particular from weighing in. Furthermore, there is definitely something suspect, and may even be something reductive to the claim that IQ, which is to some extent an occasion to demonstrate one's fluency in the dominant culture in which the test is designed, is a predictor of one's success in that culture, especially if that culture has historically been organized to protect the supremacy of some of its citizens over others.

To his credit, Sam Harris reminds Klein that intelligence is not intrinsically a quality of superiority.  After all, as his own output often attests, what good is intelligence if you're just wrong?   But there are several reasons to doubt the truth of Sam Harris's racial IQ science, and to doubt the integrity of his position.  Many of them have to do with flaws in Harris's style of discourse and thought which he has conveniently provided examples of in "conversation" after "conversation" over the years with a series of frequently distinguished opponents on a series of similarly incendiary topics.  Among the problems:

Cherry picking: It's really not enough in this case to accept Harris' decree that the science is non-controversial on race and intelligence-- a characterization that is not merely dead wrong, but laughably tone deaf to the outrage that could be provoked by reducing a topic with a complex and brutal history to an anodyne abstract from out of a journal only scientists and policy makers would read.  As for the validity of  characterizing the state of the science as settled, the exception that proves the rule came on Klein's own Vox site in the person of three Intelligence scientists (2 of whom are referred to in the above exchange) who argued the opposite point.  By definition, their testimony invalidates Harris' point.  Note that this is not yet even a critique of the science, merely of the notion that the science has all been done and that there is now consensus about it among all whose opinion is valued and allowed on the topic.

A pattern of selective skepticism:  None as regards Ruth Benedict's classic colonialist take on the Dobu of Papua New Guinea in 1934's Patterns of Culture, a pleasing narrative about the disagreeability of an isolated  and backward people sitting on some lovely resources that was used as an example of an extreme of cultural relativity, which account was ultimately debunked by anthropologist Susanne Kuehling in 2005, five years before Harris used Patterns of Culture's account of the Dobu as a jumping off point for his 2010 work The Moral Landscape and which he introduced again most recently in a conversation with Jordan Peterson of lobster fame.  To the topic at hand, it should escape no one's attention that whereas Harris presents Charles Murray's thesis on race and IQ as a dispassionate appraisal of scientific fact, and seems almost scandalized by Klein's impugning of Murray's agenda, Harris instantly rejects contrary opinion on the basis that it is tainted by politics.

A habit of special pleading:  for starters, for instance, with regard to the intentions of western democracies in military exercises, particularly contrasted with those they exercise against.  In the present conversation, according to Harris, Murray, who has had a privileged life in Washington as a prominent, influential conservative think tank wonk is especially due the courtesy of a hearing, whereas voices representing the groups Murray's writings have consistently striven (and not without success) to deprive-- voices that I would argue have perhaps been occasionally provoked to a justifiable scream on this topic--  are barred from the conversation that Harris, the self-described public intellectual, thinks we need to have. 

An addiction to very bad thought experiments:  the construction of hypothetical situations that (surprise surprise) Harris believes could objectively be agreed upon by reasonable observers to be responded to with torture or unilateral pre-emptive deployment of a nuclear bomb;  the assumed logical endpoint of the influence of the Koran (above all other collections of writing) on a civilization isolated from any other literature or science. From the Harris Klein debate, proffered as a counterfactual example of a "forbidden truth": What if instead of Europeans being 2.3% Neanderthal as was recently determined from genetic studies to virtually no outcry form Europeans,  it were found that humans of African descent were?  To borrow NPR entertainment critic Tom Shales' dismissal of the 'What if Peter Pan grew up?' premise of the movie Hook: What if Moby Dick were a guppy?  Thank goodness we don't have to put it to the test, but let's hope not even Charles Murray would be motivated to adopt a group's traces of pre-historic interspecies ancestry as a further basis for depleting the funding of anti-poverty programs.  If there are themes in what causes Harris's thought experiments to fail, I propose that the most incipient is his unfounded confidence in what is self-evident.

Sam Harris is drawn to what he terms Forbidden Knowledge, much of which on examination turns out to be Questionable Opinion -- albeit almost consistently, including in this case, opinion that is pretty close to the received and conventional orthodoxy of the elite.   We're all entitled to our opinions, however questionable.  But in most orthodoxies only the priesthood gets to decide what are facts.  Sam Harris is a priest of orthodox opinion.

It's appealing to think that all one needs to access truth is reason; that a rational mind privileges one to proximity to the way the Universe works.  It's pretty to feel oneself free from the burdens of identity that straitjacket those preoccupied with their own perceived oppression-- to know that like Dorothy in Oz, if only they could see it, the more intelligent of those born to less automatically privileged demographics would likewise have access to truth that is just freely available to those who through no fault of their own were born to greater advantage.   But to the contrary, Harris makes clear that he would have those concerned about where his vaunted science is leading shut off the intelligence that they would bring to bear on the conversation that he is having about them.  He may not be a racist, if you want to be believe him.   But especially in light of his performance on topics such as Islam and race and intelligence, I have difficulty believing he is not at least, as Ezra Klein so eloquently put it, an "anti-anti-racist."

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Further Reading:

Take a look at this to get a sense of how quaint, limited and calcified Harris's working notions of human history are.

Here is why Sam Harris gets to call himself a "neuroscientist".  Here is why we should perhaps not be so hasty to be impressed by that.