Shot In The Dark - Politics and Current Events in Minnesota and Beyond

Saturday, March 16, 2002

Black, Meet White - Oliver Willis is a black blogger with a few interesting ideas among all the rest. I stumbled on this one and found it interesting - noting the number of blacks who may or may not be actual conservatives who oppose the likes of Jesse Jackson and Al Sharpton, and are looking for a realignment in the civil rights movement.
posted by Mitch Berg 3/16/2002 08:46:43 PM

Ooops - A billing error with my ISP caused some service interruption. Believe it or not, they admitted it was their error.

Feel free to collect your extra viewing of Shot in the Dark, as part of the settlement!

More shots in the dark to come shortly.
posted by Mitch Berg 3/16/2002 06:40:37 PM

Wednesday, March 13, 2002

Yates Guilty - The jury didn't buy the insanity defense, and Andrea Yates was convicted yesterday of murdering three of her five children.

Two thoughts come to mind: first, the ongoing infantilization of women has taken two big setbacks in the last two months, with the conviction of Kathleen Soliah, and now this. The feminists must be getting some serious grudges on.

And the husband; I'd love, in a perverse way, to know what's going on in his mind. Of course, to the zealot, it's purely a function of Mr. Yates being a "domineering man" and, of course, a "fundamentalist Christian".

This is not to say, by the way, that Mr. Yates doesn't have serious problems, and that he doesn't bear significant responsibility for the deaths of his children. However, in light of . ">the article I linked to last week on the differing standards of justice for men and women, I'm not surprised that Mr. Yates' sins of omission are being treated as more odious than Mrs. Yates' ghastly sins of commission.

But I think it's more complicated than that.

Was Russell Yates so beaten down by living with an insane woman all these years that his entire mind is geared to nothing but mindless support of the woman in his life, even after she's killed his family? I can see that. Or his he insane, himself? I'd suspect a little of both- at the risk of sounding like Stuart Smalley, that relationship had to have been built on thick slatherings of codependence, built around keeping the wife somehow emotionally afloat, at all costs.

People - especially my feminist friends - castigate Mr. Yates for having baby after baby after baby after her condition was diagnosed. But if the hormones of pregancy were the only islands of respite in their lives together - and they both recognized it - isn't that a normal (if sick) response? The instinct for self preservation is a strong one - those islands of relative sanity must have been very tempting to both of them.
posted by Mitch Berg 3/13/2002 12:10:18 PM

Monday, March 11, 2002

American Jingoism - The current conflict has shown us a great example of blinkered American jingoism.

No, not from the government, or most of your average Americans, but from the media.

How many of you knew from the American media that special forces from Australia, Britain, Germany, Canada and Norway are fighting by the side of American troops in Afghanistan? Amid the publicity over the deaths of eight Americans last week, now many of you knew that an Australian Special Air Service trooper had died in action? (The SAS is the British, Australian and New Zealand equivalent of Delta Force). Or amid the furor over John the Taliban Walker, that three Australians had been captured after fighting for Al Quaeda?

It's a big world out there. And while we are bearing the lion's share of this action, we're not the only ones.
posted by Mitch Berg 3/11/2002 09:46:18 AM

When Cicero Spoke- Full disclosure - my father was a speech teacher. I study oratory and its role in history.

I was talking with a friend about the relative merits of President Bush and former president Clinton, especially Bush's merits and failings as a public speaker - and his rising to the occasion since September 11. Because while Clinton was a great orator, and Bush's gaffes are amply-publicized (although Al Gore's equally-hilarious gaffes curiously went unreported in the national media), Bush has risen to the occasion, delivering some fantastic speeches at just the times the nation needed them.

"But Mitch", said my friend, a Democrat, "that was just a bunch of feel-good platitudes, designed to keep the nation's spirits up during the crisis!".

Yes, indeed. And Winston Churchill's classic "Dunkirk" and "Blood, Toil, Tears and Sweat", and "Battle of Britain" speeches never shot down a single German bomber. But they buffed up Britain's nerves for the struggle ahead - a struggle perhaps vastly greater and, at the time, more one-sided than the one we face now.

In this, Bush is doing very well.

He'll be taking the podium shortly. If I have comments, I'll put them here.
posted by Mitch Berg 3/11/2002 09:07:07 AM

Shooting, Part II - Concealed-carry activists are frequently asked why we can't use pepper spray, or mace, or martial arts or stun guns instead of firearms.

Yesterday's shooting of the mentally-ill Somali man shows where non-lethal forms of resistance to violence fall short. If your attacker is on drugs, or severely mentally-impaired, non-lethal force is very frequently ineffective.

According to the FBI, not resisting a violent attack is seven times as likely to get you killed as resisting with a handgun (not necessarily killing the attacker). Non-lethal means? Four times as much.
posted by Mitch Berg 3/11/2002 08:47:47 AM

Six-Month Anniversary - Hard to believe it was six months ago today that the world seemed to turn on its ear.

In many ways, life doesn't seem all that much different now. The day to day grind really isn't, honestly. Not here, not for me. And yet it's changed one of the most important things in my life.

Indulge me, here.

I grew up in rural North Dakota, not far from the vast fields of Minuteman III missiles, close to the glide paths of the B-52 bombers,. all of which were on alert for my entire cognitive life. I was keenly aware of the presence of all of those first strike targets, forty miles away. And while I may have been one of a minority, growing up around all of that did affect me - there was a long-standing anxiety that my life and the entire world around me could be incinerated in seconds, or irradiated away, without warning.

The Berlin Wall fell about the time my oldest child was born. It would be easy and melodramatic to tell you that knowing my daughter would grow up in a world without that tension hanging over her was a wonderful, liberating sensation - but it's the truth.

I was driving to work on September 11. I was on 394, by Xenia/Park Place. I'd just flipped over from KQRS' interview with PJ O'Rourke to MPR's live coverage of the attacks, without warning. And as the day wore on , and the shock sank in, that exhilaration - covered by the many other emotional layers of an adult's life - sank away. The threat is different - but it's still the same.

So my kids are growing up in the same world I did, now. The threat is less omnipresent - I dont' suspect the Twin Cities are high on any terrorist's hit list - but more visceral. Maybe that's a good thing - it's harder for this threat to fade into the background of daily life, like the insanity of the Cold War's "Mutually Assured Destruction" amid whose tools I grew up.

And perhaps, knowing that history was not over in 1991, we were all fools to ever let our emotional guard down.

Back to the usual business of holding the "anti-war" left's feet in the fire tomorrow.
posted by Mitch Berg 3/11/2002 08:26:57 AM

Accuse First, Ask Questions Later - The left in Minneapolis is crying foul over the weekend shooting of a machete-wielding, mentally-illy Somali man by the Police - apparently after the officers on the scene exhausted all of their non-lethal options. Interestingly, they were issuing press releases via email long before the story got out via any other media.

The police apparently tried to use a number of officers that were specially-trained last year to deal with the violent mentally-ill:

"More than 40 Minneapolis police officers have
been trained to respond to situations involving
people with mental illnesses. They make up the
city's Crisis Intervention Team, which was created
last year in response to police shootings of three
mentally ill people in 1999 and 2000.

Crisis team members, who have undergone about 40
hours of training, carry Taser guns as a nonlethal
way to defuse a situation when police feel threatened.
Two members of the team attempted to subdue the man
Sunday before he was shot.

So - at risk to themselves and everyone around them, the police try to use non-lethal techniques to subdue him. Somalis attempted to talk him down. In the end, he took a swing at the cops and got shot - and that's unjustifiable?

What - is the life of a cop worth less than anyone else's?

The shooting is tragic. Does anyone have any solid evidence that it wasn't justifiable? The police aren't clairvoyant. If they did everything they could - and let's make sure they did - then what more was there to do?

I grew up near a State Hospital. The outpatients wandered the street, day in, day out. Some of them were severely schizophrenic, deeply dissociative. We were told they weren't dangerous - and they weren't. Until they were. There were killings, rapes, other crimes.

Do you suppose that saying "the perpetrator wasn't responsible for her actions" makes the victims feel any better? Or alive, for that matter?

This last year, with the shootings of the mentally-ill in Minneapolis and the Andrea Yates case, has seen a groundswell of support for the notion that the mentally-ill deserve a special dispensation for their actions, no matter now violent or homicidal. Yates, the logic goes, CAN'T be responsible for murdering her children; a mentally-ill man swinging a machete isn't a danger in his own mind, ergo he's no danger at all, and any damage he inflicts is just too bad.

This says "the life of the mentally-ill person is worth more than that of the rest of society". They are certainly worth no less than the rest of us. They can not be made worth more.
posted by Mitch Berg 3/11/2002 07:56:13 AM

Berg's Law of Liberal Iraq Commentary:

In attacking the reasons for war, no liberal commentator is capable of addressing more than one of the justifications at a time; to do so would introduce a context in which their argument can not survive