Category Archives: news

Fear, itself

news, ,

In December, 1999, a U.S. Customs agent in Port Angeles, Washington became suspicious of one passenger driving his car off a ferry from Canada, and asked him to step out of the car. While she was trying to get him to answer questions while she checked his passport, other customs agents searched the car, and found a large number of bags and bottles of suspicious substances. The driver fled on foot, was tackled a few blocks away, and arrested.

Experts quickly determined that the materials in the car were ingredients to build a very big bomb, and soon put the pieces together of a plot to set the bomb off at the Los Angeles International Airpot on New Year’s Eve.

In Seattle, a suddenly nervous mayor and city council feared that there might be more bombers out there, and announced they were considering canceling the New Year’s Eve fireworks display at the Space Needle, just in case. People were upset. Businesses that had spent a lot of money for the celebration were very upset. People argued that canceling the celebration would be the same as surrendering to the terrorists.

After bit of sturm und drang, the officials agreed to let the fireworks go forward. But the park around the Space Needle would be fenced off, so the public could not come in. Some private property owners offered to clear out a couple of nearby parking lots so people could gather there. And the fireworks happened.

And Mayor Paul Schell (whose embarrassing defeat in the primary election the next year has earned him a bit of immortality, as reporters in Western Washington now refer to the act of an incumbent failing to advance from the primary to general elected as being “Schelled”) earned a new nickname: Mayor Wimp.

The stupid part was that fencing off the park didn’t put anyone in any less danger. Since the parking lots were announced days in advanced, any theoretical bombers could have placed their bomb near one of those parking lots and caused a horrific number of deaths. The only thing that the fencing did was make sure that those tragic deaths would happen on private property, so the city would theoretically not be liable.

As if a good legal team couldn’t argue the city was still somewhat culpable because the city told people to gather at the parking lots.

It’s tempting, when some horrible thing like a bombing, a shooting spree, or a threat of such a thing happens, for people to run around frantically doing things to keep people safe. Just in case someone else is planning the same thing. Or in case someone decides to copy the sociopath.

Bank robber Willie Sutton (who stole about 2 million dollars during the 30s, 40s, and 50s, and spent more than half his life in jail) is said to have once answered that he picked banks because “that’s where the money is.” He probably never actually said those words, but they remain true nonetheless.

The Millenium Bomber wasn’t targeting LAX because he had a grudge against that airport. The Theatre Gunman didn’t target The Dark Knight Rises because he hates Batman movies. These places are picked because that’s where people are.

And the reason no one was killed in a bomb blast near the Space Needle on New Year’s Eve, 1999, wasn’t because nervous officials fenced off the park. It was because no bomber was targeting Seattle that holiday.

If we all suddenly decide not to got to the movies, the next nutjob will just figure out where the most people will be, and he’ll go there. Hiding isn’t a solution.

There isn’t an easy solution. We can look at better ways to enforce gun laws and better ways to deliver mental health care. We can try to pay a bit more attention to our surroundings. We can try to increase the amount of goodwill and mutual respect in society. Those things won’t cure the problem, but just like that Customs Agent who had a hunch, sometimes we’ll get lucky.

Rough, manly sport

news, people, ,

On the first day of school my eighth grade year, instead of having each of us go to our final period class at the end of the day, they had all the girls go to the library for an “assembly,” while all the football players went to the gym for a pre-practice meeting. And they told the boys not going out for football to report to the math teacher’s room.

It was a small town middle school: sixth, seventh, and eighth grade totaling a bit less than 200 kids, about half of them boys. There were only eight boys out of that 100 who were not going out for football. So the eight of us sat in the room, not sure exactly why we were there, or what we were supposed to do.

And then the principal walked in.

Continue reading Rough, manly sport →

Good luck with that (haters gonna….)

news, ,

So some of the usual suspects (*cough* American Family Association *cough*) have gotten something in a twist because Google is endorsing the “radical” notion that people shouldn’t be executed just for being gay. That’s the issue that kicked off the Legalise Gay campaign, in case you didn’t know.

So these people, who claim to follow that guy who said “love your neighbor as yourself” and “why do you worry about the speck in your neighbor’s eye and pay no attention to the log in your own?” are calling for a boycott of Google because Google is opposed to mortal violence against gay people.

Boycott Google? That’s going to be interesting.

Let’s forget about products like smart phones running Google’s Android OS, and services like GoogleDocs and such, and just think about their core business: search. So, who are they going to use? Bing?

Not that they can’t, but here’s the thing: a couple of decades back Bing’s owner, Microsoft, decided that maybe they should have a lobbyist go down to the state capital here in my home state (which is also Microsoft’s home state) because that’s what successful companies do. They polled their employees, including managers and executives, about what the lobbyist should suggest the legislators do. The overwhelming consensus: pass some statewide Gay rights law.

Not lobby for a tax break (that sort of thing would come later), but lobby for Gay rights.

And that’s what they did. Even now when the company (IMHO) has lost much of its way and become just another lumbering short-term profit making beast, it still sponsors and supports gay events, provides health benefits to same-sex partners, lobbied for the full domestic partnership refendum a couple years ago, the marriage equality referendum coming up for a vote soon, and in pretty much every way is at least as supportive of Gay rights as Google.

Yahoo, like most other large tech companies also has gay-friendly corporate policies and has sponsored gay rights events. It’s difficult to find a large tech company in the western world that hadn’t twigged to the fact a bit ago that one way to attract and retain talented employees is to be inclusive and supporting of, among others, gay employees.

So for search alone, they’re going to be hard-pressed to find an alternative that isn’t supportive of gay rights. I don’t see how a boycott is even possible.

As an aside, for the allies and defenders of the AFA and their ilk, getting angry because a company or person suggests that maybe gay people shouldn’t be executed just because they love who they love? That is advocating violence against gays. It isn’t a misinterpretation or distortion. It is exactly what they are doing.

And exactly what you are defending.

Can’t prove a negative…

news,

An oft repeated truism is,”You can’t prove a negative” by which people usually mean that it’s impossible to prove that something does not exist. This is a retooling of another old saying: absence of evidence is not evidence of absence. Many people believe it is a law of logic.

It’s not. And it isn’t true outside of logic, either.

In most legal systems a form of this principle exists, though it’s usually expressed as a burden of proof argument: the defense doesn’t have to prove that their client didn’t do it, they just have to show that the prosecution hasn’t conclusively proven that the client did do it. However, that doesn’t mean that the defense isn’t allowed to go the extra mile. If the defense can prove that another person actually committed the crime, for instance, or if they prove that it was physically impossible for their client to have done it, they have proven a negative.

In mathematics we have proof by impossibility, which is another form of proving the negative. And in logic you can use a rule of inference called “denying the consequent” to prove other kinds of negatives.

So the next time someone accuses someone of something horrid with little evidence, and replies to any arguments by saying, “you can’t prove it didn’t happen!” Point out that they have the burden of proof wrong: the accuser is the one who has something to prove. The rest of us just have to raise reasonable doubts…

Losing history

news, people

I’m not ancient, but sometimes I really feel like it. Such as when I was explaining to someone recently that the legal notion that a woman’s body was the property of her husband, rather than herself, was still fully active in U.S. law only 35 years ago (and that some vestiges of that notion still survive in the law today).

I remember when I was in junior high school people were still quoting parts of the Bible (that had been previously used to justify slavery) to argue against civil rights laws to protect racial minorities. The federal civil rights act had been passed some years before, but politicians and activists were still openly arguing that some races were inferior to others — and they were using the Bible to justify it.

One such politician ran as a third-party candidate for president in 1968 on an explicitly racist platform and won several states. He softened his proclamations when he ran again in 1972, but his compaign speeches had enough racist “dog whistles” (including some biblical ones) that it was clear he was still appealing to racist voters. And he was doing very well in the democratic primaries, until a nutjob out five bullets into him in an attempt to assassinate him (and even then, he did well in the next two state primary votes while recovering in a hospital).

So it is disheartening to learn how many christian journalism students at a recent conference didn’t realize that when a speaker said the Bible had been used to justify slavery he was simply reporting a fact, and not even one from ancient history, but rather within his own lifetime.

Just because it didn’t happen on twitter doesn’t mean it is ancient history, totally inapplicable to the here and now.

When words move you

news, , , ,

There’s this silly “alternate weekly” here in Seattle, the Stranger, that I read all the time. I admit, sometimes I read it to see what crazy thing one of them is going to say this time. But I also read it because several of the writers are good, and even when they aren’t, they often cover stories no one else does. The story I’m about the link for you was covered by lots of people. It was about a horrific double-rape, murder and attempted murder. About a pair of women waking up, one with a knife to her throat, the evening after they had a fitting for the dresses for their commitment ceremony. Only one of the women survived, and eventually she testified before a jury about that night.

Eli Sanders wrote a series of stories about the crime, the investigation, the perpetrator, and the process of how we, as a society, investigate and handle horrific crimes. All of the stories were good, but he was awarded a Pulitzer Prize for the tale of testimony the surviving partner eventually was able to give.

He called it, The Bravest Woman in Seattle. I cried the first time I read it last summer. I cried when I tried to explain to someone about the story that made me cry. I cried when I read again today after learning it had won a Pulitzer. I cried when I tried to tell Michael the link I was looking for.

Back in the days I was writing for college newspapers and thinking of possibly going into journalism as a career, that’s the kind of story you hoped someday you would get to tell.