Nothing Else Fit

by hilzoy

Wretchard at the Belmont Club has a post about the very light sentence given by Indonesian courts to Abu Bakar Bashir. At least, that’s what it starts out discussing. He then segues into a discussion of Abu Ali, the Virginia student who was accused of plotting to kill the President after being held held in Saudi Arabia for 20 months. About that case, Wretchard writes:

“Presiding judge O’Grady issued the ritual apology which has become a standard part of treating with these men of the shadows. “I can assure you, you will not suffer any torture or humiliation while in the marshals’ custody”. Already the victims have become accustomed to craving pardon, in advance, for their unspeakable inferiority, before the emissaries of the madrassas. If US judges are halfway to their knees how likely is it that the Indonesians will hold themselves erect? “

For some reason, it would not have occurred to me to describe assuring a suspect that he would not be tortured in custody as being “halfway to (one’s) knees”, as if stating that federal marshals will follow federal law were some sort of craven concession. But the really offensive part of Wretchard’s post comes later:

“Who was it who said that all wars of consequence were conflicts of the mind? Without getting too metaphysical, it still makes sense to regard ideas as the foundation of historical struggles; the thing that animates the visible clashes. While an idea’s potency remains it will find adherents.

The casual outside observer would conclude, from the apparent fact that the Western ideal can find no public defenders, that it is not worth upholding. Radical Islam, on the other hand, must self-evidently be an idea of great worth, as so many are publicly willing to die for it. And to a limited degree they would be right, for something must be terribly wrong with the West to cause such self-hatred.

America has shown itself apt at striking the visible parts of its enemy but seems unable to touch its foundations. On the contrary, every blow it deals seemingly reverberates within it, spreading cracks throughout its own base. Sometimes I think this is fortunate because I am beginning to suspect that the foundations of Barad-Dur lie within the West and not within Islam.“

So, just to be clear: when America tries to undermine the ideology of radical Islam, it ends up harming only its own. And “sometimes” Wretchard thinks this is a good thing. And why is that? Because he suspects that “the foundations of Barad-Dur lie within the West.”

In an earlier post, I quoted C.S. Lewis on where hatred leads:

“Finally we shall insist on seeing everything—God and our friends and ourselves included—as bad, and not be able to stop doing it: we shall be fixed for ever in a universe of pure hatred.”

Wretchard began, as best I can tell, by hating the Islamists who attacked this country on 9/11 and the unspecified “Left” who, in his view, enable and support them. But now his hatred has circled back on itself. At least, that’s the only way I can interpret his saying that it’s a good thing that cracks are spreading through the ideology that supports this country, and that the West he began by defending contains “the foundations of Barad-Dur”. Even if we assume that he only means that we on “the Left” provide those foundations, what he actually says is that he “sometimes” thinks that it’s “fortunate” that America harms the ideological foundations on which it is built, since when our foundations are harmed, Barad-Dur’s are harmed as well. This is madness.

There are other things about this post that are also — I don’t know what word to use other than ‘delusional’*. Is it an “apparent fact that the Western ideal can find no public defenders”? Not in the world I live in. We can debate who those defenders are — those on the right might cite the President, for starters, while I might be more likely to point to those who have protested the abuses at Abu Ghraib and elsewhere, and the courts who have ruled that the President does not have the right to detain people without charges. But whichever side you take, the idea that ‘the Western ideal can find no public defenders’ is not just false; it’s so false that one has to wonder what planet Wretchard has been living on all this time. Likewise, he says that the madrassa system “has proved too powerful to shut down or even criticize”, in the course of a discussion of Abu Ali, who went to school in Virginia. But obviously the reason Islamic schools have not been shut down isn’t that they’re ‘too powerful’; it’s that pesky little First Amendment. And if Wretchard thinks that no one has criticized madrassas, I have to wonder once again whether he and I inhabit the same universe.

On reflection, I think we probably aren’t. He is trapped in Lewis’ “universe of pure hatred”, fighting enemies only he can see.

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Because I am a copycat, I too have updated my blogroll. Brief descriptions below the fold.

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I know it sounds stupid, but I’m a bit emotionally exhausted from my last post and the responses to it in the four places I’ve posted it.  So instead of writing the post I wanted to, I want to take advantage of the fact that I’m a conservative writer with a liberal audience and conduct an informal and unscientific survey which is attempting to test how separate the conservative and liberals sides of the political blogosphere are. 

Don’t google it, at least until after you answer.  If I say "Eason  Jordan CNN Scandal", do you know what I’m talking about? 

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Back in December, Scientific American had an interesting article on self-esteem which von wrote about before I could get to it. Now its authors have written an article in the LA Times (via Kevin Drum, and this time competitive me is determined to be the first to pounce on it. From the LA Times article:

“Here are some of our disappointing findings. High self- esteem in schoolchildren does not produce better grades. (Actually, kids with high self-esteem do have slightly better grades in most studies, but that’s because getting good grades leads to higher self-esteem, not the other way around.) In fact, according to a study by Donald Forsyth at Virginia Commonwealth University, college students with mediocre grades who got regular self-esteem strokes from their professors ended up doing worse on final exams than students who were told to suck it up and try harder.

Self-esteem doesn’t make adults perform better at their jobs either. Sure, people with high self-esteem rate their own performance better — even declaring themselves smarter and more attractive than their low self-esteem peers — but neither objective tests nor impartial raters can detect any difference in the quality of work.

Likewise, people with high self-esteem think they make better impressions, have stronger friendships and have better romantic lives than other people, but the data don’t support their self-flattering views. If anything, people who love themselves too much sometimes annoy other people by their defensive or know-it-all attitudes. Self-esteem doesn’t predict who will make a good leader, and some work (including that of psychologist Robert Hogan writing in the Harvard Business Review) has found humility rather than self-esteem to be a key trait of successful leaders.

It was widely believed that low self-esteem could be a cause of violence, but in reality violent individuals, groups and nations think very well of themselves. They turn violent toward others who fail to give them the inflated respect they think they deserve. Nor does high self-esteem deter people from becoming bullies, according to most of the studies that have been done; it is simply untrue that beneath the surface of every obnoxious bully is an unhappy, self-hating child in need of sympathy and praise.”

The conclusion: “After all these years, I’m sorry to say, my recommendation is this: Forget about self-esteem and concentrate more on self-control and self-discipline.”

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A few days ago, Reihan of The American Scene commented on the sometime injustice of the U.S. justice system:

What angers me, and I realize that I haven’t been very coherent, is that a middle-class person can mess up again and again, falling through safety net after safety net, and still thrive, given time and a bit of gumption and stick-to-it-iveness. If you’re not middle class, and you’re not from a stable, intact, literate, ambitious family, you will have a very, very hard time. Your likelihood of death is vastly higher, as is the likelihood that you’ll live at the mercy of a criminal justice system you scarcely understand. (That I, in my infinite idiocy, scarcely understand.)

Jonah Goldberg responded, "I can certainly understand where Reihan is coming from. But I just can’t quite get where he’s going with this. Is it a shock that the Middle Class have more resources than the lower class? Is it news? Is it unique to the issue of drug addiction? The answer is no on all fronts."  (Reihan responds to Goldberg here.)

There’s not really a dispute here; rather, a debate over a dressed-up cliche. (Shorter Goldberg:  Life ain’t fair.)  Still, it can be a bit shocking when the essential unfairness of life suddenly presents itself, unhidden and without euphemism, in your full view.  Knowing that life ain’t fair in some esoteric sense isn’t the same as seeing that life ain’t fair in the human being before you.

Now, I don’t have much experience with the criminal justice system as an attorney (or a citizen, I hasten to add).  A stint as a law student working at 26th and California in Chicago for Judge, now Justice, Fitzgerald; a little pro bono time donated to the Federal Defender program while an associate at my old firm.  But I suspect that I have more experience than either Reihen or Goldberg in this area.  So let me tell you a story. 

This is a story about the day I met the Smooth Criminal. 

(The story of the possibly insane but clearly innocent alleged arsonist and the ATF agent who decided that Javert was, in fact, the hero of Les Miserables will have to wait for another day.)

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