"Did you thank the Lord for that split-second decision?"

After a woman described how she left her now-destroyed house, narrowly escaping the Oklahoma tornado which would have killed her and her infant son if she had followed the family's standard procedure of waiting in the bathroom, Wolf Blitzer asked her whether she thanked God that she and her infant son weren't hurt. (The husband/father was safely out of town at the time.) This led to a mildly amusing moment when she responded that she's an atheist.



Just once I'd like to see a TV host ask someone who survived a natural disaster unscathed: do you blame God for the fact that it killed, maimed, and trapped other people?

(You can watch the full interview here — it's actually a very touching testament to the ingenuity and resilience and goodness of ordinary people.)

The forgotten lesson from the Clinton impeachment and the 1998 midterms

Ramesh Ponnuru explains why the trifecta of ongoing news stories that are widely seen as harmful to President Obama (Benghazi, IRS, and Associated Press) might not help Republicans in the midterm elections:

The biggest danger for Republicans in giving themselves over to scandal mania is one that the conventional retelling of the Clinton impeachment neglects. Republicans didn’t lose seats simply because they overreached on Clinton’s perjury. It is true that his impeachment was unpopular, and public approval of the Republicans sank as they pursued it. Still, only 5 percent of voters in the 1998 election told exit pollsters that the scandal had played a role in their decision, and Republicans got a majority of those voters.

Social Security was the top issue for more than twice as many voters, and Republicans lost that issue by 18 percentage points. Even more voters cared about education, which Republicans lost by 34 points. They lost on health care and the economy by similar margins.

For the most part, Republicans didn’t campaign on impeachment in 1998: They didn’t say, “Vote for me and I’ll do my level best to oust Clinton.” Their strategy was more passive. They were counting on the scandal to motivate conservatives to vote while demoralizing liberals. So they didn’t try to devise a popular agenda, or to make their existing positions less unpopular. That’s what cost them -- that, and the mistake of counting on statistics about sixth-year elections, which also bred complacency.

Republicans have similar vulnerabilities on the issues now. They have no real health-care agenda. Voters don’t trust them to look out for middle-class economic interests. Republicans are confused and divided about how to solve the party’s problems. What they can do is unite in opposition to the Obama administration’s scandals and mistakes. So that’s what they’re doing. They’re trying to win news cycles when they need votes.

Congressional Republicans were right to press for hearings on all of these issues. But investigations of the administration won’t supply them with ideas. They won’t make the public trust Republicans. They won’t save them from themselves.

Jacques Barzun on life

This is Charles Barzun (a University of Virginia law professor) writing to his grandfather, Jacques Barzun, who died last year at age 104:

[F]or all the words spent on your achievements, I still felt as though the tributes had missed something. What they failed to capture was the way in which you used the written word not only to define and distill cultures past and present, but also to reach out, to lift up, and—for lack of a better phrase—to establish a human connection. ...

In 1997 I had taken a job in San Francisco at an Internet media company. For a while I performed well enough as director of product development, but then in the winter of 2002 I wrote to you out of a genuine crisis of identity. The crisis had been partly brought on by the events of 9/11 and partly by my own discovery that I could not have cared less about my job. I had started reading philosophy again for the first time in years and wanted to tell you this: "More than anything," I wrote, "I am trying to find that which is true, permanent, and enduring in myself—to find or create (which is it?) my life philosophy of sorts. So much philosophical inquiry has been devoted to deducing or discerning that which is true, timeless, or eternal in the universe. For me, merely finding the eternal for me, in my lifetime, would be sufficient!"

I will never forget your response. You immediately demonstrated that you knew exactly what I meant. Such a "spiritual search," you reassured me, was not at all unusual for someone my age: "It really had been brewing for some time and the event that triggered your new awareness was certainly of a magnitude to justify the ensuing disarray. You may be assured that it is not damaging or permanent, but fruitful of good things." You then continued:

"When you have worked through it, by further reflection and some decision as to the immediate future it will turn into something like a path marked on a map, to be followed for a good while and possibly for the rest of your life. To put it another way, you will have made a Self, which is indeed a desirable possession. A Self is interesting to oneself and others, it acts as a sort of rudder in all the vicissitudes of life, and it thereby defines what used to be known as a career."

Even now I find it hard to describe the effect your words had on me. Suffice it to say that my life, or, more accurately, the way I lived it, took on a different cast. I became more conscious of what I was doing and why I was doing it. ...

Amazingly, you played such an immense role in my life almost entirely through your letters. They were just words, but they were words written with care and attention and with the thought of a particular individual in mind. It occurs to me that for much of your own lifetime, there was nothing unusual about writing letters on a regular basis. Now, of course, that seems like an antiquated craft. No one writes letters anymore, and that includes me, now that you are gone. ... Then again, everything I write that requires some degree of thought and reflection is a letter to you. So in that sense our conversation continues.

"The new global battle over the future of free speech"

I recommend reading this interesting and important article about "the Deciders." That's the author, Jeffrey Rosen's, term for the people in charge of content policy at Google, Twitter, and Facebook, whose "positions give these young people more power over who gets heard around the globe than any politician or bureaucrat—more power, in fact, than any president or judge."

I strongly agree with this part:

"The company that has moved the furthest toward the American free-speech ideal is Twitter, which has explicitly concluded that it wants to be a platform for democracy rather than civility. Unlike Google and Facebook, it doesn’t ban hate speech at all; instead, it prohibits only “direct, specific threats of violence against others.” Last year, after the French government objected to the hash tag “#unbonjuif”—intended to inspire hateful riffs on the theme “a good Jew ...”—Twitter blocked a handful of the resulting tweets in France, but only because they violated French law. Within days, the bulk of the tweets carrying the hash tag had turned from anti-Semitic to denunciations of anti-Semitism, confirming that the Twittersphere is perfectly capable of dealing with hate speech on its own, without heavy-handed intervention.

As corporate rather than government actors, the Deciders aren’t formally bound by the First Amendment. But to protect the best qualities of the Internet, they need to summon the First Amendment principle that the only speech that can be banned is that which threatens to provoke imminent violence, an ideal articulated by Justice Louis Brandeis in 1927. It’s time, in other words, for some American free-speech imperialism if the Web is to remain open and free in twenty-first century."

The problem with free-market economists

Explained by a free-market economist.

"Your odds of dying in a terrorist attack...

... are still far, far lower than dying from just about anything else." See point #8 at that link, which points out:

In the last five years, the odds of an American being killed in a terrorist attack have been about 1 in 20 million (that’s including both domestic attacks and overseas attacks).

And Megan McArdle explains why deadly terrorist attacks are "so rare":

I can right now think of several terrorist strategies which would kill a lot of people and be nearly impossible to defend against. I'm not going to offer terrorists any ideas, but here's one that's already been tried: the DC sniper. They were caught only because they were too poor to switch the cars they were shooting from; a slightly better bankrolled effort could have effectively gone on forever. And you can't really imagine how you'd re-engineer America to defend against such attacks.

So why don't they happen more? The most convincing answer I've gotten to that question is that fostering terror is only one of the aims of a terrorist attack. These attacks also function as recruiting, and as fundraising promotions for your terrorist organization. There are what you might [call] business considerations, in other words, and those business considerations dictate the kinds of attacks that terrorists want to carry out.

Thank God, randomly shooting one person every week or so does not satisfy the business plan. Terrorists want large, splashy attacks on specific sorts of targets that have high emotional resonance for both the victims and the people on your side who you hope to recruit, or tap for money. This helps explain why Al Qaeda was so obsessed with the Twin Towers, a place that--until they fell--most New Yorkers regarded as a rather ugly landmark containing some so-so office space. To a terrorist group looking for publicity, on the other hand, it had immense symbolic value: the tallest building in America's biggest city, with the hubristic name of "World Trade Center".

That's why we don't get high-frequency, low-intensity attacks on crowded spaces near some Texas town that no one in Abottabad has ever heard of. When attacks on those places happen, they tend to be the provenance of local lunatics for whom the nearby mall, or primary school, has some immense symbolic emotional importance.

And thankfully, there are not nearly as many lunatics as there are schools, or malls, or even marathons. That's why most of our public spaces are safe from mad bombers--and I'm glad to say, why they will remain so.

Top 10 posts from year 5 of the blog

I started this blog exactly 5 years ago, on April 12, 2008. Here are my top 10 posts from the past year:

1. The "acting alone" fallacy

2. A few points about Justice Scalia's comments on sexual orientation and murder

3. Thoughts on playing sad songs and easy guitar parts

4. How can Republicans win after 2012?

5. Businesses help people

6. The linguistic quirks of Romney and Obama

7. "Who's in charge — you or your brain?"

8. Judge Posner's bad reason to keep the electoral college

9. If people are bad at deciding what's best for themselves, is government the solution?

10. Live-blogging the general-election debates: Obama vs. Romney #1, Biden vs. Ryan, Obama vs. Romney #2, Obama vs. Romney #3, Johnson vs. Stein.

Guns and mental illness

Alex Knepper explains what's wrong with our national conversation about them:

In the aftermath of the tragedy at Sandy Hook, the NRA called for a "national database" of the mentally ill, against which new gun sales can be checked. Similarly, President Obama has consistently advocated that Congress do something to prevent the mentally ill from possessing guns.

The general public's thought process seems to be something like this: Anyone who would use a gun to murder children must be crazy -- and crazy people should not have access to guns in the first place. But it is impolitic to use the word 'crazy,' which sounds too loaded, too politically incorrect. The polite way of expressing such a sentiment is to declare that 'mentally ill' people should not own guns.

Contrary to the general public's ignorant abuse of the term, though, 'mentally ill' does not mean 'crazy.' The term covers an extremely broad spectrum of disorders whose symptoms and causes vary significantly. Paranoid schizophrenia is classified as a mental illness, but so are Attention-Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder, and anorexia nervosa. The real question, then, becomes: Which mental illnesses should disqualify a person from owning a gun, and by what grounds do we justify singling out the people who suffer from them?

And this is where the argument starts to fall apart. As is usually the case, crafting a specific, viable policy plan is a bit more difficult than making empty emotional pleas to do something. While people with severe mental illnesses -- such as paranoid schizophrenia or major depression -- are somewhat more likely than the average person to commit acts of aggression, they account for only 4 percent of all violent crimes. Virtually all people with severe mental illnesses are just everyday men and women, no likelier than you or I to commit an act of violence. Of course, the authorities should investigate any credible claims of violent tendencies, but this is true regardless of the status of the suspect's mental health. The logic of a blanket policy targeting the mentally ill is identical to the logic of racially profiling Arab Muslims at airports.

My own experience as the close friend of a young woman with severe mental health issues has taught me that politicians, insurance companies, and the general public are astonishingly unfamiliar with what such people's day-to-day lived experiences are like. One of the most debilitating issues that my friend confronts is simple ignorance: Misconceptions about mental health issues are frighteningly common, and they can cause problems in school, work, and family life. Most mentally ill people have the ability to live normal lives -- but only with a network of support....

Michael Fitzpatrick, the director of the National Association for the Mentally Ill, expressed hope that President Obama's call for dialogue would help combat the stigma against the mentally ill. It hasn't, and it won't -- and it's easy to see why. The framing of this 'dialogue' is in the context of Sandy Hook; that is: in the context of violence and fear. What message does it send to the public that we only bother to talk about mental illness after an act of mass murder against children has taken place? The central question of the dialogue should be "How can society help those who suffer from mental illness?" But the dialogue as it has actually happened has centered around the question, "How can society protect itself against crazy people?" That's no way to craft good public health policy. It's time to stop scapegoating the mentally ill -- and start looking for real ways to help them.