From the vaults, Theodore Dalrymple on why prison works:
[Former Justice Secretary, Ken] Clarke was quite right to say that short prison sentences are not effective but, with the practised lack of logic of a man who has spent far too long in politics for the good of his own mind, he has drawn precisely the wrong conclusions from it. His error will cause much unnecessary suffering. There are indeed many arguments against short sentences. The recidivism rate after such sentences are completed is very high. They pose large administrative costs on the prison system. They do not reassure victims that the suffering or loss inflicted upon them by criminals has been taken seriously by the state. They discourage and demoralise the police, who labour mightily, if mainly bureaucratically, to procure a conviction for very little result. They promote intimidation of witnesses…
But it is quite wrong to suppose that if something is not very effective it has no effect at all. Short prison sentences are ineffective by comparison with long ones, but that is not to say that they are ineffective by comparison with no prison sentences at all. It is a fact that a large proportion of crimes are committed by a relatively small number of people. It is not unusual for career criminals to commit a hundred or more offences a year. Therefore, keeping them in prison for six weeks, say, prevents the commission of 12 crimes. Of course, if they were kept in prison for four years, 400 crimes would be prevented. But it is better to prevent 12 crimes than no crimes at all.
See also this.
Christina Hoff Sommers on the alleged gender pay gap:
The 2007 report does give readers the impression that millennial women are facing serious workplace discrimination. But buried on page 18, we find this qualification: “After controlling for all the factors known to affect earnings, college-educated women earn about 5 percent less than college-educated men earn. Thus, while discrimination cannot be measured directly, it is reasonable to assume that this pay gap is the product of discrimination.” As Steve Chapman noted in Reason, “Another way to put it is that three-quarters of the gap clearly has innocent causes – and that we actually don’t know whether discrimination accounts for the rest.”
And Jeff Goldstein ponders Obama’s hipster mythology:
To me, Obama was never cool, was never substantive, was never a man of gravitas, was never capable of being the post-political, post-racial healer he was sold as. Instead, he was a man of constructs and mannered rhetorical tics; a man of tone, not of ideas. He was a fraud, and to those who don’t find comfort in belonging to a hipster ethos — which is no different than belonging to, say, a chess club or band camp, only on a grander scale — he was a fraud who was trying to turn statism and tyranny into the new cool, the new black, if you will… None of these attacks on individual sovereignty were ever cool or hip. Rather, they were an attempt to turn collectivism into a hipster pose, and reduce individualism to a superficial denial of certain truths: namely, that you didn’t build that, you aren’t ever going to be self-reliant, and that rugged individualism is a punch line, as trite and G-rated as an episode of Little House on the Prairie. What happened that turned conformist statists chanting Obama’s name into the epitome of cultural hipness? What made submission to the state an act of supposed defiance of The Man?
Feel free to add your own links and snippets in the comments.
What happened that turned conformist statists chanting Obama’s name into the epitome of cultural hipness?
But voting for Obama is like having sex.
It reminds me of the time I was asked – quite seriously and by an adult – if I’d seen the latest episode of Glee. I actually had to point out that I’m not in fact a thirteen year old girl.
Obama is America’s very own Zapatero (I live in Spain).
No substance, woolly-minded, statist, paternalistic (before turning aggressive), denialist (because when you care you are right even when things work out wrong; Debt? What debt?), somebody else’s money spender (and I’m not referring to tax but borrowed money). Full of caring rhetoric but ruthless in pursuit of his ‘agenda’, arrogant and worst of all truly mediocre.
We got rid of Zapatero. Just saying…
Debt? What debt?
Budget? What budget?
etc, etc…
Thinking about it, the ‘voting for Obama is like having sex’ reared it’s ugly head here in Spain with the Socialist Party’s very own Pedro Zerolo (a young gay Madrid politician) who said listening to Zapatero gave him orgasms. He’d never had so many. First the ones his husband gives him and then the ones Zapatero gave him.
Watch 25 seconds of him, even if you don’t speak Spanish
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W0qEFa1-RdY
Now, I’m easy, but… I’m obviously on the wrong side of the political divide.
“None of these attacks on individual sovereignty were ever cool or hip.”
Oh, but – sadly – they were. And are, not just in America.
That’s the problem we face. Once you get past, say, legalizing drugs – which, of course, many mainstream “individualists” try to ignore – individual liberty and responsibility aren’t cool. As Bill Whittle put it on one of his “Firewall” videos for PJM, we suck. It sucks that nothing is free. It sucks that you can’t just take other people’s money to pay for it. Or print your own without screwing up the economy. That’s just, like, totally not cool.
The Democrats’ mistake was to try to go beyond that gut feeling and turn it into an argument: because you have to rely on other people for some things, self-reliance is a myth, that sort of thing. Didn’t work. But even if their opponents turn out to be the majority next week, they’ll still be the cool kids.
Sam,
“That’s just, like, totally not cool.”
It’s one of the fundamental problems for our self-declared radicals – whatever their pretensions, they depend on others having the same bourgeois values they affect to despise. Take away those terrible bourgeois people, or tax them into resignation, and the whole house of cards tumbles. And so, for instance, Laurie Penny can pretend to scuffle with the police while denouncing the “small, ugly ambitions” that gave her a comfortable upbringing, but only so long as enough people choose to live in the “small, ugly” ways she insists should be “abandoned.” Just as Alexander Vasudevan is counting on the fact that those terrible bourgeois people – whose property he wants to see “seized” and “occupied” – won’t return the favour and take his stuff.
Three and a half years with no budget and another five trillion in debt.
http://dailycaller.com/2012/10/29/oct-29-marks-three-and-a-half-years-to-the-day-since-the-senate-passed-a-budget/
Vote Obama!
I find it interesting — and very disturbing — that the Main Stream Media in the US (echoed over here on Airstrip One) has continually refused to report on Obama’s numerous weaknesses and deceptions. The preference is to gawp the show and not examine the substance.
Obama is a weak man by many accounts; he comes across as a narcissistic poser of limited intellect, a man secretive when not devious and remarkably thin-skinned in the face of the inevitable criticism that comes with the job of president, though he gets so very little from the media. Collectively the media prefers to ignore his shortcomings and errors of judgement (when he can be bothered to make a judgement, that is) and frantically covers for him.
I can only conclude that left-leaning journalists over there and in this country appreciate some of his ideas enough to happily paper over the ones they don’t. If they like, say, his stance on one emotive issue they are willing to ignore the three or four practical failures that betray his inability and bedevil America.
What we are seeing then is the growth of the dishonest journalist. News today is not a matter of research and examination, but of hasty opinion that should ideally dovetail with the dinner party circuit and chat round the water-cooler, and if it doesn’t match the approved agenda then the facts will be ignored or the reality bent to conform. Obama has benefitted hugely from this to a degree that will astonish future writers and broadcasters if they ever shake off the current ‘correct mode of thinking.’ But it is certain that if Romney wins he will not be granted the same latitudes that Obama luxuriated in.
“One of the most intriguing pieces of data I came across while researching Unlearning Liberty is that there is an inverse relationship between how much education people have and how frequently they talk to those with whom they disagree politically… In other words, there is evidence that the more schooling you receive, the tighter your echo chamber becomes.”
http://www.volokh.com/2012/10/29/free-speech-on-campus-unlearning-liberty/
Shocker.
It’s one of the fundamental problems for our self-declared radicals – whatever their pretensions, they depend on others having the same bourgeois values they affect to despise.
Just as you and Zombie observed about the nekkid people in San Francisco, who are not interested in the state of undress per se as much as they are invested in scandalizing the squares.
And like the idiot teenagers who always do the opposite of what someone tells them to do, their sense of self depends entirely on what everyone else is doing.
Free spirits, indeed.
dicentra,
As Victor Davis Hanson says in the post I linked this afternoon, “Contrarianism is… indulged without risk only when the larger tribe is safe and secure.” And so Ms Penny and Mr Vasudevan are counting on the rest of us not behaving as they do (and as they pretend that we should). It’s a mix of pantomime and parasitism.
‘The gender pay gap is a media myth’.