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mousey musings
Wednesday, April 26, 2006
Edward Rosenthal's conviction has been overturned -- Since the entire trial was a farce, it's good news to hear the guy will be getting another one. Of course, he's still going to be barred from telling the jury that he was asked to grow pot by the local government for its medical marijuana program, so jurors will think they have a drug kingpin on their hands. This is a case where simply giving the jury the facts would probably lead to a fair outcome, but the government is determined to prevent any mention of motive or legal authorization from reaching the jury's ears. The oddest thing about this reversal is it's ultimate grounds: a juror was advised by an attorney (!) that voting to acquit when the law called for a guilty verdict could get the juror into legal trouble. It's frightening to think that any attorney believes jurors can be prosecuted for making a bad decision (absent bribery or such, and even then the issue is bribery rather than the verdict).
Friday, April 21, 2006
PBS effort to bridge controversy creates more -- This is an article about the documentary "The Armenian Genocide." On the one hand, the documentary was indeed one-sided, giving a few seconds to each major argument on the other side of things. In particular, it raised but didn't rebut the argument that Muslim losses in Eastern Anatolia exceeded Armenian losses. Everything I've seen suggests this to be false, but the documentary should have marshalled the available evidence on the question of Muslim losses. It also depicted the 1896 massacres as more or less spontaneous outbursts of hate, without addressing the root causes of the Kurd-Armenian security dilemma in Eastern Anatolia. Unlike the 1915 genocide, there really was protracted fighting between Armenian rebels on one side and government forces and Kurdish irregulars on the other side in the 1890s. The key evidence that convinced me that 1915 was genocide and not merely counterinsurgency gone bad consisted of chronology: the government first rounded up, disarmed, and murdered all Armenians in the armed forces (that is, the most loyal Armenian citizens were killed first); it then rounded up and murdered educated Armenian elites in the cities, starting in the West rather than the East; only after eliminating loyal or educated Armenians did it turn to the Armenian masses, deporting them on death marches which often went in circles and were coordinated with local militias in order to ensure that Armenians wouldn't survive the trip. Armenian resistance didn't occur until after the deportations began. So counterinsurgency was limited to the later phases of the genocide; it was not the cause of the genocide.
Saturday, April 15, 2006
Fuck -- A fasinating forthcoming law review article on the history, usage, and controversy surrounding the word "fuck." What I find most remarkable is that a major law review agreed to publish it without changing the name of the article. Of course, law reviews are generally edited by law students and papers are seldom peer-reviewed, so this isn't quite the same as an academic journal publication -- but it's still an interesting piece.
Monday, April 10, 2006
Arkansas Bans Smoking in Most Public Spots: "The legislation would ban smoking in vehicles when there is a child present who is younger than 6 or weighs less than 60 pounds and is restrained in a car seat.
The sponsor, Democrat state Rep. Bob Mathis, said, 'It galls me to no end to see people smoking in the car with the windows up and that poor little child in there can't do anything about it.'" I like this bill, but couldn't the rule be changed to require two rolled-down windows if a child is in the car, rather than a straightforward ban on smoking? It's legal to smoke in the same house as your kids, and it seems unlikely that a car with rolled-down windows would have a much higher concentration of smoke than a room in a house with closed windows.
Arkansas Bans Smoking in Most Public Spots: "The legislation would ban smoking in vehicles when there is a child present who is younger than 6 or weighs less than 60 pounds and is restrained in a car seat.
The sponsor, Democrat state Rep. Bob Mathis, said, 'It galls me to no end to see people smoking in the car with the windows up and that poor little child in there can't do anything about it.'" I like this bill, but couldn't the rule be changed to require two rolled-down windows if a child is in the car, rather than a straightforward ban on smoking? It's legal to smoke in the same house as your kids, and it seems unlikely that a car with rolled-down windows would have a much higher concentration of smoke than a room in a house with closed windows.
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