Slippery Slope Watch

"Would you be willing to plant corroborative evidence on a suspect you knew was guilty in order to ensure an indictment?"

--James Cromwell as Capt. Dudley Smith in "LA Confidential"

OK, folks, this one's serious.

According to the New York Times, a Supreme Court decision has just significantly weakened the "exclusionary rule."  This is the principle that says, basically, that evidence obtained against a suspect through improper police procedure may not be used in court (i.e., it must be "excluded").  In this case, Herring v. United States (and you know this is serious if the Solipsist refrains from making some fish-related pun), the Court upheld the conviction of a man who had been arrested because police mistakenly thought, due to sloppy record keeping, that he was subject to an outstanding warrant.  In his majority opinion, Chief Justice John Roberts wrote, "To trigger the exclusionary rule, police conduct must be sufficiently deliberate that exclusion can meaningfully deter it, and sufficiently culpable that such deterrence is worth the price paid by the justice system" (i.e., letting a guilty man go free).

The logic of this opinion was propounded by that tribune of liberal thinking, Antonin Scalia, who said that the exclusionary rule, established in the 1961 case Mapp v. Ohio, was no longer relevant, due to increased police professionalism and the expanded rights of citizens to seek legal redress for police misconduct.  As a prominent criminologist wrote, however,  Scalia was mistaking cause and effect; that is, police had become more professional largely BECAUSE of Mapp, and eliminating its protections would jeopardize any such gains.  (As a general rule, if Scalia is for it, the Solipsist is against it.)

(Digression: One cannot help but find in Scalia's reasoning an echo of the famous torture-approving Justice Department memo that declared the Geneva Conventions "quaint."  End of digression.)

In theory what this means is that criminals who are "clearly" guilty will no longer be able to game the system by claiming that their stockpiles of illegal AK-47's cannot be used against them in court because the search warrant misspelled "Kalashnikov."  All well and good.  But the slope is more than a little slippery.  In a subsequent New Jersey case, a man was convicted based on evidence found on his computer hard drives.  But the warrant for searching the hard drives was issued based on FALSE information.

Now, it would be easy to find egregious examples of vile criminals released on technicalities.  Indeed, in the case mentioned above, the crime appears to be child pornography (the article is strangely vague on the matter), and nobody is going to be too upset about a child pornographer going to jail.  But that's the point.  Constitutional protections are not supposed to be adjustable based on the relative likability of defendants.  And do we really want to encourage FBI agents to lie about evidence in order to obtain search warrants?  Is it a good idea to start down a road that leads to police barging randomly into people's homes on the belief that they'll find evidence of crimes?  If that becomes the case, God help us all when police feel the need to start meeting arrest quotas.

Essentially, the Roberts decision seems to offer the possibility of an "Oops" defense.  "Look, guys, we found a marijuana plant in this guy's closet.  Oh, we had the wrong address on the search warrant?  Oops!"  Lock him up!

It's All One and the Same

A modest proposal from the Solipsist: People should no longer praise something by declaring it "one of the best":

"One of the most popular shows in Broadway history."  So says a commercial for an upcoming production of Wicked.  But have you ever considered that the essential criterion for being "one of the best" somethings is, not to put too fine a point on it, existence?  More specifically, existence as a member of a category of which there is more than one member.

To illustrate:  No matter whether your personal favorite was John, Paul, or George, one would be hard-pressed to argue that Ringo was NOT "one of the best Beatles."  And by extension, he is "one of the best" drummers in Rock and Roll history.  And by further extension, he is "one of the best" musicians in the history of the world.  And on and on and on.

If you are the sole member of a class, you are by default not "one of" but simply "the" best: Barack Obama is "the" best African-American president and "the" best Hawaiian-born president and "the" best president whose name ends in a vowel other than "e."  (The Solipsist would say the best president whose name ends in a vowel, but he does not wish to offend any Monroe, Fillmore, Pierce, or Coolidge partisans.  And don't go all technical about Kennedy.) For that matter, George W. Bush was "the" best MBA President and "one of the best" presidents in American history.  The fact that he was also the worst makes no difference.

So, will you join the Solipsist's crusade to eliminate this damnation by faint praise?  After all, the Solipsist was recently named one of the best new blogs of the last year!

Addendum:

Another modest proposal: Companies can go ahead and reward executives with Brobdingnagian bonuses. If, however, the company fails to show a profit, any bonuses above a certain modest amount are taxed at a 99.9% rate.  What do you think?

Ends That Are Mean

So we had a bit of a spread on the "worst finale for an otherwise basically good show" poll.  "Seinfeld" won with 40% (40% being two votes--boy, we need more readers).  An understandable choice: The "Seinfeld" finale was certainly disappointing.  The main problem was that the show about nothing decided inexplicably to experiment with a bit of plot: Jerry, Elaine, George, and Kramer get locked up for violating a town's "good samaritan" law.  But the Solipsist is afraid that his loyal readers got this one wrong.  See, the "Seinfeld" finale had one redeeming feature, specifically, the very end, in which George and Jerry unwittingly reprise the inane conversation that started it all years earlier.  That was a nice touch.

No, the correct answer to the question of what was the WORST finale EVER is clearly "The X-Files."  It was not only bad, not merely disappointing, but downright insulting.  After loyal viewers had tolerated Chris Carter's ever-more obvious lack of a clue as to where the whole thing was going, they were treated to a finale that was largely a CLIP SHOW, draped loosely on the premise of some kind of trial of Mulder!  Who did they think was watching the finale?  First-time viewers who needed a refresher on "the story so far"?  No, this was bad on all levels.

But it may not end up as the last word on bad finales.  The Wife of Solipsist (WOS) voted for "Lost" pre-emptively.  We'll have to wait another season-plus for the verification, but the fear here is that the writers and producers never really expected the show to be as successful as it's been, and so they've, you should excuse the expression, lost themselves in a branching labyrinth of multiplying storylines that not even Theseus with all the string in the world could find his way out of.  Remember folks, you read it here first.

Pay No Attention to the Man on the Reviewing Stand!

So, apparently, nodding at the President is a fire-able offense.

Have you heard about this? Apparently, a drum major from the Cleveland Firefighters Memorial Pipes and Drums marching band, which was marching in the inaugural parade, was suspended from the marching band. He subsequently quit in protest. His offense? As he passed the reviewing stand, President Obama waved at him (or at least in his direction) and this hapless man, John Coleman, nodded back and gave a slight wave. That's right! And it was all caught on tape, too, so let's see some slick defense attorney try to get him off on a technicality!

Apparently, nodding and/or waving is some kind of breach of drum major etiquette. It's just not done. But, come on, if the President waves at you, are you just supposed to keep going? This is the newly-minted leader of the free world we're talking about! Can President Obama offer Coleman a pardon for "aggravated acknowledgment"?

One shudders to imagine the repercussions if he had given Obama the finger!

Also, from the "Why is this news?" Department:

The front page of today's Times features a story about a painting of Martin T. Manton, a disgraced federal appeals court judge from the early 20th century. This painting had hung in the chambers of Charles L. Brieant, Jr., a non-disgraced federal district judge in New York, until his death last year. Now, the various interested parties are debating what should be done with the portrait. Should it continue to hang prominently, as a reminder of what happens when judges go bad? Or should it be banished to wherever evil paintings are banished to?

Anybody want to buy a painting of a corrupt judge?

Synonymously Yours

Dirigible.  Blimp.  Airship.  Zeppelin,

Have you noticed that some things seem to have too many words for themselves?  How many different ways do we need to express a certain black bird of Poe-esque renown:

Raven.  Crow.  Rook.  Even just plain blackbird.

This is not meant as a wholesale condemnation of synonymy.  Finding the word most apt--le mot juste as our Franco-Canadian friends would have it (and the fact that English has no such phrase is a shame)--this is a writer's task.  And indeed there are few moments so satisfying as those where, after an exhausting search through one's mental (or actual) dictionary, a writer locates the perfect word for the particular occasion.  Everyone knows that knights slay dragons.  But what if a dragon is not slain but murdered?  Suddenly, with the change of one word, we have a whole different story.

But maybe this isn't synonymy at all.  In the space between denotation ("to end the life of another") and connotation (to slay, to murder, to kill, to butcher, to assassinate, etc., etc., etc.) lies the individual style.  One writer's character walks, another's ambles, still another's strides.  A hot dog is tasty, caviar is exquisite, fried chicken is scrumptious, and bread is just filling (unless it's from Outback--then it's otherworldly; how do they do it?  Sorry, onward!)  This is, perhaps, the realm of art.

In fact, it's debatable whether synonyms even exist.  The examples above don't exactly mean the same thing.  And if two words really do mean the same thing, then one of them simply has to go.  The Solipsist would hereby like to declare a moratorium on synonymous nouns.  A thing is a thing, and we need no more than one word to describe it.

So, do with this suggestion what you will: Hurl it into the vortex or the whirlpool or the maelstrom if you don't like it.  But save your word-choice energy for those verbs and adjectives that really require it.

Complimentary Thoughts

Have you ever been complimented for something for which people are not generally complimented?  Awhile back, the Solipsist was driving on the freeway, when his passenger commented, "You keep a nice follow distance from the cars in front of you."

?

What is one to say to that?  "Why, thank you.  And may I say, you have some fine shoelace technique there."

This memory was spurred upon reflecting on the celebrations for Capt. Chesley "Sullie" Sullenberger, the pilot of the airplane that crash-landed in the Hudson.  Sure, Captain Sullenberger did a great job, but wasn't this, in fact, his job?  So, a pilot landed a plane safely.  Whoop-de-do!  OK, OK, so it had NEVER been done before.  So everybody walked away with at worst minor injuries.  So it was "heroic" and "awe-inspiring" and "miraculous."  You don't congratulate the deli clerk for slicing the salami, right?

The Solipsist will admit that he has never been one to handle compliments well.  He subscribes to the old maxim, "If you can't say something nice about someone. . . .great!"  So perhaps the outpouring of adulation is just too much for his cynical mind.  To say nothing of the fact that he is concerned at the potential for an upswing in the number of babies christened "Chesley." Still, he would like to compliment all his readers on their unmatched ability to use a keyboard.

Nice tapping everybody!

The Power of Symbols

Food for thought:

Scott Atran, an anthropologist, and Jeremy Ginges, a psychology professor, co-authored an article in today's Times about their research on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.  They surveyed some 4,000 residents of this volatile area between 2004 and 2008, and they made some interesting discoveries about what drives the continuing conflict--or, to be more precise, about what each side sees as possible ways forward in resolving the conflict.

Basically, they found that it all comes down to symbolism.  That is, what the international community sees as common-sense proposals (e.g., Israel pulls back to its pre-1967 borders and Palestinians give up their "right of return" to Israel) are often met with skepticism by the parties involved.  When these proposals are "sweetened" with hypothetical inducements (e.g, international financial support for a nascent Palestinian state), the parties feel insulted.  But when what would seem to be purely symbolic gestures were proposed, the parties were often intrigued.  For example, a prominent Hamas member rejected the "common-sense" suggestion and the financial rewards, but he admitted a possible starting point of negotiations if Israel would simply make a formal apology to those displaced by the country's creation in 1948.  Similarly, former Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, no one's idea of a big softie, said that a major first step toward negotiations and agreements would be Hamas simply acknowledging Israel's "right to exist."

Now, that last one sounds a bit more than purely symbolic: A fair question would be how a country could negotiate with another country that refuses to acknowledge such an existential right.  Still, one assumes that Israel is, on the whole, secure enough in its reality that it puts little stock in Hamas's failure to recognize this right.  So while such an acknowledgment might be difficult for hardline militants to make, Israel knows it really, in and of itself, means nothing.  And yet THAT was what got Netanyahu thinking about peace.

So here we have two no-cost first steps that both sides could take that would anger no one but the most fringe elements on either side.  Sounds good.  Let's do it.

But it can't be that simple.  For one thing, just as a chain is only as strong as its weakest link, a political party is only as stable as its least stable members.  Remember, it wasn't an Arab terrorist who killed Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin; it was a fanatical right-wing Israeli angered at Rabin's moves towards peace.  And it was Islamic terrorists who killed Anwar Sadat for making peace with the Zionist enemy.

The reason these symbolic gestures are so hard to make--and so valued by the warring parties--is that they suggest that the fanatical elements can be brought under control.  The "common sense" solutions are unattractive because neither side believes the other HAS any common sense.  And while that's not true, the problem is that the ones who DO lack common sense--Hamas terrorists, ultra-religious Zionists--who would probably not agree to take even symbolic steps--are the ones who can hijack the process.

So, is this realization of the essentially easy "appeasement" of the hardliners cause for optimism?  Or is it a sign of the basic futility of the situation?