Does It Make It Better If They Don't Hate You?

Admittedly, there is something appealing about "Hate Crimes" legislation. These laws usually target offenders whose crimes are motivated by racial or ethnic--or, in the case of legislation recently approved by the Senate, homophobic--hatred. These crimes evoke a visceral disgust in the majority of the population, probably because they so offend some bedrock precepts of "American-ness": the idea that all people are created equal, the idea of Americans as basically decent and tolerant, the idea of the United States as a "melting pot." We find these crimes so repugnant that we feel the need to mete out extra punishment to the offenders, beyond that which would normally be administered for their various crimes.

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Is this reaction motivated by fear? We often hear about horrific crimes and "senseless" violence, but what stimulates calls for hate crime laws are those crimes that are horrific and "senseless" but not, from a certain perspective, irrational. Indeed, we often look with something like pity on authors of truly horrific crimes that are truly senseless. Even a clearly culpable murderer, for example, may be found not guilty by reason of insanity--by reason of verifiable irrationality. On the other hand, those who attack members of different races or ethnicities or religions or sexual preferences merely because of those differences are acting in accordance with their own "rational" biases and fears. In other words, to the vast majority, these people have no excuse: They are beyond consideration of leniency and, indeed, their beliefs place them so far beyond the reach of civilized behavior that we want to do everything in our power to separate them from society for as long as possible.

Again, on a "gut level," there is something appealing about this.

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One simplistic objection to hate crime legislation--particularly when considered for murderers--is that all crimes are hate crimes: You don't murder someone you don't hate. This is demonstrably untrue. Many killings are not motivated by hatred. If you think someone is running towards you brandishing a knife, and you have the means to stop that person with lethal force, you will most likely do so: While you are understandably frightened of that person, you probably don't "hate" him--and, indeed, this type of killing may not be considered a crime at all. But even killings that more clearly fall under the heading of "murder" are not necessarily motivated by hate: a contract killing is "just business, nothing personal"; a mugging gone wrong is probably not motivated by personal animus toward the victim; even, as mentioned above, psychopathic murders or spree killings may be motivated by chemical imbalances or other deep psychological factors that have nothing to do with hatred.

In this sense, then, hate-crimes legislation sounds like a good idea: Since not all crimes are committed for equal reasons, we should have different standards for judging and punishing crimes based on their "reasonableness."

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One concern with hate crimes laws is what might be called the "slippery slope" argument: There's a fine line between punishing people for crimes committed due to "hatred" and punishing people for "hatred" itself. In Germany, anti-semitism is effectively illegal. If one walks down the street wearing a t-shirt with a swastika, that person is subject to arrest. Given Germany's history, we understand and perhaps applaud such zealous guardianship of civil rights. In America, however, we would shoot dirty looks at that person while congratulating ourselves on our enlightened respect for all viewpoints, however odious. At least until the swastika-emblazoned thug throws a rock through a synagogue window. Then, all bets are off. We seek to punish that person not just for the action but for expressing "hatred" through the action.

The question is, Is the window-breaking made "worse" by the fact that the window-breaker was wearing a t-shirt with a swastika on it? What if he had thrown a rock through a 7-11 window? What if the manager of that 7-11 happened to be Jewish, but our young antagonist was unaware of that fact--or at least claimed to be? In the parlance of today's youth, this person might be a "hater," but was his crime a hate crime? And what difference does it really make to the person whose window was broken?

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And how far should hate-crimes legislation reach? Lately, because of the country's economic troubles, homelessness has been increasing in many areas. At the same time, attacks on homeless people have been increasing as well, and many states and localities are considering whether to pass hate-crimes laws essentially establishing the homeless as a protected "class." Even civil-rights activists are ambivalent about these proposed laws, mainly because they fear that expansion of this type of legislation will "dilute" hate-crimes laws. They argue that homelessness, as opposed, for example, to race or ethnicity, is not an inborn or permanent trait, and so it should not be subject to special legal protection.

We can't get behind that argument. It sounds like those opponents--who include such established civil rights groups as the Anti-Defamation League--are saying that, because homeless people can, ultimately, stop being homeless, they should not receive special protections under the law. But this is like arguing that it's the homeless's own fault that they're being targeted: If they don't want to get beaten up by roving gangs of bored teenagers, they should just get off the street and go live in houses! Stupid homeless people!

No, our objection to expanding hate-crimes laws to protect the homeless is that it's a simplistic "solution" that won't solve anything. We suspect that people who attack the homeless don't "hate" the homeless--certainly not in the same way that racists and white supremacists and homophobes hate the respective targets of their wrath. Some people may hate homelessness, seeing in it a reflection of their own vulnerability in troubling economic times. They may use the homeless as scapegoats for their own troubles: "Homeless people cause crime! Homeless people bring down property values!"

Wrong? Probably. But is it hatred? Were these folks raised by parents who told them that homeless people were an inferior race, as many klansmen and their ilk were probably raised to think of blacks, Latinos, Jews, etc.? We doubt it.

We think politicians advocating hate-crimes protection of the homeless are at best naive and at worst opportunistic. It's easy to score political points by coming out against intolerance. But it's a lot harder to try to solve the problems. What will it cost in extra policing or judicial services to prosecute hate crimes against the homeless? Would this money be better spent trying to help house the homeless instead?

Think of it this way, most Jews, for example, would probably be offended if a politician proposed the following solution to the problem of anti-semitism: Jews should just stop being Jewish. On the other hand, given two options for solving the problem of violence against the homeless--expanded prosecution of those who attack the homeless or spending more money to get these folks off the streets--which do you think the victims would choose.

Given a choice between grandstanding and problem-solving, give us problem-solving every time.

Felicidades Justicia Sonia Sotomayor

The outcome of the Senate vote was never much in doubt. Still, we're shocked--shocked!--at the partisanship. The final vote was 68-31 (Ted Kennedy wasn't there); all 59 Democrats voted to confirm, but only 9 of 40 Republicans followed suit. They can say all they want that this was "not about politics." But when John McCain begins his remarks by noting that she is "an immensely qualified candidate"--and then votes against her anyway--what are we left to conclude? Is Mr. McCain still bitter, recalling how another "immensely qualified candidate" (cough cough) got shellacked last November? If so, we could almost excuse his vote, but what about the other 30 Republican naysayers?

Look, as a "moderate liberal" (if Facebook quizzes have any validity at all), the Solipsist was none-too-thrilled that President W. got to name two justices to the Supreme Court. Still, one could hardly argue that either of them--particularly Chief Justice John G. Roberts--was unqualified. Undesirable, from a certain perspective, sure. But not unqualified. And the inescapable fact is that the President gets to pick the justices. Indeed, the Supreme Court is always an issue in presidential elections, and the fact that Obama won--again, whether you like it or not--indicates that the country wanted a President Obama to be the one making Supreme Court appointments.

By the way, to all those Republicans who voted "No"--who supposedly think that Justice Sotomayor is too radical, too biased, too unqualified to sit on the Supreme Court, we would like to ask one thing: If you really feel this way--if this is not simply base politics--then why have you not acted against Justice Sotomayor before? After all, according to what you've been telling the American people, the poor folks in the Second Circuit have been suffering under the tyranny of an unelected judicial fanatic for more than 20 years! Where were the congressional hearings? The impeachment proceedings? The trial and execution?

We think it no small measure of the fundamental difference between the two parties that, when Roberts' nomination went to the full Senate, fully 50% of the Democratic caucus voted to confirm. Honestly, we think the other 22 Democrats really had very little excuse for voting "Nay," but it's still far less disgraceful than the fact that more than 75% of the Republicans today--people who are supposedly in Washington to do the People's business--are unwilling to look beyond blind ideology to do the right thing. Did they learn nothing from the last election?

Congratulations Justice Sotomayor!

Lies and Damn Lies

A local car wash offers a "Triple-Mega Car Wash." Can you imagine? That's a full 50% better than a Double Mega Car Wash! Statistics don't lie.

Speaking of statistics, here's a sentence, courtesy of Hal Varian, chief economist at Google, that you probably never expected to read: "I keep saying that the sexy job in the next 10 years will be statisticians, and I'm not kidding." ("For Today's Graduate, Just One Word: Statistics") Sexy? Maybe, maybe not. But the world is so data-saturated that those who can interpret it will certainly become ever-more attractive to some people.

In Isaac Asimov's Foundation books, one of the main characters is a "psychologist." The word, though, doesn't have its familiar meaning: psychologists in those books are really sort of statistical soothsayers; they look at data, scope out trends, and are thus more-or-less able to "predict" the future (presumably within some sort of confidence interval--yes, the Solipsist is a bit of a datahead himself).

It seems life is now imitating art (whether its appropriate to call Foundation "art" is a question we'll leave for another day). Tech-savvy math whizzes--math-savvy tech whizzes?--make six-figure salaries crunching numbers for Google and other companies. And what are they doing if not trying to predict the future? How better to figure out the next hot commodity or political rising star or looming epidemic than by reading the digital entrails of the internet community?

A nagging fear: People are becoming data points. But then, no. Not "becoming"; "are"--or, rather, have always been. We're neither more nor less "predictable" than we've ever been. All that's changed is our ability to compile the psychosocial data. Still, there's something ironic in the thought that our greater ability to compile and analyze the choices and preoccupations that make us human are used to target and to an extent program--dehumanize--the people who make the choices. Two sides to every coin, we suppose. And that's a statistic, too.

Stalking Poems

Ahhh. . . food coma. WOS and YNSHC just got back from "Fuddruckers": All we're saying is, half-pound Kobe bacon cheeseburger! 'Nuff said.

But we are not here to plug some commercial enterprise like Fuddruckers--even if Fuddruckers does have delicious hamburgers. No, we will say the same thing whether Fuddruckers ever becomes a solipsistic sponsor or not. Of course, if Fuddruckers were to sponsor "The Solipsist," we could probably guarantee that such comments would receive prominent placement in all future blog posts. We're just saying.

But today what's on our mind is found poetry: little nuggets of linguistic wisdom that just pop up from time to time. Years ago, when the Solipsist was a writing tutor in New York, he helped an Asian student who was struggling mightily with the English tongue. She was writing a paper about coming to the United States. The paper was rife with grammatical errors, and YNSHC was having difficulty even figuring out the gist of the paper. All of a sudden, stuck almost randomly in the middle of a paragraph, was this:

"Being an American is easy. Living in America is hard."

We were floored! Parallelism! Irony! We almost fell out of our seat. We praised the student's probably unintentional display of linguistic virtuosity and recommended that she just scrap everything and start with those sentences! And, hell, might as well just end with those sentences, too; it wasn't going to get any better than that.

Facebook can be a source of found poetry, as well, especially the "What's on your mind" bar. Just yesterday, COS--not to be confused with COS (Cats of Solipsist), or COS, who told us about RunPee.com--this is her brother, another Cousin of Solipsist--anyway, ACOS had this posted as his "status":

"Evan is wondering if the Panthers might consider Zherdev."

???

Probably some sort of hockey-sport reference. But the images it conjures! Sleek jungle denizens prowling the Amazon pondering. . . well, pondering something Russian anyway. Not to be outdone, one of ACOS's friends, responding to another post, had this wondrous bit of Dadaism: "I agree with Litter box." The odd thing is, in context, it made sense!

For more "found poetry," check out foundpoetry.wordpress.com or www.poetryteachers.com. One of our favorite examples on the latter site was by Bruce Lansky, who demonstrated that you could craft "found poetry" out of snippets from an evening newscast:

I'll love you til the end of time,

But shooting ducks should be a crime.

The Pope arrived to lead the prayers.

The Dallas Cowboys beat the Bears.

So keep your eyes out for found poetry, folks. We're collecting!

How Bad Is Badly?

Oh, for the record, the Solipsist does NOT watch "Grey's Anatomy." Just wanted to clarify. Also, nice to see that Sol's Bud is still with us. Now, on to today's comment.

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A local news segment segment called "People Behaving Badly," raises certain expectations for a viewer: gang members pushing old ladies under buses; people teasing squirrels; at least some egregious littering, right? What we're saying is, you reasonably expect--nay, demand--some heinous shit.

(Digression: "Heinous Shit" would be a good name for a band. EOD.)

Imagine our anticipation, then, when the anchorman announced an installment of "People Behaving Badly" this morning. We practically salivated when the reporter, Stanley Roberts, informed us he was going to expose badly behaving people targeting hapless San Francisco tourists. This would be good! We had visions of Amish farmers accosted in the Castro and dragooned into usher duty at gay nuptials!

No such luck. The extent of the bad behavior consisted of hustlers--quite possibly homeless people--who offered their services as "guides." Their major offense was hoarding copies of the free San Francisco "City Guide" and then selling them to people for a buck or two. Dishonest? OK. But in the annals of grand sleaziness, we don't think this makes the cut. Frankly, in a capitalist society, this sounds rather like entrepreneurship.

Now, of course, we prefer our homeless to be flat-out beggars, asking for spare change in return for nothing--and if they're mentally unbalanced, smelly, and overbearing, so much the better. So insofar as these folks belie our image of the indigent, we suppose you could say they're "behaving badly." But in a city where WOS once saw a man pleasuring himself in the middle of Market Street, you would think Stanley Roberts could do better.

Miscellany

Last week's poll question was:

A recent survey suggested that white lab coats might--might--contribute to disease because they pick up germs. What do you think doctors should wear? The choices:

--Those white coats are so snazzy! I'll take my chances!

--Ugh, germs! Let doctors wear whatever they want, as long as its clean.

--Doctors should have a sort of "uniform," but it should be updated every year--like fashion.

--Doctors should be naked!

The results are in, and with a whopping 50% of the vote, Sloppists have declared, "Doctors should be naked!"

Now, a word about that "whopping 50%": That translates to TWO PEOPLE! What's the matter with all of you? Don't you like to take polls? Who doesn't like to take polls? Maybe we didn't make it clear enough that this was a poll, and we actually wanted your input. Get with the program, folks!

The other conclusion to draw from this is that Sloppists are a bunch of perverts. Well, either that or you all have super-hot doctors. In which case the Solipsist really needs to reconsider his health plan.

Does "Grey's Anatomy" present an accurate picture of the relative attractiveness of medical professionals? Could this be why healthcare costs are out of control: Too many Dr. McDreamy's enticing too many young ladies (and some men) to schedule unnecessary office visits? It would make sense. Hey, if our doctor looked like, say, Katherine Heigl, we might schedule a few unnecessary prostate exams. This might be something for healthcare reformers to look into.

(And next time, TAKE THE POLL!)

Too hot for Medicare?

(Image from tv.yahoo.com)

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Also.

This morning the news reported that Michael Jackson might actually have a fourth child, a Norwegian rapper (yes) named Omer Bhatti. Now, who knows? But here's the eye-roll: The reporter made a big deal about video footage showing Jackson riding a Jet-Ski with a 13-year-old Omer; Omer is in front, and Jackson is sitting behind him. The reporter stated that this footage showed how close Jackson and Omer obviously were, thus supporting the idea of a father-son relationship.

Sure. 'Cause, why else would Michael Jackson want a 13-year-old boy scrunched up against his crotch?

Too soon?

The Cutting Room Floor

If the advent of the DVD has taught us anything, it's that a lot more footage is shot than actually ends up in movies. Virtually every DVD is jam-packed with bonus material: deleted scenes, alternate endings, blooper reels. Whether anyone actually wants or watches this material is, well, immaterial.

So, in that spirit of giving the people what they never asked for, we here provide Sloppists with material from the cutting room floor: Extra tidbits from this week's entries that didn't quite make the cut (or that, frankly, we forgot to include when we wrote the original pieces). Enjoy. (Or, y'know, click to return to the "Main Menu.")

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(From "Butterflies"--July 29, 2009)

(Digression: Memorizing the Rorschach test is like memorizing the eye chart; i.e., if you simply memorize the chart, you can achieve a passing score. This accounts for the majority of driver's-license renewals in Florida. But while we understand why psychiatrists would have difficulty generating and "norming" new ink blots, we don't understand why optometrists and state agencies can't change the eye chart from time to time. Does the alphabet need to be "normed"?EOD)

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(From "Packing It In"--July 30, 2009)

Little Timmy's parents always knew he was destined for a career in packing. At playtime's end, he was a little too enthusiastic about putting his toys away. He screamed at his baby sister when she broke his favorite label gun. And when his mother's sister, who lived across the country, called one day, horrified, to report that she knew what had become of the family's missing dog--it having just been delivered to her doorstep--Timmy apologized but also gave a little smile, pleased at a job well done.

Do failed packers have to turn in their lapel pins?

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(From "Play Roboball!"--July 31, 2009)

During a random test for performance-enhancing drugs, New York Mets slugger K-4000 was found to have an illegal substance in his oil sample. The substance is believed to be a Venezuelan oil additive that increases viscosity between moving parts. 4000 referred questions to his robo-agent Dick V-900, who disputed all allegations before going on a murderous rampage and destroying a large swath of midtown Manhattan.

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(From "The Most Useful Website Ever"--August 1, 2009)

Won't RunPee.com become a victim of its own success? If it catches on, everyone will run to pee at the same time. The website will need to compile a secondary list of slightly more important but still negligible movie moments. Shouldn't be too hard. After all, virtually everything has fat that can be skipped if not trimmed. Even Moby-Dick is really just a five-word story: Man fights whale; whale wins.