What's the Biggest Problem?

I’m getting worried that the LUEE folks will think I’m stalking them, so it’s high time I talked about another podcast. That’s right, I’m seeing other podcasts. Sorry you had to find out this way.

There’s this show called Geeks Without God, from three Minneapolis-based improv comics. They have a segment where at the end of every interview they ask each guest the same five questions. This month they rolled out a new series of questions. One of them is particularly interesting: “Say Religion is gone.  What is the biggest problem that now faces humanity?”

They have put this question to three guests so far. This week, Joseph Scrimshaw answered either guns or internet comments. Last week Miranda Richards answered the power vacuum that would develop, and the need to make sure that with all the leaders gone, the world wasn’t just handed over to assholes.

The first guest to get this question was Rebecca Watson, three weeks ago. She objected to the premise, because the wording of the question implies that religion is the biggest problem right now. When pressed she answered that income inequality is the biggest problem right now and would continue be the biggest problem with religion gone… that religion can worsen income inequality, but that income inequality can worsen religion to a much greater extent.

Like Rebecca, I think the premise could use some serious examining. It’s fairly well established that nonreligious people are more ethical than religious people. They are generally much less racist and sexist and homophobic and such, and they are much less likely to commit crimes. But it’s very difficult to figure out if that correlation means causation, and if so which is the cause.

Heina Dadabhoy did a very good takedown of the prison statistics. It’s true that in the United States the nonreligious are much less likely to be in prison, perhaps less than a twentieth as likely… but they are also better educated, better employed, wealthier, and whiter. That takes care of most or all of the distinction.

There’s a similar problem on the societal level. Sure, those countries with less religion are much better places to live, that’s indisputable. Phil Zuckerman wrote a great book on it, Society Without God. But the causation might go the other way. Zuckerman proposed - and was certainly not the first to do so - that religion flourishes in societies that aren’t nice places to live. That religious communities are a vital part of the social safety net when in places where governments fail. That the afterlife becomes valuable when life is cheap.

It’s been a few years since I’ve read his book, but from what I remember I think he also proposed that inequality contributed more than absolute wealth. This explains of the highly religious United States, which is relatively wealthy but has high concentration of wealth… some people are very very rich, but there is much more poverty than in many poorer countries.

That leads right to Rebecca’s answer… that the main problem in the world today is income inequality. If religion vanished overnight, the causes of religion would still be there. Something would take its place. People fighting for scraps would find new divisions to kill for. People desperate for escape would find new fairy tales to tell themselves. Leaders trying to control the populace would find new justifications for arbitrary rules.

I’m not sure it’s the best answer, though… it’s hard to disagree with Rebecca, but can anything really top internet comments for pure evil?

Welfare, Justice, and Laffing

I’ve been doing a little canvassing for the NDP, and in that capacity I’ve gotten in more political discussions than I’ve ever had in my life… even though those discussions generally take up too much time to be worthwhile. I’ve had some trouble understanding the conservatives around here, because I give them the benefit of the doubt and assume they understand the consequences of their positions. If they aren’t ignorant, they must have some motivation, right? But it can be tough to figure out their motivations.

So I’ve been trying to figure out some of the underlying differences between conservatives and liberals, stuff that goes deeper than the issues of the day. Robert Altemeyer’s work was very helpful in showing the authoritarian / anti-authoritarian split, but I figure there must be other causes as well. After all, there was a time when there were authoritarian left-wing regimes, albeit not recently enough for me to remember them.

I think one of the big psychological impulses underlying conservatism these days is probably a drive to prevent cheating a punish cheaters. This must be behind the drive to limit welfare, and especially to drug test welfare recipients… conservatives will tolerate an inefficient and wasteful system if is helps prevent anybody from cheating the system, from becoming a “welfare queen”.

It’s probably similar with the justice system. Here there’s the liberal impulse: “better ten guilty men go free than one innocent suffer”. And there’s an opposing conservative impulse, which is best seen when dealing with despised underclasses like racial or religious minorities: better to lock them all up than risk one going free. Or better to kill them all and let God sort them out.

I suspect that optimally efficient solutions could be found for both of these, a level of scrutiny which will produce some false positives and some false negatives. That solution need not be the average of the liberal and conservative ideals, though, nor even between those ideals at all. I’m reminded of the Laffer Curve idea for optimum tax rates, which usual predicts that the most efficient tax rates are 60 to 80%, far above what even the crunchiest lefties want in this country.

There could be some dispute choosing the best goal to aim for, though. In the example of the tax rates, the 60-80% is the rate to maximize tax collection, and thus the size of the government. Other optimum rates can be found to maximize the size of the private sector (not zero, but certainly not 70%) or to maximize the size of the economy as a whole.

I guess this brings it around to those motivations. If someone is proposing a justice system that isn’t calibrated right to give the lowest crime rate, what is it calibrated for? What is the real goal?

This is getting perilously close to me needing to read a whole stack of new books. I’m not sure when I’ll find the time.

KevinMD Strikes Again

I'm going to get perilously close to talking about something that I actually know a thing or two about. I'll try not to make a habit of this.

I read an article today on KevinMD, 10 things you might not know about the emergency department. I wasn’t too happy with it, mostly for the same reasons I brought up back in April: High-minded rhetoric about the ER being inappropriate for certain medical complaints overlooks the fact that it’s the only medical service available to many people. Saying that the ER isn’t the best place to treat tooth pain is all well and good, but Dentists aren’t free. If that tooth ends of breaking or rotting, guess what, the ER will deal with it. It will just be ten times more expensive by then.

One part that jumped out at me was the section on not trusting patients… every woman gets a pregnancy test, regardless of what she says about her sexual activity. Just this morning I saw a post somewhere - I’m not sure who wrote it, or even what site I saw it on - saying how empowering it had been to get a CT exam without having a pregnancy test first. How wonderful it was to have the doctor trust her, even just a little bit.

I’m not saying pregnancy tests aren’t a good idea, to help diagnose abdominal pain, or before giving treatments that are dangerous for pregnant women. But just doing the test on every woman who walks through the front doors is excessive.

There’s a complaint about patients using their phones… when I went to the ER last month, I packed a phone, a charger, a spare battery, and ebook reader, and a tablet. I knew I was in for a wait.

Oh, yeah, the article also says not to complain about the wait. Well, if you aren’t allowing any food, water, or distractions…

This isn’t the only problematic article on KevinMD recently. There was also a video a couple days ago, complaining about having to treat obese patients. I didn’t see it, it was pulled as soon as there was a public outcry. And there was an article on July 7 telling about how a surgeon cut a patient’s vena cava in order to teach a student how to deal with emergencies. This was presented as a valuable lesson, not an attempted murder. That article was pulled as well, not because it described a horrific crime, but because it couldn’t be verified. Something tells me the author wasn’t eager to give out incriminating info just to prove it happened.

It doesn’t surprise me that some doctors have this kind of contempt for their patients, though I am surprised they are so eager to admit it publically. Maybe everyone involved in medicine should be the patient now and then… if only to see how long they last without a bed and a book.

Vast Majority Vaccinated

Can we all just agree not to consider the “vast majority” vaccinated unless it reaches herd immunity? This is a very hopeful and optimistic article, but the news it presents is not actually all that good. The vaccination rates are sufficient to protect most people, but most is a pretty low bar when it comes to infectious disease.

91% immunized against polio is enough to keep it from spreading. But 72% is not enough for HPV. And 89% is not enough for measles, not nearly enough. The required threshold for measles might be as high as 94%. And that’s just to prevent spreading throughout the whole population, not for prevent local outbreaks. Unvaccinated people tend to associate with each other… it doesn’t help for even 99% of the population to have immunity if all the vulnerable people live in the same town or go to the same school.

There are many people who simply can’t be vaccinated, because they are too young, or too old, or they have compromised immune systems, or they are immunosuppressed. The measles fatality in Washington this year was immunosuppressed.

89% sounds like a high number when you first hear it. But that still means 11% are being negligent. It still means the deaths of infants and cancer patients. If 11% of the population were attacking transplant recipients with thrown rocks instead of viruses, would that be low enough?

I Had To Pass To Earn It For You

There’s a meme going around facebook, about drug-testing for welfare recipients. I saw it yesterday and immediately blocked it, but today I’m still angry enough that I figured I should write about it. Unfortunately, I can’t find it again… I don’t know if there’s a way for Facebook users to find a list of content they’ve blocked.

Even more unfortunately, I could find lots of similar images, because the sentiment is so common that it gets recirculated frequently.

There’s a few different arguments being made here… practicality, that money can be saved by not paying welfare to those who test positive. Fairness, that workers have to be drug tested so everyone should be. A free will argument, that addicts can stop using drugs on a whim when it becomes inconvenient to them. And finally retribution, that people who use drugs should be punished with destitution, starvation, and death.

That’s a lot to unpack, but I’ll start with the easy one. Welfare drug testing is not practical, because it costs far more to conduct the drug testing than is saved by cancelling the benefits to those few who test positive. This is mostly because of the low baseline rates of drug use, even lower in the welfare population than the general population. This makes sense, right? Drugs cost money. It should not be a surprise.

Just like I said yesterday, it’s great when you can avoid a difficult ethical dilemma because the premises are unsound.

On to the fairness issue. The problem with this is that two wrongs don’t make a right. Your employer treats you like crap, and you think the solution is to drag other people down to your level? There are other options. Get a better employer, a better contract, a better lawyer, or a better union. You shouldn’t have to put up with that kind of treatment. I don’t get routinely or randomly drug tested, and I have the constant danger of killing people with a moment’s inattention.

Can people stop? Some illegal drugs aren’t significantly addictive, like marijuana, mushrooms, or ecstasy. With these, you could very well reduce usage by preventing welfare payments. But the problem arises that less addictive drugs are also the least harmful. Those drugs which are the most debilitating, the most harmful, the most expensive to treat, these are the drugs which people would be unable to stop using upon request. In other words, if welfare drug testing worked to reduce drug usage, it would only reduce the use of those drugs that we really shouldn’t care if people use or not.

Retribution… well, that one’s harder to argue with. If someone thinks that addicts ought to starve to death I’m not going to convince them otherwise in a single essay. That shows either a lack of empathy so severe as to be considered sociopathy, or a level of ignorance so severe as to require years of education. Either one, I think, would be better treated by experts than by me.

I’m just here to keep people who ought to know better from clicking Like and Share without thinking about what that actually means.

Avoiding Ethical Dilemmas the Easy Way

There was a new episode of LUEE last week… I know it seems like it hasn’t been long enough since I commented on their work, but that’s because my last post was nearly a month late. Like 29 days and 22 hours late.

This month they were talking about the judicial system. Can I just say for starters how much fun it is to have people say things I agree with, backed up by multivariate statistical analysis? So much better than just shouting your opinions louder and louder, like I normally do.

They talked a bit about gun control, and I think they missed the mark a little. Don’t get me wrong, I agree with them here too. But it’s not enough to say that gun control means fewer gun homicides and gun suicides. The gun nuts have heard that before, and there’s an easy comeback that goes back at least to Archie Bunker: You’d prefer if people were stabbed?

Now, those gun deaths don’t all get replaced with other deaths. You know it, I know it. But it can’t just go unsaid. But there’s enough people intentionally confusing the issue that you need to talk about all-cause mortality, even if only briefly.

On to funner things. Racial profiling doesn’t work. Isn’t that great? It’s so convenient when you can completely avoid a difficult ethical dilemma because the basic premises are unsound.

There’s a new panelist (or very rarely recurring), Brendan. He was talking about prison abolition, focusing mainly on the US. I tend to agree with most of what he was saying, but I don’t think the case has been made for abolishing prisons in all cases. And in his defence, he admits there aren’t any easy answers for “what about the murderers”.

I think there’s a lot to be said for adjusting the baseline, though. In Canada the default rate of imprisonment is only a fifth that of the US, with no ill effects. I’m lefty-progressive enough to think that the Canadian prison rate could stand to drop as well, but if you take it as it is that still leaves room to abolish 80% of American prisons. Or better yet, abolish half of prisons and release 80% of prisoners, so simultaneously fix the overcrowding problem.

Not only is it nice to avoid difficult ethical dilemmas when the premises are unsound, it’s also really nice when you can put them off because there’s a lot of fixing to be done before you even get close to encountering that dilemma.

Anyway, great show. But I think I now have three books I have to read, which I don’t know that I have time for. I’ll see how it goes.

Salute

I’m seeing a lot of hubbub about the Queen being taught the Nazi salute by her uncle. The news sites have screwed this one up pretty badly, and I hate to see that much ignorance on display.

Now I’m not normally one to defend the monarchy... you’re not going to make me defend them, are you? It’s just not fair. See, the british royals are terrible people who do terrible things in terrible ways for terrible reasons. But they aren’t Nazis. Well, not necessarily, not based on this flimsy evidence at any rate.

The pictures are from 1933. As it turns out, all sorts of people used that salute back then. Before it was the Nazi salute it was the Fascist salute. 

Before that, it was used by Americans in the pledge of allegiance.

And way, way before that, it was the Roman salute.

About the only thing these groups all have common is Nationalism, and some right wing anti-socialism. And it’s not exactly news that the British royals are Nationalists. Were you shocked? I wasn’t shocked.

So in conclusion, something something doomed to repeat it. Don’t be doomed. And don't write news articles based on The Sun except to point and laugh. And if you have to point and laugh maybe don't point with your whole hand.

Kim Campbell Syndrome

In my last post, about Labels, I used the phrase “I didn’t know there was a word for it”. As it happens I’ve been trying to put together a post on how women tend to get put in charge of sinking ships. The idea being that the company, party, or government gets to look like they're making an effort at being representative, but the ship keeps sinking and the woman gets ousted shortly after so they don’t need to have her in charge for long, and they get a convenient scapegoat.

I was mostly thinking of this in terms of Canadian politics, because that’s what came to mind first. Alison Redford. Pauline Marois. Probably Kathleen Wynne and Christy Clark, though they’ve both survived their first elections as leaders.

In my head I’d started calling this Kim Campbell syndrome. But as it turns out, this phenomenon is well known enough to have a name. It’s called the Glass Cliff, and knowing the name makes it much easier to find the many examples that I hadn’t heard of before.

There is a problem with the phenomenon being well established, though… there’s not much else I can say about it because that ground has already been well trod. Just go read the wikipedia article, I guess.

Labels

Finally, at long last, my belated commentary on the June episode of Life, the Universe, and Everything Else. When I first heard this podcast I thought I would skip the commentary... couldn't really think of anything to add. Events of the past four weeks have proved me wrong, though, as over and over I've thought of something new to say.

I'll try to avoid giving away the whole episode, but there's a few things I should cover before getting into the telling omissions.

So the episode was all about labels... the labels people get stuck with, the ones they claim for themselves, and a few that get incorporated into their identities. Right off the bat they talk about labels people technically have but dislike. One panelist, Ashlyn, hates the label Egalitarian… her reasons aren’t really given. I suspect it’s because of the unfortunate associations it’s developed in recent years. These days, when people say “I’m an Egalitarian”, it usually comes right after they say “I’m not a Feminist”. There’s no reason someone couldn’t say “I’m a Feminist and an Egalitarian”, or even “I’m a Feminist because I’m an Egalitarian”. But that’s not the context I’ve seen it in, and I suspect it’s the same for Ashlyn.

If you’ll forgive me plagiarising myself, this observation of mine from last week is too good not to reuse:

“I probably should have thought of this yesterday, but... do you know what 'egalitarian' sounds like to me now? "Black ALL Lives Matter".”

Another panelist, Gem, qualifies as a Humanist by any definition. He doesn’t normally call himself that, and isn’t really sure why. I wouldn’t want to put words in his mouth, but it would be understandable if he avoided it for the same reason I avoid Egalitarian. In the time following the Great Rift of 2011 (the elevator thing) it became something of a trend for feminist atheists to be told to butt out, leave atheism to the misogynists, and just go be Humanists. Even if you agree with Humanism it’s not easy to take when it means abandoning something else.

Also… can I just say that the American Humanist Association’s “Sounds Like Humanism” campaign is a little creepy? They have quotes from these famous people espousing some humanist value or another, and then say “Sounds Like Humanism”. Some of those people might have considered themselves Humanists, others came before the philosophy was developed but likely would have agreed if they were still alive. But the campaign also included people like Martin Luthor King and the Dalai Lama… you can’t just go appropriating those people to your cause. It’s like the Mormons posthumously baptising Anne Frank. Imposing your labels on other people without their consent is not good.

Another panelist, Laura, doesn’t call herself a nutritionist. Any schmuck can call themselves a nutritionist, she’s a Registered Dietician. Sometimes you avoid a label because you’ve surpassed it.

They (mostly Lauren, I think?) talk about one of the dangers of labels, the risk that you might get stuck with it when you don’t want it, and the risk that it will negatively affect how people treat you, with psychiatric diagnosis and learning disabilities as the main example. I’d like to add in another downside. When you internalize a label, you start rationalizing away things that conflict with that. How many times have you heard “That thing I said can’t be misogynist, I’m a feminist”.

Near the end of the show they start talking about games they like to play… none of them calls themselves a Gamer. Who would touch that label these days?

There were a few things they left out, and I think it’s telling to consider why they were left out. Nationality, for one. I was a little surprised not to hear “Canadian” mentioned as a label. Perhaps that’s not as important to the panel, but I suspect it’s just because it’s a label they all share, so it’s less useful in this context.

I’m pretty sure none of them mentioned ethnicity or race, either. I don’t know if the whole panel was white - I haven't met all of them - but in any case it’s something that people in the majority tend to forget about. Or have the luxury to forget about, I guess. In much the same way as people might self-identify more as Gay or Trans than Straight or Cis… Cis people often have the luxury of ignoring the issue entirely, so they don't use the label.

There are some positives to labels, though. They can be very useful for establishing identities and building communities. I don’t remember which panelist it was, but I heard the phrase “I didn’t know there was a word for it” said with a lot of relief. It can be the only way to find like-minded people.

And labels can be critical when you want to say something without writing a weighty tome to explain it. Or a multi-page blog post.

Because the Stakes Are So Small

President Obama just announced new rules in the US regarding overtime pay. The threshold for requiring overtime to be paid will be raised, from around $20000 to around $50000. It’s a big change, one I’ve mostly heard about with regards to academia, perhaps because those are the people whose job involves professing.

An unrelated internet controversy sheds some light on this: An article in Science recommending that new scientists work 17 hours a day and find a compliant wife who will put in all the unpaid labour to make it work. There’s too much wrong with that for me to do much more than point and laugh, but it’s a sign of the kind of hours that can be expected.

So the big kerfuffle concerns postdoc positions, because these are not students but are generally paid about the same as the janitorial staff… which, when you consider the unpaid overtime, works out to below minimum wage. When the new rules were announced some postdocs assumed that this meant they’d either be eligible for paid overtime or their base pay would be increased to the new minimum. Assumed, of course, because that’s what the law requires.

Dr. Isis rains on that parade a little:

“Bargaining and other such labor tomfoolery only works when you can hold the man by the balls and twist. Postdocs aren’t in such a position.”

Rules or not, there is still a glut of people who both want to be professors and are highly qualified, so naturally some form of hazing is instituted to whittle the numbers down. In academia, this takes the form of starvation pay, a sleep schedule that will kill the unprepared, and generally a decade delay in the onset of adulthood.

It reminds me of the Firefighting jobs that require applicants to disable all their social media accounts. Sure, it might be illegal, but there are a hundred other applicants and at least one of them won’t complain…

Dr. Isis uses a different analogy, medical residents. They too get terrible pay and terrible hours in exchange for a chance at a prize at the end. But there are some crucial differences between medical residencies and postdoc positions. Namely, the size of the prize at the end. Except for a few elite private schools, professor pay is nothing to write home about. My semi-skilled blue collar job is not only better paid than postdocs, it’s better than adjuncts, than tenure-track professors, and even a little better than tenured professors.

It was a sobering realization a few years ago when I first figured that out. At the time I assumed it was just because of the overtime. But if academics are working those kind of hours, maybe the real difference is that my overtime is paid.

I don’t know if there are any good solutions here. Intentionally distorting the labour market is the sort of thing that doesn’t succeed often. Just about the only thing I can think of is harsh punishment for any schools that try to fudge the overtime requirement… but any postdocs reporting would have pyrrhic victories as they would likely find themselves unemployable in academia.

They might be better off that way.

Go Fix All The Other Problems First

I just read a great article on the Guardian about the ethics of contacting isolated tribes in the Amazon. Scientists must let world’s most isolated tribes make own decisions.

There’s a very compelling progressive argument to be made to the contrary. I know because I’ve made it. This idea is, these isolated tribes are not capable of informed consent. Isolated, by definition, means they are ignorant and not informed. They are refusing education, medical care, and food, without anything that could possibly be considered enough information to make that decision. And worse, they are making that decision on behalf of their children as well.

There’s a big flaw with that argument, though, and it’s based on the imperfection of the society we’ve built that they might seek to join. We still have desert compounds without education and urban ghettos without medical care and northern outposts without food.

Instead of asking how much we COULD offer isolated tribes, we need to ask how much we WOULD offer them. Not much, I’d guess.

In the end I guess this follows the same philosophy as my solution to the Kennewick Man and Mauna Loa Telescope issues. Go fix all the other problems, and then circle back around and see if this issue is still as difficult. If it’s still a problem at all, at least the ethical issues will be much more clear cut.

That’s my preferred approach to drug policy, as well. Go fix poverty and mental health care, then see if there are any problems left that can only be blamed on drugs.

Sometimes procrastination might be the best choice.

Brian Cox comments on Tim Hunt

I don’t think I’ve said anything yet about Tim Hunt’s comments on women in science. Here are the comments, for reference.

"It's strange that such a chauvinist monster like me has been asked to speak to women scientists. Let me tell you about my trouble with girls. Three things happen when they are in the lab: you fall in love with them, they fall in love with you, and when you criticise them they cry. Perhaps we should make separate labs for boys and girls?"

Brian Cox has weighed in on the controversy:

No, wait, that wasn’t it. Sorry. He was talking about something else entirely there. Probably homeopathy or moon hoaxers or something. Here’s what he actually said:

"On the other side of course, there is the wider problem of trial by social media. People do make ill-advised comments from time to time so is it appropriate to hound someone out of their position at a university or indeed is it appropriate for the university to react in the way UCL in this case did and ask someone to resign or threaten to sack them?"

Very interesting. So I guess the first quote, although it seemed to be a general statement, actually had a hidden clause giving an exemption for this case so that these comments should be left immune to criticism.

The question then is, is the exemption because the guy making the statement has a shiny prize for a thing he did back when he was a working scientist? Or is because the statements were about women?

Back in the Game

I’m back! Tonight is my first shift since the surgery, and today was the first real exercise. I had been hoping to take part in the Myra Canyon to Penticton bike tour today, but missed the registration deadline, what with being in the hospital and all. In lieu of the railbed I took the newly rehabilitated mountain bike up to Oyama Lake for a backcountry loop.

This loop, to be precise.

There’s a few differences between this sort of road and a railbed. First of all, you need to have brakes, and right around the first big hill I realized I probably should have reconnected those.

I fell around the 10km mark, which you might recognize from that map as almost the worst possible place to fall. At least the view was good.

Banged up my elbow and hip a little, nothing too serious. I decided to keep going because I’m a complete imbecile.

At 13km the route turned into more of a cliff, dropping very quickly towards the lake, and I was biking slower than a walking pace through what is a road 11 months of a year but becomes some kind of waterfall in April.

At 16km I decided to get out and walk. This is where the route changed from abandoned logging roads to the High Rim Trail, which is about four inches wide and more vertical than horizontal. It was a tough slog up about half a kilometer of hill, before getting to the monolith.

You can already hear the Strauss just looking at that thing, can’t you?

I decided to run the rest of that trail, carrying my bike. Also probably not my wisest move but I was getting a little fed up with the slow going. Over the river, through the woods, leaping and clambering and swearing across endless fields of deadfall.

Despite breaking into a run that 3km took me nearly an hour. That’s what bushwhacking does to you, I guess. I finished the final 4km of biking in a comparative blink of an eye… finally some flats to deal with. I think I might have even got out of second gear once.

Anyway, I would have written a more intellectual blog post but that’s how I spent most of my day, and now I’m spending the night working. So there you have it.

I'd give the Devil benefit of law

This morning I found news stories about two attacks on lawyers, in Winnipeg and Montreal. This post is only tangentially related to them, but it’s what set me off. Since I know nothing about these specific cases I’ll try to defend their whole profession instead.

First I just need to state as a disclaimer that this post is heavily influenced by, perhaps plagiarized from, another thing I read. It’s in that grey area where “Ghostbusters” was plagiarizing “I Want a New Drug” but Theory of a Deadman somehow isn’t plagiarizing Nickelback. It was either an article or an essay or a blog post, written by someone or another, maybe five or ten or fifteen years ago. I’d cite it if I could find it.

There’s this thing in police procedurals where lawyers are viewed exclusively as an obstacle. When a suspect “lawyers up” by asking for representation, it’s considered a sign of guilt. It means the noble protagonists have found the right guy, and now all they have to do is prove it… as task which becomes harder and harder as the lawyer gets involved. All of the sudden they can’t just try to force a confession.

I don’t watch police procedurals much anymore, but I saw something similar in the new Daredevil series. In this show the protagonists are lawyers, but they will only defend clients who are innocent… something that must be vanishingly rare, since they have trouble finding clients.

It’s a nice idea, to only defend the innocent. But it also really pisses me off whenever I see it, because I’m reminded of the Boston Massacre (this is the part mentioned in that other article I’m plagiarising). The soldiers involved in the Boston Massacre had trouble finding lawyers, but they convinced future president John Adams to defend them. Even though he risked sabotaging his future career, he thought it was too important that nobody be charged without getting the chance for a fair trial, whether guilty or innocent.

William Roper: So, now you give the Devil the benefit of law!Sir Thomas More: Yes! What would you do? Cut a great road through the law to get after the Devil?William Roper: Yes, I'd cut down every law in England to do that!Sir Thomas More: Oh? And when the last law was down, and the Devil turned 'round on you, where would you hide, Roper, the laws all being flat? This country is planted thick with laws, from coast to coast, Man's laws, not God's! And if you cut them down, and you're just the man to do it, do you really think you could stand upright in the winds that would blow then? Yes, I'd give the Devil benefit of law, for my own safety's sake!

Back when Dzokhar Tsarnaev was captured, there was considerable delay in getting him a lawyer. There was talk, in fact, of not letting him have a lawyer at all. Just shipping him off to Gitmo never to be heard from again. Finally a local magistrate snuck into his hospital room, interrupted the interrogation, and gave him the Miranda warning, telling him that he had the right to remain silent and the right to counsel. All of the sudden there needed to be a real trial, a fair trial in front of a jury of his peers.

I’ve mentioned before that I disagreed with the jury composition and the sentencing guidelines, but I’m happy that at least the trial took place, and that he had a lawyer there with him. Sometimes the rule of law is the only defence we have.

Stream of Semiconsciousness

Well hey, that’s an awesome title. I’m a little jealous of my own title. Or I guess I’m jealous of the readers who get to encounter that without having gone to the effort of creating it. Sort of like how I’m jealous of my own veins, but really I’m jealous of the people who get the joy of starting IVs in such excellent veins.

Where was I?

Today would have been a great day to be healthy, I think. I had been scheduled on the duty car, and I saw them out and about three times today. And then a little later I saw a tremendous traffic jam on 97 that probably resulted from some sort of wreck. I think my replacement had some fun today.

No sooner did the shift I didn’t work finish than this happens:

We're activated to support evacuation of Forest Service Rec site where the only easy road out is under Evac order - Joe Rich interface fire.

— COSAR (@okrescue) July 4, 2015

Come on, that would have been perfect. I know those roads. I learned to drive on those roads. I’ve hiked there ten thousand times.

Oh well. At least the downtime gave me the chance to catch up on some reading. So caught up, in fact, that I went and bought a new video game to suck up some extra time. Well, that and a console to play it with. It took about three hours to get the new console working and my that point another dose of codeine had kicked in to I only played the new game for about 15 minutes before falling asleep… that’s why I’m writing this so late, actually. Just woke up on the couch.

Where was I?

The game store has a $15 membership that comes with a 10% discount, so because my order was more than $150 I got that. Don’t expect to use it much. The clerk was trying to point out all the benefits… apparently if I spend $5000 a year the renewal is free! I told him that I’d been playing for 20 years, bought seven consoles and scores of games, and still hadn’t spent anywhere near $5000 in my entire life, let alone one year. He was flabbergasted. This poor schmuck apparently has $20000 worth of video games lying around. I hope he gets an employee discount.

Anyway, that’s all the time we have this week. Keep your stick on the ice.