emgoldstein

No one can enlighten anyone; you have to enlighten yourself.

Where did you get this picture of the pre-1968 world? For instance, your picture of classical Europe as "hardcore unrestricted capitalism" is frankly bizarre; you seem to be projecting 19th-century classical liberalism, a left-wing ideology in its day, back two or three centuries:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mercantilism https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jean-Baptiste_Colbert

My turn: feel free to undarkly enlighten me. Watch this movie, or even skim it, then tell me that all is for the best in this the best of all possible worlds:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aBZ6hgA-Cc4

When this film was made, most women didn't have to work; now they do. When this film was made, African-Americans had a 25% illegitimacy rate, which Moynihan thought terrifying; now they have an 75% illegitimacy rate (with whites at 25%). When this film was made, women in college were treated like ladies; today they're treated like Casanova's whores. When this film was made, Detroit was America's third-largest city; today it's a ruin.

Tell me again what your abstractions have done for women and African-Americans? For Detroit? For anyone, for anywhere? Can you find me a population that was struggling in 1966 and is thriving now? Can you find me a place that was a shithole in 1966 and is gleaming now? I can sure as heck find a lot of examples in the other direction...

Your "ideas" are abstractions. These abstractions are new (they are a product of 19th and 20th-century ideology). The realities behind them (charity, social mobility) are anything but new. For instance, Cardinal Wolsey was born into a poor family:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomas_Wolsey

In general, the answer to your question is "the Catholic Church." This was not a perfect institution. Ours are not perfect, either. The present has had many opportunities to give you its view of the past; the past has had no opportunity to give you its view of the present.

This is why it's a great idea to try these cases on Hacker News. (I'm only half kidding.) Always and everywhere, if you sit on a jury and listen only to the prosecutor or defense attorney, you will come to the conclusion they want. This is for the same reason you can't tell what a magician is doing with his hands: he's an pro, you're an amateur.

From:

http://www.cjlf.org/deathpenalty/CooperReview.htm

3. Josh Ryen told the police he thought three men committed the attack. He later changed his story.

"When Josh was rescued the day after the murders, he could not talk because his throat had been slashed. He could only squeeze the police officer's hand in response to questions. The story that Josh was finally able to tell police was that he was awakened in the middle of the night by his mother's screams. When he and his friend Chris went to investigate, he saw the bodies of his parents and Jessica and the backside of one unfamiliar person, so he ran and hid. Then he heard Chris screaming, so Josh ran back towards his friend. At that point, something struck him in the head, knocking him unconscious. He awoke later in a pool of blood.

When later queried by investigators, Josh spoke of three Mexicans who had come to the house earlier and thought they could have done it because they had been there once before. However, Josh never said he saw three people commit the murders. He consistently told different investigators that he saw only one attacker. The triple murderer theory is merely speculation based on the visit of the three Mexicans and twisting of a little boy's words.

Additionally, Josh was an eight-year-old boy who was startled awake by a horrific murder and was brutally attacked. It is unsurprising that probing questions by adults and the power of suggestion later tried to confuse his story. Most important however, Cooper was not convicted on the limited testimony of an eight-year-old. He was convicted by the mountain of other evidence incriminating him."

1. The girlfriend of a former inmate friend of Cooper's, thought her boyfriend might have been involved in the murder. She turned his bloody coveralls over to the local Yucaipa sheriff's substation, but they threw out the coveralls without testing them.

"This girlfriend, Diane Roper, was dismissed by law enforcement as completely lacking credibility. She was a professed witch who claimed she had a vision during a trance that the murder had been committed after she heard about the Ryen case. However, she had no substantive reason to believe her boyfriend was involved with Cooper the night of the murder. In fact, she told sheriff's investigators that she did not even know to whom the coveralls belonged. She said she "just knew" from the vision that the coveralls were connected to the case. By the time the San Bernardino County Sheriff's Department heard about her fantastic story, they had Cooper in custody with mountains of evidence (see above) against him. Based on their limited resources and already having the likely killer in custody, the San Bernardino County police chose not to expend precious time and money chasing Roper's crazy story."

As for the other evidence:

"The victims died from numerous chopping wounds later determined to have been inflicted by a hatchet or axe and stabbing wounds inflicted by both a knife and an ice pick. Later that day, bloodstained items were found in the vacant house where Cooper had stayed, including a button from a prison jacket identical to the one he was wearing when he escaped. A police criminologist also found evidence of blood on the carpet, in the bathroom sink and in the shower along with Cooper's footprint. Hairs from the shower drain and the bathroom sink were consistent with those from two of the victims.

A bloodstained hatchet from the vacant house was later found near the Ryen home. The sheath from the hatchet was found on the floor of the bedroom where Cooper had slept. Some hunting knives and at least one ice pick were also missing from the vacant house. A strap fitting one of the missing knives was found in the same bedroom. Shoe prints were found in the Ryen home and the vacant house next door matching the unique pattern of shoes issued exclusively to prison inmates. The prints indicated shoes of Cooper's size and brand that he had recently received in prison.

While most of the blood samples taken at the murder scene were determined to have come from the victims, one sample was conclusively determined to have come from a black person with the same blood group as Cooper. The sample was too small to determine if it was Cooper's rare blood type.

The Ryen station wagon was found several days after the killings in a church parking lot in Long Beach. Hairs found in the car matched those of Cooper. Tobacco issued exclusively to prison inmates, which Cooper smoked, was found in the vacant house and in the Ryen's station wagon.

Two days after the murders, Cooper befriended a couple in Mexico and joined them on a boat trip up the California Coast. Weeks later, Cooper was arrested on a boat off of Santa Barbara after the woman reported that he had raped her at knife point, threatening to kill her if she woke her husband. Following his arrest, several items taken from the vacant house in Chino were discovered on the boat.

At his trial, Cooper admitted staying in the Chino house but denied any involvement in the Ryen murders. Josh Ryen, who miraculously survived his injuries, testified that he awoke on the night of the murders after hearing his mother's screams. He remembered being hit from behind when trying to investigate but was unable to identify his attacker.

For the 19 years following his 1985 conviction, Cooper's claims of trial and sentencing errors have been reviewed by California and federal courts. In 2000 he won a delay of his execution so that new DNA testing could be performed on various blood and saliva samples found at the murder scene, in the stolen station wagon, and on a bloody t-shirt found near the Ryen home. The DNA from all of these samples was found to have come from the same person. This DNA was then compared to DNA from Cooper's blood. It matched. The odds of the match being by chance were 1 in 310 billion."

When you hear one side of the story, always look for the other -- whether or not it's a criminal trial. Adversarial justice works.

EDIT: show quotes clearly.

The Ryen account is a little far down that page. Since we heard one story in anatomical detail, how about another?

"The first time I met Kevin Cooper I was 8 years old and he slit my throat. He hit me with a hatchet and put a hole in my skull. He stabbed me twice, which broke my ribs and collapsed one lung. I lived only because I stuck four fingers in my neck to slow the bleeding, but I was too weak to move. I laid there 11 hours looking at my mother who was right beside me.

I know now he came through the sliding glass door and attacked my dad first. He was lying on the bed and was struck in the dark without warning with the hatchet and knife. He was hit many times because there is a lot of blood on the wall on his side of the bed.

My mother screamed and Cooper came around the bed and started hitting her. Somehow my dad was able to struggle between the bed and the closet but Cooper bludgeoned my father to death with the knife and hatchet, stabbing him 26 times and axing him 11. One of the blows severed his finger and it landed in the closet. My mother tried to get away but he caught her at the bottom of the bed and he stabbed her 25 times and axed her 7.

All of us kids were drawn to the room by mom's screams. Jessica was killed in the doorway with 5 ax blows and 46 stabs. I won't say how many times my best friend Chris was stabbed and axed, not because it isn't important, but because I don't want to hurt his family in any way, and they are here.

After Cooper killed everyone, and thought he had killed me, he went over to my sister and lifted her shirt and drew things on her stomach with the knife. Then he walked down the hallway, opened the refrigerator, and had a beer. I guess killing so many people can make a man thirsty."

[EDIT: this is from Ryen's testimony in 2005.]

There's one fact that is never mentioned in this story.

Methane is lighter than air (about 0.7th the density of air). The methane leak is above Porter Ranch (about 1200 feet, a fact that is mentioned).

You know that and I know that. But do most NYT readers know that? If not, why doesn't the writer mention it? He does mention elliptically that the town residents are smelling mercaptans, not methane. He doesn't mention that the methane can't possibly be reaching them. It seems like this simple science fact would bring a lot of clarity to the picture.

(In related news, the greenhouse effect is O(log n), as a function from greenhouse gas concentration to thermal forcing. I'm sure everyone here knew this as well.)

Whenever I see smart geeks talking about tons of CO2, I always wonder what percentage of them know whether the Arrhenius effect (temperature forcing as a function of CO2 concentration) is exponential, linear, or logarithmic.

Answer here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Svante_Arrhenius#Greenhouse_ef...

Not entirely welcomed:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lawrence_Dennis#Sedition_trial

I recommend Malcolm Muggeridge's autobiography for a compelling look at the circle of Western journalists in Moscow in the '20s and '30s, of which Muggeridge was a part. Scott Alexander has a good review:

http://slatestarcodex.com/2015/08/11/book-review-chronicles-...

You either stayed in that circle or dropped out; there was no in-between. Of the reporters listed in the link, W.H. Chamberlin is the only other one who defected. Duranty (whose Pulitzer the NYT still refuses to return) was the norm, not the exception.

Also note that Thompson was part of the most bloodthirsty wing of New Dealists (eg, Rex Stout, also seen in the link) who supported prewar and postwar anti-German atrocities. It was certainly Nazi policy from 1941-45 to kill as many Jews as physically possible, but it was also Allied policy from 1941-45 to kill as many Germans as physically possible -- and that policy by no means stopped on a dime in May 1945:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Food_in_occupied_Germany

A real and complete moral reckoning for the period has yet to come, and will be more interested in our crimes than those of our defeated enemies.

Ah, but that was 1946. The (American) party line had changed -- most American liberals were anti-Stalinist in 1946.

A quick google search turns up this from 1943:

http://trove.nla.gov.au/ndp/del/article/11332745

"Dorothy Thompson, the well-known columnist, writes: 'Russia does not want to make an isolationist policy. Russia wants a friendly Europe in a friendly world, with a system of collective security. There are signs of such hostility in both Europe and America to Russia that it gives Russian leadership some reason for suspicion. As things look at present, it is by no means certain that defeat of Germany will assure a non-Fascist Europe or one prepared to adopt a good-neighbor policy toward Russia."

Her views in 1946 are standard 1946 post-FDR New Dealism (after the Anglo-Soviet split); her views in 1943 are standard 1943 New Dealism. You're just hearing the party line; God only knows what she actually thought, and when.

It would be much easier to fight the memory hole if we didn't have these ridiculous copyright laws, but a lot of original WWII propaganda (not cherry-picked by modern hagiographers) remains on line. It's often pretty appalling reading.

Thompson, like many (if not most) American journalists of her time, was a Stalin apologist in the Duranty circle:

http://spartacus-educational.com/USAthompsonD.htm

I'm not sure any intellectual who collaborated with Hitler should get points for warning the world about Stalin. Or vice versa.

If Harper's had written an article called "Who Goes Bolshevik" in 1941, it could have been much shorter: "pretty much everyone." Or at least, everyone who mattered. If you wanted the truth about Stalin in 1941, you'd do much better with the Voelkischer Beobachter than the New York Times.

Be careful in selecting your "other side" -- the examples you use to define it may have been brought by "your side."

I can't speak for the other two, but I'm guessing you're not thinking of Steve McIntyre. Eg, go here and have a productive conversation:

http://climateaudit.org/2016/01/05/update-of-model-observati...

I think a very small amount of stylometric analysis would cast a lot of doubt on this theory.

Satoshi's grammar is always perfect. His sentences are tight. He's clear and to the point. Wright rambles; his grammar is terrible; he seems to have no idea what a comma is for. Scanning his blog for a minute, he comes across as the kind of slightly dotty kook who would try to convince people he's Satoshi with this kind of "leak."

I'll stick with the current mainstream theory, thanks...

TLDR: the researchers you admire are part of a school that disagrees with Dr. Hsu's school.

Or at least, sort of disagree. It's not that they have any results showing a method for increasing either IQ or mathematical capacity. They just don't feel that it's entirely, completely, totally and utterly proven that such a method (which the entire education industry has spent the last century searching for) doesn't exist. Well, sure. Obviously, in an empirical science, negatives are pretty hard to prove.

But let that be. Suppose your guys are totally right. It used to be, in days gone by, when perhaps the spirit of science was better understood, that everyone interested in science understood that a hundred flowers bloomed, contending schools are a great and normal thing, and scholars can disagree -- without attacking each other personally as failed physicists, college administrators, etc.

Let alone elitists, racists, and Trotskyist wreckers. Speaking of the spirit of science, and schools thereof, I wonder what your position on Professors Boas, Gould and Mead might be? Do you regard them as conclusively guilty of scientific fraud? Or do you feel that in some way the jury remains out? What do you feel Professor Turkheimer's views on the question might be?

This has to be the nicest, most reasonable-sounding ad hominem argument I've ever seen.

But it's still an ad hominem argument. Is there any way you actually disagree with the post? What would you say to Dr. Hsu if he were in the room?

Also, what is your evidence that he's not in touch with experts in psychometrics and human genomics? I don't know him, but I have very much the contrary impression.

Your evidence (of the absence of sexual dimorphism in the human brain) is that rats with identical genes can be trained in different directions? (Your second link is behind a paywall, for me anyway.)

I'm trying to figure out how you would even begin to do an objective study of what you're looking for since by the time kids present meaningful interests, they're already irrevocably influenced by society and their parents' expectations.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Falsifiability

What you're saying is that your hypothesis (the absence of human sexual dimorphism in brain neuroanatomy) can't be proved false by any practical experiment. Nor can the Flying Spaghetti Monster.

Imagine you lived in a world (perhaps the world of 100 years ago) in which everyone believed in human sexual dimorphism in neuroanatomy. (BTW, here's the top link I get when I google that: http://cercor.oxfordjournals.org/content/11/6/490.short). Lacking MRI scans, these uneducated people give as evidence the fact that girls prefer dolls and boys prefer tin soldiers.

Your job is to convince them otherwise. You say: my theory is that it's possible that girls prefer dolls and boys prefer tin soldiers because of thousands of years of cultural conditioning, etc. You've offered an alternative hypothesis to explain facts that both of you observe.

You haven't even begun to explain why your hypothesis should be believed over the existing null hypothesis. Your listeners ask: what evidence makes your hypothesis more plausible than mine? That genetically identical rats can be trained to do different things? What does this tell me about human sexual dimorphism?

But actually, it's not as bleak as you think. Society today has enough parents and scientists who believe in the absence of sexual dimorphism above the neck, that this experiment has not gone unperformed. One example:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Money#Sex_reassignment_of...

No, I'm asking you to produce evidence for a hypothesis you seem to believe. I don't have any hypothesis of my own.

If you tell me that the Sears Tower and the Empire State Building are the same height (a hypothesis), you should show up with evidence that they are the same height, or some other a priori reason to believe that your hypothesis is more likely to be true than untrue (for instance, if both buildings were the product of the same prefab factory).

[1] is a rat study. How it relates to any hypothesis about XY versus XX humans is beyond me.

If XX and XY humans have different interests/aptitudes, that's a very parsimonious explanation for the toy aisle at Walmart, right?

But if your hypothesis is true, we need to search for other explanations. For instance, Walmart and other toy stores might be controlled by a conspiracy of conservative Christians who believe in different gender roles, and are willing to sacrifice profits (from boys buying Barbies, girls buying cars, etc) to support their goal of an unequal society. Is this the hypothesis you're proposing? It also needs to apply to Target, etc, all of which have the same boy/girl aisles.

I'd love it if articles like this came with links to scientific evidence that XX-chromosome humans have the same distribution of interests and aptitudes as XY-chromosome humans. Alternatively, maybe HN readers have some such links?

At the very least, I'd hope reasonable people could agree that in a universe where this scientific hypothesis isn't true, or turns out not to be true, this situation looks very different from the way the article (which seems to assume it is true) presents it. Certainly, Occam's razor being a thing, any falsification of this hypothesis would be a very parsimonious explanation for the statistical disparities being observed.

Let me change one word in your response:

Students don't need "protection" from free speech, nor does anyone need to be rescued from the "mockery" and "humiliation" of an accusation of communism.

Demands for journalism-free "safe spaces" are bad, but so too is the idea that accusations of communism are so beyond the pale that people need to be shielded from them by institutions.

Or:

Demands for journalism-free "safe spaces" are bad, but so too is the idea that accusations of witchcraft are so beyond the pale that people need to be shielded from them by institutions.

Can you honestly be unaware that we live in a world where no one gets fired for being a communist, or a witch? But...

I guess the reason the original title seems neutral: I couldn't even tell you whether others think has a left-wing or right-wing bias.

I do know it was being strongly upvoted under this title, which might be objective proof of linkbaitiness...

The original speech title (from the URL) was "Law enforcement and the communities we serve: bending the lines toward safety and justice." I don't know if this is either misleading or linkbait, but I know it's not good, and you're not using it.

"Defense of mass incarceration" seems like a neutral summary of the content of the speech. The author's main point, from the content: 'to speak of “mass incarceration” I believe is confusing, and it distorts an important reality.' But the literal words "mass incarceration" seem simply factual, although "mass" might be more neutral as "large-scale."

Replacing this summary of the content with the author and location, as above, replaces it with an irrelevant, content-free title, which couldn't be better designed to go unread. How many HN posts are labeled "Article by Walter Mossberg in the Wall Street Journal?"

It seems better to simply describe the link as inappropriate. But many pieces on this subject appear on HN...

Once again, HN surprises me with its open-mindedness.

If you read this and feel strong emotional disagreement, one way to manage that emotion productively is to imagine yourself in the room with the speaker, and try to express your perspective in the way you'd find most likely to convince.

Another way to say that: the way to productively disagree is to talk to your opponent, not at your opponent.

I guess I wouldn't define a silent perspective, whether majority or minority, as present in the conversation.

It is one phenomenon when everyone agrees. Probably everyone is right. When everyone who speaks agrees, and everyone who doesn't agree doesn't speak, that's quite a different pattern.

As I noted above, I agree: I think the problem is the tone. In combination with this pattern, of course.

(I should have just noted that it seems possible that the reason American parents find their children less safe in public is that they're right. Parents are worried about assaults and kidnapping. I couldn't find statistics on child assault and/or kidnapping, but the Japanese rape rate is roughly 27x (not 27%) lower than the American [1]. Given this fact, it's not immediately obvious why one should search for an additional cause of the disparity.)

Wherever our moderator is from, his perspective is an American perspective. This is an objective factual statement, like the fact that English is an Indo-European language. Probably in the same geographic region 100 years ago, there was a living pre-American intellectual tradition. But it hasn't existed since 1945 at the latest.

(The most concentrated remaining geographic locus of pre-American ideology is -- by no coincidence -- the subject of this article. Nippon Kaigi anyone? But I don't believe Dan is Japanese. And even Japan isn't exactly what it once was.)

[1] http://www.nationmaster.com/country-info/compare/Japan/Unite... [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nippon_Kaigi

That said, I owe you an apology. I don't think my style in the thread above is good.

If I were moderating a site like HN, I think I'd have explicit guidelines for anyone wanting to present a perspective which is a minority view or in any way otherwise controversial.

My guidelines would recommend special care in keeping your presentation with a completely neutral tone and an absolute absence of snark.

And in particular, the poster should be explicitly informed that his or her opponents will not, cannot, and probably even should not be held to anything remotely like the same high bar. Because that's life, kid.

From within, a monoculture is easily mistaken for an absence of ideology.

From outside, this thread looks like a set of mocking, contemptuous dismissals of anyone who doesn't agree with that ideological monoculture. Even without any dissenting thoughts, it remains a flamewar; just a flamewar with only one side. Perhaps I'm alone in finding that a little creepy.

There's no evidence that people with a mental illness pose a risk of harm to other people or to children.

Of course not. The cause of helicopter parenting is irrational parents who perceive, obviously due to media stereotypes, that people with a mental illness cause a risk of harm to other people or to children.

I love you, Weimerica. Don't ever change.

According to free-range child advocate Lenore Skenazy, there are a little over 100 stranger abductions per year in the US. [1]. Therefore, abductions are a not a big deal.

According to Wikipedia, 100 years ago, there were about 100 lynchings per year in the US. [2] Therefore, lynching is a big deal.

I love this meme about the media. Quick question: for you, personally, when was the last time you saw a media story about an abducted child? When was the last time you saw a media story about paranoid helicopter parents, etc, repeating the ideas you see above? In my experience, the ratio is 1:10 if not 1:20.

There's a very straightforward reason why parents keep their kids indoors: the same parents, while outdoors, regularly encounter human beings that they wouldn't trust their kids around. Deinstitutionalization anyone? Free-range mental patients or free-range children: pick one. [3]

[1] http://www.freerangekids.com/over-700-children-are-abducted-... [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lynching [3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_psychiatric_institu...

Until the 20th century, most people believed that human varieties were like animal and plant varieties, which can reasonably be expected to display heritable, variety-specific physical and psychological traits.

This expectation is a prior, or null hypothesis; evidence is required to refute it. For instance, if you claimed that Great Danes are just as good as border collies at herding sheep, you'd have to present evidence to support this claim, which otherwise seems implausible.

Military and political events in the 20th century reversed this burden of proof. The null hypothesis is now that all dogs are equal, at least behaviorally. If you want to claim that Great Danes aren't likely to be good sheepdogs, you have to present evidence showing their inferior performance on herding tasks, and your evidence has to rule out all non-genetic factors. For instance, obviously if your border collies grew up in the sheep pen and your Great Danes didn't, that's a valid non-genetic explanation. It's not especially difficult to raise the bar indefinitely on this test.

Well, okay, we haven't changed our minds about collies, Great Danes and sheep-herding. But we have changed our minds about Ashkenazi Jews, Australian aboriginals, and chess.

The "out of Africa" narrative suggested considerable genetic homogeneity that supported this politically desirable narrative of universal behavioral equality as a null hypothesis. Recent discoveries in the complex history of human DNA have not been favorable to this narrative.

One of the most interesting discoveries is haplogroup A00, a Y chromosome with a divergence time which could be almost 600,000 years ago [1]. This precedes our current use of the species name "Homo sapiens." 23andme now reports estimated Neanderthal ancestry, but to my knowledge they're not telling anyone they have "the erectus chromosome."

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Haplogroup_A_(Y-DNA)#A00_.28Pe...

Consider your objective of "restoring faith" and the means you (and many in society who seem to agree with you) adopt to bring it about: propagating the idea that miscarriages of justice frequently occur. Even if this isn't a miscarriage. Even if Trayvon Martin, Michael Brown, Ahmed Mohamed, etc, aren't miscarriages.

You could say: our means of increasing faith in justice is to tell everyone that miscarriages occur all the time, even if they maybe don't, so that good ordinary Americans will become more and more concerned and prevent miscarriages, which will increase faith etc.

This is a very complicated and indirect way of purportedly getting the result you want.

However, if you wanted exactly the opposite result - that is, you wanted to decrease faith in the criminal justice system - what would you do? Answer: give as much publicity as possible to miscarriages of justice, purported or real.

Which is exactly what you're doing, right? Have you ever heard the thing about what to do when you're in a hole?

Also, I'm quite aware that Americans aren't Japanese. On the other hand, I seldom hear that awareness from people who point out how much better urban life is in, say, Reykjavik rather than Detroit. And appear to believe that the problems of Detroit can be solved by adopting the ideology and/or governance structures of Reykjavik. (Which, in fact, has pretty much already happened - if anything, the flow is in the other direction.)

As for throwaways: stay on the reservation, and you'll have nothing to fear. Duck under the barbed wire, and you'll find out...

The other billionaire is Trump, of course.

My point is that if your concern (or pg's) is strictly of the form "minimize the number of innocent people being killed unjustly," there are much more effective reforms available than abolishing the death penalty. For example, switching to the Japanese criminal justice system:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crime_in_Japan

Judging by comparative crime rates, this would probably save 10,000 to 15,000 innocent lives per year. And I mean certainly innocent lives, not conceivably innocent lives (like Glossip's).

Of course, it would be a reform in more or less exactly the opposite direction than you and everyone on this thread is suggesting. That's why I posted this under a throwaway.

Which raises the question: if minimizing the number of innocent lives taken unjustly isn't the source of the general concern for Glossip, what is?

I've served on two juries. In both cases, a drunk driver was acquitted. In both cases, the defendant's guilt was obvious, and the cause was a single juror who hated cops. (Or, more indirectly, the cause was an arrogant young DA who wasn't aggressive enough in voir dire.)

On one of these cases, I was the last juror to hold out. It was like "12 Angry Men" in reverse: "12 Hungry Men And Women." It was 5pm, I wanted dinner and so did everyone else, and I didn't want to bring 11 other people back again tomorrow. So I took the easy way out, as did 10 other people.

On our way out, the DA thanked us sarcastically and noted that the defendant had two prior DUIs. If we'd given him a third, she pointed out, there might actually have been consequences. As it was... I live in slight terror of glancing at a newspaper and noting that he's erased someone's six-year-old, just because I was hungry and wanted to go home for dinner.

To put it slightly differently: a few months ago, a woman in SF suffered the death penalty. She was innocent. She just wanted to look at the sea lions, or something. Unfortunately, San Francisco had sentenced her to death.

The executioner was an illegal-immigrant drifter who'd been pulled out of ICE's deportation pipeline by "sanctuary city" policies originally intended for intellectuals fleeing El Salvador in the early 1980s. A couple of days before, he'd smashed the window on a car and stolen a gun, which he was using (according to him) to shoot at sea lions. A bullet

Is her death an accident? How about Glossip's? I know of one billionaire who cares a lot about Kathryn Steinle. I know of another billionaire who cares a lot about Richard Glossip.

It seems to me both these deaths involve the action of the State, in choosing to allow a human life to be taken -- in one case intentionally based on the determination of guilt, in another case negligently, based on -- honestly, I couldn't even tell you what this level of carelessness is based on.

Supposing Glossip is innocent -- which doesn't seem terribly likely once we read the piece above, which is far more detailed and down-to-earth than the emotional appeals that triggered pg. Then, his death would be an accident, wouldn't it? The State did not set out to kill an innocent man. It didn't set out to kill an innocent women, but it did that as well -- with far less thinking than went into Glossip's case.

Suppose our other billionaire, the one we adore here instead of laughing at for his ridiculous hair, had chosen to care about the other human life in question. Or, more to the point, the next 1 or 10 or 100 that might be sacrificed in this absurd and cavalier fashion. What would your response have been?