Alas, a Blog | Feminist, anti-racist, pro-fat, plus whatever else we feel like talking about.

Open Thread And Link Farm: Bill Day Is One Of The Worst Cartoonists In America Edition

Posted on January 17, 2013 by Ampersand

Invisible Men: We now send so many people, especially young black men, to prison – where they are not counted in most official government statistics – that it badly distorts statistics on high school drop-out rates, employment, wages, and voter turnout. “…inmates and ex-inmates are at once constantly under surveillance and effectively unseen.”
America’s Real Criminal Element: Lead Eliminating lead from children’s environments might be the most important anti-crime measure we could take. Kevin Drum has been writing up a storm about this; here’s a round-up of his lead blogging.
Thirteen theses on cannabis policy
Seventeen Magazine Promotes Body Hatred by partnering up with the TV show “Biggest Loser.”
The Transformation Of Labor Unions From Opponents of Immigration Reform To Its Biggest Champions
Children, Parents and Mass Incarceration
Player Piano Roll Copying is Killing Music (And It’s Maybe Illegal)
In New Castle, Pa., trying to break free of poverty. A long but very interesting story about one teenage girl’s struggle to climb the economic ladder.
A Lesson Is Learned But The Damage Is Irreversible. This comic strip cracked me up.
Melinda Gates’ New Crusade: Investing Billions in Women’s Health.
Robert George explains natural law. (PDF file).
Revealed: how the FBI coordinated the crackdown on Occupy | Naomi Wolf
A Letter To The Guy Who Harassed Me Outside The Bar
House Republicans Derail Bill Targeting Rapists
“I can find no way around the thicket of laws and precedents that effectively allow the executive branch of our government to proclaim as perfectly lawful certain actions that seem on their face incompatible with our Constitution and laws while keeping the reasons for their conclusion a secret.” – Judge Colleen McMahon, regarding the Obama administration’s secret rules for deciding when it’s okay for the US government to assassinate US citizens. (Via.)
Rabbi Shmuel Herzfeld’s Sermon on Same-Sex Marriage: An Appreciation
Back when 50 miles was a long way. A very neat historical map of travel times.
President Obama Would Choose to Fight the Horse-Sized Duck
“…As I sit here in my skinny jeans and fitted top, for the first time in my life I am fat, female, and unashamed.”
Ten Rules for Fat Girls
A Rape At Burning Man
Is there objective morality in the Universe? – The Good Atheist
Cartooning Plagiarism Scandal: It’s About Time!
Plagiarism allegations hit Bill Day in closing days of fundraising campaign. And as well as reading that, it’s hard to appreciate what an embarassment Bill Day is to political cartooning without at least skimming through That Cartoon Critic.
To Stabilize the Debt, Policymakers Should Seek Another $1.4 Trillion in Deficit Savings — Center on Budget and Policy Priorities
‘There’s nothing mutual about it’: White evangelicals, privileged distress and grievance envy
” Does the right to religious freedom include the right to impose your views on others? Does it include the right to impose your views on a diverse workforce? On customers and patients seeking your services you offer the public? Does it include the right to close the door – in your office or your bakery or your emergency room – because you disagree with the person seeking services?”
“Justice Clarence Thomas broke his nearly seven-year silence at Supreme Court oral arguments Monday. But no one is sure exactly what he said.”
Petition: Remove United States District Attorney Carmen Ortiz from office for overreach in the case of Aaron Swartz.
Anti-Feminist Press Crows Over Book Celebrating Domestic Abuse, Then Finds Out How Bad It Can Get
Sex, Stereotyping, and Same-Sex Marriage
“She’s the first ever out trans person in the United States to compete in the Miss Universe pageant system and has the goal of attempting to become the first trans Miss USA and trans Miss Universe. “
The White House’s official reply to the petition to “Secure resources and funding, and begin construction of a Death Star by 2016.” This, and also the ducks video, via Elayne.
Covering Up Climate Change | Andrew Sullivan
An oldie but a goodie from Garfunkel and Oates:

Posted in Link farms | 124 Comments

Obama’s Gun Control Proposals and Executive Orders

Posted on January 17, 2013 by Ampersand

Prominent Republicans, including members of Congress, have responded by calling for impeachment.

It’ll be interesting to see if any of Obama’s proposals make it through Congress. If any do, I expect they will be considerably watered down. Executive Orders, of course, don’t require Congressional approval, but may be undone the next time a Republican is elected President.

Anyway, here’s the list. You can also read a transcript of Biden and Obama’s remarks at the signing of the executive orders. They talked a lot about the Newton massacre, a little about a couple of other high-profile mass shootings, and mentioned in passing the 900 Americans who have died from gun violence in the month since Newton.

I don’t think these proposals, if passed, would be a magic bullet (heh) eliminating gun violence and mass shootings. However, it’s plausible that they would reduce the numbers of gun deaths.

I’m of two minds about the mental health provisions. On the one hand, the provisions themselves, which (unless I’m missing something) seem to focus on making voluntary mental health care more accessible and affordable, are good. But attaching them to gun control, as if mental health problems are a significant driver of gun violence, is dubious at best and flat-out bigotry against mentally ill people at worst.

The Racism in this NRA Video Needs to be Called Out

Posted on January 16, 2013 by Richard Jeffrey Newman

I’ve seen this video written about in two places, The New York Times and The New Yorker. Neither of them takes on the video’s obvious (to me anyway) dog-whistle (and maybe not even dog-whistle) racism. First, there is the divide-and-conquer aspect of the video, i.e., the unstated fact that it is about an African-American man whose children get all that protection when there are so many African-American children who, in the video’s formulation, die from gun violence because that kid of protection is not available to them. Then, there is the plain old racism of manipulating white viewers to forget that we’re talking about the security needs of the children of the president of the United States and focus on the “fact” that this Black man and his children, not to mention his wife, are getting a level of armed protection that this same Black man–again, in the NRA’s formulation, though of course the video never uses the word “Black”–wants to deny the rest of us.

To be honest, though, my first response on watching the video was to be appalled at what I think is a different level of racism, one that I think has been active from the start of President Obama’s first campaign until now, and that I have seen called out only very rarely, if at all: the way all too many of his opponents feel authorized to cross lines of decorum and respect–and I mean respect for his office, not just him as a human being–that I don’t believe they would think of crossing if they were opposing a white president. The birthers and the politicians who gave them any kind of support are perhaps the most obvious example of this, but I am thinking as well of the elected official who called Obama a liar during his health care speech; and this video by the NRA strikes me as another prime example. Somehow, I don’t believe the NRA would have gone after the president’s children in this way if the man in office were white, and so I don’t know how to read the subtext if this video as anything other than a very large, very powerful group of people trying to put this “uppity” Black man in his place, “Remember, we know where you live; we know who your children are and where they go to school.”

There is a lot to talk about when it comes to gun control and violence in the United States, including–though this is all too often not included–the role played in that violence by our ideas about manhood and masculinity. It seems pretty clear to me that the NRA’s campaign as a whole is more about fear-mongering than really having that discussion, but the racist fear-mongering this video trafficks in is especially insidious and dangerous and it needs to be called out over and over again, plain and simple.

Cross-posted.

Posted in Race, racism and related issues, The Obama Administration | 21 Comments

Bright Ideas from Wayne LaPierre

Posted on January 16, 2013 by Jen Sorensen

This is neither here nor there, but while drawing Wayne LaPierre, it occurred to me that he has slightly weird hair. It swirls over his brow in a sometimes-bulbous arc that, for me, evokes shades of Jimmy Swaggart. You’d think a guy who gets paid around a million bucks a year by the NRA could afford a better stylist!

Posted in Syndicated feeds | Comments Off

Both Parties Agree: Drown Government In A Bathtub. But Only The GOP Admits That’s What It’s Doing

Posted on January 14, 2013 by Ampersand

Ross Douthat discusses the two major political parties and the debt:

In this landscape, no matter which painful solution polls better in the abstract, a political coalition that’s actually laid the groundwork for what it wants to do seems more likely to succeed in doing it. The Republican Party is an unserious party in many ways, but it has leaders (from Paul Ryan to Tom Coburn) who understand that crucial point, and who have spent the last few years elaborating the kind of entitlement reforms that the conservative vision of government requires, and putting their fellow Republicans on the record in support of them.

I think even this is giving the GOP too much credit. The GOP is not willing to put their name to any specific entitlement reforms that could hurt them with voters – especially when it comes to Medicare, and Medicare is nearly all that matters when it comes to the long-term debt. In the recent “fiscal cliff” negotiations, Republicans flatly refused to propose entitlement cuts, instead demanding that Obama propose them. In the 2012 election, Romney and Ryan relentlessly attacked Obama for cutting Medicare spending, essentially surrendering this issue to Democrats by treating cuts to Medicare as unthinkable.

Douthat continues:

From Barack Obama on down, I don’t see the same thing happening on the Democratic side; instead, I see a party that’s still loath to acknowledge that its program requires sacrifice from anyone save the wealthy, and that just responded to a moment of maximum leverage by narrowing its definition of who constitutes the rich. If Democrats want to raise middle class taxes — and I mean really raise them, not just cut deals that nudge revenue upward a little here and there — they need to lay the political and policy groundwork for that kind of push, and they need to start relatively soon.

I think this is absolutely correct. Barack Obama, by swearing to never, ever raise taxes on anyone but the top half of the upper class, has essentially surrendered on revenues to the Republicans. The Democratic Party’s agenda is simply not affordable if we take the position that no American earning under a quarter million dollars a year should pay for it.

When Bush passed his ten-year tax cuts, Democrats pointed out – correctly – that the tax cuts were unaffordable, would lead to soaring deficits, and would make paying for a first-world government impossible. Now Democrats have made 82% of Bush’ tax cuts permanent, and bizarrely, are counting that as a coup.

Posted in Economics and the like | 81 Comments

Some Things I’ve Read Or Seen Lately

Posted on January 13, 2013 by Ampersand

Django Unchained
If the idea of an action movie featuring a former slave bloodily blowing away dozens of white slavers appeals to you, then this movie won’t disappoint. I loved it. It was extremely well-done popcorn, well-filmed and well-acted, and Samuel Jackson’s supporting role was great – I don’t think I’ve ever seen a more virtuoso display of code-switching on screen.

That said, Django was relatively weak as Tarantino’s movies go – it lacked the scenes of unbearable tension that made Inglorious Bastards memorable, the characters were not well-developed compared to Reservoir Dogs or Jackie Brown, and as a pure popcorn “watch the action” flick it’s not a deliriously fun as Kill Bill, if only because watching people shoot each other to death isn’t nearly as fun as watching them karate each other to death. ((On screen! Obviously! In real life, would be considerably less fun.))

China Comics by Sushu Xia
Sushu Xia is a teacher who I met when she and her husband stayed a night at my house (they’re friends with a housemate). After she described China Comics to me, I shamelessly nagged her to send me a copy of her comic, and I’m glad I did. This short (fifty pages or so, half comics and half prose) self-published comic is Xia’s answer to the question “so what is China like?” (Xia was born in China, moved to the US at age six, but every few years since has visited China during the summer.) Rather than a traditional narrative, Xia does a series of one-page comic strips about particular aspects of daily life in China: a page about ubiquitous hot water bottles, a page about the street life vs. residential community divide, a page about dress codes, a page about racial identities, and so on.

Xia’s artwork lacks professional polish, but it’s effective, readable and has charm. The book is a satisfying read – although there are only about 24 pages of comics, most of the pages are pretty dense. I was left wishing that I could spend some of my life living in an urban community in China, eating in a late-night restaurant in my pajamas. If a friend of mine was preparing for a trip to China, I’d definitely give them a copy.

Asterios Polyp
I’ve read this graphic novel at least ten times since it came out in 2009, and I’m sure I’m not done rereading. There are weaknesses in it, but oh, the cartooning! David Mazzucchelli does more interesting cartooning in this book than anyone else in any single book, I think. Every element – the linework, the lettering, the colors – is carefully thought through for how they can serve the storytelling.

The Larry Sanders Show
Rewatched the first few episodes of this very funny satire of celebrity culture. One of my favorite TV shows ever.

Other Life Forms by Julia Glassman.
This novel by Julia Glassman, who has occasionally blogged here on Alas, is about a young wannabe sculptor who is stuck in a holding pattern, can’t find the drive or confidence to work on her art, and has horrendous taste in boyfriends. She works as a waitress in a hipster artsy coffee shop and imagines that the other wannabe artists working there have it much more together than she does. She’s in mourning, wounded from a past relationship that went bad, and mainly is suffering from profound loneliness.

I found this novel sometimes funny, sometimes frustrating but in an enjoyable way (because the main character would have so much going for her if she’d just get more self esteem), and extremely engrossing.

Wreck It Ralph
I saw this today with my friend Jenn and her three (four? not sure) year old daughter, who was so terrified by the dark parts of this movie that she cried and she and her mother had to leave early. But I enjoyed it; it was funny and sweet and a reasonably good action movie. There were a lot of video-game injokes, I assume, but since I’m not a video gamer ((Why does “gamer” just refer to video games? I play role-playing games, I play board games like Space Alert and Dominion – but somehow only the annoying video game people have come to own the term “gamer.”)) all that stuff sailed right over my head unnoticed. Of the voice actors, I thought Jane Lynch was especially good.

One thing: I wish that the ending had been cleverer, and in particular that the villain had been redeemed instead of killed off. Having an irredeemable villain really goes against the main themes of the movie.

Les Misérables
I’ve seen the musical on stage years ago, and enjoyed it. Sondheim it’s not; the characters and story are not subtle, and neither are the melodies. It’s a big, bombastic melodrama, and I really like it for what it is.

I saw the film figuring that either I’d love it, or I’d love sitting with friends in the restaurant afterward talking about why we hated it. As it turned out, me and my two friends all enjoyed the film. The singing is not as good as you’d see on Broadway – Hugh Jackman can certainly sing, but his voice isn’t in the right range for Jean Valjean – but it was good enough to be enjoyable. Several of the performances were great – Anne Hathaway was heartbreaking as Fantine, Helena Bonham Carter and Sacha Baron Cohen were very funny as the Thénardiers, and – astoundingly – British stage actor Eddie Redmayne made Marius, usually a black hole of tepid blandness sucking down the middle of the show, into a touching and interesting character.

The big problem was Russell Crowe as Javert. Crowe has a weak singing voice that absolutely destroys “Stars,” and doesn’t seem confident enough to act while singing. In short, he sucked. There are at least a hundred stage actors who could have done this part a hundred times better.

Everybody Sees The Ants by A.S. King
This book – which is mainly about the experience of carrying scars – was wonderful.

Bucko by Jeff Parker and Erika Moen
The cover of this graphic novel (a collected webcomic) makes it look like a mystery novel, and I wonder if that’s what they intended it to be when they started their webcomic. But very quickly it becomes a pure farce, which is good, because I like farce better than mystery. Zillions of wacky characters running around Portland and bouncing off each other like ping-pong balls, and no one seems to take anything all that seriously. And it all ends in four-way sex that readers don’t actually get to see.

For me, the main fun was Erika Moen’s art ((Full disclosure: Erika isn’t a close bud, but she’s a acquaintance who I’ve met a bunch of times and enjoy talking to.)), which is cartoony and graceful and shows a really nice sense of design, especially in the character who always wears clown makeup. There were also some fun “the making of” notes, which were mostly given as footnotes on each page.

American Virgin: Head
This was pretty awful. Cynical only works when it’s combined with clever and funny, and the writing of this graphic novel is extremely pedestrian, with the sort of hip contempt for human life that a lot of Vertigo comics have (Preacher is the king of this particular, ugly mountain). Becky Cloonan’s art was excellent – has she ever done a bad job? – but I couldn’t recommend this comic to, well, anyone.

I’m sure there was more I read or saw, but that’s what comes to mind right now.

Posted in Comics I Like, Popular (and unpopular) culture | 9 Comments

“My Kind of Girl,” by Buddhadeva Bose – A Kind of Canterbury Tales Writ Small

Posted on January 12, 2013 by Richard Jeffrey Newman

I’ve just finished reading My Kind of Girl, a novel by Buddhadeva Bose, an important 20th century Bengali writer. In addition to the books he wrote in his native language–he was a fiction writer, a poet, a playwright, and an essayist–Bose also translated into Bengali the works of Baudelaire, Holderlin and Rilke. My Kind of Girl was brought into English by Arunava Sinha, whose name I did not know until I picked this book up, but whose website appears to be an organic anthology of South Asian literature in translation, and I’m excited to have discovered it. Sinha’s translation of My Kind of Girl was originally published in 2009 by Random House India, but the edition I read was put out by Archipelago Books, a press that you should know about if you don’t, and that I hope you will consider supporting. Archipelago only publishes literature in translation, from languages as far flung as Icelandic and Arabic, with plenty more in between, performing a crucial function in our culture, where, on average, only 3% of the books published in a given year are in translation (and the website that link takes you too is worth knowing about as well).

Translation in general, but literary translation in particular, is often the only way that people from one culture are able to gain sympathetic and empathetic insight into the people of another. It doesn’t always work that way, of course. One of the Persian poets I have translated, for example, Saadi of Shiraz, was first brought into French in the 1600s by a man named Andre du Ryer, who thought it was important for his compatriots to be aware of a Muslim writer whose progressive-for-their-time values (and in some ways progressive for ours as well) mirrored their own. Then, in the 1800s, when the British became interested in classical Persian literature because Persian was the language of the Moghul courts of India, Saadi’s works were among those Iranian works translated into English, as John D. Yohannan wrote in The Poet Sa’di: A Persian Humanist, to help make “British rule in India more efficient…. In other words, the Sa’di of the Enlightenment had given way to the Sa’di of the colonial age” (6).

If you take a moment to think about it, some of the most influential books in western culture, starting with the Bible, both the Jewish and the Christian versions, are actually works in translation. Here are a few others: Dante’s Inferno, the Iliad and the Odyssey, Anna Karenina, War and Peace, the poetry of Sappho, and more. We so take for granted the values these literary works have brought into our culture–from our ideas about good and evil, heaven and hell, to how we understand love and adultery–that we forget we learned them from some place else. Even a book like The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, along with its companion volumes, demonstrates how valuable literary translation is as a medium of cultural exchange and cultural change. My Kind of Girl is a much smaller, more quiet, and modest book than any of the ones I’ve just mentioned, but it nonetheless provides the same kinds of insights, exploring love through the stories told by four middle-aged Indian men, strangers to each other, when a December snowstorm prevents their train from getting through and forces them to spend the night together in the station waiting room. A young couple looking for some privacy inspires the men to start reminiscing about what it was like to be young and in love, and they decide that each one should tell a love story. My Kind of Girl, in other words, is a kind of Canterbury Tales writ small, without the comic bawdiness and cynicism that marks many of Chaucer’s tales.

The first man to tell a story, the only one that is not autobiographical, is the contractor, who narrates the tale of Makhanlal and his love for Malati, the “not exactly what you would call beautiful” daughter of the “semi-impoverished college professor” who lives next door. Makhanlal’s mother, Hiranmayee, who values education, sets about trying to arrange a match between Malati and her son, but Malati’s family is not interested. They don’t want their daughter marrying into the family of a “mere” shopkeeper. Hiranmayeee is insulted, deeply so, and when, several years later, circumstances make it possible for her to gloat over her neighbor’s misfortune, she does so with glee. Makhanlal, however, who has (or so he thought) quite innocently carried his love for Malati all this time–he is not the most self-aware of men–wants to help. When he does so, he learns a painful lesson in how class and gender and the contractual machinations and hidden agendas that often accompany marriages in cultures where they are arranged interfere with love, contaminate it, so that even when you think your love is innocent and without guile, it very likely is not.

Of the four stories, only one, the doctor’s, ends happily, and it is telling that his is the only tale in which he meets the woman he loves as an adult, already a professional–she requires medical attention–and under circumstances where falling in love is the last thing on his mind. Nonetheless, each tale is quintessentially the story of a man living in a culture where men and women exist in separate spheres. None of the women these men love is realized in this novel as anything resembling a three dimensional character. Indeed, except for the doctor’s Bina, the women in these stories are not much more than empty ciphers onto which the men project their own desires and beliefs about love, women, the future and more. Makhanlal loves Malati, for example, without having spoken even a word to her; and the same is true for Gagan Baran Chatterjee, the government official, who falls in love with Pakhi through a “conversation of the eyes.”

Yet each story also reveals how the man whose love it relates is either forced, or struggles, to meet the woman he loves as a real person, with all the potential for further love, disappointment, bitterness and sweetness that moment contains. This is how the writer puts it after hearing the tale of Makhanlal:

The girl of our dreams, who lives in our heart, Makhanlal wanted to see her for one time as a real person–that is all that is real, all that matters, nothing else does. Surely Makhanlal would have married a girl of his mother’s choice after they moved to their new house–by now he must have a full family of his own children, he must be earning a lot too–but none of these subsequent events cancel out the earlier one. Whatever Makhanlal had to get from his Malati, he has gotten already, he will never lost that don’t you think?

My Kind of Girl explores this idea in a poignant and moving way. It’s a book worth reading.

Cross-posted.

Posted in Recommended Reading | 2 Comments

Barry Interviewed on KBOO Radio Today

Posted on January 10, 2013 by Ampersand

[Updated: Time is 11:30am, not 11am. I’ll update the post with a link to the archive once I’ve got it.]

Me and cartoonist Jenn Manley Lee will be interviewed on KBOO at 11:30am pacific time today. We’ll be talking about our respective comics (Jenn is best-known for her amazing science fiction comic Dicebox). You can listen live at KBOO’s website.

Jenn is a longtime pal of mine as well as a great cartoonist, so I expect this interview to be fun.

Thanks to S.W. Conser of the show Words and Pictures for making this happen!

Posted in Cartooning & comics, Hereville | Comments Off

Chickenomics

Posted on January 9, 2013 by Jen Sorensen

Threatening to not pay for expenses approved by Congress isn’t “negotiation” and the proper response is not “compromise,” popular though these memes may be. It is, instead, an abuse of democratic institutions by a party that can’t get its way through actual legislation. Hopefully Obama has learned his lesson and will stand his ground this time.

Posted in Syndicated feeds | 3 Comments

Forgiving Their Daughter’s Murderer

Posted on January 8, 2013 by Ampersand

Jake Squid’s comments about an acquaintance who accidentally shot a relative reminded me of this stunning New York Times article, about a pair of parents who forgave their daughter’s murderer, going so far to get him a reduced sentence (20 years plus ten years probation, when otherwise he probably would have gotten 40 years to life). The murderer, Conor McBride, was the fiancée of the victim, Ann Grosmaire. (That’s the two of them pictured above, the same year as the murder).

I recommend reading the article, which is long and very well written. Trigger warning for – well, for the obvious reasons, including a description of the murder from the murderer’s perspective which has lingered in my mind since I read it.

The Grosmaire’s eventually sought out a Restorative Justice approach, sitting down in a room with Connor, Connor’s parents, the prosecutor, Restorative Justice expert Sujatha Baliga, and a photo of the late Ann Grosmaire, to talk about what happened. Restorative Justice focuses on amends rather than punishment. (I last wrote about Restorative Justice in 2006, in the context of rape.)

From the article:

When Conor was booked, he was told to give the names of five people who would be permitted to visit him in jail, and he put Ann’s mother Kate on the list. Conor says he doesn’t know why he did so — “I was in a state of shock” — but knowing she could visit put a burden on Kate. At first she didn’t want to see him at all, but that feeling turned to willingness and then to a need. “Before this happened, I loved Conor,” she says. “I knew that if I defined Conor by that one moment — as a murderer — I was defining my daughter as a murder victim. And I could not allow that to happen.”

She asked her husband if he had a message for Conor. “Tell him I love him, and I forgive him,” he answered. Kate told me: “I wanted to be able to give him the same message. Conor owed us a debt he could never repay. And releasing him from that debt would release us from expecting that anything in this world could satisfy us.”

Visitors to Leon County Jail sit in a row of chairs before a reinforced-glass partition, facing the inmates on the other side — like the familiar setup seen in movies. Kate took the seat opposite Conor, and he immediately told her how sorry he was. They both sobbed, and Kate told him what she had come to say. All during that emotional quarter of an hour, another woman in the visiting area had been loudly berating an inmate, her significant other, through the glass. After Conor and Kate “had had our moment,” as Kate puts it, they both found the woman’s screaming impossible to ignore. Maybe it was catharsis after the tears or the need to release an unbearable tension, but the endless stream of invective somehow struck the two of them as funny. Kate and Conor both started to laugh. Then Kate went back to the hospital to remove her daughter from life support.

Like a lot of people, my first response was to wonder if I could ever be that forgiving. I don’t know if I could. That level of forgiveness is admirable, but it’s also more than I’d ask of any person, including myself.

I thought blogger Rebecca Hamilton’s response was interesting:

I can’t talk about the things my constituents tell me. But I will say that there are people who form relationships with their children’s murderers and visit them in prison and actually claim they’ve come to love them. It’s not so unusual as you might think. It also isn’t so appealing in real life.

There is no one more lost and hollowed out than someone whose child has been murdered. They want something, some contact with their lost child, and they are searching for it in the person who murdered them. […]

The grief-driven relationships that form between families of murder victims and their loved one’s murderer, whether they be burning hate or saintly forgiveness, are always at least partly a response to pain that cannot be borne. I do not take this pain lightly. I certainly do not approach miracles of forgiveness disrespectfully.

But they are not a reason to give light sentences to cold-blooded murderers. The emotions of those family members who are moved to vengeance are also not reasons to give life sentences to people who killed someone by accident, even if the accident included serious negligence or even violence. Murder is an intentional act committed by someone who intends to kill.

I don’t agree with everything Rebecca says; I think likelihood of reoffending is a reasonable things for judges to consider during sentencing, for instance. (And for parole officers to consider, as well). But I do share her concerns about victim-centered justice being capricious.

What do you think?

Posted in Prisons and Justice and Police | 18 Comments