Daily Archives: June 22, 2012

Conviction speaks to core issue in sex abuse cases

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Every national MSM site is currently leading with this story:

PHILADELPHIA — Msgr. William J. Lynn, a former archbishop’s aide, was found guilty Friday of endangering children, becoming the first senior official of the Roman Catholic Church in the United States to be convicted of covering up child sexual abuses by priests under his supervision.

The 12-member jury acquitted Monsignor Lynn, of the Archdiocese of Philadelphia, on a conspiracy charge and a second count of endangerment after a three-month trial that prosecutors and victims rights groups called a milestone in the sexual abuse scandals that have shaken the Catholic church….

There’s a good reason for that, and it’s not that the MSM is picking on the Church.

A lot of people think the problem is that Catholic priests tend to sexually abuse kids. That’s not the case. They are, if anything, less likely to do so than men in the aggregate.

The problem is that, in the rare (but not nearly rare enough) cases when it does happen, the Church on the whole has not — or at least, did not for far too long — respond effectively to prevent abusers from committing their horrific crimes again.

And that’s what this case addresses. That’s what makes it a “milestone,” as the NYT put it.

An unpardonable insult to Jack Kerouac

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I’m reeling here. I’m stunned. I’m looking about for some hope for the world.

In connection with a comment I was responding to today, I went looking for when I’d written about repealing the 17th Amendment not being such a crazy idea, and there I found a link to a Christopher Hitchens piece from early 2011, which I followed for nostalgic reasons, and noted there a link to the cover of the current edition of Vanity Fair, and there I saw the thing that shocked me.

What I saw (accompanied by a photo in which she demonstrated that, however much money you spend on a glamour shoot, there are some people you can’t MAKE glamorous, because their facial expression will drag the whole thing down) was a mention of Kristen Stewart — she’s the notably underwhelming star of the “Twilight” movies — in  the same breath as Jack Kerouac. I saw her name in connection with a coming movie adaptation of On the Road. In a connection that was crafted as though she were starring in it or something:

As the Twilight-series finale approaches, Kristen Stewart is also starring in this month’s Snow White & the Huntsman,followed by an adaptation of Jack Kerouac’s On the Road. Ingrid Sischy finds her on the run, in Paris. Photographs by Mario Testino.

See? They even used the actual word, starring! Well, first, I had to think, so is she Dean Moriarty or Sal Paradise? Or Carlo Marx? And if so, how does that work? OK, so she’s Marylou. Well, I have to admit I don’t have as clear an image in my mind of Marylou as I do the others, except for this: I can’t imagine the wild jailkid Dean, the quintessential Mad One who burns, burns, burns across the American landscape, going for anyone remotely like Kristen Stewart. There is no way you envision her as a character produced by a brain writing on a continuous roll of butcher paper under the influence of benzedrine. (OK, so she’s based on a real-life person, but you know what I mean.)

Now, I’ve seen other people say less than kind things about this actress, and I was like, Aw, leave the kid alone, but when you start talking about putting her anywhere near the centerpiece of anything as iconic as On the Road, well you’ve gone to messin’. Near as I can tell, there’s a reason why she was the star of the Twilight movies. It’s because she was so painfully ordinary and unremarkable that teenage girls everywhere could project themselves onto her, and identify.

That’s not a quality I connect with Kerouac.

Also… one expects a Kerouac project to have a bit of an alternative feel to it, and not be cast according to mundane box office considerations.

OK, that’s about all I’m going to say, except to say that this is a little bit personal for me. Kerouac introduced me to my wife. OK, not personally, because he was dead at the time. What I mean to say is, we met at this party she threw for a mutual friend, and she was reading a Kerouac biography at the time, and I was reading On the Road for the first time, and we realized it and started talking about that, and connected in a powerful way, and started dating seriously about a week later, and were married a year after that.

So, you know… it seems like whoever was in charge of casting would have checked with me or something…

Being too ‘smart’ to see your own errors

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Bart brings my attention to this thought-provoking piece:

Jonah Lehrer’s new post at The New Yorker details some worrying research on cognition and thinking through biases, indicating that “intelligence seems to make [such] things worse.” This is because, as Richard West and colleagues concluded in their study, “people who were aware of their own biases were not better able to overcome them.” Being smarter does not make you better at transcending unjustified views and bad beliefs, all of which naturally then play into your life. Smarter people are better able to narrate themselves, internally, out of inconsistencies, blunders and obvious failures at rationality, whereas they would probably be highly critical of others who demonstrated similar blunders.

I am reminded of Michael Shermer’s view, when he’s asked why smart people believe weird things, like creationism, ghosts and (as with Sir Arthur Conan Doyle) fairies: “Smart people are very good at rationalizing things they came to believe for non-smart reasons.” If you’ve ever argued with a smart person about an obviously flawed belief, like ghosts or astrology, you’ll recognise this: their justifications often involve obfuscation, deep conjecture into areas you probably haven’t considered (and that probably aren’t) relevant, and are all tied together neatly and eloquently because she’s a smart person…

Interesting proposition.

Here’s how I responded to it…

Well, I think there is little doubt that smart people are better at rationalizing a bad position.

I’ll also agree with the proposition that it is harder to argue a smart person out of a position if he is wrong. But only because it is harder to argue a smart person out of a position whether he is wrong OR right.

I’m going to strain your credulity by using myself as an example, even though that requires you, solely for the sake of argument, to consider me to be a smart person (but hey, I consider this to be a community of smart people — dumb people would be watching TV rather than debating ideas in writing, right?).

People — smart people — on my blog get frustrated sometimes with their inability to talk me out of a position. It’s not that I’m incapable of changing my mind on something. I sometimes do so quite abruptly. But usually not on the kinds of things we talk about on the blog. That’s because I have spent SO much time over the years honing my positions on those issues. And much of that time has been spent thinking about, and one by one knocking down, the arguments that might be offered in an effort to change my mind.

It’s not that I’m smarter than any of y’all. It’s that it was my job, every day for many years, to write my opinions for publication. When you do that, you take much greater care than most people do with their opinions. (I was very surprised to realize, over time, how much more carefully considered my positions on issues were after a couple of years on the editorial board. Before that, my opinions were private, and therefore largely untested. After I joined the board, every opinion I had went through the wringer before and after being expressed, and I took greater care accordingly.) You obsess about everything that could be wrong in your position, and raise every possible objection that you can think of that the hundreds of thousands of folks out there likely to read your opinion — including people more knowledgeable than you about the particular subject under discussion — might raise to knock it down. You work through each and every one of them before you finish writing and editing your opinion piece. Add to that the fact that it won’t get into the paper until it’s been read, and potentially challenged, by other people who do the same thing for a living, and go through the same daily exercises.

It makes for positions that, once fully formed, are hard to shake — whether they are wrong or right. I also believe that the process helps one be right, but whether wrong or right, shaking it takes some doing.

So basically, I admit that I could be wrong. It’s just that the process I went through in arriving at my wrong answer was sufficiently rigorous that even if you’re smarter than I am, you probably aren’t willing to invest the time it would take to dismantle the constructs upon which my position rests.

But I do hope you’ll keep trying. I like to think there’s hope for me…