Category: Uncategorized

Salon’s Allen Barra notes that the biggest problem the National Basketball Assocation has is that it relies on colleges to act as a minor league system. Unfortunately it doesn’t pay athletes in its minor league system like other sports do.

The solution is to recognize reality: Division I college basketball is a farm club for the NBA and its time to start paying the athletes. The NCAA needs to abandon its view that the only good college athlete is an impoverished one and allow the NBA to pay college athletes.

The best way to do this would be for all the NBA teams to contribute a small percentage of their total player salary to a central fund which then gets distributed equally to all Division I teams, who then decide for themselves within their programs how to divide the money up between players.

In addition, the NCAA should remove all restrictions on booster contributions directly to athletes. Some rich alumnus wants to buy the star center a Ford Explorer? More power to him.

About two or three times a week some genius sends me an e-mail saying something to the effect of, “Boy you’re a moron — and you’re ugly too!” Which is pretty much the level of sophistication offered by the Blog You folks. I think Al (no last name that I could find), has the best observation about Blog You,

I expect critics to have a basic working knowledge of the subject matter they are critiquing. By spouting meaningless cliches such as ”the drastic limitations of Manila” (come on, boys; tell us how you really feel about Manila. Oh, wait; you have- repeatedly) and nit-picking at spelling errors while ignoring their own, they have done little but reveal a lack of understanding of the tools and techniques that make up the modern weblog. I expect that with as much time as these young men seem to have on their hands, that they will have plenty of chances to educate themselves on these issues before attempting a project of such scale again.

I give Tom and Ed a ”5” on Al’s 10 point scale. I award them points for audacity and bravery in the face of the daunting task of reviewing the vast arena that makes up art form of weblogging, along with a bonus for hubris. I take points away for a lack of deep knowledge and empathy; these are gifts that experience, hard work, and time will bring them as they continue with this project.

Besides which they’re apparently too busy to realize that at least one of the sites they dog for being another boring Manila site isn’t actually hosted with that software. Don’t they teach reading for content in American high schools anymore?

The Oregonian reports on efforts by an Oregon state senator to get rid of hate crime laws in that state. Gary George introduced a bill in the legislature that would greatly expand the number of crimes covered by Oregon’s hate crime laws. George would add crimes committed by eco-terrorists and anti-capitalists to the list of hate crimes.

The Oregonian sums up George’s views writing, “George, however, says that if criminals can be singled out for enhanced penalties if they are motivated by racism or anti-religious sentiment, he sees no reason not to include crimes against such embattled groups as fur farmers.”

Rather than see people who smash windows at fur shops get extra time in jail, however, George’s point is that it is possible to define pretty much any crime as a hate crime. The statute of his proposed bill defines anti-capitalist hate crimes, for example, as “a hatred of people who subscribe to a set of political beliefs that support capitalism and the needs of people with respect to their balance with nature.”

But while George sees this as a way to undermine hate crime bills, in fact other people are seriously attempting to use hate crime bills to go after people who commit crimes motivated by political ideology. Late last year, for example, prosecutors in Utah attempted to prosecute an animal rights activist under Utah’s hate crimes law.

Activist Eric Ward had been arrested and charged for misdemeanor trespass at a demonstration against a fur store. Utah’s hate crimes laws provides additional prosecutorial power if an individual or group attempts to intimidate or terrorize individuals from exercising their constitutional rights. Prosecutor Howard Lemke reasoned that this is precisely what Ward was attempting to do when he trespassed, and charged Ward with a felony provided for by the hate crimes bill.

Ward’s prosecution fell through for one reason — although the constitutionality of Utah’s hate crime statute is in question, a federal district judge had earlier dismissed charges against alleged white supremacists charged under the bill and made it clear in his ruling that he considered the law unenforceable as written. The Utah legislature had attempted to fix the problems with the law after that ruling, but it remain unchanged as of December 2000.

The broader issue raised by the actions in Utah and Oregon is this — can political ideology be the basis for hate crimes? Could a state such as Oregon, for example, create a hate crimes bill that gave higher sentences to anti-World Trade Organization protests?

Assuming that the Supreme Court upholds hate crime laws themselves — it currently has before it a case that should decide the matter once and for all — then applying additional penalties based on political ideology will almost certainly pass muster as well. The likely test will be whether or not the additional penalties meet a compelling state interest, and prosecutors would be able to produce a great deal of evidence about animal rights activists or anti-WTO protesters to bolster their case that the state has a compelling interest to curb violent activities.

It will be interesting how the Left responds to such developments. Some conservatives and libertarians have long argued against hate crime laws on the grounds that they provide additional punishment for what a convicted criminal thinks. The standard retort to this is that the criminals are not being punished for what they think. Hate crime laws only apply to people who have already been convicted of a crime, after all, and merely increase the penalties against those whom society has deemed it needs extra protection (and who would argue with the claim that a person who would murder another based solely on skin color rather than, say, greed, isn’t more dangerous?)

The problem with this argument, of course, is that those making it always assume that they will be the ones deciding which ideas are especially dangerous. Hate crimes laws return the issue of which speech is to be punished, when uttered in conjuction with the comission of a crime, to the political arena where is a very bad place for it to be. A better approach would be to get rid of such laws and return to judges more sentencing discretion so they can take into account such aggravating circumstances.

Source:

Senator questions laws against hate crimes. The Oregonian, February 10, 2001.

Utah’s Hate-Crime Law Enjoys Short-Lived Revival. Stephen Hunt, The Salt Lake Tribune, December 10, 2000.

In case you haven’t heard by now, there’s a new book out claiming that a) IBM created a data collection system for Nazi Germany that specifically allowed it to track racial categories and b) IBM should have known (or did in fact known) that this system would be used in an effort to murder Jews and others “undesirables.” The law firm of Cohen, Milstein, Hausfeld & Toll filed suit today in U.S. District Court seeking damages against IBM for its alleged collaboration with the Nazis.

The book has been seriously embargoed — even from Holocaust experts — so there’s no way at this point to assess how accurate the claims are. My question, however, is if this suit is valid then where does that leave Executive Order 9066?

The various stories about the Nazi/IBM connection act as if Nazi Germany was the only country at the time classifying people by race for possible later confinement in a concentration camp. In fact the United States was also busy engaged in such a practice and Franklin Roosevelt put America’s own racial profiling plan into effect by signing, in February 1942, Executive Order 9066 which ordered all Japanese Americans confined to concentration camps.

Despite the fact that a review carried out by the State Department reported that there was almost no chance of any serious organized rebellion by Japanese Americans, Roosevelt ordered the round-up of 93,000 residents of Japanese descent, two-thirds of whom were American citizens.

Rarely a man of principle, Roosevelt waited until after his re-election in 1944 to formally order the dismantling of the campus (Roosevelt was afraid that he might lose California if he ordered the campus abolished sooner). It would not be until March 21, 1946, however, that the last camp would formally close.

Estimates of the total income lost by Japanese citizens for the four year period of confinement is on the order of $6 to $7 billion. It is interesting that the lawsuit against IBM was filed in New York, because a lawsuit brought by survivors of the Japan failed completely. You can sue over German war crimes in U.S. courts but you can’t sue over U.S. war crimes because of a little thing called sovereign immunity — it doesn’t matter that the U.S. committed a crime, they’re the government and can’t be sued for such things.

Congress did take up the issue and George Bush signed a bill vacating the sentences of all victims of the internment who resisted it as well as giving a lump sum $20,000 pay out to each internee, which was a few billion short. Also that settlement did not apply to Japanese nationals living in Latin America who were shipped, on the orders of the United States, to the United States and held in the internment camps. The bill signed by Bush pretends those people simply didn’t exist, although there were more than 2,000 of them (the law only gives the pay out to Japanese nationals who became U.S. citizens by 1952.

Somebody had to create the lists of Japanese nationals and Japanese American citizens. Why not sue the people who knowingly created that list? Because for the most part the data necessary for the Japanese roundup was produced by the U.S. Census Bureau — the same Census Bureau, you might remember, who told Americans last year not to worry, that the data they provide for the Census is completely confidential.

In fact the Census department was so eager to aid in the internment of Japanese Americans that it didn’t even wait to be formally asked for such data. Just two days after the attack on Pearl Harbor, the Census Bureau on its own initiative produced a report for the government, “Japanese Population of the United States, Its Territories and Possessions” followed by another report on December 10, 1941, giving block-by-block data on the location of Japanese living in California.

When will we see a lawsuit allowed in U.S. district court over that miscarriage of justice? Don’t hold your breath.