Motus Mentis

We note with continuing satisfaction that Mayor Bloomberg’s big-soda ban has been nullified once again in the courts, this time on appeal. (Our reaction to the original ruling is here.)

The issue here is personal responsibility. Implicit in this ban is the idea that it is the proper role of the State to intervene in the choices of its citizens when the citizens themselves cannot be trusted to choose wisely. But this is nothing more or less than the State assuming the relation of a parent to a child. If it is indeed the case that certain of our citizens are so incapable of adult judgment that they must be treated as children in this regard, then for consistency’s sake they ought to be assumed to be children in other respects as well, and declared wards of the State: incompetent to vote, to enter into contractual obligations, or to assume the other rights and privileges of adulthood. For the Mayor simply to assume on a whim this paternalistic role with regard to all of the adults under his jurisdiction, however, is an unjustifiable abridgment of the rights of the free citizens who hired him — as the courts, twice, have rightly observed.

Mark Steyn on Detroit, which is scrounging around for assets to liquidate:

What else is left to sell? Windsor has already offered to buy Detroit’s half of the Detroit/Windsor tunnel, perhaps to wall it up. With bankruptcy temporarily struck down, we’re told that “innovation hubs” and “enterprise zones” are the answer. Seriously?

In my book “After America,” I observe that the physical decay of Detroit ”” the vacant and derelict lots for block after block after block ”” is nothing compared with the decay of the city’s human capital. Forty-seven percent of adults are functionally illiterate, about the same rate as the Central African Republic, which at least has the excuse that it was ruled in the ’70s by a cannibal emperor.

Why would any innovator open a business in a Detroit “innovation hub”? Whom would you employ? The illiterates include a recent school board president, Otis Mathis, which doesn’t bode well for the workforce a decade hence.

One has to conclude that Detroit’s Democratic Party makes a far more comprehensive wrecking crew than Emperor Bokassa ever did. No bombs, no invasions, no civil war, just liberal politics day in, day out.

Americans sigh and say, “Oh, well, Detroit’s an outlier.” It’s an outlier only in the sense that it happened here first.

Read the rest here.

Detroit, once a great American city, is filing for bankruptcy.

Draw your own conclusions; I’m not going to spell this one out for you.

Well, as you all know by now, George Zimmerman was cleared of all counts last night in the Trayvon Martin shooting.

There’s little to cheer about here, beside the fact that the legal system worked as intended. An unarmed 17-year-old has been shot dead, and another young man will never know a day’s peace as long as he lives. The case became a disgraceful media spectacle — a “high-tech lynching”, to use Clarence Thomas’s memorable phrase — of a man with a name that, save for a single vowel, might have belonged to a member of the Waffen-SS, despite his substantial admixture of black and Hispanic blood. Even the President of The United States stooped so low as to express racial partisanship long before the case ever went to trial, and apparently the DOJ got involved as well — in what was, by any criteria other than inflammatory racial sensationalism, a local crime story.

As I said, there is nothing to cheer about here. If you are a conservative who is gloating about this today, you should be ashamed of yourself.

If you live in a liberal precinct you may, however, find yourself in conversation with someone who declares this verdict to be an outrage, a stain on the nation, and a miscarriage of justice. A great deal of emotion has been whipped up over this case, and emotion, like fire, moves fast and consumes everything. (Reason, by contrast, is positively glacial.) So if you do find yourself having such a chat, I suggest that if you disagree, you clarify matters by asking questions, rather than making contrary assertions. (The point, after all, is to understand exactly where, and how, justice is alleged to have gone off the rails.)

It might go something like:

This is a horrible story all round, but what, exactly, do you object to here? Is it the verdict itself?

If the answer is “yes”, then:

Why do you think the verdict was wrong? Do you believe that the evidence presented by the state convincingly proved its case beyond any reasonable doubt, and that the jurors are at fault? (They did, after all, unanimously agree to acquit on all charges, after only a single day of deliberation.)

If the answer here is “yes”, that’s clear enough. It’s fair to expect, however, that anyone making such a claim must have watched the trial every day, paying close attention to every detail — because that’s what the jury did — and to be able explain in detail why the jury’s interpretation of the evidence presented was mistaken, beyond reasonable doubt.

If the answer is “no” — that the state failed to make its case, but that the jury have convicted Zimmerman anyway, because of the obvious, inherent injustice of the act itself, then:

Are you saying, then, that in our justice system the principle of evidentiary proof of a defendant’s guilt “beyond a reasonable doubt” should be made secondary to a jury’s intuition? (Many innocent people are not particularly likable, after all.) If you, or a member of your family, were on trial, which standard of evidence would you prefer?

If the answer to this question is “yes” — that gut feelings should trump evidence — then you have established that the dissenter is calling into question the very foundations of Western jurisprudence, and while you can certainly have a lively conversation about that, it might be best to walk away.

If, on the other hand, the answer to the very first question is that the jurors were right to return the verdict they did, based on the case presented by the state, but that the state should have made a better case, then the question becomes what evidence, exactly, the state failed to present. This is of course a perfectly reasonable position if there is, in fact, damning evidence that was never given in court. I’m not aware of any, though, and it’s fair to expect anyone making this argument to be able to produce something that would in fact have removed all reasonable doubt.

More likely, the answer to the opening question will be something else altogether: an appeal to some intuition or other, based on Martin’s being unarmed, that he was black and Zimmerman (mostly) isn’t, that racism is still alive and well in America, and so on. But this leads us far afield from the trial itself, and the verdict.

Should Zimmerman have followed Trayvon Martin? Arguably not; he was advised by a 911 dispatcher that they “didn’t need him to do that”. But suggestions by 911 dispatchers carry no legal force, and following someone is not a crime. (Physically attacking someone for following you, however, is; and the defense maintained, plausibly, that this is what happened to George Zimmerman. It is, at least, beyond dispute that he was lying on his back, being severely beaten.)

Beyond this, we wander out into the tall grass. Should one be able to use lethal force in self-defense? For just one example, the astromomer Neil DeGrasse Tyson tweeted this today:

Unlike Florida today, only if threatened by another Gun did “Wild West” codes of conduct allow you to shoot another person.

This misses the point that guns are equalizers. Under the code cited by Dr. Tyson, what recourse would there be for, say, a woman being raped by a much larger assailant?

Walking on, after a while we come to some deep social fissures: Second Amendment rights, for one, and highly charged questions about race and crime. Further along, where the roads begin to give out, are the fever swamps, where rational discourse dies.

But to explore this hot and rugged terrain is to journey far from the trial of George Zimmerman — which was about a single event, the criminality of which was to be determined under existing Florida law. Whatever form “justice” may ultimately take, it is not the sacrificing of a scapegoat in the name of a general dissatisfaction with society itself.