I was wandering around my local Wal-Mart today thinking about how wonderful it is to have a place where people of limited means can buy high quality products (food, clothing, medicine, and just about anyting else you can think of) at very low prices. 

      So, why do so many people oppose having Wal-Marts in their neighborhoods?  I can understand the opposition from all those who own the overpriced businesses the Wal-Mart will put out of business, but why would any consumer be opposed to having such a terrific place to shop? 

     People talk about how local shops that give individual service will be put out of business.  But if these shops are actually providing a service that Wal-Mart does not, and people value that service, people will continue to shop in these smaller places and the shops will continue to thrive.   If they are forced out of business, it will be because their service wasn’t that valuable after all.

     I love having Wal-Marts near to me and shop in them every week.  How do you folks feel about them, and what has been your actual experience with them?  Anyone actually work there and can shed any light on the gender discrimination charges?  As to that last point, I speak in total ignorance, but suspect the charges are more trumped up than real.  But, I’d love to hear from folks who actually know something about the facts behind the charges.

     Bookworm is taking the weekend off, so  I’m hoping in with one of my questions.  I’ve been thinking a lot about hate speech and hate crimes since the Imus nonsense and the whole idea puzzles me. 

     Is hate a crime?  Senators Kennedy and Smith are introducing a new hate crimes bill.   NOW is all excited.  But does it really matter whether, when a person commits a violence act against another person, the criminal is motivated by hate of an individual or a group?  Isn’t the violent act punishable enough?

     Colleges all over the country are trying to ban hate speech.   One would think that college campuses would be bastions of free speech of all kinds, even hate speech, but not so.  To its credit, even the ACLU opposes such bans.  What does it say about what our kids are learning that so many schools support such bans anyway? 

     While we’re at it, should Imus have lost his job?  I don’t think he necessarily should have lost his job simply for making a bad joke, however crude.  But, just as he has a right to his speech, his sponsors have a right to decide not to sponsor his speech.  And his bosses have a right to fire him, rather than lose revenues or listeners because of his speech.  And, by the way, I have no problem with people calling on him to be fired (or not fired).  They are only exercising their free speech rights as well. 

     Anyway, what do the readers of the Bookwormroom think about hate crimes and hate speech?  Is hate a crime?  Should it be?

I have too much on my plate today and too little time, but I just had to take a few minutes to follow-up on a theme that started with the British Marines and ended, so sadly, at VTech: passivity.

Two of the best writers out there have written about the fact that our Western culture has made a virtue out of passivity in the face of violence.  Mark Steyn views the problem as an infantilization of society that has us completely conditioned to wait for others to rescue us. After explaining his viewpoint, Steyn looks at a Canadian massacre of a few years back (and doesn’t Canada have gun control?) with some of the most frightening facts I’ve ever heard — not because of what the killer did, but because of what the male bystanders did (or, rather, didn’t do):

The cost of a “protected” society of eternal “children” is too high. Every December 6th, my own unmanned Dominion lowers its flags to half-mast and tries to saddle Canadian manhood in general with the blame for the “Montreal massacre,” the 14 female students of the Ecole Polytechnique murdered by Marc Lepine (born Gamil Gharbi, the son of an Algerian Muslim wife-beater, though you’d never know that from the press coverage). As I wrote up north a few years ago:

Yet the defining image of contemporary Canadian maleness is not M Lepine/Gharbi but the professors and the men in that classroom, who, ordered to leave by the lone gunman, meekly did so, and abandoned their female classmates to their fate — an act of abdication that would have been unthinkable in almost any other culture throughout human history. The “men” stood outside in the corridor and, even as they heard the first shots, they did nothing. And, when it was over and Gharbi walked out of the room and past them, they still did nothing. Whatever its other defects, Canadian manhood does not suffer from an excess of testosterone.

Apropos the men in Canada, I read somewhere on the blogosphere, and I can’t remember where, that when the Titantic sank, the men truly abided by the age-old adage of women and children first:

First of all, if you were a man, you were outta luck. The overall survival rate for men was 20%. For women, it was 74%, and for children, 52%. Yes, it was indeed “women and children first.”

The other post I read today on the same these was at Big Lizards, where Dafydd wrote about the peculiar virtue our Western culture has made of not fighting back:

I see the circumstances of the Virginia Tech shooting and of the British hostages as betraying the same very poignant — and dangerous — perspective: helplessness as a virtue.

But the two circumstances also differ in a way that at first appears vast, but upon reflection seems not so great after all. When a soldier, by inaction, renders himself helpless, we call it cowardice; but civilians do not seem to be under the same duty as a member of the military, one who has voluntarily assumed responsibility for protecting and preserving his society.

Surely, however, adult civilians are not completely bereft of any such responsibility; in fact, assuming personal responsibility for the lives and freedoms of others is, by my reckoning, exactly what separates the child from the adult. When a boy or a girl freely accepts that he has a certain duty towards his fellows, even when nobody will ever know whether he fulfilled it or not, that is when boy becomes man and girl becomes woman.

The epiphany is usually a series of small revelations that mount up over time, but it can also strike like the fangs of a diamondback in the dark night of the soul. Either way, dawn can begin at any age past puberty and can take a number of years, or a few short days… or else a lifetime can pass without the change completing.

The epiphany is this: Each one of us is a foot soldier for civilization; when evil threatens, we must do our utmost to thwart it.

Your utmost may be as simple as snitching on your best friend when you discover he has systematically looted the company you both work for… or as profound as Virginia Tech Engineering Professor Liviu Librescu, a Holocaust survivor, who gave his last full measure blocking the doorway to his classroom, allowing his students time to escape out the window.

Steyn and Dafydd are both absolutely right about the way in which Western culture has emasculated itself.  It’s confused the cultural virtue of avoiding bullying (a good thing), with the cultural death knell of becoming helpless.

As for me, when I heard about the Marines being led onto waiting Iranian ships, and when I heard about the VTech students lined up to be shot, all I could think of was the Jews passively getting round up by the Nazis. When Israel says “never again,” she means that her citizens will never again allow themselves to be taken without a fight. What the country realized collectively is that, if you’re going to die anyway, take the others down with you — and you may discover that your death toll isn’t as great as you thought.  Professor Librescu, having survived the Holocaust, understood this and willingly sacrificed himself that others could live.  The passengers on United 93 understood this and, through their sacrifice, may have saved the Capitol.  Every member of the armed forces who fights a battle or goes on a rescue mission understands this.

And lest you think that this line of reasoning holds true only in extreme situations of battle or terrorism, it also applies in a microcosmic way to every assault or rape in this country — or so I was told during a long-ago self-defense class. The teacher said that studies about attempted rapes show that women who fight back are more likely to get hurt but (and here’s the kicker) less likely to get killed.

Last week, when I paid my taxes, I had three thoughts jostling for primacy in my brain:  1.  I hate funding pork.  2.  I’m glad I live in a well-functioning country and my tax dollars help.  3.  Even though I’m scrupulous in obeying the law, I hope the IRS doesn’t hassle me.  Turns out I’m not alone in these thoughts.  Rick Moran, at Right Wing Nuthouse read an utterly fatuous Matt Stoller post about the joys of paying taxes (and the evil of those conservatives who rail against excessive taxes), and proceeded to savage Stoller’s thinking.  It makes for very good reading, as well as (yet another) compelling argument for tax reform.

One of my clients made a very foolish mistake.  I was somewhat upset, although philosophical, because the consequences weren’t as bad as they could have been.  I learned yesterday that the opposing party made an even bigger mistake that completed negated what my client had done.  In twenty years, it has never happened before that something stupid on my side got wiped out by something more stupid on the other side.  What could be better?

Just a quick reminder that today marks the 101st anniversary of the great San Francisco earthquake.  Growing up in San Francisco, it infiltrated itself into my consciousness to become a date I never forget.

News is coming that Cho Seung-Hui, the Virginia Tech killer, had written ISMAIL-AX on his arm, which may have been a reference to the story of Abraham’s son Ishmael who, in Muslim Arab mythology, is believed to be the progenitor of all Arabs.  While that may well be true, it will take a whole heck of a lot more to convince me that this was a sudden jihad syndrome killing. 

What’s much more likely, based on the news trickling in about how profoundly disturbed this young man was, is that his insanity reflects the angst of our time.  In the medieval era, delusional people thought they were possessed by the Devil; in the mid-20th Century, aliens possession took over as the delusion of choice.  It wouldn’t be surprising that, in this day and age, a delusional man with no connection to Islam nevertheless incorporates that cultural awareness into his insanity, and Islamic possession becomes his manifestation of a broken mind. 

Ralph Peters has written a great, straightforward analysis about the purpose and costs to society of terrorism.  I don’t know that it says anything we don’t already know, but it ties the threads together so beautifully that I think it’s definitely worth reading.  Here’s the intro, which I hope will have you wanting to read the rest:

THE most important consumer good any government supplies to its citizens is security. Consequently, the universal terrorist strategy is to convince the people that their state can no longer protect them.

Thanks to their paramount weapon, the suicide bomber, our enemies have been making progress.

From the relentless attacks on Iraqi innocents, to last week’s blasts in Morocco and Algeria, terrorist masterminds seek to destroy the people’s confidence in their governments, to persuade them that safety lies only in submission to the extremists.

It’s a brilliant approach. Even where it ultimately fails – and terror usually does fail – it succeeds in doing two related things: It costs the victimized government a disproportionate amount of money to respond to could-be-anywhere threats, and it punishes those who decline to see the light.

The deaths at Virginia Tech are a staggering tragedy. Thirty-two people got up and began an ordinary day, only to be cut down with terrible savagery. All of us are shaken. “How did it happen?” “How can something like that happen?” We try desperately to imbue this violence with meaning, whether it’s to look at larger social issues (gun control) or heroic acts of personal bravery. It affects us deeply — as it should. But it also reminds us about the nature of context, about sympathy and empathy, about tribalism.

The fact is, our daily news, way too often, is filled with stories of ordinary people dying violent, senseless deaths. They die en mass in Iraq, Israel, Afghanistan, Africa, India, Indonesia, Spain and more places than I can name off the top of my head. They die from bombs, earthquakes, airplane crashes, train wrecks, shipwrecks, and whatever other devices of death that man and nature can provide. With significant exceptions, such as the staggering death rate from Indonesian tsunami, we read of these deaths, feel a shudder of sympathy and, of necessity, move on.

Part of our ability to move on is, of course, compassion fatigue. Living in a wide world where bad stuff happens, we would become dysfunctional were every death in the world to be a wrenching emotional experience. However, if compassion fatigue were the whole answer, we wouldn’t be devastated by 32 deaths, on the other side of the continent, involving people we don’t actually know. That we are devastated is because we go beyond “mere” sympathy, into empathy. In Clinton-esque fashion, we feel these peoples’ pain.

But why do we feel their pain, when we feel only sad about, but don’t feel the pain of, 37 people killed by a suicide bomber in Baghdad? I think it’s the nature of tribalism. We seem innately to divide the world into an “us” versus “them” pattern. Most people think of tribalism in warfare terms, in terms of the “us-es” fighting the “thems” for finite resources (or, at least, resources that one or both sides perceive as finite). We forget that this same binary thinking also works at the compassion level. People I know, or that I could know, people who live as I do, or almost as I do, are going to excite more sympathy from me, because I assume that, not only do they live as I do, but they feel as I do. Their loss, their pain, are exquisitely similar to mine.

Or, to put it differently, and more simply, when people die in Virginia, I feel “There but for the grace of God go I.” When people die in Iraq, I think “Thank God I’m an American, not an Iraqi.” The latter deaths I can place at an emotional distance, the former I cannot.

And so, selfishly or not, when someone dies on my soil, on American land, in a context intimately familiar to me, an American college, the fear and sadness I feel is immediate, not academic. It turns out, that in death, as in everything else, context matters.

UPDATE: Here’s James Taranto’s take on why incidents such as yesterday’s shooting at Virginia Tech are particularly hurtful and personal:

For those of us whose job it is to have opinions, an event like yesterday’s massacre at Virginia Tech is a bigger challenge than, say, a terrorist attack. The murder of 32 people by South Korea native Cho Seung-hui is no less evil than massacres carried out by suicide bombers or hijackers, but it is harder to comprehend. Terrorism is carried out by an organized enemy with a political agenda; we can rally to defeat the enemy. The Virginia Tech shooter seems to have been a lone nut. He murdered all those people only to render his own life a nullity by committing suicide in the end.

As is so often the case when he writes, I think he makes an excellent point.

UPDATE II: Speaking of context, here’s a low key headline that 127 people died in Iraq.  That’s 127 lives snuffed out, 127 people ripped apart on a sunny morning.  We note it in passing and, with sadness, we think “Thank God I’m in America, not in Iraq.” Nevertheless, we don’t spend an obsessive day repeatedly going back to the story for more information, we don’t talk about it over the water cooler, and it doesn’t dominate the news.  It’s sad, but it’s not our tribe.

My deepest condolences to the families of the 21 students killed at Virginia Tech.

UPDATE: The most complete updating I’ve seen on this story is at Hot Air. It’s also the most disturbing, insofar as it claims that 32 (!) people are dead, and that the killer, searching for his girlfriend, lined a bunch of people up so that he could kill them execution style.

As for the fact that a gun was used, Hot Air also notes that gun control people have already been speaking out. I have a couple of off-the-top-of-my-head thoughts. First, I’d be surprised if the shooter had the legal right to possess those guns, even if it is in fact legal in America to possess the ones he used. That’s a guess, of course, and I’m perfectly prepared to be proven wrong. Second, if others had guns, he would have been disabled much more quickly. As it was, he had the luxury of shooting fish in a barrel — unimpeded access to unarmed victims. It was only the appearance of policemen with guns that stopped him.

As someone who doesn’t like guns, and who spent her entire life on the gun control side of the spectrum, I can’t avoid an obvious fact, which is that bad guys have always been able to obtain weapons and do bad things with them. And because good guys obey the laws and, often, don’t like guns to begin with, they’re sitting ducks (or barrelled fish).

Gun technology is a Pandora’s box. We have the ability, and therefore do, make weapons of ever greater killing power and all the laws in the world don’t seem effective at keeping them out of the hands of those who want to use them to kill. Short of a Barnhouse effect, they’re not going away.

UPDATE II: Fox News definitely says it’s 32 dead.

UPDATE III: Here’s what happens when law abiding citizens have access to guns when bad guys are shooting. Recall, too, that, during the shootings in Salt Lake City, the matter was ended sooner because an off-duty cop, with gun, coincidentally happened to be present. I’m also trying to hunt down a story about a gunman who attacked NRA headquarters, only to be shot down within seconds of entering the building.

Greg would like a world without guns. So would I. But that’s not happening. The world is what it is, and that’s a world in which bad guys can get guns. (And, as Greg inadvertently demonstrates in his comment, they can get them even if they’re not supposed to under the law, as the Columbine shooters did.) The question then becomes how, in a world with guns, people maximize their own safety. The one thing I do know is that we probably don’t maximize our own safety by rendering ourselves helpless.

I would, of course, be interested in a study showing that there are people who, while they wouldn’t kill if they had to get an illegal gun or work hard to get a gun, would commit mass murder if they had easy access to guns. In that case, the better situation would definitely be the one we have now, where bad guys have to make a huge effort to arm themselves, weeding out all but the most malevolent, and putting a natural cap on the number of inevitable massacres. Because humans seem to have a killing instinct, and in some civilization does not weed out that instinct, we’re always going to have bad stuff happen, especially in our pluralist society. We need to figure out how to minimize the inevitable, recognizing, sadly, that it won’t go away altogether.

And please don’t give me the stuff about Sweden, specifically, or Europe, generally. When those cultures were very homogenous, it was easy to enforce normative behavior regarding guns, and their use. It’s getting harder. England, which has very stringent gun control laws, is having ever increasing amounts of violent crime, especially gun crime in London, where legal gun ownership has been barred. This almost certainly has a lot to do with the de-Anglification of England. It’s not the same people. Likewise, Sweden is becoming an increasingly crime ridden country as it becomes less Swedish. It’s still way behind America crime wise, but the sad fact is that it’s crime rates are increasing, not stagnant. With a wildly (or increasingly) diverse population, you can’t just tell people not to commit crimes, and then make those crimes go away — even in Europe!

UPDATE IV: It will be a while before we can figure out “who” and begin answering “why”: “They [police] also said that the shooter was not carrying identification and his head wounds were so severe that authorities could not immediately identify him.”

UPDATE V:  Curt, at Flopping Aces, has excellent information, with a lot of posts relaying information from people on the scene.  According to Curt’s data, it sounds as if the killer found his girlfriend in bed with another man, killed both and then started his insane rampage.

As I already knew from my legal contacts, as to fired S.F. U.S. Attorney Kevin Ryan, there was nothing nefarious going on.  He was simply a bad manager (which has nothing to do with whether he was a good lawyer) and needed to be replaced:

Newly released Justice Department documents on the firings of eight federal prosecutors include a scathing evaluation of former San Francisco U.S. Attorney Kevin Ryan — whose district was labeled “one of the most fractured offices in the nation” — and reveal that the Bush administration was considering possible replacements more than a year before he was ousted.

The fact that replacements for Ryan and several other U.S. attorneys were being looked at months before they were fired appears to contradict testimony from a former top aide to Attorney General Alberto Gonzales that no such lists had been in the works.

The documents were among thousands of pages that the Justice Department released Friday to congressional committees looking into the dismissals in December of the eight U.S. attorneys, all originally appointed by President Bush. Gonzales, whose changing explanations of the firings have led top Democrats and some Republicans to call for his resignation, is scheduled to testify to the Senate Judiciary Committee on the issue Tuesday.

Ryan, a former Alameda County prosecutor and Superior Court judge in San Francisco, was named by Bush in August 2002 to succeed U.S. Attorney Robert Mueller, who became director of the FBI. Ryan officially left the job in February and has been hired by a San Francisco law firm.

Unlike several of the fired prosecutors, there has been no indication that Ryan was a target of political criticism by Republicans. Previously released documents have shown that Justice Department officials rated him highly for following Bush administration policies, and among the documents released Friday was one showing that he was the only one of the eight dismissed U.S. attorneys who once belonged to the Federalist Society, a conservative lawyers’ group.

But the newly disclosed documents contain the strongest public confirmation to date that Justice Department officials targeted Ryan for his management of the office, which handles federal prosecutions in coastal Northern California. Ryan’s term included some prominent cases, such as the BALCO steroids prosecutions and the nation’s first criminal charges involving stock options backdating, but it also was marked by the departure of many veteran prosecutors and reports of low office morale.

A memo dated March 5, from Monica Goodling, the Justice Department’s White House liaison who has since resigned, to Assistant Attorney General William Moschella in preparation for his congressional testimony included the following assessment of Ryan:

– “Significant management problems have manifested during his tenure.”

– “The district has become one of the most fractured offices in the nation.”

– “Morale has fallen to the point that it is harming our prosecutorial efforts.”

– “The USA (U.S. attorney) has lost the confidence of many of his career prosecutors.”

The memo noted that Justice Department auditors had conducted two evaluations of Ryan’s office, “which dictated the need for a change.”

Another memo, dated Feb. 12, contained handwritten notes referring to Ryan’s department audit: “terrible manager, bad morale.” The author of the notes wasn’t identified, but the Associated Press said Justice Department officials had confirmed that Goodling wrote them.

Read the rest here.

Back in 1987, before the fall of Communism, I went to Czechoslovakia.  It was awful, something I would have realized then if I hadn’t been so hopelessly naive about the horrors of Communism.  Everything was shabby and dirty.  The food was vile.  The lodging was so primitive we stayed in one room with a dirt floor.  The people were incredibly hostile.  The trains ran on time, but that was scant consolation for three days of the worst traveling I’d ever had.  All the while, my mother, with whom I traveled, kept saying that her father, who traveled to Czechoslovakia in the late 20s and early 30s, always referred to it as the Crown Jewel of Eastern Europe.  She was even more disappointed than I, because her expectations had been so high.  If only we had waited a few years to go….

Fast forward 20 years, have more than a decade free of Communist control, and you get the really lovely Czechoslovakia that Gail (who blogs at Crossing the Rubicon) visited.  Gail’s photos are especially beautiful because she combines the area’s natural beauty with her own artistic eye. 

Anyway, here is what you’ll see if you visit Gail:

The oldest surviving Jewish cemetery in Europe.  Because Prague capitulated so quickly, the Nazis elected to preserve the Jewish quarter, not out of respect, of course, but as a museum to who the lives of the Jewish vermin the Nazis so confidently expected to destroy completely.  What’s amazing about the cemetery — and what even Gail’s fine pictures can’t convey — is how packed it was.  Since the Jews were confined for centuries to a minute area of land, they crowded the dead to make more room for the living.  Colma this isn’t.

Medieval Prague.  Gail’s pictures highlight how beautiful it is.  I’m sure it was beautiful in 1987, too, because, just as the Nazis wanted the Jewish quarter as a sort of museum, so too did the Communists want all of Prague, unspoiled by WWII bombs, to be a sort of museum.  The atmosphere back then was just so grim, though, that it was hard to enjoy.

Theresienstadt, the starting point for so many deaths. This, of course,was the Nazis’ “model” concentration camp, the one where they took credulous Red Cross representatives to prove how “well” they treated the Jews. They liked to boast about the prison orchestra. They didn’t boast about the fact that, without exception, the inmates where shipped to the death camps, where they were almost all murdered.

Beautiful pictures of Budapest, a place I haven’t yet been.  Frankly, I hadn’t realized so much survived the war.  In the 1980s, when Mom and I were planning our trip, because we’re old building fanatics, we chose Prague over Budapest, because we’d heard that the latter had mostly been leveled.  We regretted this later because, in contrast to how grim Communist Prague was, we heard that Budapest was a very enjoyable place to visit.  If Gail’s pictures are any indication, it’s beautiful too.

And one post which jumbles together lovely pictures of both Prague and Budapest, including a Holocaust memorial wall that most certainly did not exist 20 years ago.

It  might be time for me to start thinking about traveling again….