May 8, 2014
Weighty injustice
Scott Greenfield discusses something most of us have never given any though to:
In a New York Times op-ed. former AUSA turned Minnesota lawprof Mark Osler did a mitzvah by explaining the game played in drug sentencing. After noting some of the problems recently raised about mandatory minimums, the pardon game and absurdly long Guidelines sentences, he goes on:
Unfortunately, none of this addresses a very basic underlying problem: We continue to use the weight of narcotics as a proxy for the culpability of an individual defendant, despite this policy’s utter failure. If a kingpin imports 15 kilograms of cocaine into the country and pays a trucker $400 to carry it, they both face the same potential sentence. That’s because the laws peg minimum and maximum sentences to the weight of the drugs at issue rather than to the actual role and responsibility of the defendant. It’s a lousy system, and one that has produced unjust sentences for too many low-level offenders, created racial disparities and crowded our prisons.
[…]
But when a person is prosecuted based upon an arbitrary distinction, that he carried a certain number of grams of dope (because we can all distinguish between the weight of 7 grams and 8, right?) it should reflect a significant difference in crime and sentence.
[Radley Balko] goes on to discuss a related, but separate, issue, that drug weight is aggregate rather than pure. In other words, ten kilos of cocaine can contain 9 kilos of baby laxative, cut as it’s called in the trade, and only one of active narcotic, but it’s still ten kilos for the purpose of charging and sentence. This is a policy decision, that the purity of the drug is not considered, even though it tells a great deal about where the defendant is on the food chain of drugs. The higher the purity, the higher on the food chain, as drugs get “stepped on,” or diluted, at each level down the chain.
This applies even with less applicable concepts, such as marijuana, where the weight of stalks and stems of seized marijuana plants can be included in aggregate weight even though they are useless as drugs. The message is, you pay by the pound, regardless. It simplified the police and prosecutorial function, even as it undermines any doctrinal justification for the charge and sentence.
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George Orwell was a socialist, despite what many right-wingers piously believe
I’m not sure how you could characterize the great George Orwell as anything other than a socialist, unless you’ve never actually read any of his works:
One wonders whether the confusion stems from what [Krystal Ball] thinks she knows about Orwell’s politics? Contrary to the devout wishes of many conservatives, it remains an indisputable fact that George Orwell was a socialist. He was not “confused” about his politics. He was not a “capitalist in waiting.” He was not merely “living in another time.” He was a socialist, and he believed that, “wholeheartedly applied as a world system,” socialism could solve humanity’s problem. By contrast, he was wholly appalled by capitalism, which he described as a “racket” and which he believed led inexorably to “dole queues, the scramble for markets and war.” Abandoning a comfortable upbringing that had included an education at Eton and a stint as an imperial policeman in Burma, Orwell not only went out into the streets to discover how the other half lived but went so far as to risk his life for the cause, fighting for the Workers’ Party of Marxist Unification against Franco in the Spanish Civil War. (He was shot by a sniper, but survived.)Orwell’s press card portrait, 1943
When the Right seized upon 1984 (which his publisher quipped to his irritation might be worth “a cool million votes to the Conservative party”), Orwell reacted with controlled anger, explaining in a letter that was published in Life magazine that,
my novel Nineteen Eighty-Four is not intended as an attack on socialism, or on the British Labor party, but as a show-up of the perversions to which a centralized economy is liable, and which have already been partly realized in Communism and fascism.
So far, so clear.
And yet, admirably, he never lost his independence of mind, writing in the very next line of his explanation that,
I do not believe that the kind of society I describe necessarily will arrive, but I believe (allowing of course for the fact that the book is a satire) that something resembling it could arrive. I believe also that totalitarian ideas have taken root in the minds of intellectuals everywhere, and I have tried to draw these ideas out to their logical consequences.
This fear came to preoccupy him — and to the exclusion of almost everything else. “Every line of serious work that I have written since 1936,” he explained in Why I Write, “has been written, directly or indirectly, against totalitarianism and for democratic Socialism, as I understand it.”
How he understood it was changing by the day. “Collectivism,” he warned in a 1944 book review, “leads to concentration camps, leader worship and war.” More important, perhaps, he admitted that this might always be so, suggesting that “there is no way out of this unless a planned economy can somehow be combined with the freedom of the intellect, which can only happen if the concept of right and wrong is restored to politics.” Like Wilde before him, he held that freedom of the intellect to be indispensable. The question: Could socialism accommodate it?
It is de rigeur these days to cast Orwell as being merely an anti-totalitarian socialist — a “democratic socialist,” if you will — and, in doing so to parrot the graduate student’s favorite assurance that, because Marxism has never been tried in any sufficiently developed country, its critics are condemning merely its “excesses.” Certainly, Orwell did not believe that the Soviet Union was in any meaningful way a “socialist” state: “Nothing,” he charged, “has contributed so much to the corruption of the original idea of socialism as the belief that Russia is a socialist country and that every act of its rulers must be excused, if not imitated.” But, dearly as he hoped it could be realized, he also never quite managed to convince himself that his form of socialism was possible either — let alone that it could coexist with the English liberties he so sharply championed. For Orwell, it was not simply a matter of distinguishing between the “good” and “bad” Left, but worrying whether the former would lead always to the latter — a concern that the British literary classes, which indulged Stalin’s horrors to an unimaginable degree, did little to assuage.
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Minnesota Vikings’ 2014 draft needs
Last year, in my annual pre-draft post, I admitted once again that I have no real idea who Minnesota will select, as I don’t follow college football. I’ve been reading the fan sites’ schizophrenic swerving back and forth among the various quarterbacks (this week, Bridgewater is hot garbage, but Bortles is the bomb: last week, Manziel was the man and Bortles was nowhere, etc.), as quarterback is the most obvious long-term need for the team (likely with their first round pick, although trading back to stockpile additional picks is another alternative).
While I don’t have much of a clue about who will be drafted, I do know that the team has certain positional needs that have not yet been addressed in free agency. The Vikings made some good acquisitions during the free agency feeding frenzy, with Linval Joseph at nose tackle and Captain Munnerlyn at cornerback filling two of the biggest deficiencies in 2013. Here are the top positions that should be addressed during the draft (in my opinion, anyway):
- Quarterback. The Vikings have the 8th pick in the first round and given the depth of the talent this year thanks to a record number of college juniors who have declared themselves eligible for the draft, the talent pool is both broad and deep. There are three quarterbacks who have received the most attention in the run-up to the draft and one or more of them may be on the board when the Vikings are on the clock. They’ve got Matt Cassel under contract for 2014 and 2015 and Christian Ponder still has a year left on his rookie deal: the team chose not to exercise their fifth-year option on Ponder’s contract. I had assumed the team was hoping to trade Ponder for a draft pick this year, which might mean spending two draft picks on quarterbacks, one early and one late. However, in a press conference on Tuesday, Rick Spielman specifically ruled out trading Ponder either before or during the draft (and we’re free to believe him or not). Several bloggers are predicting the team will use the #8 pick on a defensive player and attempt to trade back into the bottom of the first round to take a quarterback (so they get the fifth-year option on his rookie contract).
- Middle Linebacker. I was surprised to see the Vikings re-sign Jasper Brinkley after he spent a year with Arizona. He’s good against the run, but not very good at all defending the pass. Others on the roster include fan favourite Audie Cole (he of the back-to-back pick-sixes in preseason play as a rookie), and Michael Mauti (who had three ACL tears in his college career). However, the middle linebacker may not be as important to the new defensive scheme as it was in the Tampa-2 variant the Vikings ran last year — or the responsibilities are changed enough that defending receivers isn’t a priority.
- Safety. Harrison Smith suffered a turf toe injury last year which kept him off the field for half the season, and the team struggled with filling the gap. Andrew Sendejo improved over the season, but drafting a safety to strengthen the passing defence would be a good move.
- Cornerback. Xavier Rhodes made great strides in his rookie season and should be a fixture on the Vikings defence for several years if he continues to develop. New free agent signing Captain Munnerlyn may fill the role Antoine Winfield did so well: outside corner in base, then switching to slot corner in nickel coverage. Josh Robinson had a truly awful year in 2013, but he was playing in the slot and had reportedly never played that position in college. Drafting an outside corner makes a lot of sense for the Vikings, and it’s another position with good depth this year.
- Running Back. Adrian Peterson is still the best running back in the game, but he’s getting to the point in his career where the vast majority of running backs start to decline. The Vikings had the luxury of a high-quality backup in Toby Gerhart, but he departed in free agency to get a chance to be a starter. With the new coaching staff, the Vikings are likely to de-emphasize the running game, so it’s unlikely the team would spend a high draft pick at this position, but a mid-round selection would make a great deal of sense.
- Offensive Guard. The offensive line is one of the strengths of the team, but an upgrade might be in order at the left guard position. Charlie Johnson got a two-year contract to come back, but finding a rookie to be his understudy or even to replace him as a starter would make the line even better than it already is.
- Tight End. The expensive John Carlson experiment came to a close after injuries kept Carlson off the field far too much and the team didn’t get much production for their big money investment as a result. Kyle Rudolph is very good and still improving, and Rhett Ellison does a good job of imitating Jim Kleinsasser as the big blocking tight end/H-back. It wouldn’t be surprising to see the Vikings invest a mid-to-late-round pick on a pass-catching tight end to pair with Rudolph.
Not on my list of priorities but a position that’s suddenly being discussed over the last few days is defensive tackle (specifically Pitt’s Aaron Donald). This might just be a side-effect of the extra two weeks of speculation caused by pushing the draft back into May, or it might indicate that the Vikings have their doubts about last year’s first rounder Sharif Floyd. Floyd played behind Kevin Williams and didn’t seem to have as much impact as you might hope for a first-round selection. While I don’t see the team spending another high pick on that position with so many other areas to address, I guess it should be considered as a possibility. I’d think trading back for more picks would be a much more likely outcome, however.
At 1500ESPN, Andrew Krammer lists the Vikings’ needs on offense and defence.
This all assumes that the Vikings stick with their current allocation of draft picks (eight, including an extra they got in the Percy Harvin trade from Seattle). There’s a strong sense that the Vikings might trade down to amass more picks in later rounds — Rick Spielman didn’t get the nickname “Trader Rick” for nothing. If they do want to move down in the first round, John Holler covered some of the possibilities (including positions I don’t think are worth a first round pick for the Vikings).
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