Comments Elsewhere

Kennedy: Will you concede that many of Tookie’s supporters holding Schwarzenegger to this standard are not holding the former leader of the Crips to anything remotely like the same standard?

I wouldn’t know; I haven’t talked to many of them. I don’t think that an answer can be read off the public statements I’ve read or the ones you’ve pointed to.

Whether or not they’re holding Tookie Williams to the same standard as Arnold Schwarzenegger depends on (1) whether or not they believe that he’s guilty of murder at all, and (2) if they do think he’s guilty, whether or not they think that the murders he committed were as bad or worse than Schwarzenegger’s participation in having him killed.

As for (1), some people think that he’s innocent, at least of the murders that he was slaughtered for; and that belief may or may not be dishonest — I wouldn’t know — but if it is, the dishonesty doesn’t have anything in particular to do with comparative judgments with Schwarzenegger. If he is innocent, then there just isn’t any question of holding people to the same standard at all, since they don’t believe that they both did the same thing.

As for (2), how would I know? I haven’t seen any statements comparing the two at all, or resting on an implied comparison between Williams and Scharzenegger. You might think it’s implied if they (a) believe Williams is a mass-murderer, but (b) try to portray him as a good person nevertheless, while not extending the same charity, or indulgence, towards Schwarzenegger. But it seems obvious to me that how you take someone’s past violence to bear on their character depends a lot on whether it was committed a quarter century ago or less than a week ago. Again, maybe people who think that Williams genuinely repented of his past are fooling themselves — again, I wouldn’t know — but again, it’s unclear what the dishonesty in question would have to do with Schwarzenegger, who had a man killed not a week ago and to all appearances sticks by his sincerely-felt endorsement of it.

I’m sure there are plenty of people who opposed killing Tookie Williams who were being dishonest — that’s true of most political movements and there are specific facts about the conditions under which campaigns against a particular death sentence are conducted that encourage dishonest arguments (it’s a person’s life at stake, the time is limited, the arguments most likely to succeed are arguments against the verdict rather than the sentence, etc. etc. etc.). That sucks, and I don’t like it or engage in it, but it’s not clear that the phenomenon has to do with differing standards for outrage.

Kennedy: Rad’s running interference for people who don’t mean what he means. Schwarzenegger was called a cold blooded killer to condemn him, but there’s nothing intrinsically wrong with cold blooded killing as Rad lays it out. A man may justly kill even if his blood isn’t hot. No, they were saying that Schwarzenngger was doing as bad or worese than what Tookie was convicted of. That’s not the case.

When you say “No, they were saying that Schwarzenngger was doing as bad or [worse] than what Tookie was convicted of. That’s not the case,” do you mean to complain that it’s in fact not the case and that Williams’s supporters were wrong to believe otherwise, or that they don’t even believe that it’s the case, and so were being inconsistent or dishonest to imply it? If it’s the former, then why do you suggest they’re not holding both men to the same standard, instead of just saying that their standards are wrong? If it’s the latter, what grounds do you have for saying that? If it’s that you think that death sentences for convicted murderers aren’t as bad as freelance murders of the innocent, then again, it’s unclear why the issue is supposed to be dishonesty rather than error. If it’s that they think that death sentences for convicted murderers aren’t as bad as freelance murders of the innocent, why would that death penalty opponents believe that?

That’s connected with my reasons for “running interference” through a narrowly literalistic reading of the words involved. I think that bullshitting through word-choice is one of the ways that people avoid real arguments about matters of life and death, particularly when they’re connected with the State, and I’d like to put a stop to it. I also think that in this particular case it conceals where the real argument lies. Greenwald explicitly claims, and you seem to want to suggest (maybe you don’t; if so, my bad) that you ought to object to the way that Tookie’s supporters are carrying on about Schwarzenegger and the hangman State broadly whether or not you believe that the death penalty is justified, because it involves dishonesty or hypocrisy. I think that the moral status of the death penalty as applied to Williams is the only genuine issue in the debate, but that this is concealed by using language that covers over what a death sentence is. The actual complaint is that Schwarzenegger is being held to standards that Greenwald disagrees with, not that he’s being held to a different standard from Tookie Williams, or to a different standard from Iran or China or whatever other slaughterhouse we’re supposed to be denouncing first thing this morning. The shift in language from “cold-blooded killing” to “the execution of the unquestionably guilty mass murderer and violent gang founder Tookie Williams — after a jury trial and multiple judicial appeals” makes it easier to talk in a way that effectively presupposes that killing Williams wasn’t a serious offense that anyone ought to care about, and so helps license the classic “And what about your blacks in the South?” feint.