If Brad were still around, he would chide me for missing the chance to call him a "seminal gayblogger". Just an incredibly generous, funny person. Working a tighty-whities shot into a Katrina fundraiser sums it up even more than Fred Phelps calling him "the most dangerous sodomite in Missouri".
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Ever hear a grown man howl?
Just woke up crying from a very vivid dream. A movie really, where I was a cop failing to protect a witness, and collapsing at the end in grief and rage and wailing.
I walked in my sleep til I was ten, had night terror as a child and adult, I punched walls and was kicked out of two houses for screaming in my sleep.
Darvon brought them on but I haven't taken Darvon for decades.
"In addition to night terrors, some adult night terror sufferers have many of the characteristics of abused and depressed individuals including inhibition of aggression,[2] self-directed anger,[2] passivity,[3] anxiety, impaired memory,[4] and the ability to ignore pain.[5]" ...Wiki
Hmm. Hypoglycemia can be a cause. I'll eat a grape.
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It's funny how these circles of blogdom know little of one another -- back in the day of course there were so few weblogs that either you knew nothing about them or you knew of them all. Did anyone else here know Brad at all? I would imagine quite probably not.
I'd never heard of him -- I saw another comment on his death somewhere, but not before that. It's a shame, it sounds as if he was funny.
I have to say, wrt the Olmsted post, that it's somewhat disingenuous to say "Don't politicize my death, because in doing so, you are hurting my grieving family." And then to go ahead and write a post that politicizes your death. It smacks of "ha ha, I get to do this, but if you do it, you're a monster!" Olmsted might have memorialized himself in any number of ways, yet he specifically chose to use his posthumous bully pulpit to offer a justification of the Iraq War and his decision to participate in it. That demands a political response. You can't credibly say "I was right to go to war, my death in war was meaningful and important, but the only response you're allowed to make to that statement is along the lines of 'Oh, he was such a nice guy, and kind to children and small animals.'"
There's also a cloying reek of American Exceptionalism about the whole thing. I didn't know this guy from Adam's off ox, and yet, because he had a blog, he's the one person in the world who gets to say "don't politicize my death"? I mean, the entire justification for the war he died in was based on politicizing the murders of a few thousand Americans, discounting the lives of hundreds of thousands of Iraqis and Afghans, and arguing that anyone who objected to this was a traitor and a lunatic.
This soldier may have been a perfectly nice fellow when he wasn't off fighting imperial wars to protect the profits of the oil trusts, but that doesn't change the fact that he lived and died mired in a grossly bungled war fought for expressly political reasons.
Eh. You're right that the 'don't politicize my death' line was, um, unfairly exploiting the superior rhetorical position he got from just having been killed I was personally fond of him, so I'm willing to spot him an unfair rhetorical move on the grounds that it's the last thing I'm ever going to get to do for him.
If he were around to argue (and I'm going to state what I understood to be his position, but can't argue it myself really), I think he'd say that he was at most really ambivalent about whether the Iraq war was a good idea, but was committed to the propositions that (1) in the world we now live in, a country like the US needs a military, and (2) the military has to unquestioningly obey the orders of the civilian government. (1) would be why he joined the military, and (2) would be why he thought his opinion on whether the Iraq war was a great idea had nothing to do with his professional responsibility to do his job fighting it.
It's been a bad year for the deaths, I've got to admit. The Don Belton thing really gets me down, in a specifically bloggy way--ie, I have internet friends who are friends with his friends, various SF writers who are friends of my friends in the waking world knew him, the whole situation with the Marines and the homophobia and racism and the struggle to be in academia with a not-classically-academic background....
There's a period missing in 8. Don't know how that happened.
I read the line about politicizing his death as being intended to head off cheap rhetorical one-liners rather than an attempt to stop thoughtful discussion of the circumstances and events that lead to him being killed. Also there's the fact that his family is likely to read the comments on that thread, so it would be insensitive to turn it political. I believe this reading of the line in question is completely consistent with his approach in his own writings. IOW, comment 7 above would be OK with him here and now, but not in the memorial thread.
There's a period missing in 8. Don't know how that happened.
It's gonna have a baby comment!
11: Also, I think the goal was that people shouldn't use other people's personal attachment to him as a political club. I don't know if you've ever spent much time around ObWi, but I could see unpleasantness along the lines of war supporters going after war opponents in the form "How dare you insult Andy's memory by saying his death was useless." Or, I suppose, the other way around, with war opponents going after war supporters in the form "I hope you realize your stupid war killed your friend."
And given that both such arguments would be stupid and unpleasant and not get anyone anywhere, I think asking people not to get into them is reasonable. I don't think the request was really pointed at comments like your 7.
7:Olmsted was smarter than your average libertarian.
He was a lifer, and in some sense wanted to separate the warrior from the war, perhaps in part for the sake of his co-workers and the institution.
It is very complicated, hidden in simplicity and perhaps so deeply in our cultural consciousness we can't approach it. It is made emotionally difficult by people and stories like Olmsted. He understood this.
But still, there is no war without warriors.
I really was fond of the guy. He was unusually open to having his mind changed; most people, and I'm including myself, are in most arguments just defending their position like crazed weasels, and listening to opposition just so that they can shore up weak spots in their positions. He was remarkably open to listening to people and reevaluating his thinking on the basis of new information.
But still, there is no war without warriors.
Without warriors (i.e. a specialized group trained for war), you still get plenty of war.
In an effort to get us off topic, can I pitch a political fund raiser for someone I know? The situation is this--Scott DeMuth is this grad student and Native activist I've met a couple of times; he's one of the organizers of a Dakota solidarity group I'm in. He's being railroaded on this weird 2004 Iowa animal rights/lab break-in case under very dodgy circumstances--he was first called before a grand jury and refused to testify, then charged when he wouldn't cooperate.
It is a funny situation, and he's at a disadvantage because unless you know some basic left culture stuff, the case looks really opaque. Like, why not testify before a grand jury? Because historically, they've been used as fishing expeditions--you start testifying about very innocent stuff and suddenly ten of your friends are being charged for conspiracy to hold a protest or something. Around here, conspiracy charges have been used in simply lunatic ways--some of my friends who planned the broad outline of the anti-RNC protests are being charged with conspiracy and could go to jail on felony charges if convicted, and there's all kinds of weird stuff in the background on that. So anyway, people around here are very reluctant to testify.
There's an academic freedom angle, too--it's quite possible that the grand jury is trying to get at information he obtained in the process of doing his PhD research on radical organizing.
This is Scott's take on the situation:
"For those late in the game, I was recently subpoenaed to a grand jury in Davenport, Iowa and was subsequently charged with conspiracy under the Animal Enterprise Terrorism Act (AETA). Grand juries are secret proceedings, and those subpoenaed do not have a right to an attorney or a judge during questioning by the prosecutor. Historically, this legal process has been used in abusive ways to investigate and intimidate social movements.
I believe I was targeted by this grand jury because of my involvement in doing prisoner support as a part of EWOK! (Earth Warriors are OK!). Further, as a part of my academic career, I have been involved in researching the animal rights and environmental movements and interviewing participants of those movements. The identity and contents of interviews are protected by confidentiality agreements, and I have an obligation to this confidentiality as outlined by the Institutional Review Board and American Sociological Association guidelines.
[...]
As expected, I was jailed for contempt of court. However, two days later, I was unexpectedly charged with "conspiracy with unknown persons" under the Animal Enterprise Terrorism Act (AETA). As evidenced by the vagueness of the charge and its filing a day before the statute of limitations expired, I believe that this charge is being used punitively against me because of my non-cooperation with the grand jury. Additionally, it seems that this charge is a last-ditch effort by the prosecution eager to get a conviction in a failed investigation."
Right now, folks are trying to raise a $10,000 retainer for a lawyer. Those of you who are lawyers probably know how much difference a good lawyer can make. So anyway, there's a good old donate button on the site linked above (or folks can get in touch with me). Leaving aside the money, it would mean a lot to me just to have regular progressives/lefties read about this stuff and believe that people get railroaded. I think that because most people (including me!) disapprove of smashing up research labs, anyone who gets charged with that (especially if they sympathize with radical environmentalism) is automatically assumed to be guilty.
Vic Chestnutt died a couple weeks ago, too. One of the guys who had at least one song that opened my eyes to what a rock song could be.
No, no, your links just had a lot of stuff to read.
If he's in Davenport, Iowa, he may as well be in jail. It can't be that much worse than the rest of the area.
16:Without warriors (i.e. a specialized group trained for war), you still get plenty of war.
Well, that is the assumption, the cultural conditioning I am trying to work on here. Individuals fight. But in order to get a group to fight another group, do you or do you not need leaders and followers?
I'll leave it as a question.
Are analogies banned? Cause this is obviously at the heart of socialist and political theory.
Well, technically he's in Minneapolis--he and Carrie had to haul down there to Davenport for the hearing. Carrie is still in jail because she's not testifying, which is what one expects.
Grand juries are really subject to abuse. If there's a case, there's a case--charge people in a regular court with lawyers.
I have come to believe that these cases are as much a cointelpro-ish disruption of the left as anything else, having seen how much time, effort and money has gone into support for the RNC8 case rather than into other organizing. If you want to disrupt a movement, hauling a few people up on baseless charges is a good way to do it. (It's also a big part of the local DA's gubernatorial campaign strategy, although it seems to be backfiring--strangely, citizens of a fairly liberal state did not like the excessive and expensive police violence during the convention and don't particularly want to people who planned the protests to go to jail, regardless of whether they supported the actual protests.)
Grand juries are really subject to abuse. If there's a case, there's a case--charge people in a regular court with lawyers.
Since there's an actual lawyer on this thread, I'm just going to say that you are right that grand juries can be abused (like nearly anything in the legal system). But grand juries and 'regular court' serve very different purposes.
But in order to get a group to fight another group, do you or do you not need leaders and followers?
Yes. But is there any human grouping of significant size without leaders, formal or otherwise?
24: It's true, and at least as affects the activist community, the purpose that grand juries serve is a bad and undemocratic one. I can't speak to the whole "trying to convict the mob" piece, sadly.
Subsequent to 26: that is, grand juries are basically used to fuck with activists. We are not the mob, we are not drug dealers, we do not traffic people into prostitution. There is very, very little urgency to cases against activists, and there isn't a whole hidden network of activist crime which needs to be exposed for the sake of public safety. People do not hesitate to testify against activists for fear of violent reprisal. ("If you testify against us for our role in blocking the street, we'll come to your house and wear tie-dye on your lawn!")
26, 27: As I said, I'm not a lawyer, but I'm not sure why you are complaining about "grand juries" in general. Grand juries are not, in my understanding, used to speed-up prosecution or protect witnesses. In theory, grand juries are supposed to be a check stopping the D.A. from prosecuting whoever they want. That is, from the point of the accused, grand juries are more democratic than the alternative. It may be different from the point of view of witnesses called before the grand jury, but I don't know about that.
17:I know people can be railroaded, am indifferent or undecided on the smashing of laboratories, currently reading a social history of the 3rd Languedoc Inquisition (which was so mild in many ways that the descriptive noun confuses) so am seeing exactly how this process was used 600 years ago to intimidate and repress dissent. I wish I had money to send.
Apparently grand juries aren't used in that many places anymore; basically only in the US, and not even in all states.
And as Moby says, the purpose of a grand jury, at least theoretically, is to provide a check on prosecutors' ability to charge anyone they want with anything they want. If prosecutors are just using the grand juries as cover to do that anyway, of course, then the system isn't working.
Do grand juries indict less than 100% of the time? IF so, when and where?
I thought the sole purpose of grand juries is to indict ham sandwiches, which would otherwise run amok.
Grand juries in colonial America (where they were a big deal) often refused to indict. I don't know anything about more recent practice.
32, 33: They've never been used to indict a cheese sandwich. Just ham. My point is that I don't think there is much the D.A. can do with a grand jury that they couldn't do on their own better, at least as far as the accused goes.
28: I think I was trying to specify how grand juries are used against activists and to convey that I couldn't speak to more general uses--obviously unclearly!
I don't have time to find a good link right now, but in terms of activism, grand juries are used to put together cases when the state hasn't turned up anything by other means--if you want to break up animal rights or radical environmental activism in your state, you subpoena anyone you think might tell you, accidentally or on purpose, something incriminating. Then you put them in a room with no direct access to a lawyer and ask questions, often in an aggressive, abusive manner. You lie to them about their ability to leave the court room to consult with a lawyer (happened to a friend!). In this particular case, the hope is probably that Scott will reveal stuff about unrelated cases based on his PhD research, allowing the prosecution to expand far beyond the case allegedly under discussion.
I would take a dim view of this in any case, but in the past couple of years I've seen local governments prosecute activists for terrorism and conspiracy over ridiculously small things--or nonexistent things, as in the RNC 8 situation. Grand juries are extra problematic because it's clear that certain prosecutors are trolling for activists regardless of whether they've really done anything.
32: Buck was just on a grand jury last year, and led them on a merry spree of not indicting people. (Oh, probably still well over 90%. But they didn't indict a couple of people. The one I remember was a developmentally disabled guy, out on the street without his caretaker; an undercover policewoman asked him if he could help her buy drugs, so he started asking people on the street if anyone was selling, and when he found someone he told her who it was. Buck was outraged, and talked the grand jury into not indicting.)
As an anecdote, my mother was on a grand jury few years ago. They met twice a month or something and I know there were several cases where they did decide the evidence wasn't sufficient to go to trial.
I served my own jury duty determining whether a few adults could have their rights granted to others because of lack of mental competency. That was brutal.
87: Also, apparently cocaine is now known on the street (or was a year ago) as "krill". Buck interrupted the proceedings to confirm that the word was in fact "krill" as in what baleen whales eat.
(I've never seen this anyplace else, so I suspect there may have been some confusion, but I offer it for what it's worth.)
And while I don't do anything with grand juries professionally, 36 seems completely reasonable and plausible -- a grand jury is an opportunity to go fishing with a witness under oath, and then threaten them with perjury charges or whatever. Think Clinton/Lewinsky.
Yes. But is there any human grouping of significant size without leaders, formal or otherwise?
I think so, As far as we can tell, and distinguished from the contemporaneous Vaudois, the Catharites were a spontaneous organic social movement.
But more to the point, aren't you sort of denying agency to Frowner in his part of the thread? It is the exact moment that an individual decides to support or confront the hegemony, as a conscious social act, with whatever personal justifications that may not be the same as the hegemony's but are used and a necessary part of the cultural hegemony, that I am interested in.
It is Olmsted's duty that confounds us.
It's alway been a goal of mine to be a 'unindicted co-conspirator' except that this implies somebody conspiring with me gets indicted. None of them are willing.
As for how many people don't face charges because a grand jury says 'no', I don't think there is any systematic, neutral evidence about this. Given the common assumption that people suspected of crimes have committed them, it may be for the best that they don't publish the names of everyone who comes before them.
Grand juries make the "citizen" a complicit/participant in the maintenance and enforcement of order.
They didn't televise the McCarthy Hearings or the Clinton Impeachment to protect the rights of defendants.
41.3: Huh? I was arguing two unrelated things. First, that avoiding creating a specialized military will hardly avoid war or violent death. Second, that grand juries are protection for the accused. Others have argued convincingly, and I allowed for the possiblity from the start, that grand juries can create problems for witnesses. I don't see much of an intersection.
avoiding creating a specialized military will hardly avoid war
Note the passivity and determinism.
Olmsted, in his libertarian hat, thought that limiting the size of the military would indeed limit the number and intensity of wars.
Dogs are calling.
Olmsted, in his libertarian hat, thought that limiting the size of the military would indeed limit the number and intensity of wars.
Many anthropologists would disagree. But this is a very contentious (and very important) issue.
And now I have to go digitize some videos. If this thread has 400 comments when I check back, I'm not going to read them.
As re the OP, it's a shame that, rather than his annual Break Bread with Bread SxSW extravaganza or his Day without Weblogs work, "blogosphere" will be what Brad is remembered for by everyone except his friends and the St. Louis theater world. He'd have something funny to say about that, I'm sure.
47: Yes, data from anthropology is what I'm thinking of.
39: Krill? That is hilarious. It also sounds like something undercover cops are told coke is called so they can be identified by dealers.
As a lawyer, I have become aware of situations where a grand jury declined to indict a client or a co-conspirator of a client, even when the prosecutor wanted it. More commonly, grand jury testimony convinces a prosecutor not to seek an indictment, as when Karl Rove avoided being charged in the Scooter Libby case on the strength of his grand jury testimony. Rove did not cooperate in the casein the sense of providing evidence against others.
Also, without defending the entire system, grand juries are useful in securing indictments of actual violent or otherwise evil conspirators, as well as for securing indictments of participants in the apparently imaginary conspiracies of the kind that prosecutors believe Frowner's friend has evidence about.
Federal grand juries did lead to numerous prosecutions of KKK-associated killers in the South during the 1960's and '70's. Grand jury testimony made possible the prosecution of the county judges in Pennsylvania who accepted bribes to send juvenile offenders to private jails. Without grand juries, public corruption would be unprosecutable.
Grand juries also are the heart of almost every conspiracy criminal case that sends evil capitalists to jail. Think of the Archer Daniels Midland price fixing gang, or the various Enron securities fraud prosecutions.
Although it does show up on Urban Dictionary meaning 'crack'. So maybe it is real.
51: Years ago, when I was in England, somebody offered me "Prawn Cocktail". I assumed it was drugs and said no.
52: I feel like we're talking at cross purposes--there are plenty of situations where grand juries are used unjustly against activists, whether or not they are used justly against capitalists/various fonts of evil.
A lesson to me that I need to fine-tune my rhetoric, I guess, since I certainly did comment that I was suspicious of grand juries generally when I was thinking more of those targeting activists. Oh well, at least Unfogged has taught me to eschew analogies, even if the rest of my writing is still sloppy.
Snarkout, although I'd only barely read Brad, I'm really moved by your tributes to him. Thank you.
Grand jury testimony made possible the prosecution of the county judges in Pennsylvania who accepted bribes to send juvenile offenders to private jails.
That private jail is now owned by the brother of my county's D.A. (Said brother is not indicted and bought after the bribes, but it still bugs me. Their dad was on the PA supreme court.)
It also sounds like something undercover cops are told coke is called so they can be identified by dealers.
So far this tape appears to contain an entire baseball game from 1984.
Recorded off the TV, no less. KNAZ Channel 2, the NBC affiliate in Flagstaff.
It seems Joe Torre is thinking of using Randy Johnson as a pitcher. He has a good arm.
Do they have the written permission of Major League Baseball?
55: I agree that grand juries can be used unjustly, and that's probably what happened in the cases you describe. I was responding to several posts suggesting that grand juries have no useful purpose.
64: I was responding to several posts suggesting that grand juries have no useful purpose.
And thanks for that. I wasn't doing a very good job of it.
Thanks, Thorn. He was one of the good ones.
64
I agree that grand juries can be used unjustly, and that's probably what happened in the cases you describe. I was responding to several posts suggesting that grand juries have no useful purpose.
I served on a state grand jury last year and I don't think it served any useful purpose. I think a preliminary hearing before a judge as is done in many states makes more sense.
55: I don't think people were just talking, rather than trying to minimize the situation you're talking about.
Okay, I completely fucked that up. I think people were just talking, rather than trying to minimize the situation.
4: I was, very thoughtfully, awakened by my subconscious via a dream in which someone (imaginary) called me on the phone to scold me for missing a deadline. And, indeed, I've got a lot of deadlines, which I'm not doing an awesome job of managing. So that got me out of bed early enough to get a review draft to AB and prep for a (lucrative) all-morning meeting.
Thanks, brain!
I miss both Andy Olmsted's posts and Hilzoy's.
Hey NPH, can you send me an e-mail?
What really stuck in my craw about the Olmsted piece was, of course, his smear against anarchism, to the effect that anarchism would cause oppression. Since the analogy ban is dead, I'm going to submit that this is akin to saying libraries cause illiteracy. I could go off on a big rant here, but I am really sick.
On the grand jury front, the problem really is how they are used and abused, not the existence per se (although I am of course opposed to the justice system completely.) There's absolutely nothing to stop a prosecutor dragging in 20 or 50 or 100 people, compelling them to testify under duress, without any real evidence of a crime or who participated in it, and then using their answers or refusal to answer to prosecute someone for something completely unrelated to whatever was alleged. And as Frowner points out, it's apparent that actual, solid prosecutions are becoming less and less the goal. Similarly to when the police round up 900 people at a time without probable cause on the first day of a protest week, simply to prevent them from attending further protests. Prosecutors are just using grand juries to harass left-wing groups and prevent them from doing other, legal organizing. And why wouldn't they? They don't need to do any of the actual work of building a criminal case against anyone, they simply pick a crime and some activists and pretend they're related. And there's no real penalty if they can't prove anything, just a grand jury that failed to indict, so it doesn't even count against their statistics, meanwhile the activists have to spend time and money and emotional energy defending themselves.
In the cases Frowner brings up, there's a huge ripple effect, where friends and family of the detained are forced to travel at great expense all over the place, hold benefits, console each other, miss work, miss out on time with their children, put various projects aside and concentrate all their lives on fighting these bogus prosecutions. That's more than enough incentive for the minions of capital and the state to file a few briefs and spend a couple of hours in court. It's a minimum of investment for the state with a maximum payoff in disruption and anguish for the activist community.
Thanks, brain!
The best way to thank your brain is to be more careful about how far you put in the Q-tip.
A belated thanks to heebie for posting this. The part that first struck me, and still does, about Andy's farewell is this:
[F]or those who knew me well enough to be saddened by my death, especially for those who haven't known anyone else lost to this war, perhaps my death can serve as a small reminder of the costs of war. Regardless of the merits of this war, or of any war, I think that many of us in America have forgotten that war means death and suffering in wholesale lots.
A decision that for most of us in America was academic, whether or not to go to war in Iraq, had very real consequences for hundreds of thousands of people. Yet I was as guilty as anyone of minimizing those very real consequences in lieu of a cold discussion of theoretical merits of war and peace. Now I'm facing some very real consequences of that decision; who says life doesn't have a sense of humor?
But for those who knew me and feel this pain, I think it's a good thing to realize that this pain has been felt by thousands and thousands (probably millions, actually) of other people all over the world. That is part of the cost of war, any war, no matter how justified. If everyone who feels this pain keeps that in mind the next time we have to decide whether or not war is a good idea, perhaps it will help us to make a more informed decision.
It contains within it the humor, the insight, the compassion and the maddening blind spots that together made up my experience of Andy's writing. I was surprised, and two years later am still surprised, at how oddly personal his death felt, given that I'd never met the man and barely even commented on any of his posts.
And a belated thanks to Snark for the Brad Graham links. I wasn't familiar with him, but the audio story and MeFi tribute was a lovely way to get to know him a little.
On the topic of grand juries, I'm not convinced that they are inherently bad or good. I think they are structurally a double-edged sword.
IME they can act as a helpful brake on prosecution (or provide political cover to allow the prosecutor to follow his or her better instincts), and as pretty much the only local avenue for addressing public corruption (especially given the death of so many local newspapers). But of course the flip side is all of the damage that they can wreak, as detailed by Frowner and Natilo above.
the maddening blind spots
Heh. Yeah, when I was talking about how open his mind was to being changed (not that I changed it much, I don't think. But in any individual argument, it felt as though it was a real possibility), that included a lot of spots where I couldn't really figure out why someone like him hadn't changed it already. I ended up spending a lot of yesterday reading ObWi archives, looking for spots where we'd talked.