I was just washing dishes and it hit me: I know what is wrong with the film And Justice for All. Now understand, it isn’t a bad film. Not at all. But really, it ought to be a great film—or at least close. And it isn’t. It is about an important subject and it provides a surprisingly accurate representation of the legal system. It has interesting characters. And it is totally geared to Al Pacino’s strange form of acting. So what is the problem?

If you haven’t seen the film, the central conflict is between Arthur Kirkland (Al Pacino), who just wants to see justice done, and Henry Fleming (John Forsythe), a heartless judge who hides behind technicalities to punish defendants without a care for the fact that they might be innocent. So far so standard: Fleming is totally typical of judges and Kirkland is a typical movie hero lawyer. About halfway through the film, Fleming is accused of brutally raping a young woman and Kirkland is blackmailed into representing him. Right before they are to go to trial, Kirkland learns some information that indicates that the judge may in fact be guilty.

So Kirkland confronts Fleming who emotionlessly admits that he did it. The core of the scene and the character is that Fleming simply thinks that there are those little people on whom he passes judgement. And then there is himself who of course is moral regardless of what he does. People don’t judge me; I judge people! And therein lies the problem with the movie: that one two minute scene.

Fleming’s character is not real. At that point, he becomes nothing more than a movie villain. But this isn’t a James Bond film. It’s all right for Kirkland to be a bit too pure. He’s the audience surrogate. But the film is supposed to be realistic and have something to say about our society. So Fleming has to be believable. And it would take so little. Unless we are to believe that Fleming is insane, he would know that one doesn’t brutally rape young women. He would have to find a way to justify what he had done in his own mind.

I’m sure there are many ways that one could do that. What I think is most obvious is that Fleming would say, sure, he got a little out of control. But one doesn’t let one little “mistake” ruin a great career. Right? He’s one of the good guys! And that would be particularly poignant, given that Fleming was directly responsible for the death of an innocent young man. And he did not care in the least.

As the film stands, we just have to assume that Fleming is a psychopath. And actually, I’m more than willing to believe that a lot of well respected judges are psychopaths. But that isn’t very interesting. What’s more, I don’t believe a psychopath would admit his guilt. There just isn’t an advantage to it. Regardless, it is a fun film with this memorable courtroom scene, that I still find affecting:

Afterword

A much more interesting (but less commercially successful) film could have been made if the filmmakers had avoided genre. Then they could have left the audience to decide on Fleming’s guilt while pushing the balance of evidence against him. Of course, that would ruin the great courtroom scene. But then, it would be a totally different film. And there’s nothing wrong with genre.

Martin Longman wrote a very insightful article over at Political Animal, What’s Really Offensive About Paul Ryan’s Remarks. It is mostly about his actual experience working for ACORN in the “inner city” North Philadelphia. His job was to hire and train young people in the area to work in a voter registration drive. And not surprisingly, he found people eager to work.

The people in impoverished inner city neighborhoods probably work harder than people in nice upper middle class neighborhoods. What is certainly true is that they are more entrepreneurial. We see the same thing in poor countries. When a group of people have access to a lot of jobs, they don’t have to work as hard nor do they need to be as creative. Longman described what he saw:

Longman thinks that the reason they wanted these low paying jobs was that they were starved for “socially-approved work.” That may be part of it. But I think there is a bigger issue. The truth is that the kind of freelance or pickup work that is the mainstay of economically depressed areas doesn’t pay that much. What’s more, it is uncertain. And it is hard. Just having a minimum wage job at McDonald’s brings in more money and is a hell of a lot easier than getting up early and hoping you might make some money today.

What’s interesting about this is how incentives play into all of this. Incentives work the same for poor people as they do for rich people. But public policy (especially from conservatives) is almost always focused on positive incentives for the rich and negative incentives for the poor. So we are told that if we raise the top tax rate, people won’t work as hard, even though the top tax bracket only applies to a very small number of people (about two percent). On the flip side, we are told that providing food stamps for the poor provides an incentive that stops them from working.

Note how absurd this is. Affluent people have all kinds of extremely generous safety nets—both public and private—that protect them from failure. These do not seem to suck the life out of their ambitions. But according to the public policy prescriptions of people like Paul Ryan, the extremely meager safety nets we provide for the poor do just that. This is very much like a parent with a “good” child and a “bad” child. The “good” child is constantly encouraged with positive reinforcement. The “bad” child is only given negative reinforcement. The problem is with the parent and not the children.

Taking this analogy a bit further, it is certainly the case that in some circumstances the “bad” child will grow up to be successful. The parent can then pat himself on the bad for the great job he did. See! All that belittling and beating worked! This is the way policy makers behave. Some people claw their way out of extreme poverty, therefore the politicians claim it doesn’t matter. The rest must just be lazy!

The truth is that people are mostly just dedicated to a certain outlook. I admit: I believe in a guaranteed minimum income. I think it is immoral that a wealthy country doesn’t provide for the bare necessities of life. I would be for this even if I thought it took a little incentive out of the system. On the other side, Paul Ryan believes in a kind of social Darwinian ideal of society. The problem is that he won’t admit to that. He wants to take support away from the poor but claims it is some kind of tough love. It is anything but. And we can’t have a real debate when one side hides its real intentions.

My colleague at The Reaction, Infidel753 wrote an excellent article over on his blog, Magnanimity in Victory? It is a response to Ross Douthat’s recent column, The Terms of Our Surrender. In that article, Douthat admits that social conservatives like himself have lost the same-sex marriage battle. But he asks for the victors to “recognize its power.” His argument is that we should be nice and allow conservative Christian florists to refuse to do business with LGBT customers.

Infidel753 asks a logical question, “What the hell makes you think you deserve any magnanimity in your defeat?” When I first read that, I thought that maybe he was being a little harsh. After all, we are liberals and being kind to the powerless is our thing. But then I read Douthat’s article. He predicted Infidel763’s reaction, noting, “Christians had plenty of opportunities—thousands of years’ worth—to treat gay people with real charity, and far too often chose intolerance.” That bit of minimization really bothers me. Douthat is a Catholic, as am I by birth. Certainly he must be aware of the church’s history with homosexuals. What he calls “intolerance” I call “murder.”

But Douthat’s main argument is that we ought to let people refuse to do business with LGBT people out of a sense of religious freedom. This I don’t see at all. No one is suggesting that we outlaw florists hating gays or being against same sex marriage. We are talking about outlawing the practice of florists putting signs in their window that read, “We don’t serve fags.” We are not talking about forcing Christians to bring lesbians into their homes. We are talking about outlawing public businesses from refusing service to “those people” whoever “those people” are.

I do think there is a limit here, though. Religious liberty does, it seems to me, apply to churches. Marriages are something that they supposedly consecrate. So I think it would be wrong to force a Baptist church to perform weddings that it did not want to. I think this falls under the same rights that allow preachers to spew out their anti-gay hatred from the pulpit.

But who exactly do these Christians think they are fooling? In forty years, almost all of them will be performing same sex marriages. At one time, churches supported slavery with Genesis 9:27, “May God enlarge Japheth, And let him dwell in the tents of Shem; And let Canaan be his servant.” They don’t do that anymore. All Christians pick and choose which parts of the Bible they are going to follow. So eventually, they will get over their problems with the idea of homosexuality.

Infidel753 makes another excellent point about this. Even if we wanted to forgive all the bigotry of the past, what about that of the present? The truth is that same sex marriage is not yet legal throughout the nation. And even after it is, a large number of conservative Christians will work to turn back the law. We’ll just have to wait for them to die off. So by the time it makes sense for us to show magnanimity, there will be no one to show it to.

Two interesting people turn 81 today. I’ll get to that man of the day shortly, but I wanted to take a moment to talk about the man not of the day. That man is Michael Caine. There are two things that I really don’t like about him. First, he is an extremely overrated actor. I think he’s barely passable. He at best doesn’t harm a film by his presence. Yet he got an Academy Aware for Hannah and Her Sisters for a wholly forgettable performance. And then he got another for The Cider House Rules. This second film is particularly telling. Clearly he got it because it was the first film he had ever been in that he took enough effort to learn an accent. For a British actor, that’s amazing.

The second thing I don’t like about him is his politics. For decades, he’s been bitching and moaning about his income taxes. This is a man who owes everything he’s ever gotten to Stanley Baker giving him a part in Zulu. Otherwise, Caine would be working in a pub somewhere in a borough on London. He is entirely typical of entertainers who believe their own PR. I just wish he would get on with dying, because he isn’t doing anyone any good. I just hope the UK has a very high inheritance tax.

The man of the day, however, is Quincy Jones. Now, his politics are really great. But I wouldn’t care because Jones is a great artist. It’s kind of hard to talk about him, however, because he’s done so much. I think of him very much as I think of Henry Mancini. Basically, there is no greater compliment. He’s probably best known for producing Thriller, but we will say no more of it. He’s produced a lot of other great albums. And he’s a great film composer. And he’s a great jazz musician and composer. So let’s just go back to his first album, This Is How I Feel About Jazz. Here is “Evening in Paris,” which I think is particularly beautiful. That’s Herbie Mann on flute and Charlie Mingus on bass.

Happy 81st birthday Quincy Jones!

Keith Humphreys is a healthcare policy expert and a liberal. And my did he step in it Wednesday while writing about economics, A Surprising Comparison of US and UK Economic Growth. He found that the economic growth in the two countries was roughly the same. And since we had a stimulus here in the US and they didn’t in the UK, it doesn’t matter what economic policies a government applies to a recession.

It gets worse. He went in for some good old fashioned false equivalence by noting that this “surprising” result would not sway people on either side. On the one side, “Most of the ‘slim government’ crowd will argue that Britain didn’t cut enough…” On the other side, “Most increased government spending supporters will see proof that the stimulus wasn’t big enough…” Oh how Very Serious Dr Humphreys was being!

I actually saw his article referenced in Washington Monthly (where it was cross-posted) on Wednesday, “At Ten Miles Square, Keith Humphreys compares US/UK economic growth rates and finds them similar despite ostensible opposed strategies.” I didn’t even click. I knew that was wrong. Not only has the UK had poor growth compared to the US, but it had a double dip recession! I should have been more curious.

It turned out that Humphreys was comparing the growth of the last quarter of 2013. This is kind of like saying that there were no casualties in the Iraq War last year. It’s a stunning bit of extrapolation. Luckily, Kevin Drum did what had to be done. At Mother Jones he wrote, The British Economy Is Not a Poster Child for Austerity. He didn’t write much. Mostly, he just provided this graph:

As I said, Keith Humphreys is a liberal. So he was quick to admit his error, Of Blogging, Errors and Boredom. He said that he hadn’t meant to make the argument that he ended up making. I understand that. A lot of times in the rush to get an article out (Any article!) you end up saying things that you didn’t intend.

Just the same, I hate the smug tone of the article. It was a facile effort to stand tall in the middle. “Look! I’m not like those ideologues on the edges!” One thing I’ve written about a lot is that the centrist position is no less ideological than the extremes. And Humphreys’ argument missed the most important point, which is that the Keynesian position is based upon actual data and science. The austerian position is based on faith and simply grabs any data and science that can be found to support that faith. That makes the “centrist” position half science and half faith. That’s nothing to feel smug about.

Today is one of those days when this year’s birthday posts with a single-person focus is hard because there are a number of cool people who I would like to talk about . There is, for example, cartoonist Al Jaffee, the Mad legend. Then there is the great comedy writer and creator of The Fall and Rise of Reginald Perrin, David Nobbs. And the surprisingly heterosexual songwriter Neil Sedaka is 75 today. But it is also the birthday of someone even more interesting—at least to me, today.

On this day in 1855, Percival Lowell was born. Now, let me say up front: he was a good astronomer. But there have been a lot of good astronomers and we don’t know their names. Lowell is known for some bad work that he did over a very long period of time. For fifteen years, he sat at his telescope looking at Mars, cataloging its canals. And these were no normal formations: Lowell was very clear that they could only have been created by an advanced intelligence.

The problem is that the advanced intelligence that created the canals were on the opposite end of the telescope from what he thought. There were no canals, natural or artificial, on Mars. No one really knows what Lowell saw, but the canals were nothing more than his own creation. To me, it’s very simple though. The human brain is little more than a pattern recognition system. If you look at noise for long enough, you will start to see patterns. This is why conspiracy theories become more believable the more you study them.

Lowell also spent years studying nonexistent features on the surface of Venus. But his career was far from a failure. He built an important observatory. And as Wikipedia puts it, “[H]is practice of building observatories at the position where they would best function has been adopted as a principle.” Astronomy is a greater science because of him.

Happy birthday Percival Lowell!