Tuesday, 15 January 2008

Dear Omi,

This will be a sort of a shift in topic.  I would like to
talk about the news.

Do you remember when football player O.J.  Simpson was tried
for murdering his wife?  How the verdict came back Not
Guilty?  How many people were not happy with that verdict?

There were more conservatives than liberals calling the
verdict unjust.  I didn't say much about it at the time to
anyone.  I remember a guy named Jack at work, a
conservative, asking me what I thought.

And I told him, "I think O.J. did it.  But I also think that
the police did a very sloppy job with the evidence, and this
verdict was necessary to slap their wrist.  But the
standards of a civil trial are lower (preponderance of the
evidence) than those of a criminal trial (absence of a
reasonable shadow of doubt), and I hope her relatives go
after him for every penny he's got."

And he paused for a while and said, "I think I have to agree
with you."

A month or two ago, O.J. was charged with robbery.  He said
he was retrieving sports memorabilia that were stolen from
him.  My thought is, "Well, shouldn't he let the police take
care of retrieving them?"

The judge ordered him not to communicate with anyone else
involved with the trial.  But he seems to have done so, and
could end up in jail over that issue.

The reason I am telling you all this is that many newspapers
and radio and TV stations have web sites.  You can get on
the Internet and read news items that way.  Some of them
have fun online surveys in which you can participate.  They
ask all sorts of questions, not all of them news related.
These questions can be like, "Whom do you favor in
tomorrow's presidential primary?"  Or, "Do you lock your car
when you leave it to go shopping?"  Just about anything.

None of these sites ask you to vote only once.  Some of them
have technical restrictions that make you do so, but
the ground rules seem to be, "What you can do, you're
allowed to do."  So some of the surveys rack up quite a few
votes in quite a short time, a sure clue that someone is
voting over and over.

It's rather like the book "Kite Runner".  Have you heard of
it?  It talks about a custom in Afghanistan of flying kites
with ground glass coating the strings.  The object of the
game is to keep your kite aloft, and saw its string back and
forth against the string of a competitor's kite, thus
causing his kite to fall.  This voting is somewhat like
that.  Pick a side, vote often, sometimes against someone
else who is voting on the other side.

That seems like a simple, and simpleminded, pastime.  Except
that there is sometimes more at stake.  People like to be
associated with the winning side of anything, and sometimes
it matters, on a moral level, which side is the winner of
such a trivial poll.

An example from yesterday:

  OJ's back in jail after violating terms of bail.  Where do
  you hope this latest development goes?

    I hope he never leaves there.  Good riddance.

    I want him to get a fair trial but wouldn't be
    disappointed if he spent the rest of his life in jail.

    He deserves a few years certainly.

    Aw, leave him alone.  Stop chasing this guy hoping to
    get him for something.

Since he never, in my mind, experienced justice for
murdering his wife, I have little sympathy for him.  I would
be glad for him to never leave jail again.  Except.  Except
that this opinion, whether held by me or someone else,
should not affect what happens to him.  Justice should
prevail, but justice under the law.  So I would make not the
first choice, but the second.

There is more to this.  There is also racism.  I'm thinking
that there are many many people who will take the first
choice because he's black.  Do you remember Grandpa talking
a year or so ago about Tookie Williams, and about how he was
not going to be executed, and how that was such a shame?
I'm thinking that Grandpa, as decent as he is, was
influenced by his own experience with blacks growing up in
Oklahoma.  And I sensed that you probably didn't want
Grandpa going on, and on, and on about how Tookie Williams
would not be executed.  So right there at the dinner table,
I made a bet with him.  I said, "I bet you five bucks he
gets executed."  And Grandpa said, "Fine".  And then he
said, "You sure you don't want to make it ten bucks?"  And I
said, "No, five bucks is just fine."  And then we changed
the subject.

See, it wasn't the money, and I didn't really have any idea
whether he would be executed.  I just wanted a graceful way
of changing the topic at the dinner table, because I knew
you didn't care for that.

That's the only time I ever made a bet with my father, and I
did it for you.  Made five bucks off it, too.

I hope that Grandpa is listening and grinning.

So.  Back to the Internet survey.  Sometimes racism finds
boldness in numbers.  This is what used to be at work in
lynchings.  No one or two people would lynch someone, but if
they got a crowd together, it happened.

So I wanted to make sure that the first answer in the survey
didn't win.  It seemed, when I first saw that survey, that
the first answer was indeed winning, and decisively.  So I
started voting for the second answer.  Again and again.

Normally, you'd vote for an answer again and again by
sitting at the computer, your hand on the mouse, and moving
it around and around and clicking like a demon.  Because of
this movement, I call such extended use of the mouse
"ironing", because it's not unlike using an iron on a shirt
or something.  But something had to be done.  So I got busy
and did it.

And the racists lost, handily.  The final tally that I saw
was:

    30.68%: I hope he never leaves there.  Good riddance.

    64.56%: I want him to get a fair trial but wouldn't be
    disappointed if he spent the rest of his life in jail.

    1.47%: He deserves a few years certainly.

    3.30%: Aw, leave him alone.  Stop chasing this guy
    hoping to get him for something.

But, of course, I know something about computers.  So I
arranged it so my repeated votes would happen automatically.
No ironing for me!  It meant that I could go into the back
yard and get some yardwork done while the computer did my
ironing for me.  All I did after that was come in every once
in a while and watch the numbers shift where I wanted them.

Sometimes justice is fun.