Remember the Digital Divide?

The New York Times admits today that the digital divide is a thing of the past.

African-Americans are steadily gaining access to and ease with the Internet, signaling a remarkable closing of the "digital divide" that many experts had worried would be a crippling disadvantage in achieving success.

Experts? Any economist could have told you that computers would phase in slowly, like every other major innovation. Phones, cars, buttons: all of these started as luxuries affordable only to the wealthy, but as supply rose to meet demand, price fell enormously until they became common to all but the poorest.

Like Jason, almost 9 out of 10 of the 21 million Americans ages 12 to 17 use the Internet, according to a report issued in July by the Pew Internet and American Life Project. Of them, 87 percent of white teenagers say they use the Internet, while 77 percent of black teenagers and 89 percent of Hispanic teenagers say they have access to it, the report said.

In the twelve or thirteen years since the internet became a reasonably well-known commodity, we've reached 77 percent saturation in the lowest-access racial group (among the young)? Phenomenal, in my opinion. It shows how incredibly cheap access is, and how universally desired. Of course, older people are slower to log in, but this is clearly a matter of preference, since the old are wealthier than the young, and if a black 13-year-old can get online, so can a black 63-year-old. But most 63-year-olds figure they don't need to find out what candy they are.

The divide was considered so dire a decade ago that scholars, philanthropists and even President Bill Clinton in his 1996 State of the Union address fretted over just what the gap would mean in lost educational and employment opportunities for young people who were not wired.

In other news, the Y2K bug didn't turn out to be such a big deal either.

Sovereignty on Trial

It is high time to stop the silliness. First in the cases of Augusto Pinochet and Slobodan Milosevic, who mercifully died this month, and now in the cases of Saddam Hussein and Charles Taylor, the Western establishment is attempting to bring dictators to justice. This is an exercise in vanity that can only hurt the image and substance of judiciousness built up by the establishment since 1945.

The model for trying members of violent regimes is the Nuremburg trials. Hitler, of course, was not tried; he had committed suicide. And the trials were not for show: they handed down acquittals when they were convinced that someone was not in fact a mover in the Nazi regime. The basic questions asked at each trial there and in the International Criminal Tribunals for Rwanda and Yugoslavia are (1) did this person commit war crimes or crimes against humanity and (2) does the "just following orders" defense hold here?

This is a good and valid system for members of violent regimes - not for heads of them. It is axiomatic that the head of a regime was not "just following orders", so the second question can be disposed of. As far as the first question, since almost all actions of subordinates can be linked to the leader, it is difficult to imagine a situation in which a court does not find a dictator guilty. In general, these trials violate the rule that there should be some doubt as to the outcome.

That said, I don't have a better solution short of executing the ex-sovereigns upon apprehension.

Making Sense of the Israeli Election

With 99.5% of the vote counted, Ha'aretz reports a solid, but not stunning, victory for Ehud Olmert and the nascent Kadima party (28 seats), which occupies the center-right. Labor, center-left, got 20 seats. Shas (Sephardic religious) climbed to 13, and Yisrael Beitenu, a newish Russian immigrant nationalist party has 12 seats. The true surprise is that Likud has a meagre 11 seats. Likud or its predecessors (Gahal, Herut) have been in the the top two since 1955. Of course, Kadima is a successor party to Likud, so this really doesn't break the streak, but it may represent a major realignment in Israeli politics. This is also only the second time in Israeli history that the top party has held fewer than 34 seats; the previous time was Ehud Barak's Labour-led government in 1999, and we all know how well that went. In addition, this election saw the lowest turnout in history, 63.2%.

A quick look:

Party	2006	2003	Position
Kadima	28	0*	Center-Right
Labour	20	19	Center-Left
Shas	13	11	Religious
Yisrael Beitenu	12	3**	Right
Likud	11	38	Right
Nat'l Union - Nat'l Religious	9	10	Right/Religious
Pensioners	7	0	Single-issue (leans left)
United Torah Judaism	6	5	Religious
Meretz-Yachad	4	6	Socialist
Arab parties	10	8	Arab (leans left)
Shinui	0	15	Center
Others	0	5

* Kadima had 14 members before the election, mostly defectors from Likud
** Yisrael Beitenu was a member of the National Union in 2003.
Bold indicates a party likely to join Kadima's ruling coalition.

Add up the boldfaced numbers, and you get 55. At least 60 seats are needed to govern. And this already includes the 7 pensioners, who are confident all their demands will be met - and with good reason; they'll be key mercenaries in coalition-building. But Olmert still needs two more members, and without defections from Likud, he'll need to embrace the religious parties or bring Likud back into the fold, or try to woo Meretz and an Arab party; but I doubt he's willing to move that far left. Basically, the political spectrum is so broadly distributed that any coalition will have to embrace a large part of the political spectrum.

Cowboys in Cairo

My last "Cowboy" post didn't directly highlight American unilateralism, though the implications were strong. In the same vein is Jackson Diehl's op-ed piece on a budding Egyptian daily - aptly called the Daily Egyptian (al-Masri al-Yom) - which has taken an objective stance towards the Mubarak regime. Why now? Unilateral American pressure.

"From 1993 to 2003 Mubarak was criticized once," [liberal publisher Hisham] Kassem told me last week. "He closed down the newspaper, as well as the political party that published it." Kassem himself published a spirited paper called the Cairo Times, but it was in English and appeared only weekly...

...Kassem brushed off the inevitable threats from the mukhabarat, or state security, and never looked back. In the past year the paper's daily circulation has grown from 3,000 to a peak of 40,000...

How did this space for press freedom open? Kassem doesn't hedge: "U.S. pressure on the Mubarak regime has been the catalyst for most of the change we have seen," he said. He traces the turning point to an April 2004 summit between Mubarak and President Bush in Crawford, Tex., at which the aging Egyptian strongman heard for the first time from an American president that political liberalization would be necessary to maintain good relations. After stalling a few months in the hope that Bush would lose the 2004 election, Mubarak reluctantly concluded that he must take some visible steps, Kassem says. One was the allowance of greater press freedom; another was the conversion of his reelection from a referendum into a multi-candidate competition.

After twenty-five years of alliance between the U.S. and Egypt, nothing had changed in Egyptian polity. Now, things are changing. Cowboy up!

Contra Adorem

Note: This post was written as a comment response to Adora, who complains about the lack of accountability inherent in a liberal doctrine of forgiveness. Read her post first. Credit my title to Contra Apionem

From a Christian perspective, your conclusions arise from three mistaken premises.

1. An underestimation of the gravity of sin. As long as we view our own sins as relatively milder than someone else's, we can't appreciate the meaning of forgiveness. See Luke 18:9-14 and Luke 7:36-50.

2. No amount of work (see your last sentence) can lead to forgiveness. According to Jesus, the only thing upon which forgiveness is conditional is that we forgive others. See Luke 6:37-42.

3. We don't make the rules. Suppose for example that God was an arbitrary, unfair tyrant, and that He decided our fate in the afterlife. Our best response would be to try and please His every senseless whim. In this sense, primitive pagans and animists are more logical than post-modernists. Fortunately, God is only arbitrary and unfair in our favor (see Matthew 20:1-16), and His rules are simple and consistent.

I can't speak for the rabbi, but I think that's a fair summary of the orthodox Christian view.

Cowboys in Darfur

Is America acting unilaterally in Darfur? Not enough, in GR's opinion!

Opinion Journal chronicles the international political inaction in today's feature article. As in Rwanda, the French are the best poised to act. Unlike in Rwanda, they are at least not aiding the genocidal regime, but they aren't pushing for troops on the ground, and they aren't giving much money. According to OJ, Kofi Annan came and asked President Bush for more military involvement, but the UN has backed down from that desire after sabre-rattling in Khartoum. It appears that putting white soldiers in harm's way is unacceptable to the Europeans.

The current statistics:

200,000 to 400,000	Sudanese killed since 2003. (Bloomberg)
2,000,000	Displaced persons
25,000	Excess deaths among the displaced*
7,000	AU peacekeepers on the ground
1,336,409,246	USD of aid given (UN)
..... 41.5%	U.S.A. government aid
..... 17.2%	U.K. and other Anglosphere gov't aid
..... 30%	EU and continental Europe gov't aid
....... 2.5%	Arab League gov't aid

Obviously, the Arabs and other Muslims are those who should be most ashamed. African nations have the boots on the ground, but are running out of money to support them (sounds dubious), and will let the UN to take over in six months. Apparently Sudan's threats to leave the AU if this happened were a bluff. Meanwhile, a Sudanese student group has somehow come up with $100,000 as a reward for Pronk's head; I wish my student groups had been so well-funded! And I wish the Western and Arab powers-that-be took the situation in Darfur as seriously as Sudanese on both sides of the lines obviously take it.

*70,000 deaths among the displaced (also Bloomberg, a death rate of 14.1 per 1000 over 30 months; compare to 9.16 for all Sudan and 8.25 for the U.S. Do the math, and you get 25,000 excess deaths.

The Disappointed Right

I spent last week in the capital, and what most surprised me was the level of disappointment with the administration and Congress among well-connected Republicans I know there. It's not a hatred for Bush, or anything like that. But things aren't getting done, PR is being handled poorly, the media is setting the agenda, and the only reason the GOP isn't being trounced in polls is the utter incompetence of the opposition.

In this environment, an independent candidate could do very, very well. John McCain, call your office.