Wednesday, May 30, 2007

Today's Must Read

Andrew Sullivan on the roots of the term "enhanced interrogation techniques".

His post is way beyond essential reading. If you want to get a grasp on how future historians may look at our torture policy then read the entire thing and digest. Point by point, the evidence is damning.

Saturday, May 19, 2007

Congratulations, San Antonio Sterns

Wilbon agrees with me:

If the NBA is going to demand that its players not retaliate, that they refrain from taking the eye-for-an-eye revenge that traditionally characterized athletic competition since the beginning of time, then the league is obligated to protect the aggrieved party. ...
...
But after having their all-NBA center Stoudemire and valuable reserve Boris Diaw suspended for running 25 feet or so toward where their teammate, and two-time MVP, had been tossed through the air like a Nerf ball, why would the Suns trust the NBA to protect them again? What's the incentive to not retaliate if the league won't be proactive and stand up to the instigator before something truly regrettable happens?

I posted on this a few days earlier:

Second, and more important in my view is the complete failure of the NBA front office to protect Steve Nash throughout this entire series. This failure directly led to the emptying of the Suns bench. In this series, Nash has been (in order): given stitches in his nose because of a headbutt by Tony Parker, kneed in the groin by Bruce Bowen, and finally flagrantly flung from the sideline into the scorers table. The second offense was investigated by the league and no further action was taken.
...
So the failure of the league to send a clear signal to Bowen that henceforth his tactics would be severely punished must have sent a correspondingly clear signal to the Suns: going forward, if the NBA won't protect Nash then we have to. Hence, Amare and Boris on the floor.

I'm still too angry to write any further, just hoping that a Stern resignation meme picks up steam. I'm probably asking for too much.

Thursday, May 17, 2007

David Stern should resign

That's the conclusion I've reached after watching the Suns give it their all and come up short in Game 5. This series, while not completely over, nonetheless is now heavily tilted in favor of the Spurs. Stern has always been a notoriously heavy handed dictator (see the Joey Crawford incident), but this is probably the most egregious example of injustice in the NBA that I can remember. I've lost pretty much all faith in Stern and his ability to be an honest broker for the players and the league. His actions have seriously undermined fan support in the US and abroad.

The Spurs have been playing an extremely provocative style of NBA basketball, where they couple borderline dirty defensive tactics with a style of play on the offensive end that can best be described as a FlopFest. This Bowen-Ginobili style of play is almost guaranteed to eventually cause a blow-up by an opposing team, one that will be much worse than the mild tickle fight seen in Game 4. A team can only take so much abuse on both ends of the court (with no corresponding corrective actions taken by the league), before that team is going to lose its composure.

This is actually kind of ironic, since it means that Stern is pretty much encouraging and inciting that which his strict interpretation of the rulebook is trying to prevent. This also means that when this future brawl occurs, the team starting the fight will be punished more heavily than the Spurs. Once again rewarding the team using questionable (dirty) tactics. This kind of stuff is once again dragging the NBA down, making it very hard to continue watching games without feeling a mild sense of disgust. After rising out of the cellar in the early 2000s, the league now has a chance to remain a truly great league again. So David Stern, fix it or get out.

Pretty amazing op-ed blasting torture in the WaPo today from a former Marine commandant and a former CinC CENTCOM. There's really no need for me to elaborate on it, other than point out that 1) they're pretty strongly against torture for all the right reasons (moral and strategic concerns being the 2 strongest arguments), and 2) they're pretty obviously not terrorists or freedom-haters. What gives? Maybe these guys really are Al-Qaeda.

(Note: I was going to make a really snarky comment about joining the John Birch society so I could have the necessary tools to infiltrate the military and root out terrorist sympathizers, so I went to their website to gather some info. Turns out they're not exactly pro-torture either. See here, here, here, and especially here (follow the link on the page to see what waterboarding is really like). So I guess JBS gets crossed off my "Assumed Hypocritical Conservative" list, in fact the more I read the more I liked the JBS' espousal of reduced executive branch authority.)

(Note 2: Charles Krulak is the son of Victor "Brute" Krulak, a pretty famous Marine general during the Vietnam era. He is famously described in Neil Sheehan's "A Bright Shining Lie", I highly recommend it.)

Wednesday, May 16, 2007

The Suspension....

..is frankly a load of horseshit.

I'm speaking of the now infamous suspension of Amare Stoudemire and Boris Diaw. The two Phoenix Suns players were each suspended one game for leaving the bench after Cheap Shot Rob delivered a body check to Steve Nash:




The NBA has a (supposedly) very strict rule on players leaving the bench during a fracas. Plain and simple: if you leave the bench, your ass is going to sit the next game. This rule is applied regardless of a players intention, whether they're off the bench to see if their player is OK or whether they plan on giving a collective Claw to the entire opposing team.

Their are several problems with the NBA's decision in this case.

First, apparent from looking at the video, Stoudemire and Diaw never made it anywhere near the other team before they were caught and escorted back to their bench. No harm, no foul - especially since the player who was manhandled was Steve Nash, two-time MVP not to mention the heart and soul of the Suns team. Which leads me to the second problem.

Second, and more important in my view is the complete failure of the NBA front office to protect Steve Nash throughout this entire series. This failure directly led to the emptying of the Suns bench. In this series, Nash has been (in order): given stitches in his nose because of a headbutt by Tony Parker, kneed in the groin by Bruce Bowen, and finally flagrantly flung from the sideline into the scorers table. The second offense was investigated by the league and no further action was taken. Once again, let's go to the tape:

Very subtle, no? You may argue that it was inadvertent. Could be - however, the player in question is Bruce Bowen. That in itself should warn you that his ballcrusher move was indeed intentional. Bowen wouldn't be Bowen if he didn't practice his wares with a subtle hand. It's like saying that a master thief couldn't have stolen something because he didn't leave any prints behind. Of course he didn't -that's why he's a master. So the failure of the league to send a clear signal to Bowen that henceforth his tactics would be severely punished must have sent a correspondingly clear signal to the Suns: going forward, if the NBA won't protect Nash then we have to. Hence, Amare and Boris on the floor.

Third, the behavior of Tim Duncan clearly leaving the bench in the 2nd quarter was never fully addressed by Stu Jackson. As seen below, after Francisco Elson dunked the ball he fell over the top of James Jones. Duncan comes wandering out onto the court until Bowen (of all people) can herd him back to the bench. According to Stu Jackson,

"Both players got up," Jackson said. "There was no altercation, and they ran down to the other end of the court."
This is a factually correct statement, but it completely ignores the possibility that Tim Duncan may have been looking to start an altercation where one didn't exist. Is it likely he was looking to brawl? No - but that is why the rule was put in place - to remove any ambiguities about a players intention. This strict reading of the rule book is why Diaw and Stoudemire were suspended, and following this same logic leads to the conclusion that Bowen and Duncan should also be suspended. Posing a hypothetical, suppose Raja Bell had been in that corner when Duncan came off the court. Chances are very high that Bell (or any Sun in the corner for that matter) would have taken his move as an escalation, possibly leading to a brawl. Looking at it from a different angle, using the NBA's own corrupted logic, while Duncan was on the floor Boris Diaw could have turned around and slapped him in the face, thereby causing an altercation and the automatic suspension of both him and Duncan. This would basically be a Diaw-for-Duncan tradeoff, one that any Sun would take in a heartbeat. Such is the state of discipline in the NBA, where teams can make morally dubious tactical decisions that the league will then reward.

New Version 2.0

Technically not new, since she was born over six weeks ago. Gabriella is her name, filling diapers is her game.