Best Of The Fray

Go Straight to Jail, Do Not Pass Rehab

Subject: Jail Therapy
Re:Explainer: What Happens in Rehab?
From: Yukon
Date: Thu Aug 16 11:23 p.m. PT

I work as a judge. … Ninety percent of my caseload is drug and alcohol related. I am intimately familiar with the rehab options available for my cases. I am also intimately familiar with their phenomenal failure rate. … Accepting the consequences of your behavior and recovering from an addiction are different things. If I get someone into rehab as merely a more comfortable place of confinement, I’m not accomplishing anything. I’m merely wasting a bed that might have gone to someone who really wanted to be there. … A former defendant said to me one day: “Treatment was fine, but jail is what got my attention.” Since then, I’ve tended to see jail as a therapeutic option—maybe not a great one, but better at any rate than wasting higher-priced resources on a vain hope of recovery.

[Find this post here.]

Subject: Claiming the Moral High Ground

Re:Chatterbox: How To Be ‘Morally Serious’

From: Craig M. Joseph, Committee on Human Development, University of Chicago

Date: Thu Aug 16  6:03 p.m. PT

[Isn’t there] a reason why “moral seriousness” (whatever that is, by the way) is more strongly associated with conservatism than left-liberalism? Isn’t it at least partly because liberals have either implicitly or explicitly renounced talk of “morality” in favor of other concepts, such as “appropriateness,” “values,” and “the political?” … (And, by the way, I’m not a conservative, still less a neoconservative.) To me, it’s not at all a sign of “lazy condescension” to note that Leon Kass is, in fact, a very serious individual, and one who tries to think deeply and yet practically about moral questions. What’s more worrying to me is the number of people … who prefer glibness to seriousness.

[Find this post here.]

Subject: What Parents Really Want

Re:Culturebox: Symphony In Utero

From: Marylb

Date: Sun Aug 19  9:22 a.m. PT

If [this theory is] correct then I must ask, why Mozart? Why not tapes which inspire the child where it counts?

1. I love to clean my room.

2. Just say no.

4. When I go through puberty I will not make Mom’s life a living h*ll.

5. Recite answers to Harvard entry exam.

6. My mommy is beautiful … and brilliant.

[Find this post here.]

Subject: Synthesis of Slate Articles

Re:Frame Game: The Ethicist’s New Clothes“; “Culturebox: Symphony In Utero“; “Chatterbox: How To Be ‘Morally Serious’

From: Arthur Stock

Date: Fri Aug 17  2:25 p.m. PT

A board of well-paid expert ethicists would probably recommend playing classical music to cloned stem cells and unimplanted blastocysts, but following the recommendation would not be morally serious.

[Find this post here.]

Fray Notes:

Exchange of the week came at the end of this “Frame Game”: Dave Kurtzman challenged William Saletan’s credentials here, and Mr. Saletan was right back at him here.

When “Assessment” dealt with August recently, Mangar said all therapists left New York then. Arthur Stock replied “No analysts in Manhattan? The Fray should be kinder to The Breakfast Table [in August].” Well, are they kinder? No, not especially: still droning on about the “News Quiz,” laying into the BT participants, and in the case of Joseph Britt, making a most unexpected post about the Star Wars movies.

There have been legendary Fray feuds: between WSBA and the Whizzer (the Whizzer, aka the Terror of the Fray, has called a truce for a month); between Scott Shuger and Charles B. Tiffany; between Commoner and the Fray editor; and most recently between a-z and Zeitguy. A-z laid out 40 rules for the Fray here (40? Even the Fray team never thought of that many) and finally decided to quit after a month. Was it only a month? A split second in Fray time, as WillV pointed out. We’ll still be here if you change your mind, a-z.

A star goes to Yukon: See his post above and also his classic Death Points entry in this “Best of the Fray.”

We first mentioned a new role for A.G. Android, the Pride of the Fray, a while back: He is Instapundit, the man who beats the professionals. Now he has set up his own Web site to prove it at www.instapundit.com. WillV (yes, again) describes it as a “partially Fray-grown labor of love.” We just hope it doesn’t distract Android from his main job, which is making his excellent posts in the Fray.