Eugene Volokh's Blog, page 2557
May 9, 2012
Georgia Democratic Party Political Director Sues Over Accusations That He Is a “Recidivist” and a “Criminal”
The trouble is that it appears that he does indeed have a criminal record. The complaint, in Richey v. Walker (Ga. Super. Ct. May 3, 2012) is based on these statements on the Georgia Politics Unfiltered blog:
“Rashad Richey, the person in charge of making political decisions for Georgia Democratic Party, has a history of making poor personal decisions.”
“The money raised from this event will help keep Rashad Richey the Recidivist on the Democratic payroll for a long time.”
“We now know what Ali Rashad Richie used all that cash for … Bail money.”
“So, a criminal is in charge of directing Democratic politics across Georgia.”
“Ali Rashad Richie, political director for Georgia’s Democratic Party is a jail bird. Rashad Richie is a recidivist.”
The complaint seems to be arguing that this is false because “recidivist” means someone who has committed more than one felony, and “Plaintiff is not a convicted Felon.”
But WSB-TV reports that, “Richey had a series of misdemeanor convictions for criminal trespass and simple battery. Channel 2 Action News has now learned Richey also had a felony conviction for aggravated assault in 1998 but was sentenced as a first-time offender. When he completed his sentence, the felony was wiped from his record.” GPB News reports that Richey’s “attorneys confirm that Richey has been arrested for a variety of misdemeanor charges, including driving with a revoked license, battery, obstructing an officer and family violence.” (Note that this is confirmation of the arrest record, and not of a conviction record, but the WSB-TV story states there was a conviction record, and nothing in the GPB News story denies that.) A quick criminal history search of my own revealed Richey’s aggravated assault conviction, and another site posts a 2007 arrest report based on a separate incident. Nor have I seen any indication that WSB-TV is mistaken about the series of misdemeanor convictions.
So Richey’s only argument seems to be that calling someone with several misdemeanor conviction and one felony conviction that was expunged (just because it was a first offense, and not on the grounds that Richey had been exonerated) a “recidivist” is recklessly or knowingly false because “recidivist” is reserved for people with multiple felony convictions. But I don’t think that the term is limited to felonies in ordinary language, and I don’t think reasonable readers of the blog would have so understood the word; rather, a typical lay reader would likely see it as simply accusation of multiple criminal offenses — an accusation that appears to be true.
I should note that if the statement “[w]e now know what Ali Rashad Richie used all that cash for … Bail money” would have reasonably been seen as a charge of embezzlement of funds, that might be libelous. But I didn’t see any reference to that in the Complaint, which suggests that in context it was likely seen just as a dig at his criminal record, rather than a serious accusation of misappropriation of funds.
Oh, and according to WSB-TV, “Richey’s attorneys believe the series of blogs are borderline harassment and constitute a form of cyberbullying.”
Greene County (Va.) Republican Committee Newsletter Editor Calls for Armed Revolution if the President Is Re-Elected
From an editorial in the Greene County Republican Committee newsletter:
The ultimate task for the people is to remain vigilant and aware ~ that the government, their government is out of control, and this moment, this opportunity, must not be forsaken, must not escape us, for we shall not have any coarse but armed revolution should we fail with the power of the vote in November ~ This Republic cannot survive for 4 more years underneath this political socialist ideologue.
A truly appalling call for violence, and a truly appalling repudiation of basic American democratic principles. The author seems willing to start a bloody war with his fellow Americans, a war that he’s certain to lose — since by hypothesis he’d be fighting against the majority who reelect the President, coupled with the armed forces who would doubtless follow the lawful orders to suppress any such revolution — and that, if seriously prosecuted, would costs the lives of a vast number of his fellow citizens.
And why? Because, by hypothesis, President Obama has been reelected? If you don’t like who gets elected, persuade your fellow Americans so they elect your party instead of the other (as in fact they have in most elections over the past 35 years). Or persuade them to elect your party to one or both Houses of Congress, to counteract the President’s power (which in fact happened just two years before). That’s the American way.
Yes, I agree that in some circumstances armed revolution can be justified. But the likely costs of such revolution in a country such as the modern U.S. range from the horrific to the catastrophic. Partly because of this, it is very rare for armed revolution to be justifiable — even under circumstances that are much more extreme than the ones we face now — in a democracy where peaceful means (winning elections) are available. And in any event, all that bloodshed can’t be justifiable if it’s likely to be futile, as it certainly would be, and if it’s over policy differences that, important as they might be, cannot warrant bloody civil war.
I realize that this author is just an editor of a county party newsletter. And I quite doubt that more than a few Greene County Republicans really believe this nonsense. (The newsletter says, “Content of newsletter does not reflect the opinion of the Republican Party whole or in part, all contents offered are individual,” and in this instance I’m sure it’s true.) But I’ve heard enough people say variants of something like this that I wanted to speak out publicly about it. And I certainly hope that the Greene County Republican Party Committee does the same, and makes sure that such calls for violence don’t appear in its publications again.
Eminent Domain and the Keystone Pipeline Project
The New York Times has an article describing how the TransCanada corporation is using eminent domain to forcibly acquire property to build the Keystone oil pipeline:
When the TransCanada men first came, Julia Trigg Crawford said, they were polite. They offered money. Seven thousand dollars to let the Keystone XL pipeline cross her family’s 600-acre farm on its way from the Alberta tar sands to the refineries on the Gulf Coast….
Ms. Crawford, 52, who serves as the farm’s manager, called the rest of the family. They agreed to sign. “We thought that at least if we signed we’d have some say in what happened,” she said.
They called the TransCanada representative. “He told us that if we could come up with a contract that worked for both parties, they wouldn’t condemn the land,” Ms. Crawford said…..
“I fully expected them to counter,” she said. “There were about five or six things we wanted, and we would have been happy to take one or two.”
Then, she said, TransCanada “went full radio silence.” The Crawfords never heard back from them — until October, when they got a letter saying their land had been condemned and a lease awarded to TransCanada.
But as the Crawfords discovered, when voluntary compensation agreements are not reached, Texas law allows certain private pipeline companies to use the right of eminent domain to force landowners to let pipelines through. This was true even for TransCanada, which has yet to get State Department permission to bring the Keystone XL across the Alberta border.
The article notes TransCanada’s claim that it has acquired the overwhelming majority of the property they needed for the pipeline through voluntary land sales. This may be true, but it is misleading. Like the Crawfords, these owners agreed to sell their land under the threat of eminent domain if they refused. Some might well have refused to sell for the price offered by the firm if eminent domain were off the table. The voluntariness of land sales undertaken in the shadow of threats of condemnation is dubious at best.
Back in 2006, co-blogger Jonathan Adler and I published an article explaining the environmental dangers of allowing the use of eminent domain for private economic development projects, as the Supreme Court ruled in the Kelo case. At the time, some environmentalists pooh-pooed the article, and one group even declared our article the environmental “outrage of the month” (it must have been a slow month for actual pollution). Ironically, as Jonathan explained here, several environmental groups are now trying to use post-Kelo reform laws restricting economic development takings to block the Keystone takings.
Such efforts are unlikely to succeed in Texas. As I described in this article, Texas is one of many states that have passed post-Kelo reform laws that pretend to constrain economic development takings without actually doing so. They might have a better chance in one of the other states through which the pipeline must pass.
Even if Kelo had been decided the other way, some pipeline takings might still be constitutionally permissible. The Constitution permits takings for “public use,” and even under the traditional definition of public use advocated by Kelo’s critics, condemnations for public utilities or common carriers that the general population has a legal right of access to might still be permissible. However, pipeline takings would be subject to tougher constitutional constraints than under Kelo, and the government would at least have to prove that the pipelines in question really are public utilities or common carriers open to the general public.
Regardless, as Jonathan points out, the controversy over Keystone has led “some environmentalists… to recognize that allowing the government to seize private property for the purpose of encouraging private economic development can facilitate environmentally undesirable projects.”
First Amendment Protection for Search Engine Search Results
Google commissioned me to write this White Paper (“First Amendment Protection for Search Engine Search Results“), so I thought I’d pass it along. I wrote the paper as an advocate, and not as a disinterested academic, but I hope some of our readers might find it interesting nonetheless. Here is the Introduction, though of course it isn’t intended to be persuasive on its own — the supporting arguments are in the rest of the paper:
Once, the leading sources to which people turned for useful information were newspapers, guidebooks, and encyclopedias. Today, these sources also include search engine results, which people use (along with other sources) to learn about news, local institutions, products, services, and many other matters. Then and now, the First Amendment has protected all these forms of speech from government attempts to regulate what they present or how they present it. And this First Amendment protection has applied even when the regulations were motivated by a concern about what some people see as “fairness.”
Google, Microsoft’s Bing, Yahoo! Search, and other search engines are speakers. First, they sometimes convey information that the search engine company has itself prepared or compiled (such as information about places appearing in Google Places). Second, they direct users to material created by others, by referencing the titles of Web pages that the search engines judge to be most responsive to the query, coupled with short excerpts from each page. Such reporting about others’ speech is itself constitutionally protected speech.
Third, and most valuably, search engines select and sort the results in a way that is aimed at giving users what the search engine companies see as the most helpful and useful information. (That is how each search engine company tries to keep users coming back to it rather than to its competitors.) This selection and sorting is a mix of science and art: It uses sophisticated computerized algorithms, but those algorithms themselves inherently incorporate the search engine company engineers’ judgments about what material users are most likely to find responsive to their queries.
In this respect, each search engine’s editorial judgment is much like many other familiar editorial judgments:
newspapers’ daily judgments about which wire service stories to run, and whether they are to go “above the fold”;
newspapers’ periodic judgments about which op-ed columnists, lifestyle columnists, business columnists, or consumer product columnists are worth carrying regularly, and where their columns are to be placed;
guidebooks’ judgments about which local attractions, museums, stores, and restaurants to mention, and how prominently to mention them;
the judgment of sites such as DrudgeReport.com about which stories to link to, and in what order to list them.All these speakers must decide: Out of the thousands of possible items that could be included, which to include, and how to arrange those that are included? Such editorial judgments may differ in certain ways: For example, a newspaper also includes the materials that its editors have selected and arranged, while the speech of DrudgeReport.com or a search engine consists almost entirely of the selected and arranged links to others’ material. But the judgments are all, at their core, editorial judgments about what users are likely to find interesting and valuable. And all these exercises of editorial judgment are fully protected by the First Amendment.
That is so even when a newspaper simply makes the judgment to cover some particular subject matter: For instance, when many newspapers published TV listings, they were free to choose to do so without regard to whether this choice undermined the market for TV Guide. Likewise, search engines are free to include and highlight their own listings of (for example) local review pages even though Yelp might prefer that the search engines instead rank Yelp’s information higher. And this First Amendment protection is even more clearly present when a speaker, such as Google, makes not just the one include-or-not editorial judgment, but rather many judgments about how to design the algorithms that produce and rank search results that — in Google’s opinion — are likely to be most useful to users.
Of course, search engines produce and deliver their speech through a different technology than that traditionally used for newspapers and books. The information has become much easier for readers to access, much more customized to the user’s interests, and much easier for readers to act on. The speech is thus now even more valuable to customers than it was before. But the freedom to distribute, select, and arrange such speech remains the same.
We will discuss this in detail below, both as to the First Amendment generally (Part III) and as to the intersection of First Amendment law and antitrust law (Part IV). We focus in this submission on Google search results for which no payment has been made to Google, because they have been the subject of recent debates; we do not discuss, for instance, the ads that Google often displays at the top or on the right-hand side of the search results page.
Australian Juries and Muslim Defendants Accused of Attempted Honor Killings
In R. v. Belghar (New South Wales Ct. Crim. App. Apr. 11, 2012), Ismail Belghar is being prosecuted for attempted murder of his sister-in-law (labeled “complainant” in the opinion). The government alleges:
On a day in October 2009, the complainant, her sister Hanife and a female friend went to the beach without the respondent’s knowledge. When Hanife returned home, the respondent demanded to know where she had been and whom she had been with. When she told him, the respondent telephoned the complainant and said, “You slut, I’m going to kill you. I’m going to fuck you up. I’m going to find you and kill you. You fucking slut, how dare you take my wife to the beach.”
[Two months later, Belghar ran into complainant at a shopping mall.] The respondent walked out of the shopping centre and towards the complainant with a key in his right hand. He stood in front of her and put his face against hers and said, “I’m going to kill you. I’m going to fucking kill you.” The respondent slapped the complainant once with an open right hand to the left side of her face. The respondent then bent down, put his arms around the complainant’s legs and waist and picked her up from the railing. He carried her to the railing on the boundary of the car park (“the external railing”) and held her over it to the extent that she could see the roadway below. The complainant was crying uncontrollably and believed she was going to die.
Complainant’s brother interceded and saved her. Belghar was arraigned for trial, and asked for a trial without a jury, but the government insisted on a jury. Under Australia law, when a defendant waives trial by jury and a prosecutor disagrees, “the court may make a trial by judge order if it considers it is in the interests of justice to do so”; and the trial judge reasoned (emphasis added),
[T]he attitude of the [respondent] regarding the sister-in-law victim is based on a religious or cultural basis and in light of the fact that there has been adverse publicity regarding persons who hold extreme Muslim faith beliefs in the community, I am of the view that the apprehension by the [respondent] that he may not receive a fair trial is a reasonable apprehension….
The reason for the animosity between the applicant and the victim as suggested by the Crown will be that the victim took the applicant’s wife to the beach where the applicant’s wife displayed her body because she was seen by the applicant to be sunburnt in her certain places on her body and this was abhorrent to the applicant by virtue of either his strict religious beliefs or by virtue of the fact that he believed he had absolute authority over the wife as opposed to the wife’s family having some authority over her….
In this particular case there is direct reference to aspects of the Muslim faith which may cause a jury to take their mind off the central issue which is a single issue, that is, what was the intent of the applicant at the point in time that he came into contact with the victim at the Broadway shopping centre….
In this particular case it really relates insofar as the Crown case is concerned as to his state of mind, and the rage created by his either faith (sic) or the culture that he had absolute control over the wife….
I feel that the application should be granted … and I do so on the basis that the Crown has not been able to demonstrate to me any prejudice that the Crown faces or any prejudice that the community faces in relation to the granting of the application.
The appeals court disagreed (emphasis added) (some paragraph breaks added):
[T]he decision that the [trial] judge is required to make [about whether to order a trial without a jury] must be founded upon evidence. That evidence may disclose that, notwithstanding that the accused has a concern that he or she may not receive a fair trial, the concern is misplaced. There are conceivably many people in the community who have particular allegiances or who are members of a minority group and who believe that other members of the community would be prejudiced against them. However, whether those fears should be accepted as having the potential to corrupt the fairness of an accused’s trial if tried by a jury must be evaluated having regard to all of the relevant circumstances. Those circumstances will include an assessment of whether the accused’s apprehension is soundly based.
The granting of an application on the mere apprehension of prejudice in prospective jurors, not based on evidence or a matter of which the court may take judicial notice, is at odds with the assumption which the common law makes that jurors will understand and obey the instructions of trial judges to bring an impartial mind to bear on their verdict[.] The fact that an accused person desires a trial by judge alone, although relevant, is not as significant as the reasons for that preference and whether those reasons are rationally justified and bear upon whether he or she will receive a fair trial….
It may be accepted that from time to time adverse publicity is given to events which have occurred, generally outside Australia, where the strict application of a form of Muslim law or Islamic tradition has given rise to the treatment of a woman or women in a manner which is generally unacceptable to ordinary Australians. It may also be that some people in the Australian community harbour prejudice against persons who adhere to the Muslim faith, particularly against those holding “conservative” views about the place and role of women in marriage or in wider society.
However, without evidence that such views are widespread in the Australian community and would be likely to influence jurors, it must be assumed that the protection afforded an accused person in the ordinary course of a trial will protect him or her from an unjust result. Those protections include the practice that before jurors are selected, each member of the panel will be reminded of their obligation to bring an impartial mind to the decision, and after being informed of the alleged offence, the identity of the accused, and the nature of the issues in the trial, asked to consider whether they can fairly consider the relevant issues.
In the present case the jury would be told that the accused is a Muslim and that an issue in the trial is whether his actions in respect of his wife’s sister were motivated by his attitude to the role of women in marriage. There will of course be extra protection afforded to the appellant by the trial judge’s directions to the jury, which will remind them that they must decide the case having regard to the evidence and be careful not to let any prejudice they may have influence the decision.
The jury may conclude that the respondent acted as he did because of his strict Muslim views, but this would be a conclusion founded upon the evidence and not resulting from any prejudice against Muslim people. The respondent’s conservative views in relation to women may be an important element in the Crown case, but not because of any inherent prejudice in the community against persons who hold those views.
I assume that the statement that “the jury would be told that the accused is a Muslim and that an issue in the trial is whether his actions in respect of his wife’s sister were motivated by his attitude to the role of women in marriage” refers to the prosecution’s likely factual argument about the defendant’s motive: The prosecution will want to point to the accused’s attitudes, neither as mitigating nor aggravating circumstances but just as an explanation for why he might have wanted to attack the victim, and a rebuttal to the claim that “he only picked her up from her seated position on the internal railing because she started to lose her balance while swearing at him. He feared that she would fall and he did not want her to injure herself.”
In this respect, it’s much like a defendant’s belief that critically depicting Mohammed is blasphemous would be admissible evidence in his trial for attacking a cartoonist who drew a critical picture of Mohammed — it would show that he had a motive to act as he did, and would rebut claims of accident or misunderstanding. If I misunderstand Australian law on this point, and the accused’s motivation is a legally significant aggravating or mitigating factor, and not just factually relevant in the way I describe, please let me know.
If you’re curious about American law on the subject of defendant’s waivers of jury trial rights that the prosecution opposes, see Singer v. United States (1965), which both describes the then-current state law rules, which vary, and the federal constitutional rule: (1) There’s no constitutional barrier to a defendant’s waiver of a jury trial if the prosecution agrees. (2) There’s no constitutional right to waive a jury trial over a prosecution’s objection, perhaps unless there is evidence that “‘passion, prejudice … public feeling’ or some other factor may render impossible or unlikely an impartial trial by jury” (a question that the Court did not resolve).
Thanks to Prof. Howard Friedman (Religion Clause) for the pointer.
When Should the Court Account for Errors?
Lyle Denniston has an interesting post on SCOTUSBlog discussing whether the Court will reconsider its judgment in Nken v. Holder because the decision was based, in part, on erroneous factual premises.
The Justice Department last month told the Court that it had provided faulty information in that case about U.S. immigration policy, but it suggested that the Court need not do anything about it. Now, however, a group of immigrants’ rights lawyers have asked the Court to actually modify the opinion after the fact, so that lower courts do not rely upon the error, with a negative impact on immigrants’ rights.
The Court has formally accepted the Justice Department’s letter expressing regret over the development, as well as the lawyers’ letter filed last Friday asking for a change in the ruling. That letter, though, was not filed for a party in the case — the immigrant Jean Marc Nken or the federal government — but rather on behalf of several immigrants’ rights groups who took part in the Nken case three years ago as amici — not a direct role. The Department has already made clear it sees no need for a modification, and Nken may have no reason to seek it, since in the meantime he has been granted asylum to stay in the U.S.
When a factual error upon which the Court had relied in Kennedy v. Louisiana was disclosed, and both the SG’s office and Louisiana sought rehearing, the Court altered the wording of its opinion, but not the result. with Nken, on the other hand, the time for rehearing has passed, but the consequences of the Court’s error may be significant.
for the immigrants’ rights lawyers, they have told the Court that this is not just a matter of procedural inconvenience or nicety. Various lower courts have relied upon the incorrect statement in the Court’s Nken opinion to deny an immigrant’s plea to remain in the U.S. until that individual has a chance to challenge deportation in court, they said. Moreover, the attorneys’ letter said, there is reason to doubt even the Justice Department’s assurances to the Court that the government now has a policy that it will allow a deported non-citizen to return to the U.S. if he or she wins a challenge to being sent away. “There is still substantial agency discretion” about that outcome, the letter argued.
What’s more, the letter said, the government can give no assurance that, in the future, some other administration may rely on what the Court had said in Nken about the right of return, and thus feel justified in refusing a non-citizen’s re-entry. The government, it added, has made no commitment “to a permanent, legally binding policy.”
It will be interesting to see how the Court responds.
Maker’s Mark’s Mark Prevails
Today the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit issued its opinion in Maker’s Mark Distillery v. Diageo North America. The opinion begins:
Justice Hugo Black once wrote, “I was brought up to believe that Scotch whisky would need a tax preference to survive in competition with Kentucky bourbon.” Dep’t of Revenue v. James B. Beam Distilling Co., 377 U.S. 341, 348-49 (1964) (Black, J., dissenting). While there may be some truth to Justice Black’s statement that paints Kentucky bourbon as such an economic force that its competitors need government protection or preference to compete with it, it does not mean a Kentucky bourbon distiller may not also avail itself of our laws to protect its assets. This brings us to the question before us today: whether the bourbon producer Maker’s Mark Distillery, Inc.’s registered trademark consisting of its signature trade dress element—a red dripping wax seal—is due protection, in the form of an injunction, from a similar trade dress element on Casa Cuervo, S.A. de C.V.’s Reserva de la Familia tequila bottles. We hold that it is. The judgments of the district court in this trademark infringement case are AFFIRMED.
Heartland’s Mad Billboard Stunt
The folks at the Heartland Institute are mad, and that seems to have driven them a little mad. For years environmental activists have compared climate skeptics and those who raise questions about the likelihood of a warming-induced apocalypse to Holocaust deniers and worse. In 1989, then-Senator Al Gore famously compared those who downplayed the climate threat to those who ignored Hitler’s rise and NASA’s James Hansen compared coal-bearing trains to the rail cars headed to Nazi crematoria, drawing a moral equivalence between the use of coal and the Holocaust. Think Progress also trumpeted the “climate denial” views of Norwegian terrorist Andrew Breivik and claimed he was “inspired” by mainstream climate skeptics.
Then, earlier this year, Heartland was the target of directed smear campaign after the Pacific Institute’s Peter Gleick surreptitiously obtained internal Heartland documents by impersonating a board member. Gleick anonymously distributed the purloined documents together with a forged memorandum purporting to provide further evidence of Heartland’s internal dealings. Progressive bloggers trumpeted the materials, and the forged memo in particular, as evidence of Heartland’s sinister machinations. While it seems likely that Gleick himself forged the memo (or knows who did) Heartland may have difficulty seeking legal redress for his actions. I posted on what some call “Fakegate” here and here.
Instead of trying to retain the moral high ground by defending the substance of its views, Heartland took adopted the tactics of its most unhinged critics, purchasing a billboard comparing those who believe in global warming to the Unabomber. According to Heartland, this was to be the first in a series featuring famous “global warming alarmists,” including Osama Bin Laden, Fidel Castro and other “rogues and villians.” Heartland explained the campaign this way:
what these murderers and madmen have said differs very little from what spokespersons for the United Nations, journalists for the “mainstream” media, and liberal politicians say about global warming. They are so similar, in fact, that a Web site has a quiz that asks if you can tell the difference between what Ted Kaczynski, the Unabomber, wrote in his “Manifesto” and what Al Gore wrote in his book, Earth in the Balance.
The point is that believing in global warming is not “mainstream,” smart, or sophisticated. In fact, it is just the opposite of those things. Still believing in man-made global warming – after all the scientific discoveries and revelations that point against this theory – is more than a little nutty. In fact, some really crazy people use it to justify immoral and frightening behavior.
The response to this ad was quite negative from friend and foe alike, prompting Heartland to pull the ad within 24 hours. Heartland now claims the billboard was an “experiment.”
“This provocative billboard was always intended to be an experiment. And after just 24 hours the results are in: It got people’s attention.
“This billboard was deliberately provocative, an attempt to turn the tables on the climate alarmists by using their own tactics but with the opposite message. We found it interesting that the ad seemed to evoke reactions more passionate than when leading alarmists compare climate realists to Nazis or declare they are imposing on our children a mass death sentence. We leave it to others to determine why that is so.
Well lots of folks didn’t get the joke, including many of Heartlands friends and funders. Several speakers have withdrawn from Heartland’s annual climate conference, including Rep. James Sensenbrenner and IPCC critic Donna Laframboise. (More reactions here and here.) E&E News also reports the publicity stunt is costing Heartland financial support, and could prompt staff departures too.
Even if the billboard was initially designed as an “experiment,” it was a stupid idea. The implicit argument of the billboards is completely unjustifiable. So what if some tyrants and whackjobs believe in global warming. This is like arguing someone should eat meat because Hitler was a vegetarian. Lots of evil, crazy, and stupid people believe plenty of sensible things (and lots of brilliant people have embraced nutty ideas). Heartland’s justifiable anger at the vitriol spewed by its most extreme or unhinged opponents does not justify sinking to their level. If the folks at Heartland believe there is a double-standard — and I believe there is, even though I also believe anthropogenic global warming is a real problem — then they should explain why. There’s no need to provoke and offend countless commuters and others by suggesting that a believing in global warming makes one like the Unabomber. It was a know-nothing message, and not just because most so-called “skeptics” actually believe in global warming too, and only reject apocalyptic climate projections. I expect this sort of stunt from extreme animal rights groups, not those who purport to want an open and honest scientific debate. However angry the Heartland folks may be with some of those on the other side, this stunt was unjustified and unwise — and by all accounts it looks like it will cost Heartland dearly.
May 8, 2012
Stanley Fish on The Hunger Games
Big-name literary scholar Stanley Fish has an interesting column on The Hunger Games, the popular series of science fiction novels by Suzanne Collins which has recently been made into a highly successful movie:
A couple of weeks ago my daughter visited from California. She brought with her the first volume of Suzanne Collins’s “The Hunger Games.” She read it in short order and drove to the local Barnes & Noble to get the other two. She finished them in a day, and then passed all three on to me. I devoured them and passed them on to my wife, who also read them in record time.
What accounts for three overeducated adults being so caught up in the story of a teenage girl — Katniss Everdeen — who lives in a dystopian future ruled and controlled by the decadent and cruel denizens of “The Capitol”?
Many have commented on the excellence of the pacing (you’re always on the hook) and on the inventiveness with which Collins devises the obstacles — both animate and inanimate, and a few things in between — that challenge Katniss and her fellow contestants as they play a gladiatorial, televised game whose point is to defeat one’s opponents by killing them and so be the last person standing.
But the technical skills Collins displays are only a part of the explanation of the novels’ power. The other part is the thematic obsession hinted at by the title: just what is it that the characters, and by extension the readers, hunger for? On the literal level the answer is obvious. Kept at a near-starvation level by their rulers, the inhabitants of the nation of Panem (bread) hunger for food, and one of Katniss’s virtues is that as an expert archer she can provide it.
Food, however, is a metaphor in the trilogy for another kind of sustenance, the sustenance provided by an inner conviction of one’s own worth and integrity….
One of the tributes names that as the goal he desires more than survival. Peeta Mellark, in love with Katniss since the moment he laid eyes on her (the moment when he gave her bread), says to her, “I want to die as myself … I don’t want them to change me in there.”
Fish’s emphasis on the characters’ inner struggle for “authenticity” contrasts with with the more politically oriented interpretations of the series developed by other commentators. I previously blogged about political and moral themes in The Hunger Games here, here, and here. I also discussed the subject in a recent podcast for the Institute for Humane Studies.
The New York Times on the Politics of Russian Immigrants
The New York Times has an interesting article on the political attitudes of New York City’s Russian immigrant community. Unlike most New Yorkers and especially most New York Jews (the Russian immigrant community is overwhelmingly Jewish), they tend to support the GOP over the Democrats:
To many Russian and Ukrainian immigrants, the cornucopia in the shops along Brighton Beach Avenue — pyramids of oranges, heaps of Kirby cucumbers, bushels of tomatoes with their vines still attached and a variety of fish, sausages and pastries — seems like an exuberant rebuke of the meager produce that was available to them when they lived in the Soviet Union.
This contrast helps explain a striking political anomaly: immigrants from the former Soviet Union are far more apt to vote for Republicans than are most New Yorkers, who often drink in Democratic Party allegiance with their mothers’ milk and are four times as likely to register as Democrats than as Republicans….
One reason these voters tend to support Republicans is that they see them as more ardent warriors against the kind of big-government, business-stifling programs that soured their lives in the Soviet Union. Their conservative stances on issues like taxes and Israel seem to outweigh their more liberal views on social issues like abortion.
Tatiana Varzar came to the United States in 1979, at age 21, from the Ukrainian seaport of Odessa. She worked as a manicurist and then opened a small restaurant on the boardwalk that grew into Tatiana Restaurant, a spacious magnet for foodies who like a whiff of salt air and a sea view with their pirogen…..
“I am what I am because of capitalism,” Ms. Varzar said, “and Republicans are more capitalistic.”
Obviously, this article is not the first to point out the stark contrast between Russian Jewish political attitudes and those of most native-born Jews. I blogged about the phenomenon here, here, and here, including links to previous commentary on the issue by others.
The Times article does, however, provide a good summary of the major reasons why Russian Jewish voters support the GOP: a combination of a preference for free markets and a relatively hawkish foreign policy. The Times is also correct to point out that Russian Jewish immigrants tend to vote for the GOP despite the fact that most of them are socially liberal (they tend to be highly secular, pro-choice, and generally left of center on most social issues, with the important exception of gay rights, where many immigrants brought with them the homophobia that is rampant in Russia itself). For most Russian immigrants, social issues are not as salient as economics and foreign policy. In many of these respects, as the Times notes, Russian immigrants’ political preferences are similar to those of immigrants from other communist and former communist nations, such as Cuba and Vietnam.
Obviously, as with voters from other groups, Russian immigrants’ attitudes are affected by political ignorance. Many may be unaware of the massive extent to which the GOP has sometimes deviated from support for free markets, especially in the Bush years. At least in my experience, many of them also overestimate the dovishness of the Democratic Party (though I hasten to add that I haven’t seen scientific polling data on this). That said, there is little doubt that, at least in New York – which has one of the most economically liberal Democratic parties in the nation – the GOP is significantly less economically statist than the Democrats.
Because New York is so overwhelmingly Democratic, the GOP leanings of Russian voters make little difference in statewide elections. They do, however, as the Times points out, sometimes make the difference in local and congressional races, which are more closely contested.
For now, the political clout of the Russian Jewish community is severely limited by its small numbers and by its concentration in areas (Boston, New York, Silicon Valley) that are overwhelmingly Democratic. Most Russian immigrants also lack the wealth and political connections that are more common among native-born Jews (though there are some striking exceptions, such as Google founder Sergey Brin). However, as Russian Jews continue to grow as a proportion of the total Jewish population and continue to increase their income and influence, they could have an effect on internal Jewish community politics. There are now some 700,000 Russian Jewish immigrants in the US, about 12% of the total Jewish population. And that percentage may well grow, if only because Russian immigration is continuing (though at a reduced rate), while the native-born Jewish population has a low birth rate.
Russian Jews have also begun to have an impact in the academic and intellectual worlds. Harvard economist Andrei Shleifer and the VC’s own Eugene Volokh are among the best known of a growing contingent of Russian Jewish immigrant academics who have had a significant impact on their fields. In sharp contrast to most other academics, Russian immigrant scholars in the humanities and social sciences are overwhelmingly conservative or libertarian (more commonly the latter), perhaps to an even greater extent than the community as a whole.
UPDATE: I suppose I should add that I do not mean to suggest that most Russian Jewish immigrants are consistent economic libertarians. Very few voters are rigorously consistent adherents to any ideology, and Russian Jews are no exception. They are, however, on average more sympathetic to free markets than the average voter – especially in liberal areas such as New York City.
UPDATE #2: Neither the article nor I distinguish rigorously between former Soviet Jews from Ukraine and those from Russia, although obviously these are now two different countries, and Ukrainian nationalists are not fond of Russia. Most Ukrainian Jewish immigrants are Russian-speakers and identify far more with Russian language and culture than Ukrainian. However, it’s worth noting that non-Jewish Ukrainian immigrants (like my wife’s mother’s family) who arrived since the rise of communism also tend towards the political right.
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