Andrew Sullivan's Blog, page 183
August 15, 2014
Policing The Police With Cameras
Nick Gillespie wants to make cops wear recording devices:
While there is no simple fix to race relations in any part of American life, there is an obvious way to reduce violent law enforcement confrontations while also building trust in cops: Police should be required to use wearable cameras and record their interactions with citizens. These cameras—various models are already on the market—are small and unobtrusive and include safeguards against subsequent manipulation of any recordings.
“Everyone behaves better when they’re on video,” Steve Ward, the president of Vievu, a company that makes wearable gear, told ReasonTV earlier this year. Given that many departments already employ dashboard cameras in police cruisers, this would be a shift in degree, not kind.
Derek Thompson is on the same page:
When researchers studied the effect of cameras on police behavior, the conclusions were striking.
Within a year, the number of complaints filed against police officers in Rialto fell by 88 percent and “use of force” fell by 59 percent. “When you put a camera on a police officer, they tend to behave a little better, follow the rules a little better,” Chief William A. Farrar, the Rialto police chief, told the New York Times. “And if a citizen knows the officer is wearing a camera, chances are the citizen will behave a little better.”
Matt Stroud talked with attorney Scott Greenwood about putting cameras on cops:
“On-body recording systems [OBRS] would have been incredibly useful in Ferguson,” he says. “This is yet another controversial incident involving one officer and one subject, a minority youth who was unarmed,” a reference to Michael Brown, who was killed by police on August 9th. “OBRS would have definitively captured whatever interaction these two had that preceded the use of deadly force.” Armed with footage from an on-body camera system, it’s possible that police would’ve had no option but to take swift action against the officers involved — or if Brown’s behavior wasn’t as eyewitnesses describe, perhaps protests wouldn’t have swelled in the first place. Instead, the citizens of Ferguson are left with more questions than answers.
Moving forward, Greenwood doesn’t see how on-body cameras can be avoided. “I see no way moving forward in which Ferguson police do not use OBRS,” he says. “The proper use of OBRS is going to be a very important part of how these agencies restore legitimacy and public confidence.”
A Poem For Friday
My friend Stephen Kramer – who loved poetry and birds, people and life so much – died this past Friday, August 8th, after a four-and-a-half year battle with Multiple Myeloma. Steve had been a hugely respected lawyer for the City of New York but retired after his diagnosis in January 2010 at the age of 62.
Recently, he’d been writing a column for The Myeloma Beacon, a blog and online forum for the Myeloma community. I recommend these essays for their gallantry and their portrait of life lived simultaneously on the edge and to the brim.
Steve and I corresponded about poems, and two in particular called out to me in the last few days when I was in touch with his family, who also surrounded him with song. The first is Emily Dickinson’s poem #1747 (of 1789), one of hundreds she sent to her sister-in-law, Susan Dickinson.
That Love is all there is
Is all we know of Love,
It is enough, the freight should be
Proportioned to the groove.
The second is Walt Whitman’s “When lilac’s last in the dooryard bloom’d.” Whitman served as a nurse during the Civil War, and watching the young die was a continual torment to him. He begins with an announcement of the mourning he has performed and ever shall for a man he proclaims later in the poem to be “the sweetest, wisest soul of all my days and lands.” The poem invokes the figure of a hermit thrush, caroling to the bard, “Loud, human song, with voice of utterest woe/…. And he sang the carol of death, and a verse for him I love.”
From “When lilacs last in the dooryard bloom’d” by Walt Whitman (1819-1892):
Then with the knowledge of death as walking one side
of me,
And the thought of death close-walking the other side
of me,
And I in the middle as with companions, and as holding
the hands of companions,
I fled forth to the hiding receiving night that talks not,
Down to the shores of the water, the path by the swamp
in the dimness,
To the solemn shadowy cedars and ghostly pines so still.
And the singer so shy to the rest receiv’d me,
The gray-brown bird I know receiv’d us comrades three,
And he sang the carol of death, and a verse for him I
love.
*
Come lovely and soothing death,
Undulate round the world, serenely arriving, arriving,
In the day, in the night, to all, to each,
Sooner or later delicate death.
(Photo by Justin Young)
You Might Be a Millennial If …
I am a member of the millennial generation, which means so are my same-age friends, obviously. Yet they routinely refuse to acknowledge this. Some genuinely don’t realize that they, born in the early 1980s, could possibly be considered part of the same generational cohort as those born in, say, 1997. Some seem to know they are millennials technically but refute the label on grounds of principle. So strong is this Millennial Denial Syndrome that appeals to logic – most generations span 15 to 20 years! not identifying with generational tropes doesn’t change your birth year! – only work about half the time.
Millennial journalist Lauren Alix Brown was recently forced to confront the terrible truth about herself:
No one likes the term “millennial,” with its connotations of narcissism, laziness, and self-delusion. And yet it wasn’t until I was editing a piece on millennials, and my office debated the merits of the term for a global audience, that I realized I was one.
But don’t worry, her pain was short-lived. Brown quickly decides that if she is considered a millennial, the term must be meaningless:
Millennial has become a catchall for everything right and wrong with the younger generation. In being used too broadly and frequently, it’s become meaningless for some of the nuances that differentiate us. It also covers a swath as wide, in some definitions, as those born from 1977 to the year 2000.+
The official millennial birth boundaries are blurry, but most place the start between 1979-1982 and the end between 1994-and the late 90s. Generational scholars William Strauss and Neil Howe, who coined the term “millennial”, defined the generation as those born between 1982 and 2000. Regardless of how you slice it, you’ll hear the same complaint from older millennials: they simply have nothing in common with those born 10, 12, 15 years behind.
“Everyone thinks they are distinct from the generation below them,” Brown acknowledges, but she thinks “among millennials, there truly is a divide”:
Most importantly, the Great Recession: A group of us entered the workforce in a distinctly different economy from today’s graduates. A recent survey conducted by Zogby Analytics looked at millennials in two cohorts—those born between 1979-1989 and those born 1990-1996. The older cohort was more apt to have a college degree, consider their current job a career, and less likely to have lost a job in the past 12 months. Older millennials were born to Baby Boomer parents and graduated college and entered the job market in a boom time.The younger set, which entered adulthood during the financial crisis, are products of Gen X-ers.
Yet millennials who entered the job market pre-recession were quickly greeted by it. Many of my friends had no sooner gotten their first professional, post-college jobs than they were losing them in 2008-2009 layoffs. I’m not convinced that entering the workforce pre- or post-recession is as great a marker of difference as some say it is. Perhaps older millennials are more likely to have college degrees and consider their current jobs a career because they are older? In the Zogby survey, we’re talking about the difference between people 25-35 versus those ages 18 to 24!
Putting economic influences aside, Brown quips that she doesn’t feel at all millennial as she encounters “new grads who drink coffee through a straw during an interview or respond with ‘k’ over Gchat.” Yet I remember hearing similar complaints from folks when my friends and I were just out of college and searching for jobs. Boomers and Gen X-ers assure me that their elders had similar complaints about them as interns and entry-level staffers.
I understand why it may seem weird, looking at a 16-year-old from the ripe old age of 30, and being told that you’re supposed to have something in common with them. But generations are, in theory, taxonomied more for historical shorthand purposes than major in-the-moment meaning. So you remember dial-up Internet and they don’t? So they got a Facebook profile at 12 and you were 20? Compared to the cultural gulf between any millennial and any member of our grandparents’ generation, or any member of the post- post- millennial generation, these differences are minuscule and virtually meaningless. And in 50 or 100 years, they will be undetectable to those looking back.
So anyway, here’s my plea to my fellow millenials: Accept the label, because you’re never going to shake it. But this doesn’t mean you have to accept what they say about us. Part of the reason millennials are so mocked and maligned is because nobody wants to admit to being one. The sooner you admit to your dreaded millennial-ness, the sooner you can start changing the conversation about us.
This Is Why Men Need Feminism
Love, love, love the response from actor Joseph Gordon-Levitt when asked about calling himself a feminist:
I read that you consider yourself a “male
feminist,” and you credit your parents who are educators and really taught you about the history of feminism. But nowadays, you have a lot of young stars coming out against being labeled a feminist.
Coming out against the label? Wow. I guess I’m not aware of that. What that means to me is that you don’t let your gender define who you are—you can be who you want to be, whether you’re a man, a woman, a boy, a girl, whatever. However you want to define yourself, you can do that and should be able to do that, and no category ever really describes a person because every person is unique. That, to me, is what “feminism” means.
So yes, I’d absolutely call myself a feminist. And if you look at history, women are an oppressed category of people. There’s a long, long history of women suffering abuse, injustice, and not having the same opportunities as men, and I think that’s been very detrimental to the human race as a whole. I’m a believer that if everyone has a fair chance to be what they want to be and do what they want to do, it’s better for everyone. It benefits society as a whole.
What’s great about Gordon-Levitt’s definition is that it shows why feminism is directly relevant to men’s lives as well as women’s. We’re all in this mess of gender expectations together. Feminism isn’t just about raising women up but helping us all – men, women, cis, trans, whatever – get to a place where we’re a bit more free.
(Image from Confused Cats Against Feminism)
“One Must Respect These Old Names” Ctd
In what has to be a French-major’s anxiety dream come to life, a reader implies that I omitted a definite article in :
I’m writing from Normandy, France. I did a quick search to look for some French articles related to that “Mort aux juifs” town, and it looks like the reporting was quite misleading. First of all, the village name is not “Mort aux Juifs” (Death to the Jews) but “La mort aux Juifs” (The death of the Jews). I found another explanation for the origin of the name, which would come from a Jewish uprising in the 16th century against the local lord, during which they were slaughtered.
The town name, as I indicated in my original post, definitely has that “La” – the “Mort aux juifs” in quotes refers to the graffiti I saw on the RER B. It could be that other accounts this reader found left it out. As for what changes when one puts “the” in front of “death to the Jews,” I’d say not much. If one wished to say “The death of the Jews,” one would need “La mort des juifs.” That said, I’m not an expert on medieval French place names, and there could some idiomatic loophole according to which, in this context, the town name translates to “The death of the Jews.” An “à” can be possessive. It’s not impossible. It is striking that “death to the Jews” would have a “the” at the front of it, and I’m grammatically flummoxed. Readers who can clear this up, or who are interested in providing me with fodder for more French-major anxiety dreams, please advise: dish@andrewsullivan.com.
The reader continues:
The “town” itself is in fact a “hameau”, the smallest possible kind of village in France. In our case, “La mort aux Juifs” is composed of only one farm and two houses. The name appears in the “cadastre” (the old official plans you can consult at the townhouse) and so it appears on Google maps too, but the postal address is completely different and the habitants refer to the place as “La Mare-aux-Geais” (the pond of the jay), probably a phonetic evolution of the original name – that’s understandable, given how distasteful the original name was!
I think the deputy mayor reaction (“one must respect these old names”) has nothing to do with actual antisemitism in France.
She simply says that the name refers to a historical event, not that she condones it. Instead of trying to change that name, I think the Simon Wiesenthal Center should just do the reverse thing: do some historical research on the antisemitic acts that lead to that massacre and then help fund some sort of street sign at that exact location, with some explanations (“In 1565, hundred of Jews were the victims of… etc). That would help educate people and the deaths of these people would be remembered instead of lost in oblivion.
I suppose it’s better that this name belongs to a very, very small town, and not to, like, Paris, but if this reader’s point is that the name is actually a solemn commemoration of anti-Semitism (akin, perhaps, to the plaques in front of French schools listing children killed in the Holocaust), then why should we dismiss it on account of its size?
I agree with this reader that a sign would do wonders (again, France already does this sort of thing), but unless the definite article in this context means more than I think it does (which is, again, possible), it would seem… not so much that the deputy mayor “condones” the massacring of Jews, but that she’s treating French heritage as more important than Jewish sensitivities. If the deputy mayor wished to convey that the place name commemorated a sad event in Jewish history, she might have spelled that out.
Other readers, meanwhile, point out that murderous place-names aren’t limited to France, or to Jews:
Earlier this year, the Spanish hamlet of Castrillo Matajudíos (Castrillo Kill the Jews) voted to change the name to Castrillo Mota de Judíos (Castrillo Hill of the Jews).
Another adds:
This one cuts in many different directions. Ever been to Matamoros (Spain or Mexico)? “Killer of Moors,” or “Kill the Moors.”
Jumping The Shark Week
Brad Plumer shakes his head over “that magical time of year when shark scientists tear their hair out over all the misleading claims about sharks that get splashed on TV”:
Case in point: On Sunday, the Discovery Channel aired a two-hour segment called “Shark of Darkness: Wrath of Submarine” about a 35-foot-long great white shark the size of a sub that supposedly attacked people off the coast of South Africa. And, surprise! None of this was real. As zoologist Michelle Wciesel points out at Southern Fried Science, the “submarine shark” in South Africa was an urban legend started by journalists in the 1970s who were trying to fool a gullible public. But the Discovery Channel didn’t debunk the myth — instead, they offered up computer-generated images and interviewed fake experts with fake names (like “Conrad Manus”) about the fake submarine shark.
As Arielle Duhaime-Ross observes, actual scientists are not amused:
Of course, this isn’t the first time Shark Week has experienced backlash for its negative portrayal of sharks and its tendency to rely on fiction rather than fact, as last year’s Megalodon documentary was widely trashed for suggesting that extinct sharks still roam Earth’s waters. But this year feels different, perhaps because a number of shark scientists have begun to explain why they refuse to work with Discovery – and how Shark Week burned them in the past. …
Samantha Sherman, a marine biologist at James Cook University, says that Shark Week was “the best week of the year” growing up, but it has taken a distinct turn toward pseudoscience. As a result, she says, her colleagues have been less than forthcoming when producers have called them and asked for help. “I have a couple friends that have been approached by Discovery and have turned it down because of where it’s going and the fear-mongering,” she says. “They don’t want to be part of the hate, or have their message misinterpreted so they have just said ‘no.'”
Joanna Rothkopf sighs:
In an interview with the Atlantic’s Ashley Fetters, Shark Week’s former executive producer Brooke Runnette outlined Shark Week’s programming strategy:
To a large extent, she says, the ominous tones and the imminent danger are still what draws viewers to Shark Week. In the past 25 years, Runnette and her team managed to isolate “what works” into a neat, distilled list of elements: “The shark is the star. Just keep showing that. Don’t give too much reason to worry. Make sure we stay outside, because it’s summertime, and everybody wants to see the colors and the light outside. You don’t want to be inside talking to people; if anything, you want to be outside talking to people. Just be in the water, with the shark; or be out on the boat, with the shark.”
It’s a classic story of modern media — when clicks and views mean success, accuracy and quality become unnecessary bonuses. We just need to stop being surprised when it happens.
Painless Meat? Ctd
On the question, a reader points to a troubling trade-off:
It is surely theoretically possible to produce meat, eggs, and dairy with far less cruelty. In fact, we could hardly do it more cruelly than we currently do. But is is a fantasy and always will be. Raising animals for food is one of the most environmentally destructive things humans do. Doing so less cruelly would significantly increase its environmental footprint.
To consider just one of many factors, animals confined so tightly that they can hardly move burn many fewer calories than animals that are free to move about. Permitting them more movement would increase the need for feed crops. Growing crops to feed animals instead of humans directly is outrageously inefficient (animals are food factories in reverse) and requires vast amounts of fossil-fuel fertilizer. The fertilizer run-off is creating dead zones in the oceans of the world that are huge and growing. Feed crop production already uses about one-third of the Earth’s arable land and an out-sized proportion of its fresh water. Livestock operations are one of the biggest threats to biodiversity.
I could go on and on, and most of these problems become worse in the dreamland of “painless meat.” The upshot is that while we are waiting for this fantasy world to arrive, we should be eating plants.
Another takes a very different approach:
You want locally produced, antibiotic-free, hormone-free, free-range, grass-feed meat raised in the most natural way possible? Get a gun and shoot a deer. Deer are so overpopulated in many parts of the country you will be doing the environment a favor. I recommend one of these rifles.
The 300 blackout round is a larger bullet in the same package as the standard NATO round, so it’s still effective against dear while being a lighter gun that is easily accessorized with any doodad you might need. (You may hear from some old timers that still love their Elmer Fudd walnut stocked bolt action rifles, but then you’d just be listening to the same people that will tell you how reliable old rotary phones were). You will have to get a five-round clip, however, as many states don’t let you hunt with a larger clip, though honestly you don’t need a larger clip to hunt deer.
On the other hand if you want to hunt wild pigs, I’d still stick with the 300 blackout round but you will need a larger clip, at least if you want to help cut down on the wild pig problem, and believe me they are a menace. (You want to take out more than one pig at a time, while deer you only want on at a time).
Another testifies:
After the Agriprocessors kosher meat scandal back in 2008, our family decided we couldn’t eat meat any more unless we could find kosher meat that was raised and slaughtered in a humane manner. Yes, it’s a big compromise on price, which does impact the quantity of meat we eat, but the quality of the meat has increased dramatically. For those who can afford to buy this kind of product even once in awhile, it’s worth a try. The non-kosher equivalent will certainly be cheaper, but a shout-out to kolfoods.com for their transparency and hard work in making it possible to “feel good about the meat you eat”.
Elsewhere on the subject of animal cruelty, our first reader wrote yesterday:
There is good news on a topic the Dish has covered here, here, here, and here:
SeaWorld Entertainment has mimicked its beloved performing whale, Shamu, taking a deep dive: its stock plunged as much as 35% after the company posted ugly second-quarter results and lowered revenue forecasts for the full year. . . . CEO Jim Atchison attributed the weak results to animal rights campaigns and negative media attention. The company, which has 11 US theme parks including three SeaWorlds and two Busch Gardens, has come under close scrutiny over the treatment of its killer whales. …
The activists have gotten help from politicians and the media. Blackfish, a widely watched 2013 documentary on the lives of performing killer whales, sparked debate about the ethicality of attending theme parks like SeaWorld after it aired on CNN. In March, the film’s director stood alongside a California assemblyman who proposed legislation to outlaw killer whale entertainment performances and captive breeding programs.
Pot Arrests Are Climbing?
Ingraham points out that “the percent of all arrests related to marijuana possession has steadily risen even as public attitudes toward the drug have shifted, states have relaxed their marijuana laws, and new research has come to light thoroughly debunking the Reefer Madness mindset of earlier decades”:
At least 658,000 people were arrested for marijuana possession in 2012, accounting for 42 percent of all drug arrests and 5.4 percent of all arrests for any offense, according to FBI data. The actual numbers are likely even higher, since a handful of states either don’t report arrest data to the FBI, or only do so on a limited basis. But the focus on marijuana arrests varies considerably by state. In New York, an astonishing one out of every eight arrests – 12.7 percent – are for simple marijuana possession. But across the state line in Massachusetts, fewer than one out of every 100 arrests are for marijuana possession.
Friedersdorf visited Boulder to witness the effects of legalized marijuana firsthand:
One thought I never had was that Boulder would be better off if its marijuana smokers were all imprisoned, or at risk of arrest, or casually breaking the law to facilitate a habit that isn’t going away. After such a brief visit, I can’t claim to have seen every aspect of marijuana culture in Boulder, or to have definitive proof that legalization will be sound public policy. That can’t yet be known. But everything I saw inclines me to agree with a modest conclusion drawn by the Brookings Institution after it completed a more intense study of legalization. “It’s too early to judge the success of Colorado’s policy,” wrote John Hudak, a Brookings fellow in governance studies, “but it is not too early to say that the rollout, or initial implementation, of legal retail marijuana has been largely successful.” If catastrophe looms in this perennially blessed city, it is as yet unseen.
Slacktivist Inc
Customers want @Dove to make ‘real beauty’ more real by disclosing when they Photoshop. Share to spread the word! pic.twitter.com/yiVUy6KUyz
— Change.org (@Change) August 6, 2014
Nithin Coca considers the economics of petition sites:
Make no mistake, online petitions are a business too. In fact, the financial model of Change.org, which reportedly has revenue in the millions, mimics those of Silicon Valley startups. Offer something for free, then sell preferential access. “Sponsored” petitions are highlighted on the site, and what Change.org offers clients is its audience: some 75 million names, who are nudged, through emails, social media, and other methods, to sign those petitions. With each click, Change.org makes a profit, and increases its clientele base. Clients are often organizations with deep pockets: Amnesty International, Sierra Club, and even the Democratic Party.
This profit model has allowed Change.org to grow rapidly and expand into new markets globally. There are other petition sites – the fellow profit-oriented Care2, nonprofits tools from Avaaz, 38 Degrees and Getup, and government-run ones like the White House’s We the People. All are dwarfed by Change.org in size as it turns into a behemoth, dominating petitions in the same way Google dominates search.
Sarah Albers despairs:
Local organizations, formerly the “authentic voice” of the community, have been all but eliminated in modern politics. The problem is not capitalism, but the lack of a meaningful way to act and influence others locally—namely, the absence of the intermediary social institutions of town, church, home; in a word, place. … Today’s political sphere has been atomized. The public has no voice, no agency unless it somehow finds a way to leverage its power in Washington indirectly. This is where slacktivism is so appealing. A click, a share, and you feel that you have influenced something, somewhere.
August 14, 2014
The Plight Of The Yazidis Isn’t Over
The Yazidis have a history of persecution. A look at their numbers in Iraq & their history http://t.co/bBfuLYJj7t pic.twitter.com/xACIGX2lJ2
— Pew Research Center (@pewresearch) August 13, 2014
While the Yazidis who fled their hometown of Sinjar and sought refuge in the mountains to the north are apparently no longer under siege by ISIS and hopefully will be able to escape to safety soon, Kimberly Dozier points to the others, for whom no rescue is forthcoming:
ISIS has taken hundreds, if not thousands, of Yezidis prisoner, and threatened them with slavery and rape. But a few of the prisoners have smuggled in cellphones and are reaching out—pleading for help. In desperate phone calls to relatives in Iraq and in the U.S., they’re begging for rescue from the prisons, schools or mosques across northern Iraq, where they are being held by ISIS militants.
They all tell a similar tale of horror:
families fleeing on foot caught by militants in trucks and cars. The men are then dragged away at gunpoint from their wives and children, never to be seen again. The younger unmarried women are being told they will be forcibly married to ISIS fighters. Some are taken away and raped and a few have even been sold at Mosul’s main market. The married women aren’t sure what will happen to them and their children—they fear they will be sold into slavery.
Matt Cetti-Roberts spoke to some Yazidis who managed to escape when ISIS overran Sinjar but whose families were not so fortunate. Resaleh Shirgany recounts:
I left my mother. I had never met her before because my parents were divorced, and four other family. [Crying.] They were living in the the Al Jazeera [housing] complex in the northwest of Sinjar. It was the third day after da’ash arrived. They discovered where they were living and my mother was one of five families that were raped. First they raped the women in front of the men, they then killed the husbands while the wives watched and then they killed the women. It was a massacre there. [Crying.] …
The same day when we ran away [from the mountain], my two female cousins who were behind us in a car as we left were captured by da’ash. One of them was pregnant and with her husband and her brother-in-law. They were stopped in the middle of the street. They raped them in front of the people that were with them and I could see it from the back window of the car. Suddenly everyone was gone. They took them away.
Previous Dish on the plight of the Yazidis here.
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