Andrew Sullivan's Blog, page 59
December 16, 2014
Dick Cheney’s Moral Standard, Ctd
Jon Stewart Rips Dick Cheney on Torture : Is He ‘Righteous Warrior or a Psychopath?’ http://t.co/G8v8gZ5UQO #BestOfYouTube
— Leet Vids (@LeetVids) December 16, 2014
Damon Linker is perturbed at what Cheney – “along with a distressingly large number of Americans – understands by patriotism: a willingness to do just about anything to advance the interests of the United States and decimate its enemies”:
Cheney’s hardly the first person to defend such a position. Machiavelli advocated a version of it in The Prince. It’s been favored by some of the most ruthless nationalists and totalitarians in modern history. And it’s expressed in Book 1 of Plato’s Republic by the character Polemarchus (the name means “leader in battle”), who defines justice as helping friends (fellow citizens) and harming enemies (anyone who poses a threat to the political community). This is what patriotism looks like when it’s cut off from any notion of a higher morality that could limit or rein it in. All that counts is whether an action benefits the political community. Other considerations, moral and otherwise, are irrelevant.
The problem with this view, which Socrates soon gets Polemarchus to see, is that amoral patriotism is indistinguishable from collective selfishness. It turns the political community into a gang of robbers, a crime syndicate like the mafia, that seeks to advance its own interests while screwing over everyone else. If such behavior is wrong for an individual criminal, then it must also be wrong for a collective.
Chait helpfully dismantles Cheney’s defense of torture. And Waldman focuses on his refusal to define the term:
[E]ven after this repeated questioning, we still don’t know how Dick Cheney or any other torture advocate defines it. Why not? It seems pretty clear. There is simply no definition that anyone could devise that wouldn’t apply to things like stress positions or waterboarding. Try to imagine one. Torture is the infliction of severe physical or mental suffering to obtain information or a confession — but only if it leaves a mark? Or only if it’s done by non-Americans? Any such definition would be absurd on its face.
So when people like Cheney are asked what the definition of torture is, they say, “September 11!” When asked what definition of torture wouldn’t apply to the particular techniques the CIA employed, they just repeat, “We didn’t torture” over and over. They not only defend torture as a means of obtaining intelligence, they sing its praises and insist that it was spectacularly successful, all without having the courage to call the thing by its true and only name.
Froomkin is concerned that, for Cheney, his Meet The Press appearance “was still a win – at least in the short term, until history passes a more considered verdict”:
Because our elite political media is unwilling to call out the morally abhorrent self-interested ravings of a torturer, Cheney’s statements effectively push the envelope for what is treated as legitimate debate. So while we finally have this long-awaited Senate Intelligence Committee report, full of achingly detailed descriptions of abuse and lies even more depraved and duplicitous than any of us had imagined, the media just sees the “revisiting of a debate” about torture.
Previous Dish on Cheney’s MTP appearance here. Andrew’s take here.
Ruble Trouble, Ctd
Matt O’Brien highlights the latest piece of bad news for the Russian currency:
Russia’s central bank raised interest rates from 10.5 to 17 percent at an emergency 1 a.m. meeting in an attempt to stop the ruble, which is down 50 percent on the year against the dollar, from falling any further. It’s a desperate move to save Russia’s currency that comes at the cost of sacrificing Russia’s economy.
But even that wasn’t enough. After a brief rally, the ruble resumed its cliff-diving ways on Tuesday, falling another 14 percent to a low of 80 rubles per dollar. It was 60 rubles per dollar just the day before. The problem is simple. Oil is still falling, and ordinary Russians don’t want to hold their money in rubles even if they get paid 17 percent interest to do so. In other words, there’s a well-justified panic. So now Russia is left with the double whammy of a collapsing currency and exorbitant interest rates. Checkmate.
Neil Irwin elaborates, pointing out that even the central bank’s attempt to stanch the bleeding is a big risk:
Perhaps the higher interest rates will make those moving money out of Russia think twice, and a resulting reversal in currency markets will lead speculators to conclude that betting against the ruble is no longer a sure thing. But the move shows how Russian policy makers are stuck with no good options. Already the central bank has reportedly been intervening to try to short-circuit the sell-off, buying rubles to try to arrest the declines.
The problem is that if you try to defend your currency and lose, you are essentially throwing your money at currency traders for nothing. As Russia has deployed its reserves to (so far unsuccessfully) stop the currency collapse, it has made traders betting against the ruble richer while leaving the Russian government poorer. Poorer by $80 billion, to be precise.
“Putin’s policy choices in this matter,” Yglesias adds, “have important implications for the distribution of wealth in Russia”:
The collapse in the value of the ruble is a disaster for Russians who have debts denominated in foreign currencies, but it’s not necessarily the worst thing in the world for those who don’t. Indeed, Russians working in tourism (which, admittedly, isn’t that many people since Russia is mostly cold and empty) or in the country’s handful of export industries that aren’t oil and gas actually benefit from a cheap currency. Conversely, much higher interest rates will be devastating to the fortunes of Russians who need to roll over ruble-denominated loans or who depend on rate-sensitive sectors like construction for their employment.
Bershidsky suggests that Moscow’s next step might be to impose capital controls like Malaysia did in 1997. But the really troubling question is what the political implications are. Noah Millman wonders whether a currency crash will be Putin’s downfall, and if so, what happens next:
If an economic meltdown leads to widespread popular discontent, the regime will have to respond in some way. The most appealing way – because the least risky for the regime – would be to stage-manage a change in leadership that promises change while changing very little. But who is Putin’s Putin? Once upon a time, the obvious answer would have been Dmitri Medvedev. But in the wake of his administration, and his agreement to hand the Presidency back to Putin after one term, I’d argue Medvedev is too closely-identified with Putin to be a plausible replacement for the regime in the event of any real discontent. …
If the regime cannot stage a satisfactory bit of theater, then the remaining options are uglier. Putin could deliberately try to provoke the West in the hopes of blaming Russia’s economic troubles on foreigners. Or he could turn force inward against internal “enemies” of Russia. Or the regime could hand Putin’s head to the mob without a clear plan for succession, leading to a period without clear leadership at the top until someone emerges from the internal struggle for power. Least likely of all would be a genuinely revolutionary situation such as obtained in 1991. None of Russia’s organs of power are willing to take that kind of risk again.
Keating fears that the crisis will inspire even more belligerent behavior from the Kremlin:
Putin can’t do much of anything about oil prices and any steps to cooperate with NATO to secure sanctions relief will make him look weak. There’s a fair chance, then, that he may actually escalate tensions to get back the rally-round-the-flag effect that has sustained his popularity through the Ukraine crisis. Russian jets continue to buzz the airspace of NATO countries, and the military recently carried out snap drills in Russia’s westernmost region, Kaliningrad. This doesn’t look like a leader on the verge of de-escalating.
December 15, 2014
The Best Of The Dish Today
And the best Christmas card ever:
Andrew is off the blog for the week, but he may pop on to write a post or two on the torture report (his parting takedown of Cheney is here if you missed it). To help in his absence are guest-bloggers Michelle Dean and Will Wilkinson, whose introductory posts are here and here, respectively. Michelle today invoked her time as a corporate litigator to scrutinize the Sony hacking story and then commented on a few drunken Santas harassing a Garner/Brown protest. Will, meanwhile, tackled the SCOTUS ruling that just gave cops even more discretion to detain, search, and arrest people.
The most popular posts of the day remained Andrew’s takedowns of Dick Cheney on Meet the Press and Fox News. A reader’s take:
Dick Cheney is not a psychopathic evil “sith lord”; he is a moral relativist, which is actually much worse. If he were the former, it would be far easier for him to be sidelined by the press and all people of good conscience the way serial killers are. The right is so quick to claim their moral authority based on the Founding Fathers and their interpretation of the Constitution. In this context, it’s important to remember that George Washington was no moral relativist, when speaking about how the Continental Army should respond to rumors of British bayonetings at the Battle of Paoli:
Treat them with humanity, and let them have no reason to complain of our copying the brutal example of the British Army in their treatment of our unfortunate brethren who have fallen into their hand.
Many recent posts were updated with your emails – read them all here. You can always leave your unfiltered comments at our Facebook page and @dishfeed. Gift subscriptions are available here (you purchase one today and have it auto-delivered on Christmas Day). Dish t-shirts are for sale here and our new mugs here. 25 more readers became subscribers today. You can join them here – and get access to all the readons and Deep Dish – for a little as $1.99 month. A new subscriber writes:
Although a Northern CA lefty, I began reading the Dish before Obama’s first election. I was impressed by your dedicated adherence to “balanced” discussions and the willingness to expose epistemic closure. I have felt guilty for not subscribing before, but signed up to quantify my support of your stance on the historically significant damages this dark episode of torture has done to our nation.
Although an Obama supporter, I have, from the start of his administration – to the revulsion of my friends – decided that his unwillingness to even consider bringing to trial those responsible for this horror will far out weigh his accomplishments. My perspective on this comes from my 27 years as part of a nonprofit aiding veterans and their families from the generational impact of service to this country. The craven destruction of America’s code of honor regarding the treatment of our enemies has removed the shield that may protect our military personnel from comparable base and depraved actions when captured.
For that alone, even if they never face the justice they deserve, Cheney and all of the architects deserve, and, I believe, will be remembered as the true traitors to this country. Keep up the great work.
See you in the morning.
No Such Thing As A Good War
With an eye toward recent history, Geoffrey Wheatcroft assails the usual distinctions made between the First and Second World Wars, asserting that “we have returned to fighting a kind of war grimly prefigured not by the supposedly evil Great War but instead by the seemingly noble Good War”:
The myth of the Bad War and the Good War has become very dangerous, insofar as it has conditioned our attitude to war as a whole. The notion that the second world war was finer and nobler than the first is highly dubious in itself, since it sanitises so much, from the slaughter of civilians by Allied bombing to the gang rape of millions of women by our Russian allies at the moment of victory.
And it may be that the sanctification of the later war has had more pernicious consequences than the anathematisation of the former. Any argument that the Great War was uniquely wicked and wasteful is plainly false in statistical terms, and the idea that the Good War was uniquely noble is absurd in view of its moral ambiguities.
Worse than that, the glorification of the second world war has had practical and baleful consequences. It has led us to an easier acceptance of “liberal interventionism”, founded on the assumption that we in the west are alone virtuous and qualified to distinguish political right from wrong – and the conviction that our self-evidently virtuous ends must justify whatever means we employ, lighting up a bomber flare path from Dresden to Baghdad to Tripoli.
(Photo of a pile of bodies awaiting cremation in Dresden, Germany, after Allied bombing in 1945, via Wikimedia Commons)
The Pursuit Of Happiness Leads To The Suburbs
Ben Schiller runs down the research of Stephan Goetz, who tracked “the number of days people said they were in a negative mood” on a county-by-county basis:
Goetz says suburban counties tend to be happier than urban or rural ones, and that non-white counties tend to be happier than whiter ones. People were also happier when they commuted less, moved homes less often, and lived in places deemed to have more closely-knit communities (higher levels of “social capital”).
For example, a 1% increase in the share of non-whites in a county reduced the average number of poor mental health days by 0.08%—which is actually a larger number than it might seem, when you consider the whole country. “After controlling for other factors including income, educational attainment, place of residence, commuting time, social capital, there is still a residual, unexplained factor that leaves whites a little bit less happy than non-whites,” Goetz says via email. “One possible factor that may explain this difference could be religious adherence, to the extent that it varies between whites and non-whites.”
(Image: the results of Goetz’s study plotted on a map of the United States, with the highest number of “poor mental health days” in red and the lowest in green.)
Face Of The Day
One of the hostages runs towards police from a cafe in the central business district of Sydney on December 15, 2014. By Saeed Khan/AFP/Getty Images.
A Wish List For Wall Street
Michael Lewis created an amusing one. Near the top of it:
No person under the age of 35 will be allowed to work on Wall Street.
Upon leaving school, young people, no matter how persuasively dimwitted, will be required to earn their living in the so-called real economy. Any job will do: fracker, street performer, chief of marketing for a medical marijuana dispensary. If and when Americans turn 35, and still wish to work in finance, they will carry with them memories of ordinary market forces, and perhaps be grateful to our society for having created an industry that is not subjected to them. At the very least, they will know that some huge number of people — their former fellow street performers, say — will be seriously pissed off at them if they do risky things on Wall Street to undermine the real economy. No one wants a bunch of pissed-off street performers coming after them.
The Whole Sontag
Reviewing the new documentary, Regarding Susan Sontag, J. Bryan Lowder argues that it demonstrates how much of her swagger was a “carefully (and wisely, for a woman in a man’s trade) crafted façade, behind which lived and wrote a person who, despite the kind of career most writers can only dream about, felt as inadequate as the rest of us”:
That Sontag harbored such self-doubt can almost feel offensive—such as when a confidant reveals to the director that, after publishing the remarkable book On Photography, Sontag could only worry that it wasn’t as good as Walter Benjamin’s work.
But if you can get past that initial bristling response, Kates’ documentary offers fascinating and crucial insight into the psychology and motivations of one of the previous century’s greatest, and most mercurial, thinkers. Indeed, the film is so attentive to Sontag’s personal life, so committed to pushing past her decades-long PR campaign, that at moments it felt like a violation. But then, there’s something important about placing the kind of person who is more-than-willing to pronounce upon everyone and everything else under a similar scrutiny, something irresistible in regarding the critic, the figure whose job description is to regard the rest of the world.
And what does Kates see when she looks at Sontag? For one thing, she discovers a woman whose sexuality clearly informed her orientation to culture and who yet declined to directly come out as queer (some oblique textual gestures aside). Though the film is not exactly angry about this omission, it refuses to respect it, dedicating a considerable portion of the run-time to interviews with Sontag’s many female partners and lovers.
The Economist‘s Y.F. has more on Sontag’s sexuality:
While on a fellowship at Oxford in her early 20s, Sontag made her first trip to Paris, where in the 1950s so much of America’s avant garde seemed to find a natural home. Harriet Sohmers Zwerling, the writer’s first lover, accompanied her to France and recounts that the day before they were due to host an expat party she punched Sontag in a jealous rage. At the party, noticing Sontag’s bruise, Allen Ginsberg asked Zwerling, “Why’d you hit her, she’s younger and prettier than you.” Zwerling replied, “That’s why.” Sontag possessed a magnetism that even in their moments of greatest candour the film and the people in it—some of them deeply hurt by her—seem unable to withstand.
While much has been made of Sontag’s desire to remain private about her sexuality, she also wrote about it often and gave it an enshrined place in her life and intellectual development. Wayne Koestenbaum, a writer, wryly sums the situation in the film: “Does the author of ‘Notes on Camp’ have to come out?” The film takes us through her experiences as a very young undergraduate in Berkeley and San Francisco in the late 1940s, discovering the area’s underground queer culture and her own place within it. “Everything begins from now…I am reborn,” she writes, “I have been given permission to live…” Of its connection to her writing she observed, “My desire to write is connected to my homosexuality. I need the identity as a weapon to match the weapon that society has against me. I am just becoming aware of how guilty I feel being queer.”
How Much Would It Cost To Make Higher Education Free?
Andrew Ross calculates it:
Several estimates are now in circulation, and Robert Samuels’s 2013 book Why Public Higher Education Should Be Free presents the most detailed proposal. According to the most-recent calculations of Strike Debt, the debt-resistance group I work with, the cost would be relatively modest. The federal loan program is propped up by a motley assortment of subsidies and tax exemptions that amount to tens of billions of dollars. Strip these away, along with some other unjustifiable subsidies (GI Bill benefits and Pell Grants that are gobbled up by fraudulent for-profit colleges) and the cost to the government of public college would be as low as $15 billion in additional annual spending. That is little more than a line item in the defense budget, and a small price to pay for meeting the challenge of the 21st-century knowledge economy.
Tough In Advertising
Christie Thompson flags findings on the impact of judicial campaign ads:
A growing body of research suggests that soft-on-crime attack ads may be changing how judges rule on criminal cases. In the American Constitution Society’s study of state-supreme-court races, Emory University law professors Joanna Shepherd and Michael Kang concluded that the more TV ads aired, the less likely individual justices are to side with a defendant. The impact was fairly small but statistically significant, showing that doubling the number of TV ads in a state with 10,000 ads increased the likelihood of a vote for a prosecutor by an average of about 8 percent. … Previous studies have found that Pennsylvania judges handed out longer sentences as an election approached, and that Kansas judges chosen in partisan elections gave harsher punishments than those who kept their seats in nonpartisan retention elections.
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