Andrew Sullivan's Blog, page 66

On Quitting The Radical Left

A blast of sanity and intellectual honesty:

I don’t have any criticism for radical leftism in general, at least not here, not today. What I feel compelled to criticize is only one very specific political phenomenon, one particular incarnation of radical leftist, anti-oppressive politics.

There is something dark and vaguely cultish about this particular brand of politics. I’ve thought a lot about what exactly that is. I’ve pinned down four core features that make it so disturbing: dogmatism, groupthink, a crusader mentality, and anti-intellectualism. I’ll go into detail about each one of these. The following is as much a confession as it is an admonishment. I will not mention a single sin that I have not been fully and damnably guilty of in my time.

First, dogmatism.

One way to define the difference between a regular belief and a sacred belief is that people who hold sacred beliefs think it is morally wrong for anyone to question those beliefs. If someone does question those beliefs, they’re not just being stupid or even depraved, they’re actively doing violence. They might as well be kicking a puppy. When people hold sacred beliefs, there is no disagreement without animosity. In this mindset, people who disagreed with my views weren’t just wrong, they were awful people. I watched what people said closely, scanning for objectionable content. Any infraction reflected badly on your character, and too many might put you on my blacklist. Calling them ‘sacred beliefs’ is a nice way to put it. What I mean to say is that they are dogmas.

The author is not just whining; she’s making the case for an alternative form of leftism, and revels in the new freedom after leaving this cult behind:

The aftermath was wonderful. A world that seemed grey and hopeless filled with colour. I can’t convey to you how bleak my worldview was. An activist friend once said to me, with complete sincerity, “Everything is problematic.” That was the general consensus. Far bleaker was something I said during a phone call to an old friend who lived in another city, far outside my political world. I, like a disproportionate number of radical leftists, was depressed, and spent a lot of time sighing into the receiver. “I’m not worried about you killing yourself,” he said. “I know you want to live forever.” I let out a weak, sad laugh. “When I said that,” I replied, “I was a lot happier than I am now.” Losing my political ideology was extremely liberating. I became a happier person. I also believe that I became a better person.

Know hope.

It Doesn’t Pay To Be A Millennial

Danielle Kurtzleben explains why more education hasn’t meant higher incomes:

The Census Bureau [on Thursday] released new data from its American Communities Survey, showing that today’s 18-to-34-year-olds are earning less today than the same age group in 1980, 1990, or 2000. …

[E]veryone thinks of college as the ticket to prosperity, so America’s young people have increasingly invested in college degrees. And it’s true that those graduates are doing way better than those without degrees, both in terms of income and employability. But it’s mostly paying off because the economic situation just keeps getting worse for people with only a high school diploma. For millennials, this means investing four or more years, plus tens of thousands of dollars, to get a degree whose value isn’t really increasing much. The whole generation has been stuck on a sort of cruel economic treadmill: working harder and harder without really getting much further ahead.

Derek Thompson also absorbs the Census findings:

In retail, wholesale, leisure, and hospitality—which together employ more than one quarter of this age group—real wages have fallen more than 10 percent since 2007.

To be clear, this doesn’t mean that most of this cohort are seeing their pay slashed, year after year. Instead it suggests that wage growth is failing to keep up with inflation, and that, as twentysomethings pass into their thirties, they are earning less than their older peers did before the recession. …

Why are real wages falling across so many fields for young workers? The Great Recession devastated demand for hotels, amusement parks, and many restaurants, which explains the collapse in pay across those industries. As the ranks of young unemployed and underemployed Millennials pile up, companies around the country know they can attract applicants without raising starter wages.

But there’s something deeper, too. The familiar bash brothers of globalization and technology (particularly information technology) have conspired to gut middle-class jobs by sending work abroad or replacing it with automation and software. A 2013 study by David Autor, David Dorn, and Gordon Hanson found that although the computerization of certain tasks hasn’t reduced employment, it has reduced the number of decent-paying, routine-heavy jobs. Cheaper jobs have replaced them, and overall pay has declined.

The Ongoing Garner Tragedy: Your Thoughts

I can’t drive? some 2,000 Eric Garner protestors shut down Interstate 80 for hours Monday night – http://t.co/qf4kV2HevC

— Mashable (@mashable) December 9, 2014

Readers push back on these two:

Your dissenter said, “…while Garner is still conscious and speaking, tries to restrain him by holding his head in place.” Yeah, he was speaking alright. He was speaking, “I can’t breathe!” What the part of that does this reader not understand?

Another also quotes that reader:

It is hard to tell from the video, but it does not appear to me that the officer continued to apply the “chokehold” (a label that may have been inaccurately applied to this case) after Garner said he could not breathe. It looks to me as if that officer grabs him around the neck for only a few seconds, and then, while Garner is still conscious and speaking, tries to restrain him by holding his head in place.

The autopsy report stated that the death was caused by “compression to the neck, compression to the body, and prone positioning”. It doesn’t matter that the officer stopped choking him, because he continued to hold him down.

An expert weighs in:

I’m coming from the viewpoint of being a retired paramedic with over 20 years experience, the last few in executive level management. I also have a blue belt in Brazilian jiu-jitsu, so I am familiar with applying and receiving choke holds.

My impression of the takedown and restraint is that he was one big guy and that the choke hold was never fully applied. If it was, he would have been rendered unconscious in a matter of seconds. I also noticed that before and after he was handcuffed, he did not receive any sucker punches or kicks.

On to the medical care, an area that I can speak about with some authority. The police have received plenty of criticism about letting him lay until the ambulance arrived. Well if you are someone with basic first aid training, there is nothing you can do for a person in respiratory distress except keep a eye on them. I counted two to four officers with him until EMS arrived, so they were doing that.

Why no CPR? Because he had a pulse and was breathing. CPR is only for pulseless and non-breathing patients. The female EMS worker is clearly shown checking for a pulse and we can safely assume breathing in the second video. Even though I see plenty to criticize about the EMS response, I would think they are competent enough to start CPR immediately if indicated.

My criticism of the EMS response shown in the video is the cursory initial examination, were they seemed to have missed how severe his distress was. I would have liked to seen at least oxygen being administer in the video. Perhaps his care improved once they got him into the ambulance, but it seems not as I have read that the EMS workers had been suspended.

Lastly, how they manhandled him onto the stretcher. It wasn’t pretty, but I have seen worse. Picking up a limp human being of his size without manhandling him is very difficult without the right techniques and equipment. It has nothing to do with the color of his skin. My best case would have been to log-roll him onto a backboard and to lift him using the backboard onto the stretcher. My impression was that the EMS workers failed to properly control and supervise the lift of him from the ground to the stretcher. It happens sometimes. The firemen or in this case the policemen start moving the patient on their own.

Another reader:

I’ve been talking through the case with an acquaintance of mine in law enforcement, and he pointed out to me that, when the decision to arrest is made, you escalate force to whatever level is necessary to get the suspect into custody. You can’t just back out if you’re overmatched. You get backup, and you’re bound by procedure to continue to increase force until the cuffs are on. People who resist arrest can die; it’s a possible outcome. You can debate the chokehold versus the headlock, but the scenario could just as easily have resulted in a routine arrest.

So maybe the fault lies with Pantaleo’s decision to arrest on such a small misdemeanor, and/or the fault lies with Garner resisting. I keep thinking that there must’ve been an alternative to arrest for such a petty crime, but Garner had 31 priors, so it would seem a justifiable arrest. But they could have just told him to move along and revisited the scene later to see if that was sufficient.

If there is a racial issue here, it’s a systemic one. It’s just another example of black petty criminals being singled out. Garner was basically evading taxes in a city where tax evasion is a competitive sport in lower Manhattan among white collar criminals. Is that fair? No, but beat cops can’t arrest what they can’t witness. They had shop owner complaints about Garner, supposedly, so they were responding to that.

Another notes:

Garner wasn’t selling anything that day, and had no loosies on him. Did he have a record? Yes, but so did the officer:

Pantaleo was the subject of two civil rights lawsuits in 2013 where plaintiffs accused Pantaleo of falsely arresting them and abusing them. In one of the cases, Pantaleo and other officers ordered two black men to strip naked on the street for a search and the charges against the men were dismissed.

Another wrote just prior to this post showing similar polling to the ones he cites below:

I wrote on Friday to indicate I expected a slew of polling early this week backing up my assertion that the Eric Garner grand jury decision would polarize the electorate along more or less the same racial lines that the Ferguson case did. I predicted that the videotape would make little difference to whites who were using a popular racial narrative (thug vs. hero) as a lens through which to view this and other deadly encounters like the Ohio John Crawford and Tamir Rice shootings.

I stand corrected, at least at this juncture. Polling from Fox News and Bloomberg seems to indicate a much more lopsided view of the Garner killing, with less than half the number (Bloomberg) of Americans supporting the Garner decision as supported the Ferguson decision. It is true that a disturbing 32% of white Americans still, in the face of that video, support the grand jury in Staten Island. But 32% is close enough to South Park’s famous “a quarter of Americans are retards” trope to safely choose to draw no conclusions from that result.

It remains to be seen whether this is truly some kind of watershed moment, or if Eric Garner will join Sandy Hook in the annals of public tragedies that compel the spilling of much ink, and then no corrective action whatsoever. But if the polling had come out as I expected I would have been back here banging out a smug email regarding my prescient pessimism, so honesty demands I eat my portion of crow. Rarely have I been so happy to be so wrong. Thanks.

Another reader:

Regarding your take on the Washington Post poll of opinions towards each decision:

This suggests, does it not, that the gloomiest assessments of America’s ability to see through race are too dire. If we were truly racially polarized, we’d see similar responses to similar white-cop-black-victim scenarios. Which means we have some common ground to stand on.

You’re making a giant leap here, in my opinion. You’re conflating peoples opinion on a decision regarding excessive force by law enforcement, not racial bias. I would like to see the opinions on whether these people believe race played a part in either of these acts. I’ve had several debates with conservative friends who strongly disagree with the Garner decision, but think race had absolutely nothing to do with it. So I don’t think this speaks to your note about America’s ability to see through race.

One more:

I’ve been a NYC prosecutor for just under ten years. When I heard there was no indictment I was shocked, and I said at the time to a colleague that I certainly would have found something to charge those guys with based on those facts and with that video. The big story that I’m not seeing as widely reported as it should be is that it turned out that the Staten Island DA didn’t present any of the lesser charges. No one is saying that they tried to murder Garner, but I’d bet that even a Grand Jury in conservative Staten Island would vote for an indictment on Reckless Endangerment as a misdemeanor and probably as a felony. Just not presenting these counts is beyond not doing your job; it’s making sure that there is no indictment, and that seems very irresponsible to me.

Read all of our coverage of the Garner tragedy here.

The Best Of The Dish Today

One thing we’ve learned these past few weeks is that seeing something with your own eyes can make all the difference. Watching what happened to Eric Garner forced us to reconsider the aggression of current policing protocols in ways that no abstract argument could. And seeing what is actually done to pigs and chickens in the factory farms protected by Chris Christie and others removes any doubt about the industrial-level barbarism involved. The same can be said of the leaked photos from Abu Graib, or video footage of Hamas planting rockets in civilian neighborhoods. That’s why there such enormous resistance to letting the sunlight in. That’s why Big Agriculture has made it a crime in many states to record the systematic abuses they inflict. And why the CIA’s Jose Rodriguez decided to destroy the videotaped evidence of the brutal torture he authorized and now defends.

Tomorrow, we may find out what the CIA was saying to itself as it committed war crimes around the world with total impunity. But we won’t get images. The best images you’ll get from GTMO are from Google Earth. But we can still get images of the force-feeding done to other prisoners at the Cuban gulag. We have videos. They have been used in court. And the Pentagon – surprise! – is dead set against releasing them. Why? For the same reason the CIA doesn’t want the torture report to be published. It will “inflame world opinion”. Murtaza Hussein explains:

In a seven page affidavit made public last week and first reported by the Miami Herald’s Carol Rosenberg, [U.S. Navy Rear Admiral Sinclair] Harris explained the reasoning for keeping the videos out of public view:

“While the videos at issue…do not in my opinion depict any improper treatment of the detainees, but rather the lawful, humane and appropriate interaction between guards and detainees, persons and entities hostile to the United States and its detention of enemy belligerents at Guantánamo Bay are likely to think otherwise.”

To put Harris’s statement another way, the force-feeding videos are at once humane and appropriate, and yet also so visually appalling that people around the world would be enraged if allowed to view them.

Yes, that’s about right. And Rodriguez both argues that the waterboarding of terror suspects was both humane and utterly in line with civilized norms … but for some inexplicable reason he destroyed the evidence anyway. My view is that it should not matter what the rest of the world thinks, when it comes to the internal workings of American democracy. The American people have a right to know what is being done in their name on highly controversial and contested questions. If the CIA and Pentagon have nothing to hide, they have nothing to fear. I think they’re familiar with that line of argument, don’t you?

Today, I previewed how president Bush has decided to go all-in on defending torture on his watch. And after all, he’s in agreement with Obama on one core issue: war criminals were “patriots.” American patriotism, for both presidents, is a defense for war crimes. It doesn’t get more sickening than that.

We also covered the zeal with which many left-feminists sought to demonize any skeptics of the UVA rape story; and tried to get a handle on what the actual statistics on campus rape can and cannot tell us. We lamented the demise of the media moguls, happy to lose bucket-loads of money on influential and erudite journals of opinion; and worried about the fate of liberal arts journalism as a whole. Plus: the disruptive market power of kitty litter!

The most popular post of the day was The Torture Defenders Fan Out; followed by Liberalism, Conservatism, Skepticism.

If you want to help keep this blog alive, and haven’t yet subscribed, please do here. It matters for all the reasons above. If you have, thank you – and you can help some more by buying a Christmas gift subscription for a friend or family member, or by buying our new coffee mug. Don’t let us go the way of TNR!

And on that, slightly desperate note, see you in the morning.

(Photo: People push a car stuck on the A93 Braemar to Glenshee road as snow is forecast for much of the UK on December 8, 2014. The Met Office yellow ‘Be Aware’ warning remains in place across the country, with drivers struggling with snow fall overnight. By Jeff J Mitchell/Getty Images.)

Faces Of The Day

A Muslim Shiite pilgrim carries a religious flag displaying Imam Hussein in Baghdad, on December 8, 2014, as they walk to Karbala for the Arbaeen religious festival. Arbaeen marks the 40th day after Ashura and commemorate the seventh century killing of Prophet Mohammed’s grandson, Imam Hussein. By Ahmad Al-Rubaye/AFP/Getty Images.

Did Sweden Opening Its Borders Backfire?

In the wake of the Swedish government collapsing last week, Leonid Bershidsky reflects on the role played by anti-immigration sentiment:

Contributing to the crisis was the government’s decision to grant immediate residency to refugees from the Syrian conflict. Last year, Sweden took in a record 86,700 immigrants, the biggest number for a European Union country relative to its population, according to a recently released report by the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development.

In part thanks to the EU’s free movement policy, in part because of the political establishment’s liberal values, European countries take in large numbers of immigrants. The U.S. only allowed in the equivalent of 0.3 percent of its population last year, compared with 0.9 percent for Sweden, 0.8 percent for Austria and 0.5 percent each for Germany, the U.K. and Spain. In absolute numbers, Germany, the U.K., France and Sweden together took in more immigrants than the U.S., though their combined population is 30 percent smaller.

Kaj Leers sizes up the situation:

A social problem is brewing in Sweden. The country has thus far been very welcoming to refugees from wartorn countries such as Syria. Former Prime Minister Fredrik Reinfeldt roused Swedes when he bluntly stated that Sweden should accept more asylum seekers, regardless of popular opinion. The Scandinavian country, however, seems stuck in the 1990s.

It continues to accept refugees from countries with different cultures, but it doesn’t seem to have thought through what to do with them. In 2013, riots hit the Stockholm suburbs, with many cars burnt throughout areas populated by refugees. The main reason: unemployment and frustration. Unemployment among asylum seekers and second-generation immigrants is rampant, and the economy isn’t providing enough jobs for all Swedes. Immigrants seem to be concentrated in small areas, creating pockets of discontent, much like in France.

This kind of discontent has proven to be fertile ground for populist far-right parties like the FPO in Austria, the Front National in France and the PVV in the Netherlands. Stefan Lofven – and anyone else hoping to win Swedish elections set for March 22, 2015 – would to well to heed the lessons of Western Europe of the past 20 years.

Joanna Kakissis reports on the Syrian immigrants in Sweden:

Sodertalje now has five Syrian Orthodox churches, two professional soccer teams, and a TV channel that broadcasts in Neo-Aramaic, Arabic and English to eighty countries. One third of the city’s population — 30,000 out of 90,00 people — now hails from all around the Middle East, says city manager Martin Andreae. … Sodertalje’s unemployment rate is twice as high as Sweden’s national rate. That’s partly because refugees are struggling to learn Swedish, a requirement for a job.

And Kay Hymowitz compares the fate of immigrants to Sweden with those to the US:

For much of modern Scandinavian history, immigration was rare. Those who did move to Stockholm or Oslo came from neighboring or other European countries—places with relatively similar cultural habits and understandings. Prior to the 1980s, for instance, Swedes often viewed the word “immigrant” as meaning Finns who had left the Soviet Union. …

In recent decades, Sweden has seen a large influx of immigrants from Iraq, Afghanistan, Somalia, and other non-Western countries. The Norface Research Programme on Migration finds that the children of uneducated, non-Western parents have considerably less success in school than their native counterparts in Sweden (and Denmark); once again, the gap is wider than that between native and non-Western immigrant students in the United States. Worse, and unlike in the United States, things don’t improve over generations. Many immigrants have arrived too recently to trace their children’s trajectory, but the most recent poverty rates for children with a Turkish background born in Sweden are three times higher than they are for native children. Unemployment and poverty are much higher in the immigrant group. “Poverty in Sweden has taken on an ethnic dimension,” Björn Halleröd, a sociology professor at the University of Gothenburg, told the Local, an English-language Swedish newspaper. Sweden remains egalitarian by international standards, but inequality grew by a third between 1985 and the late 2000s—faster than in any other OECD country.

Update from a reader:

The New Yorker firewalls it, but for subscribers, Jane Kramer’s “The Invandrare” (March 22, 1976, and anthologized in her collection “Unsettling Europe”) is worth directing Dishheads to. The boldface is mine and strikes me as as true of Republican America today as Kramer thought was true of Sweden then. Kramer:

Sweden, of course, is a notoriously provincial country. It has no history of cultural multiplicity and no real tolerance for it, and the stolid conformity that confounds tourists who come expecting a nation of sexy girls and broody, philosophical drinking partners is really a reflection of the Swedes’ profound uneasiness with difference. Sweden may produce its Strindbergs and its suicides, but the Swedes themselves seems to regard genius and madness alike as object lessons in the lamentable inability of some people to suppress their eccentricities and become cheerfully, comfortably, the same as everybody else.

Most Swedes, in fact, protectionist for centuries and secure by now in a benign but stultifying xenophobia, seem to regard foreignness itself as something insulting. Over the past forty years they have adopted the most liberal and humane immigration policies in Europe. But those policies, drafted in the name of the new social-democratic ideology, were based in large part on the conviction that the Swedish character and Swedish values, being the proper character and proper values, would instantly convert any foreigner—and that in admitting foreigners they were really adding to their sparse population hundreds of thousands of potential Swedes.

They had none of the Americans’ hard, practical dread of immigrants, nurtured by long and chaotic experience with melting-pot culture. And they had none of the cynicism about immigrants that a history of colonialism in Africa and Asia had developed in people like the French. The Swedes’ only serious colonial adventure in a millennium was a seven-hundred-year occupation of Finland, right next door. They were certainly not prepared for what they got when they began recruiting invandrare from the Mediterranean, and what they got they found unacceptable. They are uncomfortable with their new prejudice, which they suspect contradicts their image of themselves as flawlessly egalitarian, and so for the most part they do not express it. They simply defend themselves against the presence of so many stubbornly foreign foreigners with a kindly but invincible disregard.

Your Necklace Is At The Printer

LACE introduces architecturally designed, 3D printed jewelry. http://t.co/zOk6NT2Rr8 pic.twitter.com/hQwOzlUgxg

— ForbesLife (@ForbesLife) December 4, 2014

Allison P. Davis covers on a new technique in jewelry-making:

Most interesting … is the technological trick that allows [jeweler Iconery] to sell beautiful, of-the-moment jewelry at relatively cheap prices: They create the pieces on 3-D printers. While the new technology might seem gimmicky, this isn’t the standard Makerbot plastic jewelry.

Iconery utilizes 3-D printers specifically designed for the fine-jewelry industry — that is, the same technology used to create high-end, one-off pieces by Tiffany, Van Cleef, and Cartier. The advanced machinery will allow them to produce even the most intricate and fine micro-pavé pieces on an expedited timeline from their manufacturing headquarters in Los Angeles.

So how does it work for the customer? If all goes well, by customers will be able to customize various pre-set jewelry designs to create pieces that are fashion-forward and affordable. Say you want something like the Hoorsenbuhs ring. You’ll go to the Iconery website — the company is aiming for a spring 2015 launch — and select a design. (On the site, there will be a curated selection of styles from up-and-coming designers, as well as big-name jewelers.) From there, you’ll make choices that determine how much it will cost. For instance, if you know you can’t afford 18-karat gold and white diamonds, select vermeil (sterling silver coated with gold) and white sapphires — it will still feel just you’ve purchased a $6,000 piece, but only set you back $400. And you’ll have it within two weeks.

Quote For The Day II

“By the late 1960s, TNR had long since lost its cachet as the voice of re-invigorated liberalism—a cachet that was perhaps best illustrated when the dashing, young President Kennedy had been photographed boarding Air Force One holding a copy. When he sold the magazine to Peretz, Harrison believed he had secured Peretz’s promise to let him continue to run the magazine for three years. This plan quickly foundered, however, when Peretz got tired of reading rejection notices for articles he hoped to publish in the magazine at the same time he was covering its losses. Soon Harrison’s Queen Anne desk and his John Marin paintings were moved out of the editor’s office. Much of the staff, which then included Walter Pincus, Stanley Karnow, and Doris Grumbach, was either fired or chose to resign. The staffers were largely replaced by young men fresh out of Harvard, with plenty of talent but few journalistic credentials and little sense of the magazine’s place in the history of liberalism,” – Eric Alterman, 2007.

Sound familiar?

(Hat tip: Jesse Walker)

The View From Your Window

Waialua, Hawaii, 12 pm

Just How Common Is Campus Rape?

This is a question on which I am utterly unqualified to offer an opinion. My sex life at college was zero; my sex with women at grad school was not mainly (ahem) at my instigation; and all my boyfriends were off-campus. I knew of no alleged rapes when I was at either place; and have minimal knowledge of the whole heterosexual thing. So what actual solid data do we really have of a crime that is notoriously under-reported and thereby very difficult to assess? Emily Yoffe – in a piece that shows how long-form journalism has a real and vital future online – unpacks it for us. As well as providing chilling evidence of kangaroo courts and procedures, designed to eviscerate any due process for the accused, Yoffe reveals the very thin statistical base on which the left-feminists have launched their crusade. Here, for example, is the author of the study that is used to claim that one in every five female students is raped:

“We don’t think one in five is a nationally representative statistic.” It couldn’t be, he said, because his team sampled only two schools. “In no way does that make our results nationally representative,” Krebs said.

Then this:

The Sexual Victimization of College Women, a 2000 study commissioned by the U.S. Department of Justice, is the basis for another widely cited statistic, even grimmer than the finding of CSA: that one in four college women will be raped. The study itself, however, found a completed rape rate among its respondents of 1.7 percent.

They got to 25 percent by extrapolating that number for five years and doubling it because the survey was conducted in the spring semester:

In a footnote, the authors acknowledge that asserting that one-quarter of college students “might” be raped is not based on actual evidence: “These projections are suggestive. To assess accurately the victimization risk for women throughout a college career, longitudinal research following a cohort of female students across time is needed.” The one-fifth to one-quarter assertion would mean that young American college women are raped at a rate similar to women in Congo, where rape has been used as a weapon of war.

Are American campuses as dangerous for women as war-torn Congo? To express any skepticism about this is to be a rape-denialist or a rape-truther. But the inviolate truth of one in five women raped on campus requires no skepticism at all.