Andrew Sullivan's Blog, page 70

Dissents Of The Day

A rare sentiment from the in-tray:

I am having trouble understanding why you and many of my friends are so exercised about this case. Yes, it is a tragic accident, but, when I watch the video, I don’t see a murder, or even manslaughter. What I see is a big man resisting arrest and a police officer trying to restrain him. 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.

There have been a lot of comments online about whether the officer should have been trying to arrest someone for selling “loosies” on the street. The fault for that doesn’t lie with the officer, but the politicians who wrote the law and the officer’s superiors who insist that the law be enforced in this particular way. Imagine you’re that officer, and your job is to arrest someone twice your size who is resisting arrest. How would you do it? Pepper spray or a taser? We know how controversial that is. Is it fair to send this guy to jail for honestly trying to do his job? I don’t think so.

Another reader quotes me:

But there was no way to interpret [Megyn] Kelly’s coverage as anything but the baldest racism I’ve seen in a while on cable news. Her idea of balance was to interview two, white, bald, bull-necked men to defend the cops, explain away any concerns about police treatment and to minimize the entire thing. Truly, deeply disgusting.

I didn’t see Kelly that day. But I caught her show yesterday and she was very forthright in condemning the police. The only point she made is that she didn’t see proof that the excessive force used against Garner was motivated by racism. I tend to agree with her.

The police made clear their intent to arrest Garner for legitimate, albeit minor reasons. At that point Garner started arguing loudly, and he clearly had no intention of submitting. If he was going to be arrested, it was going to involve a struggle. He pretty much said exactly that.

I don’t know what the law is regarding the rights of people about arrested to quarrel with the cops, or physically resist. But I do know, from a purely common sense standpoint, that there’s no way to win that fight. You can’t argue with cops. Talk yes, argue no. If you argue like Garner did, you’re going to jail no matter what race you are.

I believe a white, Asian, or Hispanic male (of his size) would have been treated the same way. Maybe that’s wrong, but that’s the way it is. Everyone knows it. I’ve never understood why a lot of black men don’t get this fairly ordinary bit of common sense. Given the minor nature of the charges, Garner might have been able to talk his way out of arrest. But the minute he raised his voice, he was headed for the station. Most likely he would have been i-bonded out soon after arrival.

Of course, nothing excuses the subsequent use of clearly excessive force.

Will The Torture Report Be Buried After All?

This is an outrage:

Secretary of State John Kerry personally phoned Dianne Feinstein, chairman of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, Friday morning to ask her to delay the imminent release of her committee’s report on CIA torture and rendition during the George W. Bush administration, according to administration and Congressional officials. Kerry was not going rogue — his call came after an interagency process that decided the release of the report early next week, as Feinstein had been planning, could complicate relationships with foreign countries at a sensitive time and posed an unacceptable risk to U.S. personnel and facilities abroad.

First, the Obama administration set up a white-wash, in the form of the Durham investigation; then they sat back as the CIA tried to sabotage the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence; then Obama’s chief of staff prevented the report’s publication for months, by insisting on redactions of the report to the point of it being near-unintelligible; and now, with mere days to go, the administration suddenly concludes that a factual accounting of this country’s descent into barbarism poses “an unacceptable risk” to US personnel abroad. Now, after this report has been stymied for two years; now, just days before its scheduled publication; now, because if the administration can prevent its publication this month, they know full well that the Republicans who will control the committee in January will bury the evidence of grotesque and widespread torture by the US for ever.

Of course this complicates relationships with foreign countries; of course it guts any remaining credibility on human rights the US has; of course the staggering brutality endorsed by the highest echelons in American government will inflame American enemies and provoke disbelief across the civilized world. But that’s not the fault of the report; it’s the fault of the torture regime and its architects, many of whom have continued to operate with total impunity under president Obama.

Make no mistake about it: if this report is buried, it will be this president who made that call, and this president who has allowed this vital and minimal piece of accountability to be slow-walked to death and burial, and backed the CIA every inch of the way. But notice also the way in which Kerry’s phone-call effectively cuts the report off at its knees. If it is released, Obama will be able to say he tried to stop it, and to prevent the purported damage to US interests and personnel abroad. He will have found a way to distance himself from the core task of releasing this essential accounting. And he will have ensured that the debate over it will be about whether the report is endangering Americans, just as the Republican talking points have spelled out, rather than a first step to come to terms with the appalling, devastating truth of what the American government has done.

I’m genuinely shocked by this last-minute attempt to bury the truth. Does anyone doubt that one agency in that inter-agency review is the CIA itself? And can anyone seriously believe that if this moment passes, we will ever know what happened? I have confidence in Senator Feinstein’s backbone on this. I wish I had confidence in the president’s.

So let me make one last appeal: Mr President, make the right call. Release the report. Let the facts be in the sunlight. It’s what you promised. And it’s the least this country deserves.

Update from a reader:

I think you may be interested in what Democratic Senator Mark Udall told Esquire in an interview conducted on November 21 and scheduled to run in the January 2015 issue. Esquire decided to release a portion of it today:

… obviously, if it’s not released, then I’m gonna use every power I have, because it’s too important. It’s too historic. And we can’t afford to repeat the mistakes to let this slide.

(Photo by Charles Ommanney/Getty Images)

Going Public

Freddie finds that “we should start to think of crowdfunding as another failed example of turning activities that previously required expertise over to the broader public, and with awful consequences”:

After all, crowdfunding is a type of crowdsourcing; what’s being crowdsourced is the gatekeeping functions that investors and organizations used to perform. The essential work isn’t just sorting through various projects and determining which are cool or desirable, but determining if they’re responsible and plausible — capable of being successfully pulled off by the people proposing them, within the time frames and budgets stipulated.

It turns out that most people are not good at that. But then, why would they be? Why would the average person be good at fulfilling that function? Where does that faith come from? There are so many places where we’ve turned over functions once performed by experts to amateurs, and we’re consistently surprised that it doesn’t work out.

401(k)s aren’t crowdsourced, exactly, but they exist thanks to a choice to turn over control of retirement funds to individuals away from managers, in the pursuit of fees, of course. The results have been brutal. But why wouldn’t they be brutal? Why would you expect every random person on the street to have a head for investment in that sense?

Face Of The Day

Large inflatable rabbit sculptures go on display at the Southbank Centre on December 4, 2014 in London, England. The seven metre high inflatable sculptures by Australian artist Amanda Parer entitled ‘ Intrude’ form part of the Southbank Centre’s Winter Festival which opened in November and runs until January 11, 2015. By Peter Macdiarmid/Getty Images.

Getting Out The Vote By Any Means Necessary

Tomasky ponders the Republicans’ midterm advantage:

The turnout problem, I suspect, runs deeper than the message of the moment. Republican voters, being older and somewhat wealthier and more likely to own property, are more apt to see politics as a continuing conflict of interests that roll over from one election to the next—they can always be convinced that some undeserving person is coming to take away what they’ve earned. Voters who are overall younger and have fewer assets are less likely to view politics in such stark terms. The thundering high and crashing low of these voters’ experience with Obama—“I had such hope in him, I thought he could really change things”—reflect this.

Ambinder wonders if Dems will come “to view the Republicans like the Republicans view the Democrats: as an enemy”:

For good-government, consensus, let’s-get-along, politics-can-be-pure types, this is a horrible message. Can it be true that the only way for Democrats to vote their true strength is to treat the opposing party just as poorly as the opposing party treats the Democrats? Can it be true that the only way to break the logjam is to embrace a politics that is even more loathsome, more unctuous and more uncivil than it is today?nMaybe, yes.

The Parent-Friendship Trap

My single greatest fear about having a kid is that I'm going to have to make friends with other parents. Ugh. jezebel.com/a-guide-to-the…

—
Megan Carmichael (@ThunderTheft) December 02, 2014

Tracy Moore reflects on friendships rooted in parenthood:

I know what you’re thinking: Wow, do I even want to make parent friends!? Aren’t my old regular friends good enough? The answer is: yes you do and no they are not.

Try as your old friends might to adjust to you plus baby, they can and should only have to adjust so much. There is nothing better than commiserating over an annoying teacher or childhood development phase with someone staring it down on the same lack of sleep as you. If you discover that you both actually like even a few of the same new bands, restaurants or movies, lock that shit down. Because when you find other parents who are as laid back as you are (or aren’t), as flexible as you are (or aren’t), and as approximately cool as you are (or aren’t), it’s easy and fun and it reminds you how friendships work anyway: You get together sometimes, you like their company, and it’s pretty fun.

My real advice is this: Stay open-minded, lower your expectations, and remember that it’s really about your kids. So do make the effort to expose yourself and your kid to as many types of people that are out there, while also understanding that if your kid doesn’t like the kids of your parent friends, the whole situation is hosed. Try also to compartmentalize the friendships the way you might “friends with benefits,” aka, “play date with good snacks” or “play date with Pinterest mom” or “playdate with free stock market discussion.”

The View From Your Window

Lower Three Fathom Harbour, Nova Scotia, 3 pm

Thoughts On Affirmative Action, Ctd

Many readers are agitated over this post:

Regarding the comments from the “Asian-American reader and Harvard grad with a JD and MPH” on rhetoric and composition, my field of discourse, I guess I never thought to consider Aristotle, Cicero, Campbell, Blair, John Quincy Adams, Nietzsche, Burke, etc., as “squishy” scholars. I suppose I could make some rude comment about the unenlightened, unethical, anti-humanities discourse of the commentator. However, I will just let his own remarks stand and undermine his own ethos and that of his argument.

Another has Freddie’s back:

I’ve enjoyed the dialogue between you and Freddie deBoer, and I am genuinely conflicted on the merits of the policy in question. While I appreciate your dedication to airing dissents, the recent reply from the Asian-American Harvard grad is both misinformed and mean-spirited toward Freddie. I think it’s worth noting a few things:

1. Freddie’s Ph.D. program in Rhetoric and Composition (he does not yet have his degree) is extremely rigorous and empirical; I’d love for your reader to read this article and explain how it typifies “squishy” humanities thinking: “Evaluating the Comparability of Two Measures of Lexical Diversity”

2. The idea that Freddie can be lumped in with any group of “happy talk” liberals (especially the anti-intellectual strawmen this reader depicts) is pretty laughable.

3. To the larger argument: MIT is about 24% black and Latino and about 24% Asian. CalTech has chosen not to use affirmative action; that’s fine. But it is a choice, and the idea that they would be unable to put together a more diverse class should they choose to do so is not supported by any evidence at all.

4. The final anecdote about the risky brain surgery at the hospital that rewards diversity and not merit is a ridiculous false choice. Your reader went to Harvard, which has been open about trying to diversify its student body since the mid-1940s. Should your reader’s diploma have an asterisk on it? Forget brain surgery – I wouldn’t let this particular reader feed my cat.

Freddie also responds to the Harvard grad, in an email to the Dish:

My research interests are diverse, but most of my time is spent looking at spreadsheets, using algorithms used in natural language processing and corpus linguistics, typing away in R Studio. I do quantitative work, myself, computerized, quantitative work. I personally don’t think that makes my study more rigorous or meaningful, but clearly, the emailer does. Even a minute of genuine research would make this aspect of my research identity clear. Instead, the emailer Googled my name, spent 15 seconds, and did no other research to confirm his or her presumptions. I would call that remarkably lacking in merit, myself.

One more:

Your reader, his credentials aside, seems to forget that his alma matter has, according the US News, the third best chemistry department in the country, the second best physics department, the best biology department, the third best math department, and the seventh best statistics department in the country. Now, while I’m well aware that Cal Tech doesn’t use affirmative action, Harvard seems to be doing just fine using affirmative action, and in some cases, better than Cal Tech. Remember, Cal Tech is the anomaly here – all the Ivies and other elite colleges (MIT, Stanford, etc.) practicing affirmative action admit just as qualified students as Cal Tech, not worse ones. So to come out swinging with an argument that affirmative action is somehow harming scholarship or impeding human progress by prioritizing “jargon and happy-talk” over “traditional notions of academic rigor” is grossly inaccurate.

I also want to tie in this story over at the Upshot about how 80 percent of high-achieving students get into elite colleges. I think it’s important to remember that, while Asian-American students may be “underrepresented” at Harvard, they are not underrepresented in the college-educated population. In fact, the majority of adult Asians have college degrees. So it isn’t as though Asians are systematically being denied higher education in this country – they are in fact achieving it at a greater pace than the rest of us. To abolish affirmative action, aimed to help under-represented minorities in the entire education system, under the guise of helping the group that is honestly exceeding everyone else, seems wrong to me.

Mental Health Break

DJ Earworm works his magic on another year in pop:

Previously posted Earworm here.

The Universal Appeal Of Uber

Felix Salmon sees Uber’s international reach as its key advantage:

This might not be obvious to people in San Francisco, who are spoiled with dozens of hopeful and well-funded startups, many of which are doing much the same thing that Uber is aspiring to. But leave the Bay Area, and the fears and frustrations of trying to get a cab start getting magnified — especially when you’re in a foreign country. The value of Uber is only partially in the service it provides; increasingly, it’s also in the global ubiquity of that service.

I just got back from Rome; I took a standard white cab from the airport, and then took an Uber back to it. The Uber was much a much more pleasant ride, as well as being cheaper. But most importantly, it came without any of the anxieties that generally accompany getting into a stranger’s car in a foreign country. Such anxieties are generally small, in a country like Italy, but even the locals will warn you against hailing a cab in a place like Mexico City.

He remarks that Uber is “the first app which can deliver a three-ton glass-and-steel machine to wherever you happen to be, in any of 200 cities around the world, in minutes”

That’s why Uber’s bulls think of it as a logistics company rather than a taxi company: it’s fundamentally about being able to move things (initially passengers, but that’s already expanding), within city boundaries, with unprecedented levels of efficiency. Most impressively, Uber has managed to do this within a single app: it doesn’t have a different version for every country that it’s in. Anybody with an Uber account, no matter where they’re from, can automatically use Uber in any city in the world where Uber operates. This is non-trivial, and not at all easy to replicate.