Andrew Sullivan's Blog, page 71

Godard’s Eternal Youth

In honor of their centennial, last week TNR reposted a classic 1966 piece by the great critic Pauline Kael. In the essay, she reserves special praise for Jean-Luc Godard, whom she hails as a hero to a new generation of independent-minded filmmakers:

There is a disturbing quality in Godard’s work that perhaps helps to explain why the young are drawn to his films and identify with them, and why so many older people call him a “coterie” artist and don’t think his films are important. His characters don’t seem to have any future. They are most alive (and most appealing) just because they don’t conceive of the day after tomorrow; they have no careers, no plans, only fantasies of the roles they could play, of careers, thefts, romance, politics, adventure, pleasure, a life like in the movies.

Even his world of the future, Alphaville, is, photographically, a documentary of Paris in the present. (All of his films are in that sense documentaries—as were also, and also by necessity, the grade B American gangster films that influenced him.) And even before Alphaville, the people in The Married Woman were already science fiction—so blank and affectless no mad scientist was required to destroy their souls.

His characters are young; unrelated to families and background. Whether deliberately or unconsciously he makes his characters orphans who, like the students in the theaters, feel only attachments to friends, to lovers—attachments that will end with a chance word or the close of the semester. They’re orphans, by extension, in a larger sense, too, unconnected with the world, feeling out of relationship to it. They’re a generation of familiar strangers.

An elderly gentleman recently wrote me, “Oh, they’re such a bore, bore, bore, modern youth!! All attitudes and nothing behind the attitudes. When I was in my twenties, I didn’t just loaf around, being a rebel, I went places and did things. The reason they all hate the squares is because the squares remind them of the one thing they are trying to forget: there is a Future and you must build for it.”

(Video: Trailer for The Married Woman)

GE Brings Vox To Life

The enmeshment of the new media site with corporate interests – in which Vox writes ad-copy for big companies, while also claiming to cover them objectively – is not new to Ezra Klein:

GE provided crucial support for media startup Vox.com, an explanatory-journalism site launched by former Washington Post blogger Ezra Klein, with whom it already had a working relationship. While Mr. Klein was still at the Post, GE courted him and others for a news website and marketing campaign in development. When Mr. Klein left to join Vox, GE and its ad dollars followed. The GE site, launched after Mr. Klein left the Post, aggregated video clips and content featuring the blogger, along with Fox News’s Bret Baier, Politico’s Mike Allen and others, discussing and expounding on the news.

The advertiser had “absolutely zero influence” on Vox.com’s editorial content, said Jim Bankoff, chief executive of parent company Vox Media. But both GE and Vox have a similar audience in mind: young, relatively affluent and policy savvy. For GE, the purpose of the relationship was to get GE in the minds of policy makers and lawmakers on Capitol Hill. “We want to target the DC millennials,” said Linda Boff, who heads GE’s global brand marketing. The Vox sponsorship ended in August.

The merger of corporate interests and what’s left of journalism is only getting deeper. And the younger generation of liberal journalists is leading the way, and is shocked, shocked that anyone might question the appearance of blatant conflicts of interest. But a reader wants to make a distinction:

In your post “Ezra Sells Out“, you seem to be confusing Vox, which is Ezra Klein & Co’s media venture, with Vox Media, the overarching company that owns Vox.com along with a number of other media outlets like Polygon and Curbed.

I don’t disagree with the brunt of your post, but it seems a bit underhanded to title the post “Ezra Sell Out” when it is likely that Ezra Klein probably does not have much agency in the story here. I just think using Ezra’s name here implies that he’s responsible for this, when really this decision is being made by Nelson and Bankoff, who run Vox Media at large.

Fair point. Another reader:

Sure, you may have confused Vox Media with Ezra’s Vox news venture. But perhaps you should dig a bit deeper into Vox Media. Forget the CEO; he’s just a hired gun. Who really owns Vox Media? Who, to put it a better way, is the Andrew Sullivan of the Vox Media empire? Perhaps not Ezra (though both he and Mathew Yglesia are listed on the Vox Media leadership page as Vox Founders) but rather … Jerome “MyDD” Armstrong and Markos “Daily Kos” Moulitsas. For all their screaming, shrieking, progressive liberal “corporations are not people” expose the truth reputations, they ought to know better.

And of course, is it not just a hair bit ironic that in one company you have perhaps the four giants (Kos, MyDD, Ezra, Yglesias) of the early progressive blogosphere? One could only imagine the feigned outrage they would project if, say, Glenn Reynolds and PJ Media started drafting ad copy for the Koch Brothers, Halliburton, and the NRA and then claimed to be completely unbiased.

Meanwhile, it’s worth looking back at our coverage of Vox when it was first announced back in January:

[Vox Media CEO Jim] Bankoff told Ad Age that he has no intention of “tricking anyone” with alternative forms of advertising such as sponsored content or “native” ads — which other new-media growth stories such as BuzzFeed have said they believe are a key part of the future of content. Instead, the Vox CEO said he is counting on Vox’s ability to produce better-quality display ads that will bring in more revenue than the standard banner or site takeover. As he described it:

“We really are in the process of reinventing what brand advertising can be on the web… we believe it can be engaging and beautiful and well integrated [and] fully transparent — we’re not trying to trick anyone like some native ads do…

The beat, it goes on …

The Best Of The Dish Today

Scroll down for some reaction to the decision by a Staten Island Grand Jury not to indict – even for a lower charge of manslaughter – a cop who killed a man for selling loosie cigarettes.

In other news, Republicans now want mass deportation for undocumented immigrants over a path to citizenship – by a 2 – 1 margin. Hillary Clinton’s odds of becoming president remain low. Jeb Bush’s? Much worse than Clinton’s. The British government actually banned spanking in video porn (how will public school boys ever get off?). The CDC continued its aggressive campaign against penises; and Ezra Klein’s Vox announced that, for all the claims about new journalism, it’s actually an advertising agency for big corporations.

The most popular post of the day was Ebola, ISIS, Putin: Meep Meep Watch; followed by Ezra Sells Out. But who in journalism at this point hasn’t?

Many of today’s posts were updated with your emails – read them all here. You can always leave your unfiltered comments at our Facebook page and @sullydish. 22 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. Gift subscriptions are available here. Dish t-shirts are for sale here and our new mugs here. Another happy customer:

Even parrots love the Dish!

See you in the morning.

A Question Of Human Dignity

Harry Siegel has a deeply moving piece about the second tape made of the killing of Eric Garner by the police. What he gets at seems to me extremely important. It’s about the way the cops treated Garner’s inert body on the sidewalk, ordering people to stay away, barely talking to the man whose head they just smashed into the sidewalk, still handcuffed. He gets no CPR and despite being quite obviously in serious distress, he is just left to lie there, occasionally prodded, his dignity stolen, for seven minutes:

A bit later, the cops and medics finally decide to get Garner into an ambulance.

COP: “We’re going to try to get him up on the stretcher. It’s going to take like six of us.”

They hoist him up and literally drop him onto a gurney. Or at least the left side of him. One cop catches his legs falling off. Another holds Garner’s shirt, apparently to keep the rest of him from rolling off the gurney. Garner’s belly is exposed. He appears to be unconscious.

VOICE: “Why nobody do no CPR?”

VOICE: “Nobody did nothing.”

COP (as he walks by): “Because he’s breathing.”

The camera turns to Pantaleo, about 20 feet away. He waves and steps out of the picture. The camera shifts back to Garner strapped to the gurney and being wheeled away …

As he lay dying, he was treated like a piece of meat. By Pantaleo. By the other cops on the scene. Even by the medical technicians. Had Garner been treated with basic human dignity after he was violently, and needlessly, taken down, he might not be dead.

I recall the way in which Michael Brown’s body was left on the street for four hours, as if he were beneath the dignity of an animal.

Bhopal: Still Toxic After All These Years

Yesterday marked the 30th anniversary of the Bhopal chemical spill, which killed thousands and is remembered as the deadliest industrial accident in history. However, just how many died and were injured in the incident remains in dispute. The Indian government estimates that 3,800 died and 11,000 were injured, but advocates for the victims believe that the true death toll is in the tens of thousands and that over half a million people were exposed to the poisonous gas. Adam Lerner explores the controversy over how many victims there are, what they are owed, and who, if anyone, ought to pay:

The very fact that so much contention exists surrounding the death toll, with different politically motivated figures varying by orders of magnitude, underscores the fact that, 30 years after the tragedy, Bhopal’s wounds are still open.

To this date, the International Campaign for Justice in Bhopal maintains that the site of the plant hasn’t been properly cleaned and that chemical contamination of the groundwater has injured and perhaps killed thousands more. (Union Carbide insists that the evidence linking it to contamination is insufficient.) Many victims and their advocates view the settlement made five years later in 1989 as a pittance given the scope of the damage and the size of Union Carbide and its parent, Dow Chemical.

A jury concluded in 1994 that Exxon should pay $5 billion in punitive damages for its Valdez’s oil spill, despite the fact that no one died. (Subsequent court rulings cut this figure down after Exxon paid more than $3.4 billion in fines, penalties, cleanup costs, and other claims). And this past October Warren Anderson, the CEO of Union Carbide at the time of the tragedy, passed away—a fugitive from the Indian justice system who lived out the rest of his life in the U.S. while Indians burned his effigy in protest. Now, three decades after the cloud dissipated, Bhopal’s tragedy isn’t over.

Sanjay Verma recounts his family’s story:

My sister Mamta told me that there were four brothers and four sisters in our family. Our father was a carpenter, and I was the youngest in the family. We lost three sisters and two brothers along with our parents that night.

I then asked her, “How did we survive?”

She told me that she wrapped me in a blanket, and ran away along with our brother Sunil. When they were running, Sunil had to go to the bathroom, and fainted. The streets were so crowded as people were running and shouting, my sister was forced by the crowd, and couldn’t wait any longer for my brother Sunil to come back.

The following morning, when people came to collect bodies from the street, they found Sunil and thought he was dead too. They put him on a truck with many bodies, and took him to dump into a river so that they could keep the number of deaths as low as possible. When it was my brother’s turn to be thrown off the truck into the Narmada River, about 90km from Bhopal, he woke up and said, “I am not dead.” The people who were about to throw him in got scared, thinking a dead body was talking to them.

Nita Bhalla Rashida Bee and Champa Devi Shukla, two Bhopal survivors who founded a rehabilitation center for children with disabilities allegedly resulting from the disaster:

The two women said they felt a sense of injustice over the lack of rehabilitation given to victims of the disaster, and began a campaign for better support for those suffering the aftermath of the gas leak. In the beginning, they mobilized about 100 women and walked 730 km (455 miles) to Delhi to protest the lack of livelihood opportunities for women like themselves who had to become breadwinners for their impoverished families after their husbands became ill.

Over the years, their attention turned to second- and third-generation children with congenital deformities, born to survivors exposed to the gas and to women who have been drinking water contaminated by undisposed toxic waste around the factory. However, there has been no long-term epidemiological research to prove conclusively that the birth defects of these children are directly linked to the tragedy three decades ago.

Alan Taylor rounds up photographs of the disaster and its aftermath.

(Photo: A notice propagating safety is seen on the casing of a machine inside one of the buildings at the now-defunct Union Carbide pesticide factory in Bhopal on November 28, 2014. By Indranil Mukherjee/AFP/Getty Images)

Illiberal Feminism Strikes Again, Ctd

The in-tray has seen another big wave of reader responses since our most recent post, but we’re trying to balance the need for your input with the need to keep the debate productive and relatively concise. One reader who wants to keep it going:

I dissent from the dissenters. Keep talking about it. Keep questioning the excesses of the feminist hard line. I understand that they don’t want to confront their own worst elements because, like any political movement, talking about your internal messaging problems is guaranteed to annihilate your external message. So I know why they don’t want to talk about it, and I surely know that the mainstream brand of feminism is Emma Watson’s elegant, inclusive variety.

A refrain I hear often from the feminist side is that men have to learn to stop talking and listen. And when I point out that that sounds suspiciously like “shut up”, I then get a 30-minute explanation as to why it’s not hypocritical to tell men to remain silent when you’re angry that women have been kept silent for so long. You are listening, Andrew. Don’t let them tell you otherwise.

Many more readers sound off:

I do think that sometimes your maleness and gayness come together to make you a little tone deaf on feminist issues, but this pushback must just reinforce every bad stereotype you have.

Getting the Oxford debate cancelled is one giant case of ad hominem; your views have no merit because of who you are. The irony is so rich it’s cloying. But the last dissent finally clarified what’s wrong in this discussion. Your critic (male, of course) states, “every feminist contradiction you’ve covered in this thread has been debated within feminism since its beginning” (obviously, demonstrably false), and then whines: “It’s not feminism’s burden to educate.”

Seriously, dude, grow the fuck up. Of course it’s feminism’s job to educate; you just don’t want to do the work. The fact that you have suffered and/or do suffer injustice does not mean you’re not a massively over-entitled asshole. If the top level of the oppressor pyramid is a straight white wealthy intelligent educated first-world man, then almost everyone in this discussion on the first five levels of a fifty level pyramid, pointing furiously up at the top level and ignoring everyone below. They have all the entitled laziness of the top levels, but spend so much time looking up they actually feel (and act like) they’re at the bottom (like the guy who thought $450,000 a year made him poor).

This vocal minority of feminists are not wrong to name and fight the injustices. But they are childish to expect it to come easy, and only this entitled immaturity explains their gall in lecturing you, of all people, on the “burden to educate” – as though you did not spend decades educating and re-educating every new person who came to the table with a sudden insight on marriage equality.

Another continues along those lines:

The fact that this thread has revealed such a wide degree of opinions and experiences demonstrates the necessity of this education. There is a huge swath of people in this country, many of whom are intelligent and well educated, who have reservations towards or disagreements with positions in modern feminism. Even if you are certain that you are right, you don’t get to just snap your fingers and win the argument. Ignoring those who disagree with you isn’t going to help anything. Attempting to censor your detractors is only going to make things worse.

If there really are arguments that are strong enough to settle these debates within academic circles, then why is it treated as such a difficult task to show these arguments to those who haven’t seen them? Why are you “disheartened” when someone whose opinion and understanding you otherwise trust disagrees with you? Why don’t you just explain why this stuff is so damn clear to you?

On that note, a female reader wishes we hadn’t run this email from another woman:

I appreciate that you air comments from a variety of opinions and much prefer this format to a comments section, but that one could have stayed in the in-tray. Actually, no, I think it’s illustrative in that it presents the hideous stereotypes and gross exaggerations often employed by equality foes. This view that “feminists don’t care about equality for women … they want domination for women” hurts the cause of equality for all as much as the institutional patriarchy we defend ourselves against.

I’ve been kicked out of feminist forums for being reasonable and having the audacity to suggest that, perhaps, not all men are potential rapists and murders, so I know very well how they “eat their own.” But that vast majority of people who call themselves feminists, publicly or privately, actually are on the side of equality, do not hate men, and are not seeking gender domination. I’m sure you know this. I’m not convinced that your reader does, but I think by posting it you give credence to the idea that probably had some of your readers nodding along.

Another wonders where to draw the line:

I generally agree with your overall take on this subject, but like everything else there needs to be room for nuance. Here is one example: At my law school, a first-year criminal law exam included a very detailed description of rape. A huge controversy arose. Now you might easily think this is more evidence of overly “delicate sensibilities,” but you should consider that at least some women, maybe a significant number, taking that exam would have to fight through their personal experiences with rape and somehow remain as analytically focussed and dispassionate as the men taking that exam. First-year law exams essentially determine your law school success, and one blown question will be difficult to overcome. So basically, by including that rape question, the professor handed a huge advantage to the male students in his class. Should we fault the female students who were enraged by this?

Another reader expands the debate to include race:

One reader argued that what is being given as an argument is: “I know you think what you’re doing is OK, but it’s not for some unspecified reason that you can’t understand because you are not the correct gender/race/religion. Because of this, you should refrain from expressing an opinion and solicit feedback from those who do possess the relevant identity.”

Sometimes that is the argument being made, and it is self-evidently a flawed argument. And I agree that “call-out culture” is a problem, with so much emphasis put on denouncing and writing people off as bigots. And obviously, as I’m a man commenting on feminist issues, I don’t think that men are incapable of understanding issues of sexism. But there is a more nuanced version of that argument that is much more persuasive, that your reader is ignoring.

Let’s take Ta-Nehisi Coates as an example where you to defer to someone else’s life experience because of your self-admitted ignorance. I don’t think this means, or that you intend to say, that you defer completely to TNC on all questions of racism or race relations. But a lot of questions relating to racism can’t be quantified. A lot of questions relating to racism have to do with subjective experiences. A lot of questions relating to racism are researched using surveys where canny respondents can and often will perceive the “correct” answer. We can’t just ask White people whether they’re racist and expect an honest answer. Sometimes there isn’t an objective answer in the data. And I think there’s enough evidence that White people have glaring holes in their perception of racism that we shouldn’t dismiss the experience of Black people because it doesn’t match with our own. And we can see from well-crafted studies that the perception of Black people is often validated by the results.

For example, I’ve often encountered White people who are skeptical that job discrimination is still a real factor affecting Black people. Often they think that because of affirmative action, the discrimination actually goes in the other direction. Yet studies have found that if you send identical resumes with White names and Black names, the White resumes will get substantially more responses. The statistics lead to the undeniable conclusion that despite what White people perceive, that discrimination is still there. But because this discrimination may be subconscious or is at least conducted in such a way that makes it hard to prove in any individual case, White people often just don’t see it and don’t think it’s there.

This perspective does not mean that White people have nothing to contribute, and they cannot debate racial issues. But it does mean that we have reasons to think that White people’s perception can be flawed.

You are willing to acknowledge these limitations and defer to writers like TNC rather than relying just on your perceptions. But you seem to be much less willing to do this with issues relating to women, despite much sexism operating in the same veiled manner as racism and involving situations with subjective interpretation.

And there’s also good reason to suspect that men often don’t perceive issues relating to sexism accurately. For example, I know from my studies in linguistics that the perception that women talk much more than men is not really true if you look at it quantitatively. The perception simply doesn’t match the data. There were even experiments where, when teachers were forced to actually give equal time to boys and girls, their impression was that the girls were talking more than the boys.

So, when issues of representation of women are derisively dismissed as calling for quotas in order to achieve gender justice, your impression that women are actually represented fairly as journalists and composers not only overrides whatever feminist activists are saying about the issue, but dismisses their analysis as illiberal, censorious fanaticism. That they looked at the numbers, to you, suggests quotas, and the issue of whether there’s actually any sexism causing those disparities wasn’t even considered. The way you think women should interpret objectification of women say, in video games, carries more weight than how women feel about it. But maybe you should be a little bit more circumspect about your ability to perceive these issues fairly.

Another reader questions how useful the word “feminist” is:

The main problem with the label of “feminist” is that it has come to mean something different from its literal definition. Here’s another phrase to consider: “family values.” Those words are quite noble if you look them up in the dictionary, but in reality many people suspect the term as a proxy for anti-gay Christianist sentiment. For this reason, while I value my family and families in general, I will never, ever say that I support “family values,” nor will any of my friends.

Sadly, the word “feminist” has been similarly corrupted by a very vocal minority who are defined by their damage and penchant for quick disapproval, and they are far more interested in punishing the world than changing it for the better. It’s unfair, but the word cannot be rehabilitated. I would urge “dictionary feminists” to use the momentum of their hostile sisters against them, and simply pick a new label (“Equalists?”) and reject the old one. Otherwise, they are going to bang their heads against a negative cultural image that is continually fueled by extremists who simply have no interest in reaching a consensus.

Another tells the story of how he came around to the idea of “privilege”:

I was raised in an ultraconservative, fundamentalist Christian household, where homophobia and sexism were the norm. It should surprise no one that I entered adulthood with some nasty, bigoted views.

Contact with the real world – meeting gay people that were “virtually normal” and realizing that women were obviously every bit as human as me – inevitably challenged my worldview, but also it put me in conflict with myself. I started to soften my stance on issues such as gay marriage or women’s rights, adding qualifiers and exceptions to my language whenever the topics arose with friends, classmates or colleagues. Yet, in the course of these discussions, I was still so often insulted, attacked or condemned for my beliefs that I had no reason to think that feminists and “liberals” considered me anything but brutish, stupid and evil. So I never felt any impetus to consider their positions – you don’t stop in the middle of a fistfight to consider your enemy’s feelings and perspectives, and debate the relative merits of whether you should have your nose broken.

My change of heart came when I made friends with a bisexual woman who, at the time, sat on the board of the local feminist community center. She and I had many conversations over many hours and evenings about feminism, sexuality, identity politics … you name it, and we jawed about it. Rather than judging me, shaming me or telling me that my views were out of bounds or that debating certain topics was off-limits, she created a “safe space,” so to speak, and listened, attending to both my thoughts and feelings, and asking smart, vexing questions at opportune moments. It didn’t take long for me to start hearing the words coming out of my own mouth, and to realize how I had been so carelessly and unconsciously destructive with them in the past.

I’ll never forget the day she dropped this bomb: Knowing that Hemingway was my literary hero, she paraphrased him: “You have to pay some way for everything that’s good.” It became bleedingly obvious to me just then. There are so many human beings fighting for the basic privileges that I get for free, just for being white, straight and male. With great power comes great responsibility: If I don’t accord everyone the same dignity, agency and freedom that I have, I cheapen myself. You pay the price of privilege by recognizing that the privilege is good, it’s worth something, and that if you deserve it, everyone deserves it.

If she had blithely dismissed me as a bigot (which I was) and shut down the debate over some ignorant thing I said (there were many) I may have never come around. Thank God that she realized you can’t teach someone empathy, understanding and mercy with hatred, hard-heartedness and vengeance. You teach people how to be loving and understanding by being loving and understanding. It makes me think of the recent post “Jesus Amidst the Ruins“; she didn’t attack me or attempt to silence me or give up on me because my beliefs were unacceptable in polite public discourse. She just washed my feet.

The impulse to silence those that disagree with you may be all too human, but it has no place in a free society. It is the tool of the ideologue, the dictator and the assassin. Those of us that are able to participate in debates like #gamergate or illiberalism in the art world – or any public debate – need to check our privilege. You have to pay some way for everything that’s good, and the price of free speech is recognizing that it is good, that it is worth something, and that if we deserve it, everyone deserves it.

That Staten Island Grand Jury

The borough is far more supportive of police violence than anywhere else in the city:

In an average of Quinnipiac University polls taken in August and November, only 41 percent of Staten Island residents supported bringing charges against Officer Daniel Pantaleo (the margin of error on these combined subsamples is 7 percentage points). In New York overall, 64 percent approved of criminal charges. Staten Island isn’t like the rest of the city.

Half of Staten Islanders thought it was “understandable that the police could have acted” the way they did in the Garner case, compared to 43 percent who said there was “no excuse.” Again, that’s far lower than in the rest of the city, where 66 percent of residents indicated to pollsters that there was “no excuse.” … Staten Island’s adult citizen population — the group from which the grand jury was drawn — is almost 70 percent non-Hispanic white; New York overall is majority non-white.

Faces Of The Day

Demonstrators lie down during a protest in Grand Central Terminal in New York City on December 3, 2014. Protests began after a Grand Jury decided to not indict officer Daniel Pantaleo. Eric Garner died after being put in a chokehold by Pantaleo on July 17, 2014. Pantaleo had suspected Garner of selling untaxed cigarettes. By Yana Paskova/Getty Images.

The Lawful Killing Of Eric Garner

A reader writes:

I am in fear.

My son is 15 years old but looks like he is 20. He just crossed six feet tall and is growing, he is an athlete, a swimmer and is muscular and imposing, but he is also a completely sensitive wimp. I am white, he looks more like his mother, who is black. He has already had a bizarre police encounter. When he was 13 years old, we hired a college student on summer break to take him to and from swim practice because we were at work; she is a family friend; young, white and blond. On his first week, they were pulled over by the police and no explanation was given. The police immediately came to the passenger side where my son was, told him to get out of the car, put him up against the car, patted him down and demanded identification. Being a 13 year old, he had no ID. The girl was asked to step out of the car and was questioned, only about my son.

After some time, they left, no explanation, no ticket – nothing. The girl’s parents were as upset as we were but understandably told us that no offense meant but they didn’t want to be putting their daughter in that situation and so we needed to find another ride. We spoke to the police and were told that since there was not ticket or arrest, there was no report, so there was no explanation. Nothing happened, but because I have no idea why the interaction happened in the first place, I have no idea what could have happened.

Therefore I ran through a hundred scenarios, a number of which where my son could be as dead as many others. My ex-wife and I are both lawyers, we have means and can protect our children better than most. They go to private school, they have every other benefit education family and money can provide. (By the way, they had airsoft guns – pink ones – and only used them right around the house but not after last week.) And certainly they have been told often not to argue with authority – teachers and law enforcement – but they are still kids and do stupid things. We live in a city, but not in a dangerous area. But I am terrified because I am white and although I knew these things happen, I have never walked in a black man’s shoes.

However, for me, myself as a father of a kid who fits a profile, black and imposing, the type who seems to lend to unnatural terror among police, this is a scenario I can’t account for or defend against. In this sliver of circumstance, I have some small realization of the plight of people who have to deal with this daily. I am frustrated that people like me, white and privileged, have no inkling how the parents of a black kid growing up a dangerous place must feel every freaking day and how blithely we can dismiss these events because they are never going to happen to us.

North Korea Is Not Amused, Ctd

Aiiiiieee! Let North Korea’s bombing of Toronto begin! @Sethrogen @JamesFrancoTV @TheInterview #TheInterviewMovie pic.twitter.com/2as1gJqmkM

— Adrian Humphreys (@AD_Humphreys) December 3, 2014

Gordon G. Chang thinks US companies are unprepared for the type of hacker threat plaguing Sony right now:

The real story is that Washington, over the last decade, has done little to prevent cyberattacks against American-based businesses. … North Korea does not appear to hack American companies for commercial purposes, but China does. According to the Intellectual Property Commission, that nation is “the world’s largest source of IP theft.” The Kim regime has undoubtedly noticed Washington’s ineffectual response to China, which has been implicated in Pyongyang’s alleged assault on Sony Pictures—the attackers apparently used IP addresses inside Beijing’s “Great Firewall,” a sign of Chinese knowledge of the crime and perhaps complicity.

David Holmes suggests that businesses aren’t the only ones in danger – you could be too:

While a lot of talk has centered on whether or not North Korea was involved as retaliation for an upcoming Seth Rogen movie, one cybersecurity expert has a different takeaway: That this could create a field day for hackers who didn’t even have anything to do with the attack.

Robert Cattanach is a partner at the international law firm Dorsey & Whitney who specializes in cybersecurity regulatory litigation. After studying the moves of hackers for years, he argues that the films themselves leaked in the attack are going to become a prime target for cybercriminals. … Of course, pirated content has always been a breeding ground for malware. But part of what makes the content associated with the Sony attack so attractive to hackers, Cattanach argues, is that this is a high-profile, headline-making attack, and therefore the leaked movies could attract lots of average consumers who don’t normally seek out pirated content — and who may lack the expectations and experience to avoid malicious websites and prompts.

So bootlegger beware. Meanwhile, Sean Fitz-Gerald notes Sony’s other big struggle right now:

To make matters worse for the studio, Deadline reported that three class-action lawsuits involving an alleged anti-poaching and wage-fixing conspiracy with two of Sony’s animation divisions and other heavyweights have been lumped into one big complaint. Pixar, Lucasfilm, DreamWorks Animation, the Walt Disney Company, Blue Sky Studios, ImageMovers LLC, and ImageMovers Digital LLC are named as co-conspirators. The fixing allegedly began when a handful of animation-studio heads were displeased to learn about Sony’s competitive compensation and recruitment efforts, according to the documents. After restraining wage practices, the studios involved proceeded to agree upon compensation ranges.