Andrew Sullivan's Blog, page 82

Finding The System Guilty

Freddie declares “this outcome, and so many like it, are the result of a system functioning the way it is intended to function. Racism is baked right into the foundation”:

Every one of those grand jurors might have hearts of purest gold. The outcome was predetermined precisely because the outcome did not rely on the individual character of the jurors. We have police aggression against black people because the white moneyed classes of this country have demanded aggressive policing and the moneyed control our policy. We have police aggression because the War on Drugs provokes it and we still have a War on Drugs because the War on Drugs puts vast amounts of tax dollars in the hands of police departments and a voracious prison industrial complex. We have police aggression against black people because centuries of gerrymandering and political manipulation have been undertaken with the explicit purpose of empowering some people and disenfranchising others.

None of that can be solved through having pure hearts and pure minds. Racism is not a problem of mind. Racism cannot be combated by individuals not being racist. A pure heart makes no difference. In response to systemic injustice, you’ve got to change the systems themselves. It’s the only thing that will ever work.

Jamelle Bouie argues along the same lines:

It would have been powerful to see charges filed against Darren Wilson. At the same time, actual justice for Michael Brown—a world in which young men like Michael Brown can’t be gunned down without consequences—won’t come from the criminal justice system. Our courts and juries aren’t impartial arbiters—they exist inside society, not outside of it—and they can only provide as much justice as society is willing to give.

(Photo: Police confront protestors after rioting broke out following the grand jury announcement in the Michael Brown case on November 24, 2014 in Ferguson, Missouri. By Scott Olson/Getty Images)

The Legal Options Left In Ferguson

Rashad Robinson wants the DOJ to charge Wilson:

Now, justice for Brown lies in the hands of president Barack Obama and US attorney general Eric Holder. The Department of Justice is investigating the death and has the power and responsibility to arrest and prosecute officer Wilson under federal criminal charges. It’s up to our national leaders to step in where Missouri’s politicians have failed, and secure justice for Brown immediately.

Jacob Sullum highly doubts the DOJ will take action:

The relevant statute is Title 18, Section 242, which makes it a federal crime to “willfully” deprive someone of his constitutional rights “under color of any law.” If death results, this crime can be punished by a life sentence or even by execution. But it requires a specific intent to violate someone’s rights, and there is little evidence that Wilson had such an intent.

Jonathan Cohn agrees that the DOJ charging Wilson is unlikely:

But the Ferguson police department is also under investigation, from the Justice Department, and that investigation could very well end in some kind of “consent decree” under which the police changed policies under close federal supervision. It’s happened that way in other jurisdictions where police have come under attack for mistreating racial minorities—and, as Rebecca Leber has noted, many experts think such arrangements have produced better policing and improved community relations.

Peter Weber looks at other ongoing legal actions:

The Ferguson Police Department also still has its own internal investigation into Wilson’s conduct, and Missouri’s Department of Public Safety has the right to revoke Wilson’s certification to be a police officer. The most likely remaining legal action against Wilson, though, is a possible civil suit filed by Brown’s family. The burden of proof in wrongful death or civil rights cases is considerably lower than in criminal cases, and the most Brown’s family could hope for is financial penalties and, perhaps, some sense of judicial vindication.

Darren Wilson’s Side Of The Story

From a writeup of last night’s grand jury decision:

Wilson testified that Brown punched him in the head after the door-slam, causing him to fear for his life. The teen took off after the first two shots but then stopped, the officer said. “His right (hand) goes under his shirt in his waistband and he starts running at me,” Wilson told the jury. “I tell, keep telling him to go to the ground. He doesn’t. I shoot a series of shots. I don’t know how many I shot.” Ten shots were fired from outside of the police car. McCulloch added that Wilson suffered “some swelling and redness to his face” — potential evidence that he was punched. Hospital photos shown to the grand jury depicted a minimally injured Wilson with some discoloration on his right cheek and the back of his neck.

Josh Marshall highlights another part of Wilson’s testimony:

Fraught and loaded with meaning, Darren Wilson told the St. Louis County grand jury that during his scuffle with Michael Brown, the 18 year old Brown looked “angry”, like a “demon.” This is a classic case of a statement that people on both sides will see through profoundly different lights. For Wilson’s supporters, it’s Wilson’s confirmation that Brown was a thug, an out of control violent malefactor. For Brown supporters, there’s little more graphic evidence of the dehumanization that lead to Brown’s killing.

Friedersdorf reads through testimony by Wilson and witnesses. His takeaway:

I haven’t yet had time to go through all the documents released by St. Louis County, but based on these witness statements, I can see why the grand jury would have reason to doubt whether Officer Wilson committed a crime. At least some witnesses corroborate his story. Some that don’t contradict one another. If the witnesses above all testified in a criminal trial, it’s hard to imagine that a jury would fail to have reasonable doubts about what really happened. There are hundreds of pages to sift through that the grand jury saw. In coming days, we’ll probably discover at least some eyewitness testimony contradicted by physical evidence. But it seems all but certain that we’ll never know exactly what happened that day.

Paul Campos adds:

Cases like this bring to mind Akira Kurosawa’s Rashomon, the film that famously features the depiction of a violent incident from the perspectives of four witness-participants. The witnesses all contradict each other on various key points, and the audience is left to ponder how difficult it is to discern what really happened in a world full of biased, confused, and, otherwise unreliable storytellers.

Jonathan Ellis provides more highlights from Wilson’s testimony. All the released evidence can be found here.

The Ferguson Decision: Tweet Reax

Michael Brown's mother. pic.twitter.com/x64SMrtxRL

— Antonio French (@AntonioFrench) November 25, 2014

Spokeswoman for Michael Brown Sr. says he is "devastated."

— Vaughn Sterling (@vplus) November 25, 2014

Brown family statement #FergusonDecision pic.twitter.com/w9YqVRCVE7

— Mike Hayes (@michaelhayes) November 25, 2014

"The description of how Mr. Brown raised his hands is not consistent between witnesses" – #STL Prosecutor McCulloch pic.twitter.com/HFFjDvczjV

— FOX2now (@FOX2now) November 25, 2014

Grand jury deliberated for more than two days, Prosecutor McCulloch said. They returned no indictment. #Ferguson

— Julie Bosman (@juliebosman) November 25, 2014

The grand jurors "gave up their lives" for this process. Respect for those who sit on juries, but watch your language dude.

— John Hodgman (@hodgman) November 25, 2014

Good @JeffreyToobin analysis of presser. First half was an undignified whine. Second half was a very hard to follow recitation of evidence.

— Ben White (@morningmoneyben) November 25, 2014

Apparently Twitter shot Michael Brown.

— JoeMyGod (@JoeMyGod) November 25, 2014

Didn't Mubarak already give essentially this speech blaming the media and social media for everything when not resigning in 2011? #Fergsuon

— Robert Mackey (@RobertMackey) November 25, 2014

Argument that an elected prosecutor is outside of politics is laughable and solely subject to objective forces like "justice" and "science."

— Ta-Nehisi Coates (@tanehisicoates) November 25, 2014

Extremely rare for a grand jury to fail to return an indictment. Only about 0.01% of the time in federal cases (1/2). http://t.co/XrK4yLwALi

— Nate Silver (@NateSilver538) November 25, 2014

In 17 years studying crime, this is the most botched process I've ever witnessed. Horrible. #Ferguson.Hope protesters and officers are safe.

— John Roman (@JohnKRoman) November 25, 2014

There is a way to present this result that will not incite more anger. This sure as hell is not it.

— Alan Sepinwall (@sepinwall) November 25, 2014

Protesters jump on, smash @stlcountypd vehicle. Riot police move in pic.twitter.com/QYWXtq92Q7

— Brian Ries (@moneyries) November 25, 2014

Confirmed: shots fired across from #Ferguson PD and south of Ferguson PD.

— St. Louis County PD (@stlcountypd) November 25, 2014

Protestors now storming the streets of #NYC. pic.twitter.com/OTFRI40nmM

— Tracee Carrasco (@CarrascoTV) November 25, 2014

I am angry. I am angry. I am angry. I am angry. I am angry. I am angry. I am angry. I am angry. I am angry. I am angry. I am hurt. I am hurt

— Jessica R. Williams (@msjwilly) November 25, 2014

Obama making a statement at 10pm

— Danny Vinik (@DannyVinik) November 25, 2014

Interesting split screen here pic.twitter.com/hNSAzzOsWN

— Sophie Kleeman (@sophie_kleeman) November 25, 2014

Just today, Obama awarded 3 posthumous Medals of Freedom to activists who were killed in MS during Freedom Summer. time.com/3602201/presid…

—
John Lingan (@johnlingan) November 25, 2014

https://t.co/4IyNfnq7Ka

— Paul Hampel (@phampel) November 25, 2014

Police are not deploying tear gas. They are using #smoke to break up unruly crowds. #Ferguson

— St. Louis County PD (@stlcountypd) November 25, 2014

So fucking unbelievably stupid to announce this decision at night.

— JoeMyGod (@JoeMyGod) November 25, 2014

The Best Of The Dish Today

#BREAKING Ferguson cop who shot Michael Brown won’t be charged; according to Michael Brown's family http://t.co/KU3yoKgCvg

— USA TODAY (@USATODAY) November 25, 2014

Much more Dish coverage soon. Meanwhile, Elizabeth Nolan Brown offers a truce in the gender debate:

Perhaps rape is something best looked at as a phenomenon driven by a small number of serial predators that are enabled by the culture. Callous attitudes toward rape don’t “cause” rape, but they could—in aggregate—create conditions where it’s easier for rapists to do so. Do Valenti and company overstate the extent to which socialization influences rapists? Sometimes. But there’s also a tendency among conservatives and many libertarians to dismiss feminist talk of “rape culture” as patently absurd. And I like to think (or hope, at least) that this is partly a function of parties talking past one another.

It’s a piece, like many of Elizabeth’s, that’s well worth your time. My core principle in all this is about protecting free expression, even at the expense of social justice. Because without free expression, we cannot know what social justice can actually mean. There is an epistemological certainty on the cultural left that troubles me as much as the doctrinal certainty on the Christianist right. It is because we need always to doubt such certainties that free expression comes first. At root, I guess, I just don’t believe that some things must never be said and some debates must never be held. One side may go a long way toward winning … but we should never believe that a debate has ended. It can always be revived. I’ve battled both the conservative cultural police as well as the liberal version on this question. And while I’m more than happy to air as many dissents as there are, I’m not giving up on that basic principle. It’s called liberalism.

Today, I marveled at Merkel, took stock of Obama’s energy and climate legacy, and backed Rand Paul’s call for a formal declaration of war before the US ever goes into combat again. We aired the contours of the latest extension of the talks to restrain Iran’s nuclear weapon potential; and debated whether the executive branch was more of a Republican office than a Democratic one. Plus: the latest round in the fight to insist upon the facts over the myth of Matthew Shepard.

The most popular post of the day was This Is The Way Benghazi Ends …, followed by An Evangelical Changes His Mind On Gays.

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. One long-time holdout writes:

I’ve been enjoying the blog since 2008. I am sorry I haven’t subscribed until now. What won me over was the View From Your Window contest. I am completely hooked on it and was so excited to send in my (correct, I think) guess that I realized I really need to subscribe, if for the contest alone. How about more contests, like one from Tuesday to Saturday, to keep us occupied when we are impatiently itching for the next VFYW?

The contest already takes Chris but primarily Chas these days a ton of time to compile and edit each week, so having another one would be a bit too much to handle. But keep the feedback coming. A final email for the day:

What would happen if Sen. Rockefeller just released the torture report? If it is so important that the American people see it – and I agree that it is – maybe it is time for this child of privilege to take a stand for the sake of the republic. Would he be arrested? Tried? It just seems ridiculous to say “we will read it into the Congressional Record but they will probably stop us. Hmm, if only there was some way to get this report into the hands of the American people.” The Internet. Wikileaks. It’s not that hard.

The Dish is also available. Just sayin’.

See you in the morning.

Face Of The Day

Anti-immigration protesters shout “Go home!” to demonstrators during a vigil in support of children fleeing violence in Central American outside the White House on November 24, 2014. Organized by the Central American Resource Center, a Latino resource and justice center in the District of Columbia, students, activists and their supporters held the vigil to demand the Obama Administration continue to reform the immigration system. By Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images.

Teaching From The Head, Not The Heart

In a review of three recent books on education, Jonathan Zimmerman argues that “the biggest insult to the intelligence of American teachers is the idea that their intelligence doesn’t matter”:

“The teaching of A, B, C, and the multiplication table has no quality of sacredness in it,” Horace Mann said in 1839. Instead of focusing on students’ mental skills, Mann urged, teachers should promote “good-will towards men” and “reverence to God.” Teachers need to be good, more than they need to be smart; their job is to nurture souls, not minds. So [Getting Schooled author] Garret Keizer’s first supervisor worried that he might have too many grades of A on his college transcript to succeed as a high school teacher, and Elizabeth Green concludes her otherwise skeptical book [Building A Better Teacher] with the much-heard platitude that teachers need to “love” their students. Keizer is offended by comments like that, and he has every good reason to be. Do lawyers have to love their clients? Must doctors adore their patients? What American teachers need now is not love, but a capacity for deep and disciplined thinking that will reflect – and respect – the intellectual complexities of their job.

Sherman The Statesman?

D.H. Dilbeck parses Robert L. O’Connell’s Fierce Patriot: The Tangled Lives of William Tecumseh Sherman, an “effusive new biography” that “frequently offers an outright apologia” for the Civil War general sometimes accused of war crimes and even genocide. Part of O’Connell’s revisionist take is to emphasize Sherman’s achievements over his often overblown rhetoric, especially when it comes to his role in the making of modern America:

O’Connell devotes the majority of this first portrait [of Sherman as a strategist] to Sherman’s Civil War career. In the summer of 1863, midway through the war, Sherman’s strategic genius blossomed. From then until the war’s end, he perfected a hard-edged strategy for defeating the Confederacy. Sherman realized defeat was “ultimately a state of mind,” which meant he had “to utterly demoralize the Confederacy by making it look helpless.” Only then would the resilient Confederate people abandon their bloody rebellion. This strategy culminated in Sherman’s march across Georgia and South Carolina in late 1864 and early 1865. Before embarking, Sherman assured a skeptical Ulysses S. Grant, “I can make this march, and make Georgia howl!” The second half of that cable, though less well known, is far more revealing: “This may not be war, but rather statesmanship.” That is, Sherman’s military strategy always had a political goal in mind: to woo Confederates back into the Union like a shrewd statesman. O’Connell also rightly notes that the deeds of Sherman’s army during the March did not match the most ominous words of their commander.

Susan Schulten details one fascinating aspect of Sherman’s war-time manuevering – his use of cutting-edge maps:

Whether we characterize Sherman’s campaign as excessive and brutal or necessary and swift, there is no question that it was among the most ambitious campaigns of the war, because to fulfill Grant’s directive, Sherman had to take his armies beyond the reach of Union supply lines. This was unthinkable to most contemporary generals, and required a superior body of cartographic intelligence. In short, Sherman needed maps.

Thanks to Capt. William Merrill, chief topographer of the Army of the Cumberland, Sherman got what he needed, and then some. By the summer of 1864 Merrill had assembled a crack team who continuously improved Union intelligence through fieldwork, traversing the land and collecting local knowledge. As a result they simply knew the terrain better than their counterparts, and mapped it with more detail, giving Sherman a decisive advantage as he closed in on Atlanta. These maps have been ably collected in the Sherman collection at the Library of Congress, and testify to the extraordinary work done by Merrill and his men, as well as by the Coast Survey, the primary federal mapping agency.

Sherman made extensive use of their work; he studied not just the physical topography of the region, but its material and human conditions. He pored over the 1860 census, asking where his troops might best forage and survive as they lived off the land. In fact, years earlier Sherman had asked the superintendent of the census, Joseph Kennedy, whether it was possible to design maps that represented not just the land, but its people and resources.

(Image: Matthew Brady’s 1864 photographic portrait of Sherman, via Wikimedia Commons)

The Culture Wars And … Manners, Ctd

Alyssa Rosenberg revisits the debate over manners:

Civil disobedience often tests the desire of powerful organizations to be seen as legitimate and bound by clear rules and standards — it is, essentially, a test of manners and norms. There is something radical about making such a request for civility and good manners upward, and to turn powerful people’s sense of their own sophistication and goodness against them.

Asking someone who would not use racial slurs against Jews or African Americans why he or she is uncomfortable extending that same courtesy and consideration to Native Americans will force a genuinely good-hearted, thoughtful person to confront his or her contradictions. Asking someone like physicist Matt Taylor whether he considered the feelings of his female colleagues and science fans everywhere before putting on that stupid bowling shirt would probably make him think twice.

At the same time, she concedes that these “conversations and requests for polite considerations will not work with all people, and they are certainly not a solution to the significant structural problems of race, class, gender, sexual orientation and gender identity that confront us today”:

But fighting the big fights takes tremendous energy. If we can save each other some of the constant little stings that sap our resources, I’m all for adding etiquette to the list of demands.

Drum, meanwhile, recommends that we “recalibrate our cultural baselines for the social media era”:

People can respond so quickly and easily to minor events that the resulting feeding frenzies can seem far more important than anyone ever intended them to be. A snarky/nasty tweet, after all, is the work of a few seconds. A few thousand of them represent a grand total of a few hours of work. The end result may seem like an unbelievable avalanche of contempt and derision to the target of the attack, but in real terms, it represents virtually nothing.

The culture wars are not nastier because people on the internet don’t have to face their adversaries. They’re nastier because even minor blowups seem huge. But that’s just Econ 101. When the cost of expressing outrage goes down, the amount of outrage expressed goes up. That doesn’t mean there’s more outrage. It just means outrage is a lot more visible than it used to be.

Misshapen Cities

Another strike against Manhattan: Henry Grabar flags new research suggesting that circular cities are superior to their elongated counterparts. He notes a paper by MIT scholar Mariaflavia Harari, who “analyzed more than 450 Indian cities to elucidate what influence, if any, a city’s shape would have on indicators like rent, wages and commute time”:

What she found is that “compactness” — in her paper, the nearer, basically, that a city’s shape is to a circle — is a kind of urban amenity, like a subway line or a movie theater, that people will pay for. All else being equal, India’s compact cities have lower wages, higher rents and shorter commutes. “One standard deviation deterioration in city shape, corresponding to a 720 meter increase in the average within-city round-trip,” Harari writes, “entails a welfare loss equivalent to a 5 percent decrease in income.”

An instructive comparison is between Kolkota (Calcutta) and Bengaluru (Bangalore). Among the country’s largest cities, these are on opposite ends of Harari’s measurement system: giraffe-like Kolkota has the “worst” geometry, squat Bengaluru the “best.” According to Harari, “if Kolkota had the same compact shape that Bengaluru has, the average trip to the center would be shorter by 4.5 kilometers and the average trip within the city would be shorter by 6.2 km.” Just a couple of miles difference, right? But the average commute speed in India is 12 km per hour, and is forecast to fall to 9 km per hour within the decade. For the average person, on an average potential trip, compactness could save an hour a day

(Map of Manhattan via Flickr user Nick Normal)