Month: July 2010

Is it due to disease?

An amazing admission from a NYT spokesman:

“As the debate over interrogation of terror suspects grew post-9/11, defenders of the practice (including senior officials of the Bush administration) insisted that it did not constitute torture. When using a word amounts to taking sides in a political dispute, our general practice is to supply the readers with the information to decide for themselves. Thus we describe the practice vividly, and we point out that it is denounced by international covenants and in American tradition as a form of torture.”

The Times spokesman added that outside of the news pages, editorials and columnists “regard waterboarding as torture and believe that it fits all of the moral and legal definitions of torture.” He continued: “So that's what we call it, which is appropriate for the opinion pages.”

But it is not an opinion that waterboarding is torture; it is a fact, recognized by everyone on the planet as such – and by the NYT in its news pages as such – for centuries. What we have here is an admission that the NYT did change its own established position to accommodate the Cheneyite right.

So their journalism is dictated by whatever any government says. In any dispute, their view is not: what is true? But: how can we preserve our access to the political right and not lose pro-torture readers? If you want a locus classicus for why the legacy media has collapsed, look no further.

So if anyone wants to get the NYT to use a different word in order to obfuscate the truth, all they need to do is make enough noise so there is a political dispute about a question. If there's a political dispute, the NYT will retreat. And so we now know that its core ethos is ceding the meaning of words to others, rather than actually deciding for itself how to call torture torture. Orwell wrote about this in his classic "Politics and the English Language." If newspapers will not defend the English language from the propaganda of war criminals, who will? And it is not as if they haven't made this call before – when they routinely called waterboarding torture. They already had a view. They changed it so as not to offend. In so doing, they knowingly printed newspeak in their paper – not because they believed in it, but because someone else might.

This is not editing. It is surrender. It is not journalism; it is acquiescence to propaganda. It strikes me as much more egregious a failing than, say, the Jayson Blair scandal. Because it reaches to the very top, was a conscious decision and reveals the empty moral center in the most important newspaper in the country.

When historians look back and try to understand how the US came to be a country that legitimizes torture, the New York Times will be seen to have played an important role in euphemizing it, enabling it, and entrenching it. The evidence shows conclusively that there is not a shred of argument behind the dramatic shift in 2002 – just plain cowardice.

In my view, the people who made that decision should resign. They have revealed that they are nothing but straws in the wind – in a time when moral clarity and courage were most needed.

A reader writes:

They fetch.

Ambinder gets his hands on a copy of al Qaeda's first English-language magazine. Massie follows up:

Ambinder says the US is a little worried by AQ's publishing ambitions, not least because they're aimed at native English-speakers. And perhaps they're right. Nevertheless, this sort of caper also makes AQ seem somewhat ridiculous and, really, rather like a kind of terrorist version of Alan Partridge or something.

Adam Serwer's take on the cowardice of the American press differs from mine:

I think it’s actually the conventions of journalism that are at fault here. As soon as Republicans started quibbling over the definition of torture, traditional media outlets felt compelled to treat the issue as a “controversial” matter, and in order to appear as though they weren’t taking a side, media outlets treated the issue as unsettled, rather than confronting a blatant falsehood.

But this doesn't work because the NYT had already decided, as the entire world did, that waterboarding was torture. It actually changed its own established rubric to placate Cheney. And yes, it would mean that the president and vice-president – who have publicly admitted to waterboarding – are war criminals not just in a rhetorical sense, but in a legal sense. To suggest otherwise is to knowingly publish untruths – and to take a position against one's own paper. This is not fairness; it is incoherence and cowardice in the face of power. Joyner actually thinks this is a defense of the NYT: 

To have insisted that the U.S. Government was engaged in torture when the leaders of said Government adamantly denied that what they were doing constituted torture and most citizens supported the “enhanced interrogation techniques” and dismissed as buffoons those worried about poor widdle Khalid Sheikh Mohammed would have not only been taking sides in an ongoing debate but taking a very unpopular stand.

Well, no newspaper should ever take a "very unpopular stand," should it? What the fuck happened to the notion of newspapers telling the truth in plain English, regardless of public or political pressure? That's what the press is supposed to do; it's why it exists in a democracy; and it is especially important that it do this when confronting the truth would indeed be unpopular. That's when we need the press the most. And it's when the NYT and much of the MSM simply ran for cover.

In a fantastic series of Tumblr religious postcards. My favorite:

Yep, that's the "Christian" candidate, Sharron Angle. The Christianists have about as much to do with Christianity as, well, torturers.

A reader writes:

I share Gail Dines' concern that pornography is the only sex education material available to teens who aren't yet able to distinguish between fantasy and reality. But isn't the obvious answer to this problem that children deserve sex education that clarifies the physical and emotional realities of sex? Teens are caught in the crossfire of abstinence-only "education" from adults and relentless social pressure from their peers; eliminating porn does nothing to solve this problem.

The same goes for Dines' concerns over economic exploitation.

"The majority of women in pornography…are usually working class women who are who are [otherwise] looking at minimum-wage jobs." So Dines would like to eliminate pornography and force them back into said jobs? "Pornography is an industrial product." Actually, the vast majority of pornography on the internet is amatuer porn that users produce and distribute for free. Sites like Cam4 are built around video chat rooms where the exhibitionists and the voyeurs talk for surprisingly long periods of time (often more than an hour) before the sexy stuff happens. The "stars" have individual personalities they express, loyal followers who address them respectfully, and total control of when and how they perform. Which is a way of saying that there are many more kinds of porn on the internet than gonzo.

Dines also laments the lack of intimacy and love in porno sex, which strikes me as willfully naive. The kind of utopian porn that she desires already exists: steamy romance novels. If Dines would like to see more cinematic porn along these lines, then she should really complain that romantic comedies always cut away from the sex act! Because outside of amateur films – where real-life couples will often perform in ways that appear genuinely tender and loving – how can pornos convincingly convey deep emotional trust between actors?

As for the exploitation of women, this is the most complicated issue. That Dines speaks exclusively of heterosexual porn in the interview is telling. There is a lot of gay hardcore on the market that involves dominance/submission, extra large endowments and rough-and-tumble fantasies, so why doesn't she identify "bottoms" as an exploited group? Judging by the volume of posts on Craigslist's M4M sections, there are as many bottoms looking for hardcore action as there are "tops"; perhaps this is statistically specific to gay male culture and doesn't represent the desires of women (I wouldn't know), but Dines doesn't drop any statistics herself.

But here's the more eternal problem: the sex act itself may be the one arena where total equality of the sexes can never fully prevail, for the simple fact that men can penetrate women but women cannot penetrate men. Gay hardcore seems unproblematic to the extent that both partners (unless indicated otherwise) are social equals and could easily "flip" roles, if not with each other then with other partners. But straight actors cannot; men will always be the "tops" and women always the "bottoms" and this has nothing do with socialized values. To see hardcore exclusively as an expression of misogyny is a way of avoiding the more difficult, intractable problems imposed by the sex organs themselves.

The reader has apparently never met a BOB.

A reader writes:

I think Christopher would like it pointed out that he certainly doesn't believe "God" poisons everything. As he would say, "that would be absurd."

I was trying to make a joke/tease. Not very well, it appears. Another reader:

I'm sorry about your friend. But he's a tough cookie and if nothing else, I believe he could send those cancer cells packing by simply telling them where they are being oh so unreasonable. and frankly stupid. If I were a cancer cell I'd be afraid of Christopher Hitchens.

A reader writes:

I can't believe I was wasting time surfing your site during a break from studying congenital adrenal hyperplasia for my MD boards *at the exact moment* you brought up CAH.  I share your moral disturbance that parents may try to find an in utero cure for CAH (more specifically 21-?-hydroxylase deficiency – there are two other enzymatic varieties of CAH). In fairness, however, it is important to note that ambiguous genitalia, virilization and (maybe!) lesbianism are not the biggest health risks from living without 21-?-hydroxylase.

Another writes:

CAH has vast, wide reaching health side effects, far beyond the slight virilization effects that increase incidence of "nontypical" feminine behavior.  It is not the gay "gene"; it is a legitimate pathological condition that upsets the natural balance of hormones in the patient that can cause massive electrolyte imbalances, arrhythmias, hypertension, and appearance issues. Attempts to cure/prevent it should most definitely not be considered a "final solution."

Think about it this way: If you had a weird lethal tumor, and a side effect of it was to increase the likelihood that you were gay, would fixing that be a "final solution?"