Month: August 2010

by Conor Friedersdorf

The Atlantic Wire highlights this story:

The Wall Street Journal's two-plus million print subscribers got a nice surprise on Monday: a front-page Journal article with the headline, "Near Lake Tahoe There's a Bear So Tough, Bullets Bounce Off His Head." As if that wasn't enticing enough, it runs with the deck, "'Bubba' Is Blamed for at Least 50 Home Invasions and His Crime Spree Isn't Over." Who is this bear's publicist and how can the Atlantic Wire hire him?

The Journal's Marie Baca travels to Incline Village, Nevada, to chronicle the hunt for "a 700-pound black bear dubbed Bubba," who has "broken into at least 50 homes in search of food the past year, causing more than $70,000 of damage" in the rural Lake Tahoe community.

Last Thanksgiving, he ate 20 jars of peanut butter.

by Chris Bodenner

The debate over tenure was one of the most popular threads this week – find it all here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, and here. Thanks to everyone who wrote it. Some final thoughts:

The graduate student in psychology who weighed in on the issue bemoaned the fact that faculty don't spend enough time teaching their graduate students, both before and after tenure.  The fact that this is true both before and after tenure suggests to me that tenure here isn't the issue.  Rather, the issue is the fact that the faculty's employer, the unnamed university in the midwest, does not reward graduate teaching.  It factors little into tenure decisions, and likely factors equally little into decisions about promotions and pay raises.  If the university in question came to care more about it, I can assure you that faculty would put more effort into it, both before and after tenure, and would do so even absent the tenure system.

The particularly frustrating thing about this post, though, is that it is internally contradictory.  The author faults junior faculty for spending time writing grants, because it takes away from their teaching time.  But the author later faults senior faculty who do not spend the time writing grants, because graduate students need the money.  But you can't have it both ways – the grants don't come without the time put into writing them.  And changing the tenure system won't change this fact.

Another writes:

Having read through all of the tenure responses so far, a simple fact has become clear to me: different people react to tenure differently. For some, it is a shield for provocative research and opinionated teaching; for others, an excuse to avoid students, abandon scholarship, and slack on grant writing; for others, a welcomed reward for innovation and skill; for others, a soul-grinding political game that sours them on academia in general. To paraphrase Shakespeare, the fault lies not in the tenure process, but in ourselves. If that's the case, and its worst aspects arise not from its nature but from the nature of some humans who experience it, then does it really deserve to be thrown out?

Conor Friedersdorf

In my earlier response to Ross Douthat, I neglected a question he posed at the end of his post:

I’m curious what Friedersdorf and others think about the argument that Christopher Caldwell makes in “Reflections on the Revolution in Europe,” in the course of tackling the question of why Muslim immigrants have assimilated so slowly in much of the European West. Basically, Caldwell suggests that European elites have been so guilt-ridden about their past crimes, and so intent on avoiding anything that even resembled chauvinism or bigotry, that for decades they failed to put any sustained pressure on their steadily-growing immigrant populations to eschew religious extremism or phase out illiberal cultural practices. And worse, their efforts to marginalize what they considered (and still consider) the bigoted attitudes of their countrymen didn’t actually do away with anti-immigration anxieties: They just denied them a place in the political mainstream, which meant that they’ve manifested themselves instead in extreme and counterproductive outbursts (minaret bans, the political careers of Jean-Marie Le Pen and Geert Wilders, etc.).

In my reading and my travels, I've come away with the impression that many European countries conceive of citizenship largely in ethnic terms, or at least that they do so far more than is the case in the United States, where a constitutional view of citizenship based on shared civic values is much more common. This has been true as a matter of law in some European countries, and as a stubborn cultural prejudice in other countries.

It is notable that Europe's integration problem is worst not in first generation immigrants, but in their European born children, and I think one reason they are less successfully assimilated than their counterparts in the United States is the lack of a constitutional creed that successfully inculcates the idea that they're just as French or German or Spanish as anyone else. It's also true that American culture, disseminated largely through media, is many times more powerful than what a tiny country like Denmark can marshal to informally assimilate its immigrant population, and that the heterogeneity of our country means that no single minority group feels isolated in a land that a homogeneous majority dominates. Obviously this is a rough sketch of a diverse continent that inevitably glosses over nuances, but insofar as it holds true, it helps to explain my vexation with Mr. Douthat's reluctance to declare the constitutional understanding of American citizenship superior to the cultural understanding, even if there is some wisdom to be taken from the latter (and there is).

Based even on brief travels around Europe and stints living in Paris, Seville, and Munich, I can report that it's fantasy to imagine European societies succeeded in avoiding anything even resembling bigotry or chauvinism toward their immigrants (or their American visitors, for that matter!). And I also think that European guilt is rational given some of its behavior over the last century. The manifestations of that guilt are sometimes unfortunate or even counterproductive. But surely the backlash against nationalism and racism is also part of what's made another war among Western European nations unthinkable, helped to successfully assimilate many immigrants, enabled a lot of deserving asylum seekers to find refuge, and markedly improved British cuisine, among other benefits. Perhaps it even helped to keep Jean-Marie Le Pen marginalized. (I don't think it's at all obvious that Le Pen and his ilk are consequences of an elite that stifles defense since extremists of his sort were part of European politics long before current EU culture and institutions developed.)

All that said, I do wish European countries would've done much more, and much earlier, to combat anti-gay hate crimes in Amsterdam, honor killings in Berlin, civil unrest on the outskirts of Paris, and British imams with ties to terrorism, among other things. Opposing those scourges seems perfectly compatible with avoiding chauvinism and bigotry, even if some European elites find themselves unable to strike the appropriate balance. Doing so ought to at least be the ideal we're striving toward, which necessitates both challenging extremism among immigrants and calling out bigotry directed at them.

Alluding to Mr. Caldwell's account of European assimilation, Mr. Douthat writes:

This seems like a story worth keeping in mind during the current Cordoba Initiative controversy. Would Friedersdorf and others really like to live in a world where the two-thirds of Americans who oppose the project just had their sentiments ignored, because of the bigotry woven into the anti-mosque cause? That approach seems to have been tried and found wanting in Europe, with unfortunate consequences for the elites, and the masses, and the Muslim immigrants themselves.

It isn't accurate to say that two-thirds of Americans are having their views on this subject ignored. For goodness sake, how Americans feel about the mosque project, their arguments, whether their opposition is justified, and related conversations have dominated American media for days on end, and there aren't any shortage of prominent media outlets and politicians on the anti-mosque side. Nor do I personally want anti-mosque opponents ignored: that is why I've been directly engaging their arguments for days on end in multiple forums. 

The invocation of the European experience seems inapt to me. Its elite passed hate speech laws in some cases to constrain public discourse. The vast majority of writers on my side of the mosque debate would strenuously object to such a move in the United States (and some of us were similarly focused on core freedoms when it was Danish cartoonists being targeted by people whose strongest argument was "you're offending against our sense of the sacred"). Also, unlike the objectionable practices ignored by European elites, the Cordoba Initiative controversy, however it plays out, doesn't threaten the rights of women, or gays, or the safety of lower Manhattan, or any of the other threats against civil society that justified concern in the European case. As Radley Balko has pointed out (Mr. Douthat linked this too), the United States has thus far been quite good at assimilating Muslims, and the reason isn't that antagonistic populist movements have been hounding them to be more sensitive in their mosque placement, or even that elites have been studiously asking legitimate questions about how moderate imams engage radicals.

Irresponsible parties on the anti-mosque side — the ones producing incendiary ads, misleading their audiences about the intentions of the Cordoba Initiative, and suggesting that Muslims cannot be loyal Americans by citing Koranic verse — are shaping at least some of the popular opposition to the project with their lies, and creating an American atmosphere that mimics some the European pathologies that we want to avoid. It is the mosque's opponents (not all of them) far more than mosque defenders who are repeating Europe's mistakes, and jeopardizing the assimilative success we've long enjoyed.

by Chris Bodenner

From France to Israel:

Publicis E-dologic figured out a way to embed user data in IDF bracelets, and thus allow people to "Like" real world objects, places and events spreading the word about it on their facebook accounts.

They implemented these facebook-bracelets at the Coca Cola Village, a watersport, sunbathing, gameplaying amusement park activity-thing for teenagers. When the guests arrive, they are given a ‏ bracelet ID which transmits an RFID signal, which they program with their facebook login. They can then "like" activities and places in the real village, and their actions show up on facebook. Teenagers are driven by vanity like everyone else, so there was a photographer present as well, if you wanted to tag yourself in any given image all you had to do was wave your ID bracelet to the photographer.

Also: How do you say "Like" in 30 languages?

by Patrick Appel

Felix Salmon reacts to news that "by the end of the second quarter, 22% of [Fidelity's] 401(k) participants had borrowed against their accounts." He thinks 401(k) contributors should make more conservative investing choices:

Very few people are so well off that they can be certain they’ll never need to tap their retirement funds before retirement. The rest of us should be a bit more realistic about that possibility, and invest accordingly.

Megan goes in another direction and discourages borrowing against your 401(k) in the first place. Her follow up post is here.

by Patrick Appel

A reader writes:

While I often find Conor's articles and posts interesting, this one is not the most illuminating. How surprising is it that people seem far more reasonable when isolated from whatever group they identify with and forced to confront the things which the group has instructed them to hate? Individuals, no matter in what context, want to belong, want to be accepted. We are also social animals, perceptive enough to realize the responses that will get positive feedback in whatever context we find ourselves. It is the rare sociopath — someone like Fred Phelps, for example — who will let fly with what others find grotesque before any individual or group, regardless of its acceptance.

What matters at the end of the day is action. While drawing someone out elicits some progress toward reasonable debate, that same individual's actions are rarely so measured. Human behavior is only occasionally rational, and, ultimately, action — in the form of voting and other political activity — affects us far more than any of your exercises in experimentation with talk-radio audiences. Any one can flatter reason when he is prompted to do so. But how many of us act reasonably in the face of fear, hysteria, misinformation, groupthink and hatespeech? And how many of us are drawn to such forces?

by Chris Bodenner

A reader writes:

In the Cordoba Center debate, I have been thinking about the fact that the only Muslims who consistently come across as acceptable among Republicans these days are those like Ayaan Hirsi Ali, who have left the faith and are capitalizing on it.

I am an Iranian American who does not practice Islam (although many members of my extended family do) – but I am deeply respectful of people of any faith.  In that vein, I am uncomfortable with the role Ms. Hirsi Ali has taken to playing in our media and political spheres. She paints Islam with a broad and deliberately ignorant brush.  The Islam she describes in Somalia is NOTHING like I know and that is practiced in Iran or in many other majority Muslim countries.  She deliberately (and I believe cynically) confuses Islam with conservative tribal culture.  For example, there is nothing in the Koran or Islam about female circumcision, but there is a long tradition in Somali and other tribal African culture of that practice that cuts across and predates religions. Given how articulate and smart she sounds, I can’t help but think that she knows better.

This kind of sloppy thinking conflates culture and conservative tradition with religion.  No one in our media challenges her or other "ex-Muslims" who have signed on to the “clash of civilizations” thesis (except for Nicholas Kristof who got lambasted for his review of her latest book).  It is as if Ms. Hirsi Ali is part of a cynical game by certain political factions who can take cover from charges of bigotry by pointing to the token "expert" Muslims on their side. 

Finally, any criticism of Ms. Ali is countered with the story of her flight from Somalia and the crazy person in the Netherlands who threatened her life. While the way her story is told is touching, her personal narrative is irrelevant.

The reader's email reminded me of this passage from Beinart's latest piece:

It’s telling that the people Republicans are turning to for their anti-mosque street cred are not “moderate, peace-loving” Muslims, since even Muslim Republicans are disgusted by their party’s actions. The GOP’s new heroes are former Muslims like Nonie Darwish and Ayaan Hirsi Ali. That’s one way to escape the new Republican bigotry. Maybe the folks the GOP wants to harass in Arizona should try becoming former Hispanics.

by Patrick Appel

Howard Gleckman studies the latest deficit numbers:

It is easy to imagine what this middle ground looks like: Congress could extend some of the Bush tax cuts for only a year or two and use that time to begin the work of restructuring the tax code, key to creating a revenue system that can support the government we seem to want. At the same time, it could adopt steps to gradually control long-term spending. The harder part is imaging the political will that will get us there.