Month: December 2010

by Conor Friedersdorf

In September 1992, The Atlantic published “Dissent In Nazi Germany,” a piece that explored three acts of protest or civil disobedience that caused the Third Reich to abandon certain controversial policies, and even to release a small number of Jews from Auschwitz. The most powerful excerpt recounts the events that prevented The Gestapo from removing the last Jews from Berlin.

 

Of the 10,000 Berlin Jews arrested in the Final Roundup, 8,000 were murdered in Auschwitz. The remaining 2,000 were to experience a different fate. These Jews, related by marriage to Aryan Germans, were locked up at Rosenstrasse 2-4, an administrative center of the Jewish community in the heart of Berlin. By the repellent racial logic of the Nazis, the leadership had reason to deport these Jews before all other Jews. The Aryan spouses, who were mostly women, hurried alone or in pairs to the Rosenstrasse, where they discovered a growing crowd. A protest broke out when the hundreds of women at the gate began calling out, “Give us our husbands back!” Day and night for a week they staged their protest, and the crowd grew larger.

On different occasions armed guards commanded, “Clear the streets or we’ll shoot.” This sent the women scrambling into surrounding alleys and courtyards. but within minutes they began streaming out. Again and again they were scattered by threats of gunfire, and again and again they advanced, massed together, and called out for their husbands, who heard them and took hope. The square, according to one witness, “was crammed with people, and the accusing, demanding cries of the women rose above the noise of the traffic like passionate avowals of love strengthened by the bitterness of life.” One protester described her feeling of deep solidarity with those sharing her fate. Normally people were afraid to dissent, fearing denunciation, but in the square they knew they were among friends. A Gestapo man, impressed by the display, announced to the Jews, “They are calling for you out there. They want you to come back – this is German loyalty.”

The headquarters of his section of the Gestapo was just around the corner, within earshot of the protesters. A few bursts from a machine gun could have emptied the square. But instead the Jews were released. Goebbels decided that the simplest way to end the protest was to give in to the protesters’ demands. “A large number of people gathered and in part even took sides with the Jews,” Goebbels complained in his diary on March 6. “I ordered the Gestapo not to continue Jewish evacuation at so critical a moment. We want to save that up for a couple of weeks. We can then go after it all the more thoroughly.” But the Jews married to Aryans remained. They survived the war, officially registered with the police, working in officially authorized jobs, and receiving food rations.

 

After recounting other instances when protest succeeded in changing Nazi behavior, the author sums up the factors that portended victory: the dissent had to reflect collective revulsion at a regime tactic rather than individual disaffection, remain nonviolent to avoid the appearance of treason, and be done overtly: showing up in a public square was far more powerful than writing letters or secretly opposing the regime in one’s basement.

The larger takeaway is to recognize how capable we are of protesting actions undertaken by our government – if the spouses of arrested Jews in Nazi Germany could reverse that regime’s decision, surely citizens in the liberal democracies of today have both the capacity and the obligation to oppose the admittedly lesser but still serious injustices committed in our names. To be clear, I am in no way suggesting that the Nazis and their misdeeds are "morally equivalent" to the contemporary sins of the French or the British, or the torture carried out by the Bush Administration, or the prison rape that so routinely occurs in the United States, or the many innocent civilians who are inadvertently killed by our overseas bombing campaigns.

But these are serious transgressions against morality and the propositions declared self-evident in our founding documents. That our leaders are often well-intentioned, that our systems successfully guard against atrocities better than so many others, and that we’re free to protest without fear of being gunned down or disappeared would seem to increase rather than decrease our obligation to dissent.

by Patrick Appel

Clay Shirky continues to believe that social media holds political power. He writes about "the conservative dilemma," which has to do with the limits of censorship. He notes that "if a government were to shut down Internet access or ban cell phones, it would risk radicalizing otherwise pro-regime citizens or harming the economy." His prescription:

The norm of free speech is inherently political and far from universally shared. To the degree that the United States makes free speech a first-order goal, it should expect that goal to work relatively well in democratic countries that are allies, less well in undemocratic countries that are allies, and least of all in undemocratic countries that are not allies. But nearly every country in the world desires economic growth. Since governments jeopardize that growth when they ban technologies that can be used for both political and economic coordination, the United States should rely on countries' economic incentives to allow widespread media use. In other words, the U.S. government should work for conditions that increase the conservative dilemma, appealing to states' self-interest rather than the contentious virtue of freedom, as a way to create or strengthen countries' public spheres.

by Patrick Appel

A reader writes:

I'm a software engineer.  It is well-known and not disputed by anyone who works in the field that the most effective professional programmers can be thousands of times more productive than the least effective.  If this seems unlikely, keep in mind that one programmer who writes a lot of bugs that other programmers have to fix actually has negative productivity, and it can be hard to figure this out until after the damage is done.  I used to teach classes for professional programmers, and even among my students, this was easy to observe.

I am not aware of a single organization anywhere–not even here in Silicon Valley–that has come close to a pay scale where programmers' pay varies by even one order of magnitude, and certainly not three.  In fact, what we tend to do is lay off and refuse to consider hiring anybody over 35.  The reason often given is that they demand more money.

This makes sense in a way.  If you can't tell who is good, you should hire whoever is cheap.  Measuring programmer effectiveness is really hard.

A good programmer will solve a problem in fewer lines of code and take less time to do it than someone else.  So counting lines of code or hours spent doesn't work.  Counting bugs not found also doesn't work–other programmers, upon seeing an elegant solution, all agree that it's exactly how they would have solved it, and are blind to the rejected alternatives and the problems that would have arisen.  More than once, when I have gotten something finished on time and it works without needing a lot of bug fixing, I've been told that's because it was an "easy" problem.  Meanwhile, the team that misses the deadline and spends a week of all-nighters is rewarded for their obvious dedication and hard work.  The good programmer who just solves the problem may not even be aware at how difficult the problem would be for some of their colleagues.

Within a company, you develop a reputation and people see your work.  But the code you write is a trade secret, and you can't easily take it with you.  Whether you're good or bad, nobody who wants to hire you can see a complex version of your work.  They can try weeding you out by making you write code on a whiteboard, but that's sort of like asking a pianist to hum for an audition.

The brilliant thing the Indian outsourcing industry did was to throw out the idea of programmers needing to be the best.  (I don't mean to insult Indian software engineers–some are as good as anybody else, but just by sheer numbers, it's safe to say that most would have chosen another line of work if they had as many other opportunities as Americans do.)  They realized that if you can hire a lot of mediocre programmers in India, you can quote a low hourly rate, and even if it takes 20 times the effort, it doesn't matter if the cost is about the same and the delivery is predictable.  And it's a lot easier to predict how long it's going to take 20 programmers to do something than to tell if the one guy you hired is at the top of the field or the bottom.  With the 20 average programmers, it might take twice as long.  With one programmer, it might take 1/20th of the time of the average team or it might take 100 times as long.

by Patrick Appel

Rebutting this Economist article, Chris Blattman defends overproduction of PhDs:

In this world, each extra PhD raises the chances of one more brilliant, world-changing idea. While hardly comforting to the thousands who toil without job prospects, the collective benefits just might outweigh all the individual misery.

The decision might be individually rational as well, especially if students are no better at predicting their success than their advisors (they probably aren’t).

 

by Patrick Appel

Neetzan Zimmerman captions:

I’m a little spooked by how well the latest Coca Cola Christmas spot syncs up with the Inception theme music.

by Patrick Appel

Itay Hod profiles Jincey Lumpkin, producer of "porn by lesbians, for lesbians":

One thing you won't find anywhere near her set are straight girls. “Everyone that I work with is at least bisexual. My goal is to show real chemistry,” she says. In fact, she often asks her actresses who they prefer working with rather than deciding herself. “I won’t do gay for pay,” she says referring to the industry's practice of using straight actors in gay erotica.

by Patrick Appel

71-26. Larison celebrates:

The side of the debate championed by Romney, Palin, Thune, Santorum, and Bolton has lost, and the virtually unanimous opposition to the treaty from movement conservative leaders, think tanks, and magazines has been ignored. For once, deceit and fearmongering did not win the day in a foreign policy argument. More substantively, U.S.-Russian relations will not be disrupted, our allies in Europe will continue to see their security enhanced by the thaw between Washington and Moscow, and inspections of Russia’s arsenal will resume to our benefit. The harm to U.S. credibility and diplomacy that I had feared would result from the treaty’s defeat will not materialize. All in all, this should prove to be a very good week for the United States and our allies.

by Patrick Appel

Michael Petrelis makes a reasonable request:

Notice that [Michael] Specter omits links to any research backing up the effectiveness claim [that fear-based HIV campaigns work], but he does link to a chat-board containing one Kramer email, a note from a gay doctor backing him up and a press release from GMHC/GLAAD. That link helps inform the debate about HIV prevention today, but there's no link to any of the research he says exists.

The public discussion over the alarmist NYC DOH ad is put at a great disadvantage with hard research omitted by Specter. I'm not saying a fear-driven campaign can't work. It might, but I would like the backers of such campaign to produce their evidence with links to studies.

by Conor Friedersdorf

Phoebe makes a good point:

Conor asks whether newspapers should portray the world as it is or as it should be. But the Weddings and Celebrations section – like any of the various Style sections – is always "sugar-coated." I mean, are most marriages in the country, or even in the NY area, between high-achieving, photogenic young professionals who've spent their formative years in euphemistic Boston? The Vows are designed to provoke envy among not-quite-so-highly-achieving, not-quite-so-photogenic, not-quite-so-coupled-off. This week's column strayed from the norm, because it went the regular Style-section route – seemingly celebrating but between-the-lines (by allowing comments, say) mocking the frivolous rich. I guess the paper was trying to shake things up, to see if readers prefer self-hatred or smugness on their Sunday mornings. Either way, though, I can't imagine any part of that section telling it like it is.

I'm still chuckling at "euphemistic Boston."

by Patrick Appel

Room For Debate uses controversy over NYC's bike lanes to bat the question around. Caroline Samponaro provides basic numbers:

Since the city added 250 miles of bike lanes in the last four years, New Yorkers have voted with their pedals. During that same four-year period, daily cycling counts have more than doubled. It's this growth — cycling is up 109 percent since 2006 — that lets us know how effectively bike lanes make for more bicyclists. 

Sam Staley is the most negative:

Getting bike acceptance levels up to those of models like Amsterdam and Copenhagen takes more than striping lanes. It takes a focused anti-car policy that dramatically increases the costs of using automobiles.

Felix Salmon urges patience.