Month: December 2010

by Conor Friedersdorf

The story: a high school boy uses a move wrestling coaches taught him, and is charged with sexual battery.

Here's how The Advocate describes it:

Preston Hill, a Buchanan High School student from Clovis, Calif., was punished for his use of the "butt drag," in which a wrestler grabs his opponent's butt cheeks and places his finger in the opponent's anus for leverage, according to the Fresno Bee. Hill's trial before the Fresno County Superior Court begins Thursday.  Hill's father said coaches taught his son the "butt drag" when he was in middle school and that it was a common move.

The Dish linked the NYT account before without comment.

YouTube videos like this one persuade me that the "butt drag" is indeed a widely known and officially sanctioned move. I'm uninterested in commenting directly on the case against Preston Hill; I have no idea what actually happened. But it spurred me to ponder this truth: athletes from the high school level right on up engage in behavior inside locker rooms and on the field or court or rink – or hell, even among friends – that would be prosecuted vociferously if they happened in a different context.

I think back to high school. One guy on the football team was known for quietly creeping behind other guys sitting on the long wooden benches in the locker room and dangling his penis over their shoulders, provoking all sorts of laughter as the object of the prank slowly noticed what was going on. In college, I once visited a friend at another school, where it was common for guys to say to someone else, "Oh man, my watch is broken." You'd naturally glance down, where that very same body part would be stretched over their wrist in what they called a fleshy band. The fraternity guys found this to be hilarious.

As someone who groaned good naturedly upon being unwittingly shown "the broken watch," I can confidently say both that being tricked to look upon it isn't exactly pleasant, and that I'd hate for a guy enamored of the prank to be charged with indecent exposure and placed on  a sex offender resgistry for having done it at age 20 or 21. The tricky thing about this sort of humor is that it can get much more serious. High school friends told me about hazing they witnessed during college that ought to be against the law and prosecuted. Pomona College once expelled a fraternity from campus for the predictable acts with a sheep.

Folks who don't play sports are presumably ignorant about what goes on underwater during water polo games, the pranks played in football locker rooms, the fact that male soccer players in competitive leagues inevitably get their testicles grabbed, or the truth that collegiate runners tend at one time or another to streak through campus or around the track. As a high school tennis player and a college participant only in intramural inner-tube water polo, I was somewhat removed from this culture. So I'll confine my remarks to these observations: this stuff is common in every high school and college campus in America; and whether or not they begin to be prosecuted as crimes, I'd prefer, as a future parent, that participating kids aren't tried as sex offenders and placed on registries intended to warn us about very different sorts of proclivities, even if the more serious transgressions are sanctioned.

by Patrick Appel

Jonathan Bernstein defends Republican Senators:

I see no reason to attribute conservative opposition to New START to anything other than conservative opposition to all treaties.

But Republicans don't oppose all treaties. From yesterday's NYT:

The down-to-the-wire suspense is unusual in the annals of arms control votes in the Senate. Most such treaties that reached the floor won by overwhelming margins if not unanimously. The rare arms control treaties to fail were generally never brought to a vote, with one exception being the Comprehensive Nuclear Test-Ban Treaty, which Mr. Kyl helped defeat in 1999.

Larison is worth reading on this question.

by Conor Friedersdorf

It's up now at Slate. Here's the introduction:

After the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, a 13-year-old kid named Josh Stieber vowed that as soon as he was old enough, he would join the military. His goal: to help protect his country and spread its values of freedom and democracy around the world. With the war still on when he graduated from high school, Stieber enlisted in 2006 and was deployed to Baghdad in 2007. A devout Christian and a staunch political conservative, Stieber became troubled by the gap between the values he was told the military embodied and those he experienced on the ground. Partway through his deployment, he realized that his perspective had changed so drastically that he would rather go to prison than remain in the military. Instead, he learned about, applied for, and obtained Conscientious Objector status.

I'd be particularly interested to hear what our military readers think of the piece and its characterizations.

by Patrick Appel

Bernstein mirrors my thinking on the subject:

Newt Gingrich as someone with a chance to win the nomination?  As a presidential candidate, he's basically Sarah Palin without the enthusiastic supporters … He's probably, as Dinauer says, just scamming as usual.  It's also possible he's deluded himself into believing he's a serious candidate for the nomination.  Either way, there's no reason the rest of us should share the pretense.

Joyner is still betting on Romney.

by Conor Friedersdorf

One common response to my inquiry – Does the Internet age portend the end of cities as a place where anonymity is an option? – is that lots of people go through life offline, and that people can choose to avoid tools like Facebook and Twitter. Though there is truth in both of these criticisms, I'd like to challenge them, though I concede that anonymity can be preserved by someone who takes extraordinary measures to do so.

For the rest of us, a few examples that better get at the near future I envision:

– Over the Thanksgiving Holiday, I met a guy in his early thirties who was one of the few people in his friend group who wasn't on Facebook. Initially, this merely meant that his presence on the site was limited to being tagged in photographs taken at group dinners or during flag football games or other gatherings. Eventually, his friends created a Facebook page on his behalf. I am not sure whether this is because they tired of having to contact him separately to facilitate party invitations or to rope him in on conversations, or it was due to a simple rebellion against his eccentricty. Perhaps he could have the page removed if he wishes. In any case, he faces substantial social pressure to be on Facebook, and even if he continues to opt out, his photographs and references to him will continue to appear on the site, sometimes publicly.

– Some readers may be aware of Hollaback!, a movement that encourages women to take pictures of men who harass them on the street:

Street harassment is one of the most pervasive forms of gender-based violence and one of the least legislated against. Comments from “You’d look good on me” to groping, flashing and assault are a daily, global reality for women and LGBTQ individuals. But it is rarely reported, and it’s culturally accepted as ‘the price you pay’ for being a woman or for being gay. At Hollaback!, we don’t buy it.

We believe that everyone has a right to feel safe and confident without being objectified. Sexual harassment is a gateway crime that creates a cultural environment that makes gender-based violence OK. There exists a clear legal framework to reproach sexual harassment and abuse in the home and at work, but when it comes to the streets—all bets are off. This gap isn’t because street harassment hurts any less, it’s because there hasn’t been a solution. Until now. The explosion of mobile technology has given us an unprecedented opportunity to end street harassment—and with it, the opportunity to take on one of the final new frontiers for women’s rights around the word.

This is, by my lights, an example of one way that ending or radically decreasing urban anonymity would improve society.

– In California awhile back, a woman was caught cheating on her husband when a red light camera snapped her photograph in a car with another guy and automatically mailed the ticket to the address where the vehicle was registered.

– A reader writes:

The implications of the ubiquity of people’s online virtual identities, and their ready discoverability, is already recognized as a major problem in the witness protection program. It used to be if some mobster testified against his crew, you could give him a new name and social security number and drop him in Hawaii or North Dakota, and that was the end of it. Now, however, people are expected to have these “data trails” that cover their entire life: credit histories, social media accounts, photos, cell phone activities, and so on. Anyone who is, say, 35 and doesn’t have these things stands our like a digital sore thumb. But how are you supposed to create a “past” for this new identity? Major issue. Similar problems apply to creating fake identities for potential undercover operatives, whether domestic or international.

People in witness protection are an extreme case. The everyday corrolary is that when everyone is on Facebook, not being on it begins to seem suspicious. A perfectly upstanding person who merely wants to protect their privacy might avoid social networks with the best of intentions. Then one day they'll meet someone in a bar or at the airport, and exchange phone numbers in hopes of meeting up for a future date. "Or just friend me on Facebook." "Oh, I'm not online." "Really? Nowhere? Why?" "Oh, I just like to guard my privacy." Tell me part of you wouldn't wonder (if you were from a generation and socio-economic subculture where Facebook is as common as it is for these hypothetical people) if something was amiss. The choice to abstain from social networks is nevertheless there. But it grows ever more budernsome as ever fewer people exercise it.

– And perhaps costly. When last in New York City, I wandered into a bar in the Weswt Village that encouraged patrons to check in on Foursquare upon entering. We're not far from the day when discounts are given to people who interact with a brick and mortar business by finding it on Yelp or recommending it on Twitter. The Internet economy is increasingly driven by selling our privacy to middle men who pass it along to marketers.

– Finally, facial recognition seems like the real game-changer. Imagine a New York City politician who wants to run against a war or the construction of a mosque at Ground Zero or some other event that brought people out into the streets to protest. She gathers up a bunch of news photographs and cell phone images posted to Flickr. It's run through software that matches it with other tagged and untagged photos online. The identities of various attendees are determined with a reasonably degree of accuracy. And they're targeted for campaign advertisements, or solicited for donations. (Obviously, darker scenarios can be conjured too – although who needs Big Brother when people check in on Foursquare upon arriving at a riot!)

by Patrick Appel

Barbour walks back his comments. 

by Patrick Appel

Scott Adams devises one:

Imagine an objective standard for deciding who is entitled to have an opinion on a topic. All we need is some sort of wiki (user created website) where the basic facts on any debate can be assembled in the form of an ever-evolving multiple choice test. When you find yourself in a debate with someone who hasn't yet passed the test on that topic with a score of 100%, you declare yourself the winner by virtue of being better informed, assuming you scored 100%.

If both of you have taken the test and scored less than 100%, you declare yourselves "not entitled to your opinions" and walk away. If each of you scored 100% then you are, by my definition, entitled to your opinion.

Examples here.

by Patrick Appel

Last week Will Wilkinson contemplated the inevitability of regulatory capture. Douthat expands on Will's argument:

[T]he welfare state gets “captured” by the teachers who benefit from uncompetitive workplaces, the public-sector unions who benefit from inflated salaries and gold-plated benefits, the doctors and hospitals who benefit when the government subsidizes unnecessary treatment, the pharmaceutical companies who benefit when the government subsidizes their drugs, the lawyers and lobbyists who benefit from the complexities of the estate tax, the mortgage lenders and real estate brokers who benefit from the home-mortgage deduction, and so on and so forth.

Note that none of these groups have turned the programs in question completely away from their intended ends: The public schools still educates America’s children, Medicare still pays for seniors’ health care, California’s prisons still hod inmates and the trains in New York still carry people to work, the estate tax still collects money that can be redistributed to the poor, the home-mortgage deduction still (God help us!) encourages middle-class homebuying. This kind of commonplace “capture” isn’t a pure and obvious betrayal of liberal purposes — it’s just a corruption of the process, a skimming off the top, a layer of interest-group involvement that distorts programs and makes them vastly more expensive without wrecking them entirely. 

by Conor Friedersdorf

IS HALEY BARBOUR a racist? In a recent profile he spoke fondly of a group that defended segregation, in the wake of which a loathesome and juvenile quip he made 28 years ago has also been unearthed. Does this mean that he's a racist? I don't know, nor does anyone else, what is in Mr Barbour's heart, and I don't care to speculate.

– J.F. at Democracy in America

I'll punt on the question too. But I've got an observation about race, the conservative movement, and its political fortunes: the strange place we find ourselves is that being accused of racism can actually help a Republican candidate these days. Jonathan Chait gets it: "His past is not racist enough to disqualify him, but it is murky enough to spur the liberal media to raise questions. And thus Barbour will be in the position of being the white conservative attacked by liberals for his alleged racism… it will surely make Republicans rally to Barbour."

How did we get here?

Over the years, social norms in America have shifted such that being labaled a racist is tremensoulsy damaging to one's social standing and career prospects. On the whole, that's a good thing. We ought to abhor racists. But an unintended consequence is that false accusations of racism can be used to cynically accrue power. Compared to actual instances of racism, this sort of thing doesn't occur very often.

There are, however, high profile attempts that grab our attention, perpetrated by people who fake hate crimes or else by hustlers like Mike Nifong. There are also more localized instances that don't make national headlines, but that skewer the impressions of people at a given classroom or office. These are invariably the most read stories on the Web sites of the local newspaper, if it makes the news. Lots of white people fear that they're going to be wrongly labeled racist, and it provokes the same anxiety experienced when people fear, without particular reason to do so, that they're going to be attacked by a shark or have their identity stolen or that they're suffering from the deadly disease they came across on Web M.D. Some of these people are right! But mostly, they're needlessly worried by something that's unlikely but scary because the consequences can destroy life as you know it.

In recent years, conservatives have discovered the power that accrues to race hustlers. How else to explain that Rush Limbaugh makes more false accusations of racism these days than the aged Al Sharpton. Or that Andrew Breitbart labeled an NAACP audience racist based on a short, abridged video clip, even as he claims to find frivolous accusations of racism among the most offensive things imaginable.

Even more problematic is the victim game the right has discovered. It's perfectly appropriate for conservatives to object when their ideological opponents cynically or nonsensically use race as a  cudgel. I've forcefully defended folks when that's happened: here's an example where I spoke up for a Tea Party rally. But I've lately been alarmed by instances when conservative figures, attune to the backlash among the rank and file when folks are accused of racism, seem intent on provoking the charge.

Rush Limbaugh is most guilty of this behavior. He's a tremendously intelligent man. And what does he think is going to happen when he broadcasts a satire about "Barack The Magic Negro" or insists that in Barack Obama's America it's okay to beat up white kids on busses, or when he publishes on his Web site this image:

By now, Rush Limbaugh wants nothing more than for his ideological enemies to accuse him of racism, because it allows him to play the victim. He's not so different from people who fake hate crimes. In both instances, the idea is that by seeming put upon, in fact or reality, a community will rally to your defense, and you'll accruse power or catharsis as a result. Or to return to Haley Barbour, what did he think would happen when he praised a group that favored segregation? Did he miss the whole Trent Lott episode? Was he unaware that the Council of Conservative Citizens is a controversial, obviously racist group? Matt Yglesias demonstrates that Barbour damn well knew exactly what sort of controversy would be stoked.

Listen up, conservatives. People like Rush Limbaugh and Haley Barbour are using you in the worst way. They know that by stoking the right kind of racial controversy, they'll benefit among the hard right audience and GOP primary voters respectively – that being accused of racism by liberals can be a boon so long as you have plausible deniability, and that plenty of folks on the right will rally to your defense. Stop incentivizing them so! Both men are smart enough to avoid these sorts of dustups, which do grave damage to the image of the right, if they wanted to do so. Instead they willfully stoke these racial controversies. And time and again, even perfectly respectable conservative journalists unwittingly act as their tools.