Month: November 2011

Two big news items: the UN issued a comprehensive report on human rights abuses in the country and Arab League slapped economic sanctions on the regime. The emergence of the Arab League as a bulwark for democratic change in the region is a huge surprise to me. It should be an occasion for neoconservative cheering, surely. And hasn't Obama's "leading from behind" approach helped make that happen? By taking the US out of the equation as a global leader, Obama has allowed indigenous forces to do what needs to be done – and followed up with sanctions of his own. Colum Lynch is tweeting a summary of the UN Report, which Mark L. Goldberg labels "worse than you think:"

Testimonies were received from several men who stated they had been anally raped with batons and that they had witnessed the rape of boys. One man stated that he witnessed a 15-year-old boy being raped in front of his father. A 40-year-old man saw the rape of an 11-year-old boy by three security services officers. He stated: “I have never been so afraid in my whole life. And then they turned to me and said; you are next.” The interviewee was unable to continue his testimony. One 20-year-old university student told the commission that he was subjected to sexual violence in detention, adding that “if my father had been present and seen me, I would have had to commit suicide”. Another man confided while crying, “I don’t feel like a man any more”.

Could these harrowing facts help destabilize the regime? Maybe. But the Arab League sanctions are far more salient:

The Arab League sanctions cut real short term financial flexibility, predict to dramatic monetary losses, and show there is little future in investing in Syria.  Finally, the freezing of both government and personal assets of high level officials – a combination that had high impact in Libya – now poses a moment of decision to the elites regarding where continued support for Assad will lead.   In light of the bite of these sanctions, I suspect the next two to three weeks will tell us a lot about whether the elites supporting Assad will circle the wagons or will begin to defect as these sanctions leave them those two choices.

Daniel Serwer notes some evidence for pessimism. Matt Duss looks at the respective roles of Turkey and Iraq in enforcing the sanctions regime, and Micah Zenko cautions against an escalation to military action. Here's a night protest yesterday in Daraa:

This Syrian rebel taped his detonation of a security service car:

Finally, these two men - Ziad al-Masri & Abdu al-Hussain – were run over today by Assad's tanks:

Evelyn Gordon recently claimed that "the settlements cover only 1.1 percent of the West Bank" and hence cannot be an obstacle to peace. Lara Friedman drops some facts:

Almost 43% of the West Bank is under the direct control of settlers/settlements….
[Settlements] comprise less than 2% of the West Bank but aren't neatly packed into a single area.  They are spread across the entire length and breadth of the West Bank, connected by dedicated infrastructure and bolstered throughout by the Israeli army.  Together, all of this forms a network of control that makes normal Palestinian life and development virtually impossible throughout the approximately 98% of the West Bank on which settlements have not (yet) been physically built.

(Map via Wiki)

David Frum dismisses Newt's plan. Why it would be great for Republicans politically:

At a stroke, the measure would create a huge class of subordinated workers in this country. But it would also do something else, something very politically ingenious. The newly legalized residents of the United States would no longer have reason to hide from the Census Bureau. They'd be enumerated just in time for 2020. Immigration magnet states such as Texas, Arizona and Florida would gain increased representation in Congress and greater clout in the Electoral College. But because those new residents would not be able to vote, the clout would be exercised only by the state's older citizen population, and it would be that way for years to come.

Suzy Khimm likewise takes a hard look at Gingrich's immigration proposal.

A reader writes:

We don't like pop because we're black … sort of.  At least culturally. Think of the major American-born music forms:

Jazz?  Comes from the blues.

Rock n' roll?  Just rhythm n' blues, played by white kids.  From the blues.

Country?  Yup …

… originally "country blues," to distinguish it from "city blues."  Eventually became a new thing, with guitars from Hawaii, fiddles from Ireland, etc.  Jimmy Rodgers, Asa Carter, Johnny Cash – all learned from black guys how to play their music.

Bluegrass?  Good god, man, where's the banjo from?!

The first American popular music was minstrelsy, literally white guys "blacking up" to play "plantation songs."

We don't like pop because it has no blues in it, no gospel, no CHURCH.  It sounds flaky and unserious.  It doesn't speak to that part of our souls named "Africa." So we sit patiently through "Maxwell's Silver Hammer," waiting eagerly for "Back in the USSR" …

Peter Steinfels sums up a wide reaction to the new nitpicky anachronisms introduced into the English Mass:

We’ll survive the new translation. That is now the bar we’ve set: Could’ve been worse.

Paul Pillar sees the recent killing of Pakistani soldiers by NATO troops as an inevitable outgrowth of our strategy for Afghanistan:

Militants based in Pakistan foray across the border to conduct operations in Afghanistan, while other militants—of similar ilk but organizationally separate—use the cover of chaos in Afghanistan as a base for operations in Pakistan. The rationale of a U.S.-led counterinsurgency in Afghanistan is to combat a terrorist group that has hardly anyone in Afghanistan. In the face of that last fact, the rationale sometimes instead becomes the security and stability of Pakistan, even though operations conducted as part of the counterinsurgency have if anything made things more difficult for Pakistani security forces. And the same Pakistani regime on behalf of whose stability the counterinsurgency is supposedly being waged maintains cooperative relationships with some of the very insurgents against whom the war is fought. With lines of contention like that, it is little wonder that confusion can bring about something like Saturday's lethal incident.

Stephen Lee Myers [NYT] has a similar view. Simon Tisdall worries about a new war in the region:

The 10-year-old Afghan war, neither wholly won nor lost, is slowly drawing to a close – or so Washington postulates. But what has not stopped is the linked, escalating destabilisation of the infinitely more important, more populous, and nuclear-armed Pakistan. If Washington does not quickly learn to tread more carefully, it may find the first US-Pakistan war is beginning just as the fourth Afghan war supposedly ends.

Victor Davis Hanson thinks, ultimately, Pakistan will stick with the U.S.

(Photo: Pakistani activists of Peoples Peace Committee, shout slogans during a protest in Karachi on November 27, 2011, against a NATO strike on Pakistan troops. By Asif Hassan/AFP/Getty Images.)

Sacramento, California, 7.30 am

J. Ann Selzer, who has been polling Iowa for decades, discusses the difficulty of predicting the Iowa caucuses. Things can turn – and often have – within a few days of the final vote. Of interest:

In our Bloomberg poll we had an analysis of how many people had been contacted by each of the campaigns. Ron Paul was first, followed by Michele Bachmann. And the secondary analysis was to say, OK, if you've been touched by that campaign, who's your first choice? So we could kind of look and see the effectiveness of those touches. Santorum goes from 3 percent to 6 percent among people his campaign has touched, and that's double, but if you're a small number it's easy to double it. Michele Bachmann gets a one-point lift [among voters her campaign has contacted]. It's not doing her any good.

Who gets the lift is Gingrich. His campaign contact number is high 20s, low 30 percent. But he gets 32 percent first-choice votes among people his campaign has contacted. That's almost double the 17 percent he gets overall in the poll. That number is a very strong number for him. What [voters] have seen of him they liked, and what they have seen of other candidates didn't impress.

Similarly, First Read sizes up Newt's campaign footprint in the early states:

Here’s the big question for Gingrich: Can he capitalize on this momentum — to start airing TV ads and hiring more campaign staffers in the early states? The New York Times says his campaign has hired nine staffers in South Carolina and half a dozen in New Hampshire. But here’s another amazing stat: Gingrich hasn’t spent any money on paid ads in Iowa yet.

I worried that political correctness and racial squeamishness have hindered the study of intelligence. TNC counters:

Advocates of the "p.c. egalitarianism" theory, such as Andrew, evidently believe that the notion that black people are dumber than whites is a cutting edge theory, as opposed to a long-held tenet of slave-holders and white supremacists. They present themselves as bold-truth tellers who will not bow to "liberal creationists." In fact they are espousing firmly established views that date back to the very founding of this country. These views did not emerge after decades of failure of social policy. Indeed they picked up right where their old advocates left off; within five years of the passage of the Civil Rights Act, Arthur Jensen was convinced that black people were intellectually addled.

This is roughly the quality of the responses to The Bell Curve when it came out, but with added inaccuracy. No one is arguing that "that black people are dumber than white," just that the distribution of IQ is slightly different among different racial populations, and these differences also hold true for all broad racial groups:

Perhaps there really is a genetic relationship between the darkness of skin and the potency of neurons. (Only for "Africans," mind you.) Maybe the sterilizers and the slave-traders were wise beyond their years.

No, not "only for Africans". The differential between Caucasians and Asians – or between Ashkenazi and Sephardim Jews – is also striking in the data. And notice that my sole interest in this is either to counter what would be an injustice (affirmative action) or pure curiosity. I don't think any serious critic of my work could conjure up a defense of compulsory sterilization or slavery within it. And the notion that I have an "obsession" with this is bizarre. I thought it worth airing the discussion a decade and a half ago and I think it's worth airing today. It's fascinating in and of itself. Dr. X uses a different line of attack:

I think Sullivan is simply uninformed about the amount of non-racial IQ research that is occurring, as I argued in my previous post on the subject. I'm certainly not for squelching research because it makes people uncomfortable—that is a legitimate concern—but I do think Sullivan is so bothered by the possible violation of an academic principle he rightly holds dear, that he's making extremely excessive, sweeping pronouncements about the legitimate purposes of research and about a blackout in the field. It's evident that he knows little to nothing about that research or its historic and present-day context in the practitioner subdiscipline of psychology.

I certainly don't have profound knowledge of the deep research of experts in the field. But since the Bell Curve contretemps, I have kept up a little with some in the field who sympathize with my own position on this. They say the chilling effect has only gotten worse. Even a scholarly citation of Jensen can cause havoc with your career. Maybe the effect on research into non-racial aspects of IQ has been exaggerated and readers should check out Dr X's data. But they should also check out the original piece, which has some serious points to make.

As to whether my rhetorical statement that research is for finding stuff out, not helping people, I am obviously making a point about the ultimate telos of research. Of course, plenty of research is done for specific useful goals – as in protease inhibitors by, say, drug companies. But basic scientific research – the kind done at the NIH because no private funder would be interested – remains engaged in finding out truth for its own sake.