Month: November 2011

The Torture Party

Gingrich cements the new orthodoxy of the GOP:

Waterboarding is by every technical rule not torture. [Applause] Waterboarding is actually something we’ve done with our own pilots in order to get them used to the idea to what interrogation is like. It’s not — I’m not saying it’s not bad, and it’s not difficult, it’s not frightening. I’m just saying that under the normal rules internationally it’s not torture.

I think the right balance is that a prisoner can only be waterboarded at the direction of the president in a circumstance which the information was of such great importance that we thought it was worth the risk of doing it and I do that frankly only out of concern for world opinion. But we do not want to be known as a country that capriciously mistreats human beings.

The problem is not caprice. The problem is torture. Waterboarding by every conceivable rule is torture. No court has ever found otherwise in any country that adheres to the Geneva Conventions or the UN Coinvention on Torture signed by Ronald Reagan. Several federal court opinions define waterboarding as torture. The US government executed Japanese military leaders following World War II for waterboarding. It was judged torture in the 1926 Mississippi Supreme Court case, which Gingrich as a "historian" should know by now. It is featured in Cambodia's Museum of Torture to commemorate the abuses of the Khmer Rouge. As the UN Rapporteur on torture has said:

I don’t think there is any question, any serious question. I mean it’s a question of severity. If you think that waterboarding is not severe mistreatment you don’t really know what waterboarding is. … I mean if you then redefine upwards the severity standard to say that it’s only severe if it’s organ failure or death, then you know you’re really very clearly distorting the sense of the words and you know words have to be interpreted in treaty language, they have to be interpreted in their plain meaning and their plain meaning couldn’t be more clear in the case of waterboarding.

This is not an opinion. It is a fact. What Gingrich has said is untrue. It cannot stand. What the last president authorized was torture, a war crime under domestic and international law.

The FAA Bans Tech During Takeoff Because … Ctd

344 pm-coming into atlanta

A reader writes:

You said, rather glibly, that “The FAA bans tech during takeoff because there’s no evidence that it can’t crash the plane.” This is true, but that is how we have arrived at having one of the safest commercial airline systems in the world. As an example of this safety, when would you say the last fatal crash of an American passenger airliner was, without googling? (Answer: The last fatal crash of an American passenger airliner in scheduled service was the Colgan Air crash near Buffalo in February 2009, more than two and a half years ago.) To maintain these levels of safety requires a constant focus on eliminating the most minute threats to the airplane, even if it is a one in a million or even more remote chance.

Another writes:

I call bull-donkey on Fallows’ “attention theory”.

I’m always ordered to turn off my Kindle but I’m allowed to read a regular book; isn’t my attention equally distracted by both devices? I have also heard the “authority theory,” which is that they enforce tedious rules and over-exaggerate emergency protocol announcements to impress the notion that they are the absolute decision-makers on the aircraft and give a sense of security to passengers. I think that’s more plausible, but equally as ninnyocratic.

Once I saw the most ugly pendant in the AirMall magazine and I made this weird face, and out of the corner of my eye I saw the woman next to me had the same stupid pendant on. Then a split second later I mistakingly made eye-contact with her, she saw my dumb face, the magazine, put it all together and it became the most awkward flight of my life.

If they had let me keep my Kindle on, that would have never happened.

Another:

My immediate thought wasn’t the emergency situation response; it was that cell phones can be used to trigger bombs and whatnot (in fiction at least), and people fidgeting with gizmos in their laps at takeoff make me nervous (and probably make flight personnel nervous, too).

I would like to see passengers ejected for not following instructions and listening to safety talks. I don’t actually care if you fly every day of your life, you’re required by law to pay attention to the flight crew. The number of people I see who keep their headphones on, keep playing with their phones, and flagrantly ignore the safety instructions just baffles me. We all know the litany, but it’s some 60 or 90 seconds of your life. You can’t sit quietly and at least pretend to pay attention for 90 seconds?

Another confides:

Maybe I should send this in to PostSecret and not The Dish, but … I don’t turn off my phone or other electronic devices when I fly.  Sure, if my phone is in my hand when the flight attendant comes by I’ll switch it off, but I don’t go out of my way to do it.  I flew to Paris a few weeks ago.  My phone was in a bag in the overhead bin, and it was ON, and I did not stand up and dig it out and turn it off.

I figure if it was really all that important, they wouldn’t just ask people to turn their electronic devices off, they would make sure that they actually turned them off.  So shoot me.

Another reader who obviously agrees: the reader who submitted the above photo for our “View From Your Airplane Window” feature. (Don’t worry, we won’t report you to the FAA.) Fallows readers sound off here.

Mitt’s Immigration Muddle

This is why Romney doesn't give many interviews:

Allahpundit analyzes:

Essentially, Mitt thinks Newt’s plan to let some longtime residents attain legal non-citizen status is “amnesty” even though his own plan imagines letting some longtime residents become citizens provided they go to the back of line. Why one of those ideas should be deemed significantly more lenient than the other is beyond me. 

The Age Of Sex Addiction?

Chris Lee profiles an "epidemic", citing estimates of "between 3 and 5 percent of the U.S. population—or more than 9 million people—[that] could meet the criteria for addiction." But:

Here’s what the experts will tell you that sex addiction is most decidedly not: a convenient excuse for sexual indiscretions and marital truancy. Chris Donaghue, a sex therapist who hosts the show Bad Sex, says Tiger Woods, for example, does not qualify as a sex addict, despite his well-documented sexcapades and treatment at a Mississippi rehabilitation center specializing in sex addiction. “Because he didn’t honor his integrity and marital boundary does not make him an addict,” Donaghue says, adding that people will say, “?‘Because I get in trouble, because I cheat, I’ll just blame it on sex addiction. That’s my get-out-of-jail-free card.’?”

In an interview with Tracy Clark-Flory, sex addiction skeptic David Ley responds to the piece: 

A lot of the research that has been done shows that between 70 and 100 percent of these alleged sex addicts have some other major mental-health problem — there is some other diagnosis, whether it is substance abuse, depression, anxiety or a personality disorder. It violates Occam’s razor to then throw in a sex-addiction diagnosis when these behaviors are just symptoms of the underlying mental illness.

The Study Of Intelligence, Ctd

Thanks for all the emails. And the surprisingly civil debate on our Facebook page. I've reached out to some academic pros in the intelligence field, and the feedback I get is that the exploration of IQ and race is effectively toxic as a subject. But the rest of the research area is more complex than my first post suggested. An academic writes:

Within some subfields of psychology, there is a small degree of pushback against studying intelligence, but this is not true of psychology as a whole–there are thriving societies and journals, and reports of intelligence measures are not uncommon in mainstream journal articles. Nor is it unusual for researchers to document the degree of heritability of IQ (once again, within races). The study of racial differences in intelligence, however, particularly when it comes to assessing the possibility of genetic contributions, is still radioactive. Few researchers other than Jensen and Rushton are willing to go there, while marginal phenomena such as "stereotype threat" that superficially seem to suggest that the race difference is 100% environmental are avidly pursued.

And there are distortions in the larger hot zone around the race-IQ Ground Zero, such as the provably false claims that race is entirely a social construction, that general intelligence is an artifact of IQ tests, that the tests are worthless, that IQ was the basis of immigration restrictions and the Holocaust, and so on. Fortunately these are not as common (particularly within psychology) as they were in the 1970s and 1980s.

So there is some veiling of the truth here – or a decision just not to go there. Notice that there is also a great deal of research attempting to disprove any genetic component to intelligence. It's worth noting here that Murray and Herrnstein, despite the relentless smear campaign against them, never stated that genetics was responsible for all the racial gaps. They were merely debating the balance between genes and environment, and conceded that there was no firm way to calculate the balance. So we know that environment affects IQ – malnutrition depresses it in the developing world. But since IQ is proven to be inheritable, the notion that genes play no role whatever – that we remain the "blank slate" some left-liberals want us to be – is a reach. Razib Khan, a genetics expert, adds the following:

The problem here is the word "race." It has a whole lot of baggage. So many biologists prudently shift to "population" or "ethnic group." I don’t much care either way. Let’s just put the semantic sugar to the side. I contend that:

1) Human populations can be easily separated into plausible clusters using a random set of genetic markers

2) The differences between human populations are not trivial

You can say that both positions apply to human races. Or, you can say that race does not exist as a biological concept, and that both positions apply to human populations. Call it what you will, style is secondary to substance. Just as half-siblings and full-siblings are clearly genetically distinct, and those distinctions matter in terms of their traits, so French and Chinese are genetically distinct, and those distinctions matter in terms of their traits.

That's helpful. Whatever we call it, "race" has a biological component that can be genetically mapped. When you apply robust intelligence tests based on general intelligence (g) to this map, there are non-trivial differences between races that are strikingly resilient across the world. Quite why is unclear. My position is simply a) that the notion that genes are not involved in this area is highly unlikely; and b) that, as Razib says

I think an understanding of the phylogeny of the human race is a grand story. Population structure in the present is a shadow of histories past. And with the possibility of admixture with archaic lineages and recent adaptations that story has a lot of novel plot elements to keep your attention.

I'll tackle the question of whether we are better off simply ignoring this in another post soon. If you are just joining the thread, previous posts here, here, here, here, here and here.

Why Are Old Men Always Naked In The Locker Room? Ctd

Image

A reader writes:

I have always theorized that older men were so much more comfortable with nudity because they were all in the military at some point and are just used to it.  They also grew up in a time where it was not instantly assumed that two men naked in the same space must be gay for each other.  I'm 34, gay, and have spent plenty of time naked in locker rooms (steam rooms, saunas, hot tubs, etc) and analyzing what I felt to be bizarre behavior. I personally have no body shame and get naked as often as possible, but yeah, frequently the younger guys seem to be a little more inhibited than the older guys.

An older guy writes:

When I go to the gym at the university where I work (age 63), I proudly walk around naked because that is the way it is. The reason "old men" are always naked in the locker room is because when we grew up ('50s, '60s, and '70s), that was the only way you could be in a locker room for gym or sports. I don't know how it is now, but there were a few rows of lockers and gang showers. If you had attempted to cover yourself in the locker room you would have been stripped and probably had some deep heat rubbed on your balls.

The young guys seem to grasp, but frankly I think they are afraid that people are secretly comparing dick sizes or something. It is true, we did that in 6th grade (1960), but not since then, or at least I haven't. It occurs to me that we may be seeing a gradual migration from a less-conscious sexuality expressed by Whitman in Leaves of Grass to the hyper-sexualized 21st century where everybody needs to have some kind of sexual marker staked out.

Another reader:

Not sure if you've had a chance to revisit the post, but the torrent of comments from your readers adds up to something spectacular and hilarious. Check it. Dominant theory seems to be that the shift away from a norm of showering at school amped up body shame something awful.

And their reaction to the "waste" typo is priceless. Another reader sends the above image and adds, "As always, The Oatmeal nails it."

The Public Is More In Touch With Reality Than The GOP

On taxes:

Congressional Republicans may have become more anti-tax in the last 30 years, but the American public has made the opposite transition: in March 1982, three-quarters of Americans said spending cuts alone should be used to reduce deficits; today, about the same share say tax increases should be included in any debt-reduction package. Remember, of course, that tax rates were much higher 30 years ago than they are today.

The Example Of Viereck

It's a matter of shame to me that I never really engaged the political and philosophical arguments of 14647748_125924620444Sullivan, Bartlett, Frum et al.) What Viereck reveals is that in some ways, the new leftist critiques of conservatism (like Corey Robin's stimulating, if uneven, series of essays) have a point.

The conservative criticism of today's GOP that I and others have engaged in is not new. It was there at the beginning of the "movement" in the post-war period and has never really left. In other words, there is a distinctive conservative strain of non-violence, pragmatism, restraint and limited government that is at peace with the New Deal. How else to expain Eisenhower or the first Bush or Reagan in some moods?

Equally, there has been a long tradition of the kind of conservatism that is ascendant today: relishing violence and war, ideological, revanchist and in favor of limiting government but not of limiting other forces inimical to liberty, like rentier classes, or a fusion of corporate interests and legislation. Here's Viereck calling out the American right for its lack of conservatism in 1949:

"Most ["conservatives"] are so muddled they don't even know when they are being 19th-century liberal individualists (in economics) and when they are being 20th-century semi-fascist thought-controllers (in politics). Logically, these two qualities are contradictory. Psychologically, they unite to make America's typical pseudo-conservative rightist …

[Russell Kirk] and perhaps half of the new conservatives are bankrupt … How can one attribute bankruptcy to a growing concern? Indeed, this new American right seems a very successful concern. On every TV station, on every mass-circulation editorial page, the word "conservatism" in the 1960s has acquired a fame, or at least notoriety, that it never possessed before … Which is it, triumph or bankruptcy, when the empty shell of a name gets acclaim while serving as a chrysalis for its opposite?

The historic content of conservatism stands, above all, for two things: organic unity and rooted liberty. Today the shell of the "conservative" label has become a chrysalis for the opposite of these two things: at best for atomistic Manchester liberalism, opposite of organic unity; at worst for thought-controlling nationalism, uprooting the traditional liberties (including the 5th Amendment) planted by America's founders."

Sound familiar? What better description of neoconservatism at its worst than "thought-controlling nationalism". There's a great profile of Viereck in The New Yorker, from 2005. And here is his first essay on conservatism, written for The Atlantic when he was only 23. The New Yorker profile prompted a riposte from John J Miller at National Review. In it, in the immortal words of Frank Meyer, the right line on Viereck was established early on:

"Viereck is not the first, nor will he be the last, to succeed in passing off his unexceptionably Liberal sentiments as conservatism."

Again: sound familiar? Then this point, made by Viereck in 1949:

‘Religion’ is a house with many mansions, finding room not only for literal but for symbolic interpretations of church dogma.

The key difference between Viereck and his immediate successor, William F Buckley Jr was also a fascinating one. Viereck did not want to uproot the New Deal and despised McCarthyism. Buckley was his opposite in both respects. This is what Viereck said of McCarthy:

He corrupted the ethics of American conservatives, and that corruption leads to the situation we have now. It gave the conservatives the habit of appeasing the forces of the hysterical right and to looking to these forces — and appeasing them knowingly, expediently. I think that was the original sin of the conservative movement, and we are all suffering from it.

We still are. In our end is our beginning, as another actual conservative once put it.