Month: March 2012

In response to heavy criticism, Invisible Children has posted a defense of their goals and the above chart detailing how they work towards attaining them. Sarah Margon half-nods:

[Invisible Children]'s grassroots mobilization contributed overwhelmingly to the passage of The 2009 LRA Disarmament and Northern Uganda Recovery Act — the most widely cosponsored bill Africa-related piece of legislation in the last 37 years — and more generally to the ongoing prioritization the LRA throughout State and USAID, as well as to the President’s decision to deploy U.S. military advisors to central Africa. Of equal importance is that Invisible Children also supports an innovative radio program in the remote regions of eastern Congo. This program collects information about LRA movements, abductions, and defections and is often better and more up-to-date than the information obtained by the United States government. 

So, instead of continuing to debate the strengths and weakness of the Kony2012 video, or attack Invisible Children for their lack of financial transparency, let’s figure out how to turn this momentum into a constructive opportunity that can result in smart policies that will have a positive, real-time impact in the affected areas of central Africa.

Ugandan social media users are less sympathetic. Holden Karnofsky wants "smart policies" that follow from Invisible Children's campaign to be focused on malaria rather than warlords. Dish readers sound off:

Yesterday, my daughter told me she would be speaking today about Joseph Kony in her civics class. His story had not come across my radar screen; but it had come across hers. Told me she had been the one who raised the subject to Mr. Martinez, who encourages his students to discuss current events. Normally, Julia's not informing me of anything other than what the kids on "Glee" are up to. She and I both remarked yesterday that this might be the first time she was ahead of me on something that I eagerly wanted to follow up on and learn more about.

Wherever the story goes from here, I was struck that this was how I learned about it. I try to keep well-informed, and I had whiffed on this one until my socially plugged-in kid caught me up. The power of inter-connectivity and the developing methods of communication still sneaks up and surprises me sometimes.

Another is more blunt:

Who the fuck cares about all this hand-wringing over Invisible Children? The group got millions of apathetic Americans to care about something instead of the fucking Kardashians for a minute. I think this is going to set a new pathway for this type of social activism. Build all the schools you want to in obscurity, but my bet is that getting 35 million YouTubers in a day is going to have a much more significant, long-term effect. Never let the perfect be the enemy of the good.

Another:

The true problem with countries like Uganda and the Congo is that they are full of minerals, notably Coltan – a mineral used in virtually every laptop and cellphone. The governments, rebel tribes and warlords are all fighting for control of these mines, which industrialized nations purchase by the truckload with little to no regard for the collateral damage that comes with the mining. This is a far more complex and a far less sensationalist concept than hunting down Kony, but compared to this larger issue, Kony is almost irrelevant.

Once Kony is killed or found, everyone who got behind #KONY2012 will celebrate, undergo some type of catharsis, and then forget about the whole thing while they type away at their laptops that are fueling the whole thing.

The role of mining in these conflicts isn't so simple either. Nick Sibilla points out that a provision in Dodd-Frank is "a de facto embargo on Congolese mining":

This has been disastrous for that nation's already troubled economy. Some Congolese mines have seen output plummet by 95 percent, while anywhere from tens of thousands to upwards of two million Congolese miners have lost their jobs. Meanwhile, militia leaders have formed smuggling networks and bribed officials to bypass the disclosure requirement. In addition, since American demand has dropped, morally flexible Chinese firms have invested heavily in these mines, obtaining commodities at huge discounts.

Mitt now has a chance to win both Alabama and the Magnolia State, where Rasmussen puts him up by eight points (at 35%, Santorum and Gingrich are tied at 27%). Doug Mataconis considers the stakes: 

Nate Silver currently gives Romney a 70% chance of winning Mississippi. … [I]t seems clear that Romney is doing better in both of these states than many might have otherwise expected. If he manages to win one of them next Tuesday, then it will at the very least put the lie to the argument that Romney can’t win a primary in a Southern state. If he wins both of them, then the argument that either Santorum or Gingrich have any conceivable chance of winning the nomination will have been utterly destroyed.

Stop-motion in excess:

On foreign policy, Noah Millman calls Romney "the Republican Bill Clinton":

[W]hat I’d expect from a Romney Presidency is neither a moderate Eisenhower foreign policy of cautious consolidation of a hegemonic position, nor a radical Bush II foreign policy of imperial dragon-slaying, but a lot of gratuitously alienating bombast around a policy aimed at short-term political considerations and the interests of international finance. Could we do worse? Sure – President Santorum could be leading armies of Christian soldiers through Caracas on the way to La Paz. But we could do better – indeed, right now we are.

Larison agrees that Romney "would have a Clinton-like foreign policy once in office," but adds that he is "very unlike Clinton in the sheer amount of time he devotes to foreign policy criticisms during the campaign."

Alex Koppelman waves goodbye to Dennis Kucinich:

He’s one of those legislators who becomes a favorite of the base—this happens on both sides; look at Michele Bachmann—by talking a lot while doing very little. Effective legislators build coalitions, they work to persuade their colleagues, they even compromise, if that’s what’s necessary to get legislation passed (or blocked, if that’s the goal). Not Kucinich. Liberals may miss him, briefly, but they’ll forget him soon enough. After all, he left nothing to remember him by.

(Photo by J.D. Pooley/Getty Images)

Virgina Postrel makes the case for selling birth control over the counter, explaining that "because birth-control pills are available only by prescription, people tend to think they’re more dangerous and less well understood than they actually are": 

Birth-control pills can have side effects, of course, but so can such over-the-counter drugs as antihistamines, ibuprofen or the Aleve that once turned me into a scary, hive-covered monster. … Aside from safety, the biggest argument for keeping birth- control pills prescription-only is, to put it bluntly, extortion. The current arrangement forces women to go to the doctor at least once a year, usually submitting to a pelvic exam, if they want this extremely reliable form of contraception. That demand may suit doctors’ paternalist instincts and financial interests, but it doesn’t serve patients’ needs. 

The Cannabis Closet

Of the readers who answered the above survey, more than one-fifth admitted to lying to their physician about marijuana use. A reader writes:

Following elbow surgery last year, I was prescribed pain medication by my surgeon, who then referred me to a pain specialist for continued treatment. A month later I went to the pain clinic and was given several pages of paperwork to fill out. I skimmed through what looked like the usual privacy and release forms and signed everything, then was asked for a urine sample before seeing the physician. Unwittingly, I had just submitted to taking a drug test, because one of the first things to come out of the doctor’s mouth was "We need to talk about your marijuana use."

I was stunned. Because I have insurance under my wife’s plan, which is a health trust for the school district here in Las Vegas, the doctor assumed I was an educator and began to express her concern that I was using illicit drugs in that work environment. I informed her that I was not a teacher, but the admonishment did not stop there. I am a casual and responsible cannabis user, but I felt like a teen being lectured to by the school principal for bad behavior.

I understand that the abuse of prescription narcotics is a serious and growing problem in this country (as opposed to, say, casual pot smoking), but the assumption that anyone who uses marijuana should be a considered a substance abuser is ridiculous. Ironically, the physician went ahead and gave me a rather large prescription for the same narcotic medication (Percocet) that my surgeon had prescribed, in spite of the "drugs are bad, mkay?" speech. And a few months later, the pain clinic actually called me to see if I needed to come in for a follow-up – something that never happens to me. Needless to say, I didn’t need the narcotics any longer and wasn’t about to submit myself to that kind of invasive scrutiny again.

Earlier cannabis confessions here.

David French doubts that the Breitbart video "[tells] us much at all about the man who sits in the Oval Office":

My reading of Barack Obama’s political biography is pretty simple: He’s not so much a liberal radical as a member of the liberal mainstream of whatever community he inhabits. In that video, he was doing no more and no less than what most politically engaged leftist law students were doing — supporting the radical race and gender politics that dominated campus. When he went to Chicago and met Bill Ayers, he was fitting within a second, and slightly different, liberal culture. He shifted again in Washington and then again in the White House. But radical, “conviction” politicians don’t decry Gitmo then keep it open, promise to end the wars then reinforce the troops, express outrage at Bush war tactics then maintain rendition and triple the number of drone strikes.

Two points. If Obama could just close Gitmo, he would have by now. Congress has stopped him. He didn't promise to end the war in Afghanistan; he promised to end the war in Iraq, which he did on schedule. His anti-Iraq war credentials came from a speech in which he specifically shocked the crowd by saying he did not oppose all wars, just dumb ones. His Nobel speech was a defense of Niebuhrian realism in a fallen world. It was arguably one of the most pro-war speeches ever given accepting a Nobel Peace prize.

Nonetheless, I am in the same generation as Obama and at Harvard at roughly the same time. Derrick Bell was a passionate racial leftist. As president of Harvard Law Review, Obama had no choice but to enter this debate, but that he did so emphatically in defense of Bell and his rigid approach to affirmative action does suggest a more leftist past than his conservative brethren at the Law Review recall. But his calm rhetoric and appeal to an open mind in his little speech was not an endorsement of everything Bell stood for, just an endorsement of his place within the conversation, and a personal admiration for the man himself. And people can change. Obama opposed welfare reform; he now says that was a mistake. Changing doesn't necessarily mean you have some secret radical agenda you've been hiding all your life that is not apparent in any of the decisions he has made as president.

It can mean two things: you're infinitely flexible like Romney, or you have a political disposition and an open mind. I've never doubted Obama was a liberal. But he has evolved into a much more interesting blend in his subsequent years. I regard that as a plus not a minus.

A reader writes:

As a Jew who shares your disgust over the practice leading to the recent herpes death of a New York infant, I'm still offended by your comment about an orthodox religion advocating the "cock-sucking" of a child. I am, in fact, non practicing, but your information is bad, and your comment therefore not only misleading but inflammatory. It suggests two falsehoods: that Orthodox Judaism is monolithic, and that within Orthodox Judaism there is a consensus about this practice. In fact, quite the opposite is true.

Three prominent Talmudic scholars in the 19th century – Rabbis Moshe Schreiber, Azriel Hildesheimer, Chaim Soloveitchik – all individually ruled that a glass tube should be used to draw away blood rather than the mouth. All three of these were prominent Talmudic scholars, and the Orthodox sects that ignore their rulings are akin to Catholic sects that think the Church has been going in the wrong direction for the last 600 years. They represent extreme groups within the already ultra-Orthodox haredi sects and are nowhere close to Modern Orthodox Judaism, which I imagine you are familiar with. More recently, and perhaps more relevantly, Rabbi Moshe Tendler, a microbiologist and Talmudic scholar at Yeshiva University, ruled that due to the very health risks this unfortunate case has brought to light, the practice was actually prohibited under Jewish law.

What you seem not to realize, and why your comment is so misleading, is that the groups that perform the disgusting practice of sucking away the blood likely regard Rabbi Tendler as a heretic, and thus find his opinion to be worthless, and probably blasphemous. I'm hardly suggesting the practice is defensible in any way, and this may be the first time in my life I've defended Orthodox Judaism, but your comment is not only inaccurate, but slanderous. You're known for appreciating nuance; do the same here.

By the reader's own logic, my comment is not inaccurate. I made no comment on whether this was true for all orthodoxy, and linked to a story that said otherwise. But the NYT story notes that

Roughly two-thirds of newborn boys in the city’s Orthodox communities are circumcised with metzitzah b’peh, said Rabbi David Zwiebel, the executive vice president of Agudath Israel of America, who said he was using a calculation based on religious school enrollment figures… In 2005, Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg assembled rabbis throughout the city to try to persuade them to move away from metzitzah b’peh. But they said that the practice was safe and that there was no definitive evidence that it caused herpes. "The Orthodox Jewish community will continue the practice that has been practiced for over 5,000 years," Rabbi David Niederman of the United Jewish Organization in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, said at the time. "We do not change. And we will not change."

Another reader:

Listen, I know you probably don't know this, because you're Catholic and don't live in New York, but there's more to that story than you're reporting. Frankly I'm kind of pissed off that you'd pick up on that story and harp on it.

The hospital that kid died in is in one of the most deeply religious and isolated sections of Brooklyn's Chassidic community: Borough Park. This is the neighborhood that my wife's family (who are Orthodox) regards as "Oh, they're *really* crazy over there." The parents of the boy were most likely not aware that this practice was a danger to their child, this is how their family has been doing this for generations. This is how the circumcision every male child of every person in their community was done. Hell, this is how the father was probably circumcised. And their baby son died.

When my son had his bris, I warned the mohel that if his lips came anywhere near my son's penis, I was going to assault him. He told me he'd done over 80,000 of these, been in business for over 35 years, and NEVER touched a baby's penis with his lips. The practice is called "Metzizeh b'peh," and it's because the mohel is obligated to "draw blood away from the wound." In most brisim that are done every year, the mohel uses a piece of sterile gauze to perform this task. When the traditions of the family say it should be done by mouth, most mohels use a sterilized glass pipette. For the people of Borough Park (the ones that are totally isolated and dress like they're from 17th century poland) they might insist that it be done "the old fashioned way."

There's a tiny minority of people who do this, and they don't do it out of malice or with reckless disregard for the health of their child. They're doing it because it's tradition, and tradition in their community is quite possibly the most important factor (something I'd imagine a conservative could appreciate). In their world, they were trying to do the right thing for their son, and suffered the most immeasurable loss.

I'm not defending this practice. I think it's barbaric and dangerous. The vast majority of Orthodox Jews don't do this. And come on, their two-week-old baby died.

A tiny minority? If you want to argue that this is forbidden by many Orthodox authorities, how do you explain that kind of statistic – "roughly two-thirds" – or the fact that Mayor Bloomberg felt he had to intervene? Regarding the Islamic example, another reader:

The Kargar case is an interesting one; I remember it from my Crim class in law school. I don't think it's evidence of an Islamic sanction of male-male phallus affection, though.  The Afghan practice in the case is a syncretic, pre-Islamic rite that has no sanction in Islamic law that I am aware of.  It may be the case that there is no prohibition against the practice in Islamic law, but that is different than it being sanctioned or approved.  Tolerated is probably the best way to describe its status under Islamic law as applied in Afghanistan.  That is not to say that in other Islamic jurisdictions the practice would be similarly tolerated.

But again, I did not say that infant cock-sucking was endemic to Islam. It's clear from the case that it was a cultural tradition in Afghanistan, which would include Islam, but not suggest it was widespread feature of the religion as opposed to a cultural manifestation of it in one particular locale.

I suspect some Jewish and Mulism readers are so touchy about this because it is a barbarism that embarrasses them. It's time to get over the embarrassment and start protecting children from these grotesque assaults on their tiny bodies.

Pandering nearly as painful as Hillary's: