Year: 2013

Syria In The Red, Ctd

by Brendan James

Andrew J. Tabler advises the White House move to preempt further chemical violence:

Washington should make clear to Russia and Syria that, absent convincing evidence of the regime exercising control over all C.W. [chemical weapons] on its territory, episodes such yesterday’s will require the United States and its allies to take military action to prevent future use. Given the practical difficulties of locating and seizing C.W. stocks and the danger to nearby civilians from attacks on C.W. storage sites, such a warning would presumably mean airstrikes on regime units responsible for using chemical agents and, perhaps, on C.W.-related facilities.

The Post’s editorial board also opts for intervention, through a no-fly-zone. Larison shoots down the idea:

A no-fly zone isn’t going to target the missiles and artillery that the regime would use to launch more chemical weapons. As such, a no-fly zone might be imposed over southern Syria and civilians would still come under attack anyway. Establishing a no-fly zone creates the illusion of protection without offering the real thing. Foreign attacks on the Syrian military would give Assad another incentive to use more chemical weapons, and they certainly wouldn’t be able to prevent future use of those weapons.

U.S. military action wouldn’t reduce the likelihood of more chemical weapons being used against civilian targets, and to the extent that it succeeded in weakening regime forces it would increase the chances that those weapons are captured by jihadists.

More Dish on the renewed debate over intervention here and here.

Christopher Lane Isn’t Trayvon Martin

by Patrick Appel

Glenn Beck fixates on the race of Christopher Lane’s suspected murderers:

Adam Serwer looks at how the right has seized upon the story:

Twenty-two year old Christopher Lane, a student at East Central University, was shot dead in Duncan, Okla., on Aug. 16. Lane’s death has drawn national attention because the teenage suspects allegedly told police that they shot him because they were “bored and didn’t have anything to do.” Many Australian press reports have have focused on the easy availability of firearms in the United States.

Conservative media however, have honed in on the argument that the three suspects are black and the victim is white. In fact, one of the suspects is white, an official from the Stephens County District Attorney’s office told MSNBC Wednesday. “That is not the case,” the official said when asked whether all three suspects were black. “One is black, one is half-black half-white, the other is white.” Conservative media appear to have relied on an erroneous report in the Australian media about the identity of the suspects. Right-wing outlets have since singled out tweets from one of the suspects that include derogatory language aimed at white people.

Local officials have not presented evidence yet that the killing was related to or based on race, but for many conservative outlets, the assumed race of the suspects was proof enough that Lane’s killing was racially motivated.

Bouie adds:

Lane’s death has become fodder for conservative media, and in particular, its narrative of white victimization.

See, the two suspects charged with murder aren’t just teenagers, they’re young black men. And for these right-wing provocateurs, the identity of the assailants is a direct rebuke to the “Justice for Trayvon” movement and evidence of racial hypocrisy from civil-rights leaders and anyone else who spoke about the George Zimmerman trial.

“It’s worse than a double standard. This is a purposeful, willful ignoring of the exact racial components, but in reverse, that happened in the Trayvon Martin shooting,” said Rush Limbaugh, speaking on his radio show. “From Obama on down, didn’t care about Trayvon Martin. All that mattered was that incident offered them an opportunity to advance a political agenda.” He also dinged the media for not focusing on the “racial component of any of the people involved in this.”

Weigel counters Limbaugh et al:

[H]ow hard is it to understand how the Martin/Zimmerman case became a sensation? It wasn’t the only shooting of a black person by a nonblack person that year. Martin was shot on Feb. 26, 2012. Zimmerman was taken in by police but released after five hours, and not charged. The first national media stories about the shooting came more than a week later, and it took until April 11 for Zimmerman to be charged. Compare that with the Lane tragedy: He was shot on Friday, and the suspects were charged four days later. And the second wave of Zimmerman/Martin news came after Zimmerman was acquitted. On Earth-2, where Zimmerman is charged on Feb. 27, does this story from Sanford, Fla., become a national “teaching moment”? I don’t think it does.

Putting Coding Lessons In The Cup

by Patrick Appel

Patrick McConlogue’s wants to teach a homeless man to code:

The idea is simple. Without disrespecting him, I will offer two options:

1. I will come back tomorrow and give you $100 in cash.

2. I will come back tomorrow and give you three JavaScript books, (beginner-advanced-expert) and a super cheap basic laptop. I will then come an hour early from work each day—when he feels prepared—and teach him to code.

Noreene Malone, along with much of the internet, trashes the idea:

What this suggestion shares with earlier ideas to turn the homeless into wireless hot-spots and to act as app beta-testers is a belief in the saving power of the tech world.

It’s not that the ideas are intentionally exploitative or ill-intentioned; rather, it is the bubble-bound thinking that is bothersome. In this worldview, involvement in the startup scene is the kind of transformative thing that can be a cure-all balm. It’s a narrow sort of Utopianism, one that doesn’t fully consider that there might be problems that the tools they have at their disposal can’t solve. These instances get noticed because it’s not good PR to be insensitive to the less fortunate, but this mindset pervades the tech world far beyond its interactions with the homeless.

Will Oremus partially defends McConlogue:

McConlogue’s post makes people uncomfortable not only because it is naïve and condescending, but because it raises an issue over which many of us quietly harbor guilt and doubts of our own. What is the proper response when your heart aches for a homeless person you pass every day on the way to work? Is it to flip a few coins in the guy’s direction now and then? Maybe buy him a sandwich or two? Resolve to donate some money to a local shelter this year? Turn your head and walk on? And if your answer is any of the above: What makes you so sure that your approach is doing any more good than McConlogue’s?

In a follow-up post, McConlogue reports that the homeless man, Leo, chose the coding lessons.

From Bradley To Chelsea Manning, Ctd

by Brendan James

Jake Tapper interviewed a friend of Manning’s:

Emily Greenhouse notes that Manning could face serious danger in prison now that she’s announced her identity as a woman:

Discrimination and violence, especially sexual violence, against transgender women is disproportionately bad. And in prison, according to a 2009 study of inmates in California, some sixty per cent of male-to-female transgender individuals locked up with cisgendered men suffered sexual assault. Not one of the transgender inmates in the study trusted guards to protect them against rape and harm.

Amanda Hess explains the legal measures that are in place:

[D]etention facilities (including military ones) must follow special policies to protect inmates like her. In 2003, Congress passed the Prison Rape Elimination Act. Though real-world implementation of the PREA standards has been slow-moving, the act ostensibly requires facilities to—among other things—take extra care in assigning housing to transgender inmates to reduce their risk of assault. That often means respecting the prisoner’s stated gender identity. According to the National Center for Transgender Equality, housing decisions “must be made on a case-by-case basis” and “cannot be made solely on the basis of a person’s anatomy or gender assigned at birth.”

The transgender inmate’s “views regarding their personal safety must be seriously considered,” as well, and the “decisions must be reassessed at least twice per year.” Simply placing the at-risk inmate in solitary confinement to sidestep the gender issue is not an acceptable option.

Winston Ross notes how the same act could allow Manning to end up in a women’s prison:

[The Prison Rape Elimination Act] led to regulations from the federal Department of Justice to determine housing for transgender inmates on a case-by-case basis, “taking into account factors like personal preference and safety needs,” according to the ACLU, not solely based on their genitals. The act bans “protective custody” for transgender inmates, along with segregated LGBT housing units, and it requires staff to be trained on how to communicate with and treat transgender inmates, even including the ban of “genital searches of transgender inmates just to determine their gender.” Those rules, as of June, apply to all correctional facilities that require federal funding.

Manning’s notoriety and her public revelation about being transgender already put her at serious risk of harassment and/or rape at Leavenworth. No giant leap from there, then to argue that Manning would be best protected by the prison rape act by doing time in a women’s facility, [Dru Levasseur, transgender rights project director at Lambda Legal] said.

Previous commentary here.

Glitches Happen

by Patrick Appel

Commenting on yesterday’s Nasdaq shutdown, Felix argues that our “system of stock exchanges is so incredibly complex, with so much information flowing around at mind-boggling velocity, that it is certain to fail from time to time — and to fail in unexpected ways”:

As Alexis Madrigal says, the surprising thing isn’t that the Nasdaq broke, it’s that we don’t see this kind of thing far more often.

In fact, if I had the opportunity to interview Edward Snowden, that’s one of the questions I’d love to ask: How well do the NSA’s systems work? How often do they just crash, or otherwise stop working for an unexpected and unpredictable reason? The NSA is dealing with orders of magnitude more data than the Nasdaq, and has to do so in conditions of great secrecy. My guess is that things go wrong on a pretty regular basis. But the real-world consequences of today’s market outage, just like the real-world consequences of the flash crash, were pretty slim. And so too is it hard to determine what if any harm might be done by a temporary failure of America’s national security apparatus.

Is The Web Getting Less Cynical?

by Chris Bodenner

Yes, according to Eliana Dockterman:

The most read article of all time on BuzzFeed contains no photographs of celebrity nip slips and no inflammatory ranting. It’s a series of photos called “21 pictures that will restore your faith in humanity,” which has pulled in nearly 14 million visits so far. At Upworthy too, hope is the major draw. “This kid just died. What he left behind is wondtacular,” an Upworthy post about a terminally ill teen singer, earned 15 million views this summer and has raised more than $300,000 for cancer research.

The recipe for attracting visitors to stories online is changing. Bloggers have traditionally turned to sarcasm and snark to draw attention. But the success of sites like BuzzFeed and Upworthy, whose philosophies embrace the viral nature of upbeat stories, hints that the Web craves positivity. The reason:

social media. Researchers are discovering that people want to create positive images of themselves online by sharing upbeat stories. And with more people turning to Facebook and Twitter to find out what’s happening in the world, news stories may need to cheer up in order to court an audience. If social is the future of media, then optimistic stories might be media’s future.

Some evidence to bolster her case:

In a recent study from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, researchers found that “up votes,” showing that a visitor liked a comment or story, begat more up votes on comments on the site, but “down votes” did not do the same. In fact, a single up vote increased the likelihood that someone else would like a comment by 32%, whereas a down vote had no effect. People don’t want to support the cranky commenter, the critic or the troll. Nor do they want to be that negative personality online.

In another study published in 2012, Jonah Berger, author of Contagious: Why Things Catch On and professor of marketing at the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania, monitored the most e-mailed stories produced by the New York Times for six months and found that positive stories were more likely to make the list than negative ones.

When Tipping Could Be An Insult

by Patrick Appel

Lisa Wade claims that, because the original flight attendants were white men, tipping them never caught on:

If stewards were so capable and appreciated, why not offer one’s appreciation in cash?  The answer is, in short, because tips were for Black people.  Black porters on trains and boats were tipped as a matter of course but, according to [Kathleen Barry, author of Femininity in Flight], tipping a White person would have been equivalent to an insult. A journalist, writing in 1902, captured the thinking of the time when he expressed shock and dismay that “any native-born American could consent” to accepting a tip.  ”Tips go with servility,” he said. Accepting one was equivalent to affirming “I am less than you.”

Are Cyborgs Old News?

by Tracy R. Walsh

Anthropologist Kathleen Richardson is skeptical of futurists who think technology will “irrevocably change what it means to be human”:

In books such as The Singularity is Near: When Humans Transcend Biology, [Ray] Kurzweil is forever predicting that we will merge with machines and be able to upload our “complete” consciousness into machines. This idea is emerging as the next big challenge in robotics, but it could equally be viewed as a basic feature of human cultural existence. I’m “uploading” my consciousness right now into this article. A visual artist, when she paints is also “uploading” her consciousness. Consciousness is just another way of saying psychic life – the life and impulses of the individual as a member of a family and collective. Arguably, any human being that has ever created anything has transferred aspects of their consciousness to artificial materials.

A Career In Busywork

by Patrick Appel

David Graeber believes that “bullshit jobs” are on the rise:

In the year 1930, John Maynard Keynes predicted that, by century’s end, technology would have advanced sufficiently that countries like Great Britain or the United States would have achieved a 15-hour work week. There’s every reason to believe he was right. In technological terms, we are quite capable of this. And yet it didn’t happen. Instead, technology has been marshalled, if anything, to figure out ways to make us all work more. In order to achieve this, jobs have had to be created that are, effectively, pointless. Huge swathes of people, in Europe and North America in particular, spend their entire working lives performing tasks they secretly believe do not really need to be performed. The moral and spiritual damage that comes from this situation is profound. It is a scar across our collective soul. Yet virtually no one talks about it.

In response, Ryan Avent claims that “administrative jobs are the modern equivalent of the industrial line worker”:

Disaggregation may make it look meaningless, since many workers end up doing things incredibly far removed from the end points of the process; the days when the iron ore goes in one door and the car rolls out the other are over. But the idea is the same. …

The issue is not that jobs used to have meaning and now they don’t; most jobs in most periods have undoubtedly been staffed by people who would prefer to be doing something else. The issue is that too little of the recent gains from technological advance and economic growth have gone toward giving people the time and resources to enjoy their lives outside work. Early in the industrial era real wages soared and hours worked declined. In the past generation, by contrast, real wages have grown slowly and workweeks haven’t grown shorter.