March 2013 – Page 90

The Leaker Hierarchy

Ambers points out that the government is “unfair to one category of leakers: the category of government employees who are LEAST likely to leak”:

Those are the grunts, the worker bees, the men and women who get stuff done. They very rarely disclose classified information inappropriately, which is one reason why Manning’s case was so significant. But every government counter-intelligence program aimed at leaks focuses on these people. I sometimes think it’s a way of pretending to punish leakers to satisfy Congress while leaving for themselves huge avenues for them to shape policy or perception by leaking.

There absolutely is a double standard.

When Adults Bully

Linda Besner wonders if adults are just as bad as kids, especially in the workplace:

A study out of Vanderbilt University showed that some 60 percent of new nurses leave their first jobs within six months as a result of the toxic culture—a professional hazard encapsulated in the saying, “Nurses eat their young.” Nursing is stressful as hell, and old-timers can come to feel justified in taking out their frustration on the new kids.

Part of what sucks about being a kid is the lack of control—people are constantly shuffling you around to different places, telling you what to eat, what to wear, and how long to sit still. In stressful work environments, it’s kind of the same thing—it’s an absence of autonomy that often makes people dissatisfied, and that feeling of being trapped can turn into aggression.

Escalating The War On Whistleblowers, Ctd

An Army officer writes:

Benkler’s piece about Bradley Manning is deceptive. Manning is being charged under the Uniform Code of Military Justice because he is an American soldier who was entrusted with dealing with American intelligence. He’s not being punished as a whistleblower. Do we really want to empower soldiers and intelligence analysts with personal or institutional grudges (as Manning admits he had) with unleashing hordes of classified material that can damage the United States?

It should be noted that the UCMJ’s secondary purpose, in addition to providing a system of justice in the unique jurisdiction that is the military, is to uphold good order and discipline among the troops. As a commanding officer, you can’t uphold good order and discipline in a military intelligence unit, such as Manning’s, if you’re constantly on the lookout for potential ‘whistleblowers’ among your soldiers who’ve been entrusted with national or operational secrets, as Manning was. He should not be compared to a Wal Mart manager who deplores her inequitable salary and job prospects due to her gender and blows the whistle on corporate misbehavior.

I agree. Another reader goes further:

Bradley Manning is not a whistleblower. Whistleblowers expose illegal activities that would otherwise be covered up. Manning is a political activist who went too far.

Even taking him on his word that he reached out mainstream American media to no avail, he still had 500+ plus members of Congress from which to pick any number of whom would have jumped at the chance to properly expose some of what was leaked in order to affect policy change. And had Manning never heard of the Justice Department? If there was a cover-up of illegal activities, the DoJ is the proper authority to investigate and prosecute. What Manning did instead was send bulk US secrets to an organization known for virtual hostage taking – making demands of governments in exchange for the safe keeping of such information.

No matter one’s distaste for our government’s actions in the Middle East, we still have to adhere to some basic rules. For people like Manning and organizations like Wikileaks, there are no ground rules. They make up the rules as they go along. Despite all of its faults, our democracy is still intact. Defending Manning and allowing him to get away with such reckless acts only invites more of the Wikileaks attitude of deciding that “Only we are the supreme moral arbiters and custodians of justice in the world!” Start multiplying that out, and anarchy follows shortly thereafter.

Manning is a traitor not only by rule of law, but to the very notion of democratic and representative government. He should be convicted of these serious crimes and spend a significant amount time in prison for what he did.

Source “Dating”

As a female journalist having to deal with inappropriate male sources, Marin Cogan considers why “the reporter-seductress stereotype persists”:

Studies suggest that men are more likely than women to interpret friendly interest as sexual attraction, and this is a constant hazard for women in the profession. The problem, in part, is that the rituals of cultivating sources—initiating contact, inviting them out for coffee or a drink, showing intense interest in their every word—can often mimic the rituals of courtship, creating opportunities for interested parties on either side of the reporter-source relationship to blur the line between the professional and personal.

A source may invite you to meet at the bar around the corner from your apartment. If you agree, he might offer to pay for the drinks and walk you home. One Washington climate reporter remembers an environmentalist stroking her leg at one such outing and noting, disapprovingly, that she hadn’t shaved.

“I always remind young female reporters to be wary about falling victim to the ‘source-date,’ ” says Shira Toeplitz, politics editor at Roll Call. “You’re on a second glass of something, and it occurs to you, he may be misinterpreting this as a date. I advise them to drop an obvious clue along the lines of, ‘I’m going to expense this.’ “

The Sequester Stops …

… at aid to Israel. But you knew that already.

The Dish Experiment, Ctd

Amanda Palmer gives a really smart talk on funding the arts and on the intimacy between creators and fans:

Felix Salmon uses the talk to discuss the Dish’s [tinypass_offer text=”economic model”] and paywalls more generally (fresh Dish data after the jump):

[T]he more formidable the paywall, the more money you might generate in the short term, but the less likely it is that new readers are going to discover your content and want to subscribe to you in the future.

Amazing offline resources like the Oxford English Dictionary and the Encylopedia Britannica are facing existential threats not only because their paywalls are too high for people to feel that they’re worth subscribing to, but also because their audiences are not being replaced at nearly the rate at which they’re dying off. The FT, for instance, has discovered that its current subscriber base is pretty price-insensitive, and has taken the opportunity to raise its subscription prices aggressively. That makes perfect sense if Pearson, the FT’s parent, is looking to maximize short term cashflows, especially if it’s going to sell off the FT sooner rather than later anyway. But if you’re trying to build a brand which will flourish over the long term, it’s important to make that brand as discoverable as possible.

I’ve found Felix’s analysis of the question of how to get content paid for has been extremely clarifying. One small point. He writes:

If you look at the $611,000 that Sullivan has raised to date, essentially none of it has come from people who feel forced to cough up $20 per year in order to be able to read his website. To a first approximation, all of that money has come from supporters: people who want Sullivan, and the Dish, to continue.

That’s not entirely accurate. We started selling pre-subscriptions without the meter running because of time constraints between announcing our shift (early January) and implementing it (early February). But in the last 30 days, with the meter running for only 28 of them, we raised just over $100K. That’s one fifth of what might be called the kickstarter period.

Here are the sales of subs for the past 30 days:

Of course, we don’t know what will happen in the next thirty days. But the weekly waves of new subscribers does show the meter working at the margins. If it were to keep up this pace – which, of course, I doubt because I am a pessimist – we’d bring in $1.2 million a year from the meter alone. As for the meter, we now have 14,500 readers at their maximum 6 or 7 clicks and about to hit the meter request. If they all decided to sign up, we’d instantly have close to $300,000 more and hit our target for the year in keeping the Dish viable within its previous budget.

We have eleven more months to get there. You can help us – and help pioneer the simplest, clearest model for supporting online journalism – by subscribing [tinypass_offer text=”here”].

The Gladwell Effect

Jessica Love complains about the lazy tendency of social-science researchers to inflate the relevance of “counterintuitive” studies for a clickable headline:

[It is] this irksome spin that makes [these studies] such fodder for the popular press. Indeed, had the researchers not spun it this way, the press (and, alas, I include bloggers like myself) might have done so for them. Why read “Social Connections Evoke a Variety of Strong Emotions” when you can read “What Makes Us Happy Can Make Us Sad“? Why click on “Intelligence No Cure-all for Cognitive Bias” when you can go to “Why Smart People Are Stupid”? …

The counterintuitive has its place. But our love affair comes at a cost. It leaves little room in the public consciousness for social scientific work that is incremental, for work that shores up and teases apart, for work that complicates, for work on the boundary conditions—those fragile social and mental habitats upon which decisions turn. In other words, it leaves little room for most of social science.

The Iraq War’s Junior Partner

Tony Blair isn’t apologetic:

Friedersdorf gives the interviewer props:

What I like about the video above is the way contentious issues are addressed head on, so that disagreement is actually aired. It even works out nicely for Blair, because he gets to really defend himself. It’s the sort of pressing interview that teases out the actual tensions in the subject’s thoughts.

Quotes For The Day

“In November 2003, after a court decision in Massachusetts to legalise gay marriage, school libraries were required to stock same-sex literature; primary school children were given homosexual fairy stories such as “King & King”. Some high school students were even given an explicit manual of homosexual advocacy entitled “The Little Black Book: Queer in the 21st Century”. Education suddenly had to comply with what was now deemed ‘normal’,” – Cardinal Keith O’Brien, March 3, 2012.

“I wish to take this opportunity to admit that there have been times that my sexual conduct has fallen below the standards expected of me as a priest, archbishop and cardinal,” – Cardinal Keith O’Brien, March 3, 2013.

O’Brien does not stand accused of molesting or raping minors or children; just of sexual harassment of priests under his authority. One wonders if the Curia now convening realizes the mountain of hypocrisy on sexual matters they sit atop. Or rather: not whether they realize it, but whether they have the strength to elect a new Pope capable of revisiting Humanae Vitae and and non-procreative sexuality.

Sully And Hitch: “You Are Going To Die”

The last installment of my 2006 taped late-night conversation with Christopher Hitchens can be found here, along with all the previous extracts. This new one, on re-reading, stopped me short, as you might imagine from the opener – and Hitch’s priceless response:

H: Well, look, you’re not gonna trap me into saying the Gospels are true. I don’t think they’re true at all, I don’t think there’s a word of truth in them.

A: You think it was entirely made up. He didn’t even exist.

H: I think the entire thing — the Gospel account of his life is of course an absolute fiction —

A: Absolute?

H: Well, an absolute confection. A jamming together of mutually inconsistent and weird accounts. If you now tell me, “hey, are you resting yourself on the Gospel,” I’m saying, Andrew, please don’t make my point for me. That is what Christianity, however, does depend upon. And there is one thing on which they certainly agree that makes no sense at all: moral advice such as “take no thought for the morrow.” Don’t care about clothes, or wealth, or investment, or your children, or anything for the future, why bother? This is immoral advice. Anyone who took it would be highly irresponsible at best.

A: Yes.

H: It only makes sense if you believe that there is no point in doing this, if you take the James Watt view of the national parks: why preserve anything when it’s all coming to an end? This is wickedness.

A: Well, because it will come to an end, because you are going to die.

H: [Lights cigarette.]

A: And you and I are not going to be here in 50 years’ time, neither of us. We will end.

H: Well I’m holding out for stem cells, myself.

A: [Laughs.]

H: Particularly embryonic ones, because apparently they last longer. No, no of course, no one argues more strongly than me that we’re born into a losing struggle, as is our cosmos, certainly our universe. For all we know, the heat death of the universe certainly might occur before we die!

A: Is it a more logical thing to surrender to that and accept it rather than to fight it?

H: Not as moral advice, no. To say, “in that case, what is the point in preserving a surplus from the harvest and trying to make sure that the next one will be larger,” because one has children, say, or because there are other people to be fed.

A: But Jesus, of course, did not have children, and instructed his disciples to abandon their own children and abandon their own families…

H: Immoral advice.

A: …and abandon their own wealth.

H: Does the Church do an imitation of Christ in this way?

A: No. No, they do not—it’s an impossible doctrine. It is an absolutely impossible doctrine.

H: Andrew, you’re doing my work for me.

A: No I’m not, I’m actually doing my work.

H: It’s either morally incoherent or it’s actually wicked, but as a precept of morality it’s utterly void, null.

A: Or it is truer than anything you’ve said. Or it is the only sane response to living as a mortal. Now it may be that we are, as mortals, incapable of it.

H: It’s too man-made, and it’s too obviously man-made for that to be true. And it bears, as Darwin says about our species, the lowly stamp of its origin. You can tell its man-made, as you call tell with the Qu’ran as well, as with the Torah and the Talmud. This is the work of fallible mammals, and it shows.

A: Of course.

H: Well, that’s all there is to be said about it.

A: No, that isn’t. The people who wrote down the oral history of this figure that they knew—

H: Copied down from other fragments, inserted later. Have you read Barton Ehrman’s book?

A: I haven’t read it but I know of it.

H: Well, it’s quite extraordinary, much more than I thought.

A: The Misquoting Jesus book?

H: It’s called ‘misquoting’ which is a very mild statement of its title, and I hope I don’t interrupt you but I just want to say this: the story, say, the famous story of the woman taken in adultery and the very interesting and odd behavior of Jesus on that occasion that everyone remembers in their childhood—

A: Was put in a hundred and fifty years later, yeah.

H: And it isn’t in the same kind of language that the other Gospels are in, it’s to Prof. Ehrman’s shock—and I mention him because he had become the chief spokesman of the Biblical fundamentalists, was their most skilled and most multilingual and sincere and scholarly advocate. His realization that this is at best a legend, I consider to be significant. I’m taking Bertrand Russell’s test of “evidence against interest.”

A: Well yes, in his case—although I think you’re exaggerating a little his previous stature. I mean I don’t think he would claim that he was the most important fundamentalist scholar.

H: He would be too modest for that, but he was being advanced by them as such and had been to, first to Wheaton I believe and then to the college that looks down on Wheaton as slightly too secular…

A: Namby-pamby.

H: Yes, and undoubtedly entered this vocation mastering all the relevant tongues in the hope of vindicating Biblical literacy.

A: No, his story is an absolutely riveting one, and what I find fascinating in terms of the church—and not just my Church but other churches, what we’re seeing the Episcopal Church as well—is, I think, the impact of a lot of this. And I think that part of what you see in popular culture is the sort of dreck of the Da Vinci Code, it’s a kind of ghastly … I’m not going to get into the content of it, I’m just saying purely as an anthropological, sociological phenomenon, it seems to me without the awareness that scholarship has essentially destroyed the notion of a single, inerrant text.

H: I think the difference between us may be this, then: I don’t believe scholarship is necessary for that. It’s interesting, but I’m so made—and I think I’m not the only one, but if I was I wouldn’t mind—as to be certain that there wouldn’t be an infallible text dictated by God to men. That the idea is impossible to begin with, ex hypothesi, by definition, it cannot happen, there will be no revelation, there never has been one and if there was, why wasn’t it made to everybody to judge whether it’s true or not? Why was it made to a group of Bronze Age villagers who then have to pass it on, who would be incapable of passing it on in its original form?

A: Well, it has to be made to somebody—

H: Of that we can be absolutely certain.

A: Yes.

H: So it’s not that there wasn’t a revelation, it’s that there can’t be a revelation.

A: Or the truth that would be imparted would be extraordinarily hard to translate. I mean, what Jesus speaks in are these mysterious parables that are subject to all sorts of interpretation. It’s not as if what Jesus is saying is the kind of doctrine that one would read in the catechism of the Catholic Church. I mean, if Jesus was the son of God, then it’s certain the God speaking through him spoke in paradoxical, mysterious contradictory dialogues.

H: I wouldn’t say paradoxical. Contradictory, incoherent. And very often wicked, the injunctions are very often evil. They say all other tribes must be destroyed physically and—

A: I don’t recall Jesus saying any of those things.

H: Jesus doesn’t say that—

A: Well let’s stick to Jesus, then.

H: Alright, let’s stick to Jesus, then.

A: And let’s stick to Jefferson’s Jesus. Because if Jefferson, for example, who you believe had no interest—why was he so interested? What drew Jefferson to the Gospels?

H: It was compulsory to be interested…

A: No it wasn’t, he kept this privately. Why did he privately construct his own Bible?

H: In order: if I can’t mention, I won’t dwell on the evil instructions of genocide and enslavement and rape that are mandatory in the Old Testament except to say that nowhere in the Old Testament is there any mention of Hell or punishment of the dead, the most evil doctrine of Christianity, I think of them all. It’s only until gentle Jesus, meek and mild makes his appearance, or only when, rather, he does so, that the idea of eternal torment is introduced. The Old Testament contains no warrant, at least, for that. Slavery, yes, genocide, yes, racism, yes, rape, all of that, certainly. Human sacrifice, and its equivalents. But no Hell. That has to come with the gentle, more modest New Testament. But Jefferson cuts all that out of the Bible as best he can…

A: Because why? What is his justification for that?

H: Jefferson died in I think 1826. Darwin and Lincoln were born on the same day in 1819, Jefferson is just at the point where there isn’t quite enough science to disprove the Bible or to utterly negate religion. He’s a man of enormous curiosity, he wanders, goes on expeditions and has debates with French naturalists about the topography of Virginia. “How can it be the shells, the sea shells, are so high up on the mountain?” He’s just below the summit, he can’t see over— bit like Moses—but he really wants to know.

And he knows that religion is, in its clerical form, nonsense, but he feels, can it really be all untrue? Well, it might be truer if I cut out all the things that are self-evidently untrue. Well, this is a very primitive pre-Darwinian almost pre-modern view. Because he was trying his best, he was one of the precursors. One looks at the Jefferson Bible with interest but one doesn’t learn anything from his amendment of it. Except that it can’t be the word of God.

A: When you read Jefferson’s Bible, does it say anything to you? Are the sayings of Jesus, insofar as they reflect upon the way one should be among one’s fellow human beings, do they strike you as…

H: What’s left over is just as wicked as it was to begin with, it seems to me.

A: It’s wicked to love one’s neighbor?

(Photo: taken by yours truly on the beautiful grounds of Willamette University in Salem, Oregon.)