Month: June 2013

Repeating Akin’s Mistake?

Congressman Trent Franks said on the Hill today, “The incidence of rape resulting in pregnancy are very low.” Chait steps in to clarify and defends Franks from charges of Akinism:

Franks didn’t say the “rate” of pregnancy from rape is low. He said the “incidence” is low. He didn’t say it’s hard to get pregnant when you’re raped. He said rape-induced pregnancy doesn’t happen very often.

Is that claim, which is different than Akin’s, true? Well, there are about 30,000 pregnancies from rape a year. I’d say that’s a lot. I suppose that if you’re comparing it to the total number of abortions, a figure that’s 20 to 30 times larger, you could argue it isn’t so many. From Franks’s starting point, in which which abortion is murder, the United States allows massive murder of human beings on an unthinkable scale, next to which 30,000 annual pregnancies looms small. If (like me) you don’t share his view of abortion, that 30,000 pregnancies looms large.

In related news, Amanda Marcotte comments on the story of a 13-year-old girl who was impregnated through rape, chose to keep the baby, and has gotten shamed for it:

This sort of thing reveals the inescapable contradiction at the heart of the anti-abortion movement: The very same sexual conservatism that gives rise to anti-abortion sentiment also produces slut-shaming and social ostracism of pregnant young and single women (not to mention rape victims). Avoiding the shame may actually drive a woman to get an abortion—not exactly the end result the anti-choicers want. For single pregnant women who are grown adults, this contradiction is finally collapsing under its own weight, contributing to the rise in single motherhood in red states. But for teenagers, the loving support for “choosing life” promised by the anti-abortion movement remains elusive.

The NSA’s Unofficial Ombudsman

Alexander Nazaryan’s profiles of long-time NSA chronicler James Bamford:

“I have a love-hate relationship with the N.S.A.,” Bamford joked when I spoke to him last week, in the wake of the revelation that the N.S.A. is gathering metadata from telecommunications and Internet companies. “I love them, and they hate me.” They have good reason. Bamford, who divides his time between Washington, D.C., and London, is a slightly mischievous character whose obvious persistence and curiosity have served him well. He talks with the relish of a child who has entered a forbidden room and knows that he will do so again. He decided to write about the N.S.A., which is believed to receive ten billion dollars in annual government funding and employ some forty thousand people, because no one had done it before—and because it was probably more fun than reading case law.

On the allegation that the NSA isn’t very good at what it does:

Bamford said it has “failed badly” in preventing attacks since the Cold War, missing everything from the first World Trade Center attack in 1993 to the recent Boston Marathon bombing. That’s partly because, as the agency has been inundated with so much data, it has perhaps lost the ability to evaluate information in a timely manner. You need people to point out patterns, to say what is relevant and what is not. Or, as Bamford puts it in “A Pretext for War,” the “N.S.A. needs human intelligence sources to help tell it where, and to whom, to listen.” In the past, a rivalry with the C.I.A.—which is largely responsible for human intelligence, in contrast to the N.S.A.’s general focus on data—had prevented that sort of symbiosis.

The Drug War Is A Civil Rights Issue, Ctd

Wilkinson is fine with the “shameless opportunism of privileged middle-class stoners … suddenly up in arms about the systemic racism of the American criminal-justice system”:

We should welcome it. We should cheer it, even if it begins in bad faith. Indignant exhortation only gets us so far. The best hope for justice is always an alliance with self-interest. It’s unlikely that my legalisation activist friends would have come to care much about the cruelty of denying marijuana to the sick, but they came to care, genuinely and deeply. Once they saw the strategic sense of focusing first on the legalisation of medical marijuana, the needless suffering caused by prohibition truly engaged their empathy and compassion. Suddenly, tens of thousands of people too weak to fight for themselves had legions fighting sincerely on their behalf.

Previous Dish on the racial bias of marijuana law enforcement here.

The Right To Be Left Alone?

Jacob Bacharach recently reflected on the way many authority figures construe privacy in the age of the Internet:

Educators and employers are constantly yelling that you young people have an affirmative responsibility not to post anything where a teacher or principal or, worst of all, boss or potential boss might find it, which gets the ethics of the situation precisely backwards. It isn’t your sister’s obligation to hide her diary; it’s yours not to read it. Your boyfriend shouldn’t have to close all his browser windows and hide his cell phone; you ought to refrain from checking his history and reading his texts. But, says the Director of Human Resources and the Career Counselor, social media is public; you’re putting it out there. Yes, well, then I’m sure you won’t mind if I join you guys at happy hour with this flip-cam and a stenographer. Privacy isn’t the responsibility of individuals to squirrel away secrets; it’s the decency of individuals to leave other’s lives alone.

Douthat responds with a more modest understanding of privacy:

A truly moral person, a truly moral corporation, and a truly moral government would not exploit the kind of information that people now share with one another on the internet. But it is not sufficient to simply say, with Bacharach and many others who have come of age with the internet, that privacy is “the decency … to leave other’s lives alone,” and demand that the world and all its powers live up to that ideal. Privacy is also the wisdom to recognize that not all peers and powers are actually decent, and that one’s exposure should perhaps be limited accordingly. And it’s precisely because the ease and convenience of internet communication inclines us all (myself included) to forget or compromise this wisdom — or else pretend to we’re abandoning it out of some higher commitment to honesty and openness — that I expect us to make our peace with the surveillance state, now and for many years to come.

On Idealism (And Israel)

Leon muses:

People who wish to change the world have a special responsibility to acquaint themselves with the world, in the manner of scouts or spies. The realist, by contrast, has no conscience about being complicit with the world. For the realist, the world is all there is to work with. He sees no virtue and no glamour in adopting a standpoint outside reality: it would only diminish his efficacy, which is his highest wish. He does not promote his goals into ideals. Aspiring to less, the realist may accomplish more. Aspiring to more, the idealist may accomplish less. And yet even the failed idealist adds to the store of the world’s sense of possibility. Idealism is futural: it is never completely defeated because it is never completely satisfied.

And elsewhere, he seems finally able to articulate what I and others have been saying for five years or so:

Unless there is a solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, there will not be a Jewish state for very long … Nobody lifted a finger to help Salam Fayyad, who was the Palestinian leader we were all waiting for. No Palestinians and no Israelis. He came and went. It’s a historical scandal of the first magnitude.

This essential argument he deemed worse than anti-Semitism when I made it. Still, it’s good to see him finally see the point – in a trip to Israel to get a million-dollar prize without bothering to visit the West Bank.

Shut Up And Write

Reviewing a collection of exchanges between Paul Auster and J.M. Coetzee, Terry Eagleton bashes novelists who try to be pundits and pols:

It is a Romantic delusion to suppose that writers are likely to have something of interest to say about race relations, nuclear weapons or economic crisis simply by virtue of being writers. There is no reason to assume that a pair of distinguished novelists such as Paul Auster and J. M. Coetzee should be any wiser about the state of the world than a physicist or a brain surgeon, as this exchange of letters between them depressingly confirms.

In fact, there is no reason why authors should have anything particularly striking to say about writing, let alone about Kashmir or the Continuity IRA. Their comments on their own work can be even more obtuse than those of their critics. If T. S. Eliot really did believe that The Waste Land was merely a piece of rhythmical grumbling, as he once claimed, he should never have been awarded the Order of Merit.

Coetzee’s comments on the current economic crisis are not only wrongheaded but fatuous. Nothing has really happened to the world economy, he writes airily to Auster, other than a change of statistics. It is unlikely that the Bank of England, not to speak of those who have had their homes or livelihoods snatched from them by financial gangsters, would be over-impressed by this argument. Neither, judging from his circumspect reply, is Paul Auster, though he is too respectful of his renowned colleague to say so outright. Mysteriously, Coetzee goes on to suggest that putting this right requires an entirely new economic system, a piece of logic that his correspondent wisely leaves untouched. The truth is that neither man knows anything about economics, and there is no reason why being skilled in handling a metaphor should grant you such insight.

The Neocon Pathology

Daniel Larison dismantles Max Boot’s unhinged argument that we should get involved in the Syrian civil war to “settle the score” with Hezbollah:

To seek to “settle” a score from 1983 by increasing U.S. involvement in a potentially even more dangerous civil war in Syria is nothing more than the foolish pursuit of revenge. It also demonstrates a complete failure to understand the original error of the Lebanon intervention, which [Max] Boot and [Lee] Smith think Reagan ended too quickly.

If intervention in Lebanon should have taught us anything, it is that the U.S. has no business meddling in another country’s civil war. To cite the costs of the disastrous Lebanon intervention as a “compelling” reason to intervene in Syria is perverse. If the U.S. made policy decisions today based on carrying out vendettas from thirty years before, there would be no end to the wars that we would feel “compelled” to join or start. The truth is that there are no compelling reasons for the U.S. to become more involved in Syria’s conflict. Many Syria hawks have been desperately trying to find some for two years, but to no avail.

“Open The Doors!” (And The Closets?)

VATICAN-POPE-AUDIENCE

If you want to understand just how vastly different this Pope is from his predecessor, read the full and best translation of his recent impromptu remarks to the Latin American and Caribbean Confederation of Religious Men and Women. They blew me away. Can you ever imagine the anal-retentive doctrine cop, Ratzinger, ever saying this about the body that dictates doctrine that he once headed, the Congregation For The Doctrine Of The Faith:

They will make mistakes, they will make a blunder [meter la pata], this will pass! Perhaps even a letter of the Congregation for the Doctrine (of the Faith) will arrive for you, telling you that you said such or such thing… But do not worry. Explain whatever you have to explain, but move forward… Open the doors, do something there where life calls for it. I would rather have a Church that makes mistakes for doing something than one that gets sick for being closed up…

The heart swells as the voice of Jesus replaces the voice of the Pharisee. Rocco tartly observes that Pope Francis’ “penchant for veering off-text in open company just reached a whole new planet”. You can say that again. I loved this aside in observing how we are often more obsessed with tiny shifts in stock prices than the human being dying of hypothermia down the street:

Computers are not made in the image and likeness of God; they are an instrument, yes, but nothing more. Money is not image and likeness of God. Only the person is image and likeness of God. It is necessary to flip it over. This is the gospel.

And I loved this dismissal both of the uptight traditionalists who cannot see the forest for the rosaries and of those seeking to substitute the core teaching of the incarnation in favor of a vague spirituality:

There are some restorationist groups. I know some, it fell upon me to receive them in Buenos Aires. And one feels as if one goes back 60 years! Before the Council… One feels in 1940… An anecdote, just to illustrate this, it is not to laugh at it, I took it with respect, but it concerns me; when I was elected, I received a letter from one of these groups, and they said: “Your Holiness, we offer you this spiritual treasure: 3,525 rosaries.” Why don’t they say, ‘we pray for you, we ask…’, but this thing of counting… The second [concern] is for a Gnostic current. Those Pantheisms… Both are elite currents, but this one is of a more educated elite… I heard of a superior general that prompted the sisters of her congregation to not pray in the morning, but to spiritually bathe in the cosmos, things like that …

And then a possible clue as to why Benedict XVI decided to break with centuries of tradition and run into hiding after he read a dossier on abuses in the church:

In the Curia, there are also holy people, really, there are holy people. But there also is a stream of corruption, there is that as well, it is true… The “gay lobby” is mentioned, and it is true, it is there… We need to see what we can do…

Was the former Pope subject to blackmail? Were other Cardinals?

If the Vatican’s screwed-up doctrines about gay people have led to genuine threats of blackmail from within the hierarchy, if a faction of benign or malign homosexuals has really been using that leverage for whatever purposes, then we do indeed have a problem, to which the answer must be more transparency – of the kind Francis seems to endorse. The Vatican is refusing to comment on the content of the “private meeting.” But Mary Elizabeth Williams recognizes an emerging pattern:

The pope’s cryptic statement about a “gay lobby” doesn’t do anything to explain what a “gay lobby” actually is, how it’s gay lobbying and what it’s gay lobbying for — or what the Vatican intends to do about what Francis calls the “difficult” work of reforming the genuinely corrupt aspects of the huge worldwide organization he recently became the leader of. But already his actions have revealed a Hillary-like determination to do it his way, protocol be damned. …

Like his institution itself, Francis still got a long, long, lonnnnnng way to go in terms of broadening the definition of love, humility and tolerance. But a guy who’s been tweeting about “the unemployed, often as a result of a self-centered mindset bent on profit at any cost,” is a guy who’s having a good time shaking things up and making splitting headaches for the big shots around him. A guy who remembers that Jesus was a loudmouth and a troublemaker. [Vatican spokesman] Father Lombardi, I hope you’ve got plenty of Advil. Because I have a feeling your boss is just getting warmed up.

Previous Dish on the rumors of a “gay lobby” in the Vatican here and here.

(Photo: Pope Francis smiles after his weekly general audience in St Peter’s square at the Vatican on June 12, 2013. By Alberto Pizzoli/AFP/Getty Images.)