July 2013 – Page 22

Dissents Of The Day

A reader writes:

I don’t think you summarized Victor Davis Hanson fairly at all, and the “gist” of his article that you quoted doesn’t even include “the talk” or “the advice,” which is exactly the point that you are criticizing. He says that the “sermon” he received from his dad was “very precise,” and then he says that he gave his son a similar talk. Here’s what his dad told him, according to VDH (this is right before the section you quoted):

… he once advised me, “When you go to San Francisco, be careful if a group of black youths approaches you.” Note what he did not say to me. He did not employ language like “typical black person.” He did not advise extra caution about black women, the elderly, or the very young — or about young Asian Punjabi, or Native American males.

So it’s simply inaccurate for you to summarize the advice as “be wary of all young black males that you meet.” The advice is that if a) you’re in an urban setting, b) you are approached by c) a group of young black males, then d) be careful.

I think that’s pretty mild, especially given the other things he said (e.g. his father constantly stressed the importance of treating people as individuals, he was involved in legitimately progressive work with the underprivileged). I don’t know why VDH thinks it important or helpful to write a column about this advice, other than the fact that he uses it to criticize Obama’s speech. And maybe you still want to say this is ridiculous and over-suspicious and stupid. Okay. But it is pretty contextual and definitely more specified than your summary indicates. And you of all people should care about representing that accurately – just think of how you get quoted and decontextualized by those who accuse you of anti-Semitism.

My reader is wrong. Hanson specifically refers to the “talk” that African-American fathers give their sons, as described by Eric Holder, and posits his family’s white alternative. Using the word “sermon” rather than “talk” doesn’t change what he is talking about. And he summarizes the sermon thus:

The advice was not about race per se, but instead about the tendency of males of one particular age and race to commit an inordinate amount of violent crime.

He then cites incidents in his own life that have nothing to do with criminal profiling on the street of “groups” of young black men. He refers to his own experience of one attempted burglary by two black males, and one attempted bike-theft (while VDH was apparently on it) by four black males. Then he says that he “could cite three more examples that more or less conform to the same apprehensions once expressed by a younger Jesse Jackson.” Here is the quote I assume VDH is referring to:

There is nothing more painful to me … than to walk down the street and hear footsteps and start thinking about robbery, then look around and see somebody white and feel relieved.

That’s a broader brush than even Hanson, and I think it makes clear what VDH is saying here. If you see a young black man, go to the other side of the street. Another reader:

I’m going to mount a qualified defense of Hanson.

A perfectly rational actor, working with imperfect information, will not make the blanket assumption that all black men are threats. However, a rational actor will regard an unknown black male as seven (or so) times more likely to pose a threat than an otherwise identical white male. This is the risk ratio the data show, and ignoring the data doesn’t make the risk go away. You and other commentators make it sound like one is either wholly innocent of racial (or gender, etc.) profiling or a deluded, paranoid racist. But this is a false dichotomy. There is a rational, data-driven amount of race, gender, dress, and age profiling that one should do when operating with poor information and a short time-frame (e.g., walking alone at night), and that amount is not zero with respect to any of these.

There are human costs to this, no doubt. I’m a male (Chinese ancestry), but I cannot rationally be offended when a young woman crosses the street when she sees me late at night and I’m dressed scruffily. No one should panic or be paranoid, but you cannot be mad at people for playing the odds in a rational way when their safety is in play. Too many writers try to ameliorate empirical, statistical risks with feelings.

The “human cost” is the unjustified association of any single young black man with criminality. The social cost is the entrenchment of racial segregation. And no, old Chinese men in scruffy clothes do not seem to me experiencing the same thing. Another reader:

There is no such thing as “racial profiling”: there is criminal profiling, and selecting young black males, hoodies, swagger, etc. for profiling is perfectly rational, given who overwhelmingly commits the muggings, assaults, robbery, thefts and general menacing. Likewise, profiling young single white men with social problems and an obsession with camouflage or violent video games is perfectly rational given who overwhelmingly commits mass random shootings.

The Puritanism Of Progressive Parents, Ctd

A reader writes:

I’ll leave readers to decide how convincingly Mark Oppenheimer made his case about liberal puritanism, but as a proud Stumptowner, I gotta call BS on dragging Portland into it. Like so many local issues, when an essayist just grabs a headline and lazily uses it as a metaphor for some larger theme, his whole premise is undermined by misunderstanding what actually happened.

So here’s what actually happened. Flouridation has gone down at the ballot three times here – 1956, 1962, and 1978. Oregon, like other Western states, was red until the Clinton years. The voters who defeated these measures through the decades were not the hipster stereotypes you see on Portlandia. In this year’s election, the proponents outspent opponents 3 to 1 and represented a lot of the bedrock liberal interests that fuel Portland’s liberalism.

The reason voters rejected it is the same reason they always do: they have a romantic love of the natural beauty of Oregon and are enormously proud that their water comes straight from the Bull Run Reservoir in the Mt Hood wilderness. It arrives completely untouched and untreated – pure Cascade spring water. Most Oregonians are immigrants who were attracted to this region for the natural bounty, and Bull Run water is a powerful testament and metaphor for that purity. The measure failed by 20 points, not because radical lefties were afraid of fluoride (even in Portland, you don’t get 60% on far-left votes), but because of the idiosyncrasies of tap water. Lots of random Oregonians voted to save the water in its natural state. That’s how we roll.

(For the record, I voted for fluoride.)

Update from a few readers:

“It arrives completely untouched and untreated – pure Cascade spring water.” Bullshit. All tap water in the country is treated. One hiker with giardia taking a dump in the watershed and the whole city, well, you get the idea. (The watershed is generally off-limits, but still.) From the City’s website:

The 102 square-mile protected Bull Run watershed collects water from rain and snowmelt that then flows to the Bull Run River and its tributaries. The river drains into two reservoirs, where more than 17 billion gallons are stored. The Portland Water Bureau treats the water before it enters into the three conduits that transport it to Portland. The water moves through the system by gravity, requiring no fossil fuel consumption to move water from its intake to the main storage reservoir at Powell Butte.

The other reader:

With all due respect to my fellow Portlander, my read of the anti-fluoride vote was very different. I didn’t see it as a romantic desire to preserve the natural beauty or the clear water coming from Bull Run and helping maintain our PBFs. Rather, I saw it as exactly the kind puritanism the author of the original piece so justifiably pointed out.

I wrote a piece for Skepchick on the subject and posted it to my Facebook wall and my circle disseminated it widely. When I was interviewed by the Oregonian (local paper) about the issue, friends of my partner at PSU started asking why I was “shilling for the chemical industry” and accused me of the most sinister motives. I didn’t “care about children” etc. It is the psychology of purity and taboo in run completely rampant.

The left has entered into a love affair with the naturalistic fallacy which, at times, is equally infuriating and amusing. Infuriating because there’s no scientifically supportable reason to be anti-fluoride, anti-vaccine or anti-GMO and the hypocrisy of leftists who mock right-wing partisans for their global warming denial or their evolution denial is just a little too rich for my tastes. It is amusing because Whole Foods and other companies have discovered that the primrose path to the wallets of liberals is marked by the signs “Natural” and “Organic”. Put those words on your product and lefties will beat a path to your door to give you their money. There’s a very cynical part of me that gets a chuckle out of it. Then I remember the public policy implications of neither side being willing to be “humble before the data” of the real world and I face-palm and despair for the kind of mess we’re going to burden my grandchildren with.

Now, I say this as a committed liberal (although I like to think of myself as a Burkean Liberal, by which I mean that my public policy commitments are, on the whole, pretty in line with social democracy but tempered and held in check by a rather pessimistic view of human nature that we are not perfectible as a species and we should, where possible, look for incremental changes instead of radical lurchings pillar to post in public policy). Above all we should try not to break things because as many ways as there are to have a society, there are far more ways to have a bad society than a good one.

Lives We Know How To Save

Atul Gawande spotlights medical innovations that have failed to catch on. For instance:

The global problem of death in childbirth is a pressing example. Every year, three hundred thousand mothers and more than six million children die around the time of birth, largely in poorer countries. Most of these deaths are due to events that occur during or shortly after delivery. A mother may hemorrhage. She or her baby may suffer an infection. Many babies can’t take their first breath without assistance, and newborns, especially those born small, have trouble regulating their body temperature after birth. Simple, lifesaving solutions have been known for decades. They just haven’t spread.

Many solutions aren’t ones you can try at home, and that’s part of the problem. Increasingly, however, women around the world are giving birth in hospitals. In India, a government program offers mothers up to fourteen hundred rupees—more than what most Indians live on for a month—when they deliver in a hospital, and now, in many areas, the majority of births are in facilities. Death rates in India have fallen, but they’re still ten times greater than in high-income countries like our own.

Not long ago, I visited a few community hospitals in north India, where just one-third of mothers received the medication recommended to prevent hemorrhage; less than ten per cent of the newborns were given adequate warming; and only four per cent of birth attendants washed their hands for vaginal examination and delivery. In an average childbirth, clinicians followed only about ten of twenty-nine basic recommended practices.

He goes on to describe attempts to improve these practices.

Our Gitmo In Afghanistan

John Knefel reminds us that the US is still holding 60 men without charge in a prison near Bagram Airfield. Because they are neither Afghan nor American, they face an uncertain future:

Pentagon spokesperson Todd Breasseale says in an email that the third-country nationals held by the US “at the small part of Parwan [Detention Facility] that we still use are all [Law of War] detainees”–the same authority that applies to nearly every detainee at Guantánamo. (There are currently 166 detainees held at Guantánamo, 86 of whom have been deemed transferrable because they are not threats to US national security.) That legal rationale allows the US to hold prisoners until the end of hostilities in the war against al Qaeda, which Pentagon officials have suggested could last as much as another 20 years.
It remains unclear what the future holds for the prison at Bagram, though Belhadi, the attorney in Pakistan, is not optimistic. “Our impression is that Bagram will remain open even after US combat operations cease in December 2014,” he says. The way forward for his individual clients and the rest of the detainees is also unclear.

(Photo: Aerial view of Parwan Detention Facility in 2009 via Wikimedia)

Does A Company Have Religious Rights?

Sarah Posner spotlights a lawsuit challenging Obamacare’s contraception mandate:

At issue in Hobby Lobby’s lawsuit is far more than whether its employees will have coverage for all 20 methods of birth control Department of Health and Human Services regulations require employers to cover free of co-pays and deductibles. The suit, and others like it, is asking the courts to recognize for-profit corporations as entities with religious consciences that can be, in the legal parlance of [Religious Freedom Restoration Act (RFRA)], “substantially burdened” by government regulations.

The burden, Hobby Lobby argued, and the Tenth Circuit agreed, is that the government will impose fines of $100 per employee per day for failing to comply with the coverage requirement, potentially totaling $475 million in fines per year. That, the court found, amounted to a “Hobson’s choice,” forcing Hobby Lobby to choose between “catastrophic fines or violating its religious beliefs.”

[Hobby Lobby lawyer Kyle] Duncan maintained that the notion of a corporation having religious-freedom rights was “not a novel proposition,” but admitted there were no cases “squarely on point.” The vociferous dissents in Tenth Circuit’s 168-page opinion point to the conflicting legal theories that in all likelihood will be sorted out by the Supreme Court. The Tenth Circuit’s chief judge, Mary Beck Briscoe, excoriated the majority for finding that the operation of a successful for-profit corporation could be seen as a “form of evangelism,” effectively deeming them “faith-based businesses” entitled to free-exercise rights. That, Briscoe contended, “is nothing short of a radical revision of First Amendment law, as well as the law of corporations.”

Many Americas

After traveling from the Rocky Mountains to Manhattan, Ira Chernus questions whether America really needs a national identity:

Why do thoughtful people like Richard Hughes, and so many others, lie awake at night worrying about “what holds us together”? What would be wrong with imagining “the United States” as merely a loose administrative structure for a group of quite autonomous regions? Or perhaps an agency for safeguarding human rights and redistributing wealth in the interests of greater equity, or an entity serving only the purpose of protecting its various regions from threats coming from outside U.S. borders, or a vast debating society where we congenially discuss competing myths and values, or any number of other functions one might think of that “the United States” could play, while leaving regions as the principal source of political-cultural identity?

(Photo of Jasper Johns’ Map by Flickr user Krishna81)

Confronting Chronic Obesity

Judith Schulevitz wants to change how we think about the severely overweight:

What would help the most, according to obesity doctors, would be for patients, general practitioners, insurers, and even regulatory agencies to grasp that weight loss, on its own, does not cure obesity. “This is a chronic disease much like hypertension or diabetes,” says Arthur Frank, the senior physician at the National Center for Weight and Wellness. “The idea that the task is the task of losing weight is naïve and a waste of time.” As is true of those disorders, you can’t manage obesity without a lifelong regimen that includes behavior modification and probably drugs, maybe even drug cocktails. But weight maintenance is costly, and very few insurers cover limited weight-loss programs, let alone open-ended ones.

Moreover, obesity drugs are unpopular. They don’t work all that well. Then again, not much does, and it’s not uncommon for treatments for chronic disorders to achieve partial success at best.

England, At A Distance

James Polchin contemplates the work of British painter L.S. Lowry:

Lowry’s paintings are rarely intimate and instead take a more sociological vision. We encounter his scenes from a distance, perhaps reflecting his own place in these neighborhoods as the weekly rent collector. He composed these landscapes like a stage set, conjuring the reality that working class lives, by the very overcrowded conditions of their domestic worlds, were so often lived in public. This distance compels a sense of mysteriousness about these lives, at the same time as it presents them on the canvas for us to consider. There is no pretense that Lowry or the spectator can really know anything about these scenes beyond our spectator view. …

Amidst this distance is a silence that permeates these canvases. … [E]ven in the street scenes such as “People Going to Work” (1934) or “Returning from Work” (1929) or “Coming from the Mill” (1930), there is an isolating stillness that surrounds so many of those fragile figures bent forward, moving along alone. You begin to wonder about their lives. The more you look at these paintings the more you realize how much they rest on mysteries.

(Image: Coming from the Mill, L.S. Lowry, 1934, courtesy of Flickr user mrrobertwade (wadey))

Why North Korea Lies To Itself

Michael Malice is the author of the forthcoming book, Dear Reader: The Unauthorized Autobiography of Kim Jong Il, which is “based on what is presented as fact in the DPRK.” In an article about his visit to North Korea, Malice explains why North Koreans tell outlandish tales:

The laws in North Korea are oppressive, but they aren’t completely ambiguous or arbitrary. They generally boiled down to three principles: 1) Don’t denigrate the Leaders, 2) Don’t denigrate the government, and 3) Don’t acknowledge anything is wrong. It’s this last one that explains so much of the apparent insanity behind so much of what North Koreans say.

On the limits of the propaganda:

It may be easy to convince an isolated population that they have “nothing to envy in the world,” as one of their popular songs goes. But it’s practically impossible to convince them that they have more food this year than they did last. Even if that’s the fault of Yankee imperialist bastards, Kim Jong Il either authorized the actions or was powerless to stop them. The famous Kim Jong Il stories (“He has perfect pitch!” “He can shrink time!” “He can change the weather!”) serve a very real function: they’re political ads designed to convince a skeptical, not credulous, populace that the son is the equal to the father.

The Best Of The Dish Today

It was one of those summer days in this charming little ashtray of a town when a break from blogging means a trek through marshlands and dunes to dip and bathe in the outgoing tide of the lagoons at the very end of America. This space never ages – even after twenty consecutive full summers of being here. Then the sweaty bike-ride back home and a stop at the East End coffee shop, Wired Puppy, and a small freddo. If I catch the timing right, the setting sun catches a particular tree up a side-street, and sometimes, it just shimmers. And then, at low tide, freshly caffeinated, I take the dogs out without leashes onto the flats of the bay.

Dusty comes alive again, like a puppy, scampering away from me toward the next smell or fishbone. Eddy lingers behind, sniffing behind boats tilting on their side, like beached toys. The light dims and then, if you’re lucky, the bay suddenly blazes with reflected light from the other side of this little curved peninsula. The boats turn golden.

I don’t need anywhere else.

I wrote today about the contortions that public life has forced on Anthony Weiner and Samantha Power. We explored the wonder of sativa and the drama of pro wrestling. If you didn’t have the time to watch this enchanting animation, do yourself a favor.

The most popular post of the day was “Breaking: Man Gets Off Online” about sexting, politics and the future. The second was my post on the nuanced racism of Victor Davis Hanson, given an extra kick by Conor here.

If you’re one of the 33,000 readers who read this blog daily, have used up all your “read-ons”, but have yet to subscribe, [tinypass_offer text=”please do”]. We need you – and it’s only $2 a month or $20 a year. The more of you who subscribe, the more we can give back. If you have subscribed, thanks so much for joining this experiment.

See you in the morning.