Month: July 2013

It’s Not Racist … Ctd

Conor Friedersdorf spots a “glaring contradiction” between Victor Davis Hanson’s opposition to affirmative action and his support for racial profiling:

I don’t fault Hanson for opposing affirmative action (though I reject large chunks of his rhetoric on race). I nevertheless find it perverse that he insists on the scrupulous treatment of young black males as individuals anytime they would benefit from group preferences, and then, when they’d most benefit from being treated as individuals rather than dark-skinned objects of suspicion, he prejudges all young black males based on statistics about the racial group to which they belong.

For Hanson, it is a miscarriage of justice worth lamenting if an Asian American applicant to UC Berkeley loses a spot to a black applicant due to racial preferences. And perhaps that is an injustice. Maybe the Asian American is the child of an impoverished family of Hmong refugees and the black applicant is the president’s daughter. What is the likely result of that injustice? The Asian American applicant must attend UCLA or UCI.

What are the consequences of racial-profiling, the form of individuality-effacement Hanson defends? Countless innocent black men — that is to say, the vast majority who will never rob or assault anyone — walking around under constant, unjust suspicion from fellow citizens and law enforcement; racial tension heightened in America; prejudice passed down across generations; and some innocent blacks killed while under wrongful suspicion. Opining on affirmative action, Hanson wrote, “It is well past time to move on and to see people as just people.”

He should take his own advice.

Cameron’s Online Porn Crackdown

Cameron And Theresa May Visit Hertfordshire After Results Show A Reduction In Crime In The UK

On Monday, while Brits were enthralled with the new royal baby, the prime minister unveiled a sweeping anti-porn campaign requiring citizens to tell their ISPs if they want to look at dirty pictures. Oliver Wright reports:

Under his proposals, by the end of next year all households will have to “opt out” of automatic porn filters, which would come as standard with internet broadband and cover all devices in a house. Possession of the most extreme forms of adult pornography will become an offence, while online content will have the same restrictions as DVDs sold in sex shops. To tackle child abuse images, search engines have been told they will have to redact results from specific searches, while anyone accessing websites shut down by the police for containing such images will see a message warning them that what they were doing was illegal.

Cracking down on child porn is critical of course, but there are a lot of problems with the PM’s plan. For one, not even Cameron seems to know what it entails:

Mr Cameron said he did not “believe” written pornography, such as erotic novel Fifty Shades of Grey, would be blocked under the plans. But he added: “It will depend on how the filters work.” … He then added: “I’m not saying we’ve thought of everything and there will be many problems down the line as we deal with this, but we’re trying to crunch through these problems and work out what you can do and can’t do.”

Loz Blain highlights the potential for abuse:

The very fact that your web will effectively be censored unless you specifically ask your provider for access to porn raises all sorts of issues. For starters, the famous British gutter press will be delighted to reveal the names of famous people who have asked for the filter to be disabled. Somewhere, there will be a very useful list of people who are porn users, and one day it will leak.

And many of them, if the past is any guide, will be the most uptight Tory MPs. What’s more, some parts of the plan seem designed to apply to the web of yesteryear. For example, Cameron said that Google has a “moral duty” to “blacklist” certain words. David Nosowitz pounces:

This is absurdly, insultingly presumptuous. A prime minister is demanding a foreign corporation kowtow to his demands and implement a childishly naive proposal based on his own showy morality. …

Many of the illegal corners of the internet aren’t indexed by Google, anyway. Try searching for child porn right now; you won’t find any. Try searching for an online store that’ll mail you heroin. You won’t find that, either. But both exist, and you will find news stories or forums about both that can lead you there. Discussion of illegal activities isn’t illegal, but makes any indexing restriction on Google pretty much worthless.

A former head of the Child Exploitation and Online Protection Center, Jim Gamble, raised the same point:

Gamble said Mr. Cameron’s plan to tackle child abuse images by removing results from search engines like Google would be “laughed at” by pedophiles. “There are 50,000 predators … downloading abusive images on peer-to-peer, not from Google,” he said. “Yet from CEOP intelligence only 192 were arrested last year. That’s simply not good enough. We’ve got to attack the root cause, invest with new money, real investment in child protection teams, victim support and policing on the ground. Let’s create a real deterrent. Not a pop-up that pedophiles will laugh at.”

And of course civil libertarians aren’t thrilled:

Jim Killock, from the Open Rights Group, said Cameron’s plan was not only bound to fail but also sets a dangerous precedent of government intervention when it comes to freedom of expression and access to information. “I’m not sure censorship is ever the answer,” he said. “It’s a shocking attempt to claim the moral high ground. … I don’t think he fully understands what he is proposing.”

Meanwhile, Leo Mirani hasn’t missed the irony that a British tabloid is one of the initiative’s few supporters:

[Cameron] may be trying to appease the highly influential right-wing British newspaper, The Daily Mail, which has been running a campaign against online porn for months. The prime minister released his speech to the paper a day in advance. In its coverage of the speech, the paper quotes Cameron as saying, “The Daily Mail has campaigned hard to make internet search engine filters ‘default on.’ Today they can declare that campaign a success.” Yet the Daily Mail has built the world’s most trafficked news website largely on the basis of pictures of celebrities in various stages of undress. Considering the unpredictable and overly enthusiastic nature of filtering algorithms, it is not inconceivable that the Daily Mail may find itself a victim of its own success.

Well, that would be too delicious an irony, wouldn’t it?

(Photo: PC Kris Seward shows the Prime Minister David Cameron the mobile device as he visits community police in Hertfordshire on July 17, 2013 in Cheshunt, England. Cameron was observing the their new crime prevention initiatives, including targeted CCTV and a new PC based mobile device. By Paul Rogers – WPA Pool/Getty Images)

Vandals And Saboteurs, Ctd

In the NYT, there’s another account of the bizarre doings of a Congress that, despite an 83 percent disapproval rating, is far more concerned about nullifying the results of the last election through sabotage and gridlock than bringing about any change other than the kind of crude austerity that has clearly failed in Europe. The legislative nihilism is matched by total disrespect for the president. I’m not talking about robust criticism; I’m talking about the contemptuous dismissal in a statement like this:

“These are tough bills,” acknowledged Representative Harold Rogers, the Kentucky Republican who leads the House Appropriations Committee. “His priorities are going nowhere.”

I’m not surprised that dude is a white guy from Kentucky talking about a black president, I’m sorry to say. Chait, who specializes in Republican pathologies, profiles the House:

The Republican Party has spent 30 years careering ever more deeply into ideological extremism, but one of the novel 173293592-SD-600x400developments of the Obama years is its embrace of procedural extremism. The Republican fringe has evolved from being politically shrewd proponents of radical policy changes to a gang of saboteurs who would rather stop government from functioning at all. In this sense, their historical precedents are not so much the Gingrich revolutionaries, or even their tea-party selves of a few years ago; the movement is more like the radical left of the sixties, had it occupied a position of power in Congress. And so the terms we traditionally use to scold bad Congresses—partisanship, obstruction, gridlock—don’t come close to describing this situation. The hard right’s extremism has bent back upon itself, leaving an inscrutable void of paranoia and formless rage and twisting the Republican Party into a band of anarchists.

And the worst is not behind us.

He believes that Boehner’s days are numbered:

The fall will bring a quick succession of events — a possible government shutdown and a debt ceiling fight — merely to avoid calamity. If Boehner gets through those events, plus stiffing conservatives on the Benghazi investigation, he’ll be facing a potential open rebellion even before he tries to cut some kind of deal on immigration. If Boehner holds on to his job through the next election I’ll be surprised and impressed. The walls are closing in on him.

Solitary For Life

Solitary confinement has a way of outliving its justifications. First it was supposed to inspire spiritual reflection and penance, then it became a last-resort punishment. Now, Rob Fischer reports, isolation units serve as long-term housing for gang members:

Ninety-eight per cent of inmates in Pelican Bay [State Prison]’s [security housing units (SHUs)] are there because they have been “validated” as prison-gang members, based on any number of criteria—some were identified by other inmates, others by tattoos or artwork. The gangs aren’t so well represented in solitary just because their members commit more serious infractions, though that’s almost certainly true; rather, it’s because SHUs are the [California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation (C.D.C.R.)’s] gang-fighting strategy. The only way out is to disavow membership, and the only way to do that is to “debrief,” or inform on other gang members.

Most of the major prison gangs have “blood in, blood out” policies, under which an assault is part of the initiation and death is the only way out—and that can extend to members’ families. The debriefing requirement leaves some inmates with no good option but to languish in the SHUs indefinitely. It can be a particularly dispiriting state of affairs for those eligible for release. Parole boards require certain benchmarks of good behavior, like work participation and education attainment, that aren’t offered to inmates in SHUs. As a result, anyone in a SHU who has been sentenced under California’s three-strikes laws, which impose minimum-to-life sentences on third-time offenders, faces the serious possibility of a de facto life sentence in solitary confinement.

Fischer notes that Pelican Bay once capped SHU stays at 180 days; today, nearly half of its 1,100 inmates in solitary confinement have lived that way for more than 10 years. More Dish on solitary confinement here, here, and here.

Baby Talk

How we talk about royal spawn has changed over time:

[B]aby-body talk—especially when it comes to the Hanoverians and the Windsors and the Private Eyelike—hasn’t always been so forthright. Conversations surrounding royal pregnancies have mostly been a matter of indirection. Of course, this isn’t surprising, given that the word “pregnant” remained taboo until the 1950s, according to the Online Etymological Dictionary. Dainty euphemisms included “in a family way” or “with child.” (There were some cruder alternatives: Eighteenth-century slang used the non-euphemistic “poisoned” to connote the condition. According to A Dictionary of Slang and Unconventional English, “in the spud line” was at one point an alternative.) In 1857, when Queen Victoria gave birth to her youngest child, the official announcement was careful to avoid any unseemly agency with tactical deployment of the passive voice. “This afternoon, at a quarter before two o’clock, the Queen was safely delivered of a Princess …” read the official announcement.

(Image: Private Eye’s cover announcing the birth of the new prince)

Vlad The Popular

Christopher Read explains why, despite Vladimir Putin’s brutal tactics and corrupt regime, the Russian president maintains favorable numbers:

Putin gained immense popularity in 2009 by publicly taking to task one of the richest Russian-based oligarchs, Oleg Deripaska, for shortcomings in his aluminium-smelting factory in Leningrad province. Putin’s style has certainly been authoritarian, but to see oligarchs as human rights victims is to stretch the definition.

Other elements of his popularity have been a more assertive international stance in which Russia shows independence in the face of American and western opposition — currently manifesting in the crisis in Syria, one of Russia’s oldest allies — and a relatively successful economic policy which saw a period of growth, falling unemployment and rise in real wages, sometimes achieved by increasing state intervention in the economy, including the re-nationalization of factories and industries.

Obviously, none of this was popular in the West, since they curtailed Western influence over the country, limited business opportunities and, supposedly, revived Soviet-era ghosts. The response of the Russian population, apart from its oligarchs and intellectuals, has been much more favorable and, even though they are slipping, Putin’s poll ratings remain very high.

The South vs Social Mobility, Ctd

Al-Ga-Ms-SC-1

The popular thread continues: A reader points to this analysis of how ancient “black soil” helped make the South (Cretaceous rock units -139-65 million years old – are shown in shades of green. Older rock units are in gray, younger ones in yellow):

During the Cretaceous era, 139-65 million years ago, shallow seas covered much of the southern United States. These tropical waters were productive–giving rise to tiny marine plankton with carbonate skeletons which overtime accumulated into massive chalk formations. The chalk, both alkaline and porous, led to fertile and well-drained soils in a band, mirroring that ancient coastline and stretching across the now much drier South. This arc of rich and dark soils in Alabama has long been known as the Black Belt.

But many, including Booker T. Washington, co-opted the term to refer to the entire Southern band. Washington wrote in his 1901 autobiography, Up from Slavery, “The term was first used to designate a part of the country which was distinguished by the color of the soil. The part of the country possessing this thick, dark, and naturally rich soil …” Over time this rich soil produced an amazingly productive agricultural region, especially for cotton. In 1859 alone a harvest of over 4,000 cotton bales was not uncommon within the belt. And yet, just tens of miles north or south this harvest was rare. Of course this level of cotton production required extensive labor …

Another:

Your reader’s email providing “answers” on the South and social mobility leaves me with questions. “Where can someone right out of high school rise to a six figure income right away without working on an oil rig?” I’m not sure, but I am highly skeptical that the answer is “natural gas”. First off, a lot of these jobs being created in energy and natural gas in particular are not the sort of jobs you get right out of high school. Second, here are some salaries for available natural gas jobs in the Keystone state from a quick Google search (from Indeed.com):

338 available jobs making $30,000+
218 making $50,000+
105 making $70,000+
39 making $90,000+
and only 13 making $110,000+

Finally, even if there are a ton of great jobs waiting for any high-school grad, this article from Philly.com puts the total employment picture into perspective:

Even if shale-gas development has created 245,000 direct and indirect jobs – the number used by the Pennsylvania Department of Labor and Industry, and touted by industry trade groups – that still amounts to only 4 percent of total employment in a state with 5.7 million jobs.

(As an aside, it’s also worth noting that most energy analysts, and the President of the United States, recognize that in reality natural gas will almost certainly benefit MORE from efforts to address global warming – with or without fracking – than any other energy source.)

Maybe I’m wrong, and digging something out of the ground is a better route to economic mobility than cultivating a creative skill-set that provides unique, real-world value. I remain, however, unconvinced.

Another:

I had the opportunity to reflect on your thread this morning, as I left the interstate in a torrential downpour, and instead commuted to downtown Memphis via US-51, in a route that took me through the Whitehaven suburb of Memphis, directly past Graceland. I’ve lived in the Memphis area my entire life, and I can remember the same area in the early 1980s, when it was a much whiter and more affluent area. I also have been witness to the slow decline over the past decades, and this morning spent the ride dodging flash flooding and reflecting on the white flight that has occurred in Memphis, juxtaposed against the maps showing relative social mobility.

The problem isn’t the lack of social mobility, in my mind. The problem is that the post-civil rights area resulted in the mass migration of the affluent away from those who were already destitute. In so doing, the entire economic base that supported the region shifted, and further entrenched the already stagnant economics of the minorities left behind while geographically consolidating the economic fortunes of the better off. There are abandoned factories and businesses, and crumbling schools all over this area, along with the scavenger pawn shops and dollar stores that moved in to fill some of the voids.

This, to me, is what I think of when I read about the lack of social mobility. Everything that might have contributed to mobility was simply relocated, and the skeletons left to rot.

Nice Work If You Can Get It

Packer examines the practice of “public figures commanding and getting spectacular fees for minimal work”:

If it isn’t fair to ask stars to refuse the money, it is fair to ask exactly what they do to earn it. One problem with the star system (aside from its appearance of corruption and conflict of interest, and its demoralizing effect on adjunct professors, journeymen power forwards, mid-level executives, freelance journalists, and career bureaucrats) is the pervasive mediocrity and corner-cutting that it encourages: the utter banality of corporate speeches written by staff, the abuse of researchers and ghostwriters by big-name authors, the ease with which a star athlete transitions into a business franchise or a commentary gig, the lack of face time with the prof that awaits CUNY students who register for “Are We on the Threshold of the North American Decade?,” a course whose instructor needed three Harvard grad students just to help him put together the syllabus. Nothing spells the end of real achievement like becoming a brand.