Month: August 2013

Why Do Chinese Tourists Have Such A Bad Rep? Ctd

by Chris Bodenner

photo (22)

A reader writes:

I’m really enjoying the Chinese tourist anecdotes. I live in DC and have small children. I take advantage of the amazing tourist attractions here and often take my kids to the various museums and memorials downtown. My children are also very white. Like, Norman Rockwell-white. Despite an ethnic heritage which would seemingly produce darker kids, our recessive genes have created a blonde and a redhead, both with fair skin. These kids are, for some reason, a tourist attraction unto themselves.

On multiple occasions I have been downtown and an Asian tourist or ten (not all Chinese) have gestured to my child and then to his camera and nodded hopefully at me. At first, I would just shake my head and walk quickly in the other direction, but one day I nodded back. I am not sure why. At that point the man (who was in a business suit touring the U.S. Botanic Garden) handed his camera to his friend, squatted next to my son, gave a big “thumbs-up” to his friend, and told the friend to snap the picture. My son was totally perplexed, as was I.

This happens with relative frequency, though I have only consented to it that one time. And it is always Asian tourists. I have attached a picture of it happening to my daughter. I stepped back from the stroller for a moment to document the phenomenon. In this case, none of the tourists asked to photograph my baby. They just started clicking.

“Disruptive Innovation”

by Matt Sitman

That’s the catchphrase Judith Shulevitz nominates as the most pernicious cliché of our time, tracing it back to Clayton Christensen’s book, The Innovator’s Dilemma. She argues that its constant invocation reveals what “George Orwell pointed out, which is that stale phrases mechanically repeated have dangerous political effects”:

You can’t blame Christensen and his co-writers for all the dumb things said and done in the name of disruption. But you can spot some unsavory habits of mind in their prescriptions. For one thing, they possess an almost utopian faith in technology: online or “blended” learning; massive open online courses, or MOOCs; cool health apps; and so on. Their convictions seem sincere, but they also coincide nicely with the interests of the Silicon Valley venture-capital crowd. If you use technology to disrupt the delivery of public services, you open up new markets; you also replace human labor with the virtual kind, a happy thought for an investor, since labor is the most expensive line item in all service-industry budgets.

Second, Christensen and his acolytes make the free-market-fundamentalist assumption that all public or nonprofit institutions are sclerotic and unable to cope with change. This leads to an urge to disrupt, preemptively, from above, rather than deal with disruption when it starts bubbling up below. Third, they don’t like participatory democracy much. “The sobering conclusion,” write Christensen and co-authors in their book about K–12 education, “is that democracy … is an effective tool of government only in” less contentious communities than those that surround schools. “Political and school leaders who seek fundamental school reform need to become much more comfortable amassing and wielding power because other tools of governance will yield begrudging cooperation at best.”

Face Of The Day

by Chris Bodenner

KENYA-CONSERVATION-RHINO

A captured wild male black rhino named Sero at Lewa Wildlife looks out from its crate at Lewa conservancy on August 26, 2013. Eleven of Lewa’s total 73 endangered black rhinos are being relocated to neighboring Borana conservancy to afford them more space. The horn of each relocated rhino is cut and a tracking device is fitted to monitor its movements and to help combat poaching. Lewa has suffered severe poaching in the past. Illegally poached rhino horn is sold for large sums as an ingredient in some traditional Chinese medicine. By Carl de Souza/AFP/Getty Images.

Slanting To The Right

by Tracy R. Walsh

Michael Brick finds that many conservatives have rallied around cursive instruction:

The defense of cursive is not a strictly partisan issue … but the balance of enthusiasm does seem to tip rightward. Intrigued by the politics of handwriting pedagogy, I called Morgan Polikoff, an education-policy expert at the University of Southern California who has prominently endorsed a shift away from cursive instruction, to ask about his hate mail. “When I get hate mail – hate e-mail – about cursive, it’s mostly from conservatives,” he told me. “The hate mail I get from liberals is that we’ve decimated the curriculum and there’s no more beauty in schooling. … The argument you get from conservatives is more ‘How are we going to be able to read the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence?’”

More Dish on cursive instruction here.

The Latest Conservative Defector On Same-Sex Marriage, Ctd

by Brendan James

Walter Olson praises Joseph Bottum’s essay accepting marriage equality:

Those who don’t have patience for the entire [essay] and want more of a political statement might want to skip to the remarkable section where Bottum writes about how he regrets signing and helping draft the Manhattan Declaration (Robby George, Charles Colson, etc.), a manifesto of resistance to the modern liberal polity which attempts to link and in the process deeply confounds the three causes of abortion, religious liberty and same-sex marriage. As critics have already noted, Bottum makes no attempt to take down George’s position on the basis of logic, but then it’s not as logic was the basis of that position in the first place.

Isaac Chotiner, on the other hand, pans Bottum’s piece:

[T]here is nothing in his piece that gay marriage advocates should hold onto; it is a reactionary work that is more concerned with the future of Catholicism and sexual morality than it is with gay rights. Bottum isn’t a fighter for same-sex marriage. No, he is more like a general who realizes a skirmish has been lost and wants to regroup before the big battle.

The theocons, as one might expect, are less than pleased with Bottum’s change of heart. Matthew Franck growls:

Others who really know the author may wish to comment at greater length on an essay that is avowedly very personal. But what I detect in it is the work of someone who was never all that interested in investigating the arguments on either side of the same-sex marriage debate; whose scant interest in it has now been fully exhausted, both intellectually and morally; and whose present conclusions hover in mid-air without anything to support them other than a wistful regret that he has lost a hoedown partner in a gay man who has come fairly unglued over the issue.

Robert Royal declares the essay to be “preemptive surrender”:

He is saying that the Church cannot win this cultural battle, indeed is being harmed by it, given the forces arrayed against Her. Our bishops should not waste time on it and instead focus on the deep “re-enchantment of the world,” which is what it will take to get people to see the real point of the Church’s richer notions of Creation – and sexuality.

And Dreher sees Bottum’s piece as purely a PR move:

Bottum cares a great deal about how the rest of the world sees the Church. In the spring of 2002, he publicly rebuked me, then a Catholic, at a meeting of Catholic journalists for writing so forcefully in criticism of the bishops over the sex abuse scandal. He said that by attacking the Church’s bishops so publicly, I was serving as a “professional Catholic,” a useful idiot for secularist types who hate the Catholic Church, to help them justify their prejudices and deny the Church freedom. I thought that was an unfair and even gutless accusation, one that made being a theocon hack more important than speaking the truth about the failures of our Church. My view then was that it didn’t matter what the world thought of the Church, the scandal and the culture that brought it about had to be confronted openly, and by Catholics. …

It sounds to me like Bottum is still thinking along these lines. He doesn’t argue that same-sex marriage is good, only that it is a very close to a fait accompli, and that the Church harms itself by continuing to resist it.

Kerry Beats The War Drums

by Patrick Appel

Max Fisher calls Kerry’s Syria speech today a “war speech”:

It’s difficult to find a single sentence in Secretary of State John Kerry’s forceful and at points emotional press conference on Syria that did not sound like a direct case for imminent U.S. military action against Syria. It was, from the first paragraph to the 15th, a war speech.

That doesn’t mean that full-on war is coming; the Obama administration appears poised for a limited campaign of off-shore strikes, probably cruise missiles and possible air strikes. President Obama has long signaled that he has no interest in a full, open-ended or ground-based intervention and there’s no reason to believe his calculus has changed. But Kerry’s language and tone were unmistakable. He was making the case for, and signaling that the United States planned to pursue, military action against another country. As my colleagues Karen DeYoung and Anne Gearan wrote, “Kerry left little doubt that the decision for the United States is not whether to take military action, but when.”

You can watch the speech above or read the transcript here. Kerry’s speech hinges entirely on the moral depravity of chemical weapons and our alleged responsibility to enforce the taboo against them. Larison sees this as a bad reason to start a new war:

There is a broad, almost universally shared taboo against the use of chemical weapons. Attacking Syria doesn’t strengthen or reinforce that taboo.

Choosing not to bomb a country whose government has used these weapons does not signal approval of that use, and launching some cruise missiles at government forces in response to that use isn’t going to keep them from being used in the future. All that it does do is potentially invite Syrian retaliation against the U.S. and its clients and allies. At best, it is a reaction designed to show that the U.S. will “do something” while achieving nothing, and at worst it is the beginning of the slide towards escalation to a major war.

Earlier today, Fisher spelled out the cases for and against intervention in Syria. One of the arguments against military force:

Military intervention in a protracted foreign conflict can take on its own logic that makes escalation very difficult to stop. The Obama administration might have the intention of launching just one series of strikes and then backing off, but in practice that’s rarely what happens. Domestic politics, international pressure and short-term military thinking can all lead a very limited campaign to snowball into a more open-ended one. That’s particularly true if the goals of the initial strikes are vague or poorly defined.

Drum argues that half-measures against Assad are unlikely to succeed. Preventing him from using chemical weapons would require “committing ourselves to full-scale war against Assad”:

It’s possible that enforcing international norms against chemical attacks is important enough to make that worth it. But that’s the question we should be asking ourselves. A “punishment” air strike is a joke, little more than a symbol of helplessness to be laughed off as the nuisance it is. If we want to change Assad’s behavior, we’ll have to declare war against him.

The Deal The Feds Should Make On Marijuana

by Patrick Appel

Kleiman outlines it:

Washington and Colorado would like the feds to let their new commercial systems operate. And the feds would like Washington and Colorado to suppress production for out-of-state sale. When each of two parties has something the other wants, that’s the basis for a bargain.

And the Controlled Substances Act (Sec. 873, if you’re keeping score at home) orders the Attorney General to cooperate with state and local officials in enforcing the law, and authorizes him, “notwithstanding any other provision of law,” to enter into “contractual arrangements” with states and localities. The paper proposes that he use that authority to make formal deals with Colorado and Washington in which the Justice Department would agree to keep hands off state-licensed businesses in return for the states’ active help in suppressing interstate trade. That wouldn’t make the state-authorized activity legal, but it could formalize a program of targeted, selective enforcement that would give state licensees an effective safe harbor.

He later reports that in Colorado there “have been discussions involving state and federal officials, but no negotiations of the ‘If you do X and Y we’ll let your people alone’ variety”:

That seems to me like a big missed opportunity; had the federal government presented the two state governments with list of demands, as conditions of federal acquiescence with the new commercial cannabis-distribution systems, there would have been very strong incentives pushing state officials to meet those demands. Once Washington and Colorado have regulations in place and start issuing licenses, retro-fitting the terms of a bargain into that process gets much, much harder.

Not Supporting “Support Our Troops”

by Patrick Appel

Steven Salaita hates the phrase:

A nation that continuously publicizes appeals to “support our troops” is explicitly asking its citizens not to think. It is the ideal slogan for suppressing the practice of democracy, presented to us in the guise of democratic preservation. …

Who, for instance, are “the troops”? Do they include those safely on bases in Hawaii and Germany? Those guarding and torturing prisoners at Bagram and Guantánamo? The ones who murder people by remote control? The legions of mercenaries in Iraq? The ones I’ve seen many times in the Arab world acting like an Adam Sandler character? “The troops” traverse vast sociological, geographical, economic and ideological categories. It does neither military personnel nor their fans any good to romanticize them as a singular organism.

James Joyner has mixed feelings:

I’m generally annoyed by and uncomfortable with out-of-content appeals to patriotism. I don’t have “Support the Troops” ribbons on my car or wear a flag on my lapel and, unless it’s the 4th of July, find it odd to have the “Star Spangled Banner” and “God Bless America” performed at sporting events.

But “support our troops” can mean many things. While often used to demand reflexive support for our war effort, it can simply be a call to honor their sacrifices  regardless of one’s views of the war we’ve sent them to fight. For that matter, it can mean that we owe a great deal to those who have been gravely wounded, physically or psychologically, fighting those wars. In those contexts, I support “support our troops.”