Month: August 2013

Time To Cut Off Cairo’s Aid

After today’s grotesque violence, I think the balance of the argument has decisively shifted. There is no way the US can aid a government that guns down its citizens in the streets. Those who argued for it long ago have been vindicated by events. Lynch, in a powerful post, agrees:

With blood in Egypt’s streets and a return to a state of emergency, it’s time for Washington to stop pretending. Its efforts to maintain its lines of communication with the Egyptian military, quietly mediate the crisis, and help lay the groundwork for some new, democratic political process have utterly failed. Egypt’s new military regime, and a sizable and vocal portion of the Egyptian population, have made it very clear that they just want the United States to leave it alone. For once, Washington should give them their wish. As long as Egypt remains on its current path, the Obama administration should suspend all aid, keep the embassy in Cairo closed, and refrain from treating the military regime as a legitimate government. …

The hard truth is that the United States has no real influence to lose right now anyway, and immediate impact isn’t the point. Taking a (much belated) stand is the only way for the United States to regain any credibility — with Cairo, with the region, and with its own tattered democratic rhetoric.

Meanwhile, Mike Giglio reports on being arrested and beaten by Egyptian police. He wasn’t alone:

I was arrested along with an Egyptian freelance photographer, Mahmoud Abou Zeid, and a French freelance photographer, Louis Jammes. They were in the same area during the clashes and also rounded up. Both were beaten after identifying themselves as journalists. Also, in detention, I ran into the award-winning French photo and video journalist Mani. (He doesn’t use his real name.) Mani had been on the Rabaa side of the demonstration, trying to film. For what it’s worth, he says he saw no weapons on the pro-Morsi side, just rocks and sticks. This was my impression, too. I was on the Rabaa front line just before the fighting started and saw no arms; only sticks, and then fireworks that were launched at the police from the side streets.

Other journalists were killed. Gideon Rachman doubts that, at this point, elections can heal the country:

Egypt may hold elections, at some point. But it is inconceivable that the army – having effectively declared war on the Muslim Brotherhood – will risk allowing them to win elections, again. Many Egyptian commentators argue that the Brotherhood are, anyway, much less popular than when President Morsi won election. But it seems highly improbable that the army will risk testing that proposition at the ballot box. If Egypt has any elections in the near future, they will be a sham.

End the aid.

Peas In An Ever-Faster Pod? Ctd

Alon Levy, who blogs frequently about mass transit, hates on the Hyperloop:

My specific problems are that Hyperloop a) made up the cost projections, b) has awful passenger comfort, c) has very little capacity, and d) lies about energy consumption of conventional [high speed rail]. All of these come from Musk’s complex in which he must reinvent everything and ignore prior work done in the field; these also raise doubts about the systems safety that he claims is impeccable.

Tyler Cowen notes that you “can already fly LA to San Francisco in about an hour”:

Flying is carbon-negative, but of course building and running a hyperloop would be too.  In any case, it is hard to believe that a hyperloop is the marginally cost effective way to reduce carbon emissions, compared to say shutting down some more dirty coal or pricing traffic congestion.

Previous Dish on the Hyperloop here and here.

Clinton Courts Obama’s Coalition

The speech Hillary Clinton gave on Monday focused on voting rights:

http://youtu.be/I07e-aUuK6Y

Nate Cohn sees the political logic of the speech:

Clinton only lost in 2008 because her weakness among progressive activists was paired with Obama’s showing among black and young voters, who combined to assemble a non-traditional Democratic primary coalition.

If she wants to wrap up the nomination quickly, she need to win over these Obama ’08 constituencies. To do that, Clinton doesn’t want to just seem like she’s checking the boxes of the Democratic platform. She wants to be seen as a champion of the causes that animate the different corners of the Democratic primary electorate. If she’s not, someone else could be. At the very least, Clinton doesn’t want to be on the wrong side of a big faction of the party, like she was on Iraq.

Last night’s speech sounded like a first step toward being a champion of a relatively new liberal cause: voting rights. The Clinton folks have to be happy that an issue like this is enflaming the base. It allows Clinton to hit her two relative vulnerabilities among non-white voters and on the left, and there aren’t too many general election downside risks to siding with voting rights. Perhaps as a result, Clinton was pretty unequivocal about her position. If the Clinton folks are smart, they’ll return to this issue with some regularity.

For what it’s worth, I tend to think this is the right call for Clinton – but as Cohn notes, one with limited potential.

After Obama, I suspect the Democrats will likely pick someone less prudent, cautious and leading-from-behind. They’ll want a clearer liberal who leads from out-front, as the broader culture shifts left. Hillary is not a natural pick for that role – so she’s shrewd to start nailing down those constituencies early. But it’s on national security that she’ll really have to prove she’s not a McCainiac. Alex MacGillis predicts the battles over voter suppression and voter fraud will stretch long into the future:

[T]he voting wars didn’t start with Obama and they won’t end with him. Leave aside the obvious big-picture history going back to Jim Crow and the Voting Rights Act; the modern era of the voting battles started back when Obama was but a humble state senator having trouble getting a rental car at the 2000 Democratic convention. They were an outgrowth of that year’s election, which laid bare just how much voting rules could matter at the margin. Democrats took the election as a lesson to be more vigilant against things like the voting rolls purge that eliminated countless eligible Floridians from the rolls; many Republicans drew the opposite lesson, to do everything possible to crimp turnout among likely Democratic voters, to keep states like Florida from ever being so close again.

Thinking Through Stop-And-Frisk

Stop Frisk Outcomes

Heather Mac Donald defends stop-and-frisk’s racial disparities:

[T]hough whites and Asians commit less than 1 percent of violent crime in the 88th Precinct and less than 6 percent of all crime, according to [Judge] Scheindlin 40 percent of all stops should be of whites and Asians, to match their representation in the local population.

Never mind that the suspect descriptions that [Officer Edgar Gonzalez of Brooklyn’s 88th Precinct] was working off of gave blacks and Hispanics as robbery, burglary and shooting suspects. To avoid an accusation of racial profiling, he should have stopped whites and Asians for crimes committed — according to their victims — exclusively by blacks and Hispanics.

That helps us focus on the real issue here: to what extent is the disproportionate racial imbalance in “stop-and-frisk” a legitimate by-product of fighting crime? What metric do you judge it by? The proportion of criminals who are black and Hispanic? The proportion of innocent people who are black and Hispanic? Or some more complex metric? Dylan Matthews complicates Mac Donald’s argument:

The Bloomberg administration says that it’s focusing stops on areas with lots of crime. But [Jeffrey Fagan, a criminologist at Columbia Law School] found that even if you control for the crime rate, the racial makeup of a precinct is a good predictor of the number of stops.

“The percent Black population and the percent Hispanic population predict higher numbers of stops, controlling for the local crime rate and the social and economic characteristics of the precinct,” Fagan’s report explains. “The crime rate is significant as well, so the identification of the race effects suggests that racial composition has a marginal influence on stops, over and above the unique contributions of crime.”

Cassidy adds:

Fagan’s analysis also showed that blacks and Hispanics, once they had been stopped, were more likely to be subjected to the use of force, even though the probability of the stop resulting in further action—like an arrest, or a summons—was actually lower in cases involving minorities than in those involving whites.

That, to me, gets at another core question: how on earth do the human beings tasked with this job not fall into racial profiling and not get hardened in ways that mean more cop violence in minority neighborhoods? You don’t have to believe cops are racist to see that stop-and-frisk by its very nature will often lead to abuse, unless countered by almost super-human virtue. The test for me is whether black and Hispanic citizens who live in high crime neighborhoods believe the trade-off is worth it. And the answer to that is mixed:

Black voters disapprove of stop and frisk 69 – 25 percent while approval is 57 – 37 percent among white voters and 53 – 45 percent among Hispanic voters, the independent Quinnipiac University poll finds …  A decrease in police use of stop and frisk would not lead to an increase in gun violence, voters say 50 – 41 percent, again with significant racial division. Black voters say 63 – 28 percent the reductions would not lead to more crime. White voters believe it would 49 – 39 percent and Hispanic voters agree 52 – 46 percent.

Robert VerBruggen offers another point:

[I]f police are targeting minorities for stop-and-frisk above and beyond their likelihood of being involved in a crime, we might expect searches of minorities to be less likely to uncover concrete evidence of criminal activity. We do see this to some extent: Whites were carrying weapons 1.9 percent of the time; the number for blacks was 1.1, Hispanics, 1.3. For “contraband other than weapons,” the numbers are 2.3 percent for whites, 1.8 percent for blacks, and 1.7 percent for Hispanics.

However, Mayor Bloomberg has said he’s specifically targeting guns, and on that front the trend runs in the opposite direction: 0.16 percent of stopped blacks were carrying guns, as compared with 0.07 percent of whites and 0.09 percent of Hispanics.

Weak. If whites are more likely to be carrying contraband and weapons, the disparity in gun-carrying does not seem to me to be enough to justify the huge racial imbalance in overall stop-and-frisk. And the experience of feeling racially profiled routinely by cops – whatever the actual motivation – is a huge social and constitutional issue. No minority group should feel as if the law is designed to target them because of their race. That cost is real – in political, social and human terms. And the huge escalation of stop-and-frisk in the last decade – long after the biggest drops in crime – suggests we are veering toward something close to a police state in some areas.

Time to recalibrate – as the polling for race for mayor seems to indicate.

(Chart from Mother Jones)

Beard Of The Week

weeklybeard

A reader writes of a recent post:

“Don’t worry, it isn’t going to be a daily feature.” Please change your mind, Andrew. I’m a beard-wearing subscriber, and while I don’t need extra motivation to scour the Dish three or four times a day, seeing a “beard of the day” on the site would be fucking awesome.  And if getting enough submissions for a daily pic is an issue, make it your “beard of the week” instead.  What do you say?

Attached is a picture taken just before I left Afghanistan in 2012.

I. Am. Not. Worthy.

Why Haven’t More Muslims Won The Nobel Prize? Ctd

Millman joins the debate:

Here’s a handy-dandy little fact to throw out there: 20% of Nobel Prizes have been awarded to Jews. This despite the fact that Jews are only 0.2% of the world’s population. In other words Jews are represented at a rate 100 times higher than strict proportion to population would suggest. Contra Nesrine Malik, the Jews are one “arbitrary” group of people to have won far more Nobel Prizes (in every category, by the way) than Trinity College, Cambridge graduates have.

Now, what are we to make of that fact?

At first glance, it would seem that if the “it’s all culture” folks mean what they say, the implication would be that we should all become Jews. After all, if the Islamic world’s poor showing proves that Islam “holds back intellectual development,” then presumably this extraordinary Jewish performance proves that Judaism massively promotes intellectual development. Does Isaac Chotiner agree? Can I expect Andrew Sullivan and Richard Dawkins to sign up for conversion classes?

No, because my conscience calls me to Jesus and Dawkins’ to giant future hamsters. But to remove the context and history of Jewish intellectual culture, one of the great shining monuments of Western civilization, would be equally bizarre. Ditto the extremely high IQs of Ashkenazi Jews, compared with almost any other sub-group population. And how can anyone not be struck by the wildly divergent achievements of the resource-poor Israelis and the oil-rich Arab states of the Middle East without resorting to some kind of cultural analysis?

There may be other factors involved – a response to centuries of repression and ghettoization, or the Jewish cultural focus on education, or the Talmudic tradition which provides for some space between divine truth and scholarly interpretation. And the reasons for Islam’s long slide into backwardness may also be complex. But it demands an explanation more satisfying than mere randomness. Noah goes on:

From a political perspective, the right response, it seems to me, to the extraordinary disproportion of Jewish Nobel prizes is neither “wow, Jews are totally awesome; we should all be like them – and if we can’t, it must be our fault” nor “wow, this game must totally be rigged by the Jews [um, Swedish Jews?]” but “wow, levels of achievement at the very top can be really wildly disproportionate to population. And the modern economy seems to be more winner-take-all than it used to be. Maybe the selection process for Nobel Prizes isn’t a good template for how all of society should work? Maybe there’s a moral case for countervailing social and economic forces?”

Sure. But when intellectual and technological advantage confers enormous socio-economic benefits, and when that advantage is far greater in the West and Asian cultures than almost anywhere in the Muslim world, you can argue for a different metric, if you like. But in practice, it means marginalization and relative poverty. Which is what the Muslim world is now trapped in. I don’t think you can fully escape that trap without also escaping a fundamentalist culture and polity.

Update from a reader:

Andrew, please issue an immediate correction and apology to Professor Dawkins; his conscience calls him to giant future sea otters.

Egypt Is Erupting Again, Ctd

How Best To Challenge Putin?

14th IAAF World Athletics Championships Moscow 2013 - Day Four

Matt Steinglass debates the question:

America has reached a point of relative tolerance for diversity of sexual orientation today. Looking back 30 years, it’s not at all clear that this was destined to be the case. The formation of sexual identity is fraught with fear, and it’s to be expected that social and political players will take advantage of that fear to build in-groups, stigmatise out-groups, and mobilise power. I’m not sure that even Millennials could possibly not know how this works in America, but it certainly ought to be familiar to those of us who remember how culture and politics worked here in the early 1980s. If we’re looking for particular American elements that are lacking in Russia, I would say the most important would be any history of successful civil-rights movements by minorities, which Russia has never really known.

Of course that would suggest that neither a boycott of Sochi nor the display of rainbow flags is likely to accomplish much; and they won’t. Then again, since a boycott has zero chance of happening, what we’re really talking about here is whether to display rainbow flags. And we should. Why not?

That’s my feeling too. What Russia’s law does is something never done in America. In America, the First Amendment allowed for expression of ideas about homosexuality even when social attitudes and legal prohibitions were far harsher. For centuries, the First Amendment was gays’ only real recourse to ameliorate our lot. There would have been no gay rights movement without a free press, without the Mattachine Review, without the Daughters Of Bilitis, without the ability of Frank Kameny and others to march outside the White House in the 1950s. They could take everything from us but our right to speak in public – and yet it is precisely our right to speak publicly that Putin’s neo-fascist government bans.

That’s why Pat Buchanan’s glowing endorsement of Putin is so repellent: not because Buchanan doesn’t know full well how to offend and provoke (his comparison between gay Russians wearing rainbow buttons with the Nazis is lazily Coulterish even for him), but because he is, before anything, a writer and polemicist, and he is effectively supporting the suppression of writers and polemicists and even simple button-wearers in another country. He is so caught up with his own disdain for homosexual equality that he does not see that he is now attacking the very freedoms that made his entire life and career possible. Can you imagine him supporting a foreign country’s right to suppress religious speech? How then can he support one that suppresses simple public expression of the fact of someone’s sexual orientation.

And yet I’m struck by how many gay writers are leery. Jim Burroway:

[I]n Africa, the belief that LGBT rights and that gay people themselves are a product of foreign meddling. Those charges find fertile ground in Africa where European colonialism — and its import of sodomy laws — still casts a long shadow. That is why public threats of cutting foreign aid (as distinguished from private diplomatic engagement in which the same messages have been delivered) have sometimes been much more disruptive than helpful to LGBT advocates on the ground. The same potential effect could conceivably play out in Russia, where an attack on its laws, however repulsive and oppressive to human rights they may be, is seen as an attack on Russian sovereignty itself. This is where foreign protests can backfire.

I can see that. But, as so often with civil rights movements, there is also a very simple need: to speak out in defense of core human dignity. Russia’s ban on even public statements of homosexual orientation, i.e. speaking mere truth, is so sweeping, so all-encompassing, and so likely to spawn brutal personal persecution it simply demands we protest it. We’re Americans. To be told that we cannot even wear a rainbow button in public at an Olympics event is outrageous. What if Russia banned public statements of Jewish or Muslim identity from the stadium or Olympic village? Would there be any question that the Sochi Games would now be over?

This is an attempt to cleanse the public sphere of all references to gay people – and to do so at an international event, allegedly open to all.

It is designed to make gay people, wherever they are from, non-persons, to enforce the closet by force.

If we stand by and let that occur – and even allow it to be imposed on our own citizens when visiting Russia – we are complicit in the persecution. I’m not a boycotter, but I strongly believe that Putin cannot both get the prestige from the Olympic Games and enforce laws as prohibitive and radical as this suppression of speech. And if we keep our nerve, I think we can call the bully’s bluff. Yesterday, the US track star, Nick Symmonds, showed what’s possible. On Russian soil, he dedicated his silver medal to his gay and lesbian friends:

“As much as I can speak out about it, I believe that all humans deserve equality as however God made them,” Symmonds told Russia’s R-Sport. “Whether you’re gay, straight, black, white, we all deserve the same rights. If there’s anything I can do to champion the cause and further it, I will, shy of getting arrested.” “I respect Russians’ ability to govern their people,” he added. “I disagree with their laws. I do have respect for this nation. I disagree with their rules.”

Let’s see what Putin does to him. I don’t believe in kowtowing to bullies. I believe in standing up to them.

Recent Dish on protesting Russia’s anti-gay laws here and here.

(Photo: Nick Symmonds of the United States celebrates winning silver in the Men’s 800 metres final during Day Four of the 14th IAAF World Athletics Championships Moscow 2013 at Luzhniki Stadium on August 13, 2013 in Moscow, Russia. By Julian Finney/Getty Images.)

The Mother Of All “To-Be-Sure” Paragraphs

Jeff Rosen has a very persuasive – and very damning – analysis of the Obama administration’s legal defenses of its NSA spying. They make Bill Clinton look straightforward and honest. They even come close to Bush-style newspeak in their interpretation of the word “relevance”.

I must say that as the scrutiny increases – and Jeffrey’s piece is an overview of the administration’s own August 9 White Paper – I find my own ambivalence shifting to opposition to these programs. I don’t regard this as an abstract ideological issue. I see it as a tough cost-benefit analysis: do the counter-terror advantages of mass surveillance outweigh the damage done to our privacy and freedom? I’ve been listening to this debate carefully – and it seems to me that the anti-NSA arguments are increasingly convincing. These practices need to be reined in – or the law needs to be changed to make the over-reach explicit. And somehow I don’t think there’s a majority for the latter.