Month: September 2013

The Writer’s Responsibility

Julia Fierro describes her approach to it:

To tell his or her truth, to reveal his or her unique interpretations of life, while simultaneously reminding the reader of the universality of the human experience—the thread that connects saints and sinners, virgins and whores, and makes every life as redeemable as the next, no matter how grotesque or unlikable they and their actions may seem.

If there is one “maxim” I believe in when it comes to writing, it is this: the writer has a responsibility not just to the reader, but even more so to his or her characters. If a writer feels compassion for his or her characters, those characters’ needs and fears will seem authentic. The reader will find it is impossible to dismiss the characters, even the most “unlikable,” whose actions and motivations the reader wants to find unacceptable. Their redemption in that practice of acceptance has the potential to reach outside the time it takes to read the book. When a reader spots even the tiniest glimmer of his or herself (a shared desire or vulnerability, a habit or preoccupation) in a character they want to hate, it feels to me as if a life is saved, even if it is a fictional life. Humanity as a whole is strengthened. There shouldn’t be “collateral damage” in real life—I believe the same goes for literature.

Previous Dish coverage of Fierro’s views on writing here and here.

Map Of The Day

Map

Robert Tenorio responds to new data (pdf) on the world’s 232 million migrants:

Do most migrants go from poor countries to rich countries?

No. This may be one of the biggest surprises from the UN data. The number of people living in developing countries who were also born in a developing country is about the same as the number of people from developing countries who now live in developed ones. This so-called “South-South” migration partly reflects new economic opportunities in developing countries and stagnating growth in the rich world, but that’s not the whole picture. Many migrants simply find it easier to move to developing countries. This may be because of more relaxed immigration laws, family and social networks that facilitate the move, or ordinary geographic proximity. Another large contributor to South-South movement is conflict, as over 2 million Syrian refugees in Iraq, Lebanon, Jordan, and Turkey have recently made clear.

The US remains the world’s top migration destination in absolute terms, with 45 million residents born abroad. But its rate of growth, 2.1 percent annually over the past three years,  falls far behind that of South Africa (6.7 percent), Thailand (8.3 percent), or Ecuador (9.7 percent).

You Can’t Predict “Crazy” Crime

Garance is uncomfortable with creating a registry of the mentally ill:

More than half of Americans experience one or more mental illnesses over the course of their lives, and around 26 percent of Americans over age 18 each year experience at least one, primarily anxiety disorders and mood disorders like depression. The overwhelming majority of them are no danger to anyone at all. But with so substantial a portion of the country going through bouts of one thing or another over the course of their lives, the idea that any federal database could capture enough information to encompass every one who might one day be a threat anywhere is akin to hoping for a government staff of precogs.

And that’s not even getting into the highly problematic question of whether the government should mark millions of people who will never hurt anyone for a carve-out from the Second Amendment, and the privacy and stigmatization issues involved in cataloging harmless people who suffer from common mental illnesses in order to label them as potential threats in a federal government database. The idea of creating a mental health database instead of pursuing policies that involve direct regulation of guns is one put forward, not surprisingly, by the gun lobby, which knows that it’s easier to blame gun violence on out-of-control crazies than on abundant access to deadly weapons by disturbed individuals with evil intent bent on mayhem and murder.

Ambinder has similar worries:

I am pretty certain that there is no reliable matrix to predict, with anything close to reasonable certainty, that a person with “X” traits and “Y” life experiences will perpetrate a mass shooting, or otherwise brutalize people. So I believe that a mental health surveillance system, hastily constructed, would be a significant and worrisome expansion of the state, and an ineffective one, at that.

Domestic Partnership In Decline?

The Department of Labor has announced that same-sex marriages will be included under the provisions of the Employee Retirement and Income Security Act (ERISA), which regulates employee benefit plans. In response, Dale Carpenter sticks a fork in domestic partnership programs:

ERISA covers only “spouses” and will not be extended to domestic partners.  Since federal benefits will now be available to same-sex spouses wherever they live, many companies across the country will likely end their domestic-partnership programs.  Other companies, which never had such programs, will now be providing full benefits to all married couples, gay or straight.  One effect of the widespread recognition of gay marriage has been, and will continue to be, to release the hydraulic pressure to create alternative statuses.  Three decades of experimentation with alternative family statuses like civil unions and domestic partnerships is coming to an end.

Stephen H. Miller is unconvinced:

Wal-mart, the largest retail employer in the U.S., just announced it’s launching domestic partner benefits for employees and their (unmarried) same-sex and opposite-sex partners. Given the decline in straight marriage, particularly among those with lower incomes, there may yet be a future for partner status, confirmed by employers if not by the state.

The Scars Of Virtual Torture

Highlighting the inclusion of torture-as-gameplay in Grand Theft Auto V (seen above), Simon Parkin remarks on the inclusion of evil in video games:

[A] game creator does have a moral obligation to the player, who, having been asked to make choices, can be uniquely degraded by the experience. The game creator’s responsibility to the player is to, in Kurt Vonnegut’s phrase, not waste his or her time. But it is also, when it comes to solemn screen violence, to add meaning to its inclusion.

Questions about video-game violence will gain urgency. The video-game medium curves toward realism or, as the novelist Nicholson Baker put it in the magazine, a “visual glory hallelujah.” As the fidelity of our virtual worlds moves ever closer to that of our own, the moral duty of game makers arguably intensifies in kind. The guns in combat games are now brand-name weapons, the conflicts in them are often based on real wars, and each hair on a virtual soldier’s head has been numbered by some wearied 3-D modeller. The go-to argument that video games are analogous to innocuous playground games of cops-and-robbers grows weaker as verisimilitude increases.

Dreher responds:

Even if they never act on it in real life, engaging the emotions in hyperrealistic acts of evil — acting out rape and torture fantasies, for example — degrades the moral sense. I think it’s worthwhile to contemplate violence, evil, and its complexities, but there’s something about entering a video game in which you indulge these things at an extremely realistic level that strikes me as inhuman and even dangerous.

The Rouhani Op-Ed

It can be read here. Fisher annotates it. One highlight:

We and our international counterparts have spent a lot of time — perhaps too much time — discussing what we don’t want rather than what we do want. This is not unique to Iran’s international relations. In a climate where much of foreign policy is a direct function of domestic politics, focusing on what one doesn’t want is an easy way out of difficult conundrums for many world leaders. Expressing what one does want requires more courage.

This section is very promising. Rouhani is subtly drawing attention to the fact that both American and Iranian politics include hard-liners who oppose detente, and that for the two countries to end decades of enmity would require not just international diplomacy but domestic political change as well. It’s good news that Rouhani sees this, for two reasons. First, he will have to take on the hard-liners in his own government to see detente through. And, second, he will have to be prepared for the possibility that some members of the U.S. government may attempt to undermine peace; it’s helpful if he’s aware that such people don’t necessarily act on behalf of the entire United States.

Michael Rubin wants more proof that Iran is serious:

[T]he White House should not be afraid to take ‘yes’ for an answer. And here history provides some paths for Iran to demonstrate its sincerity. After decades of pursuing war with Israel, Anwar Sadat offered a dramatic gesture to Israel—and flew to Jerusalem—to demonstrate his commitment to peace. Perhaps if Rouhani is serious that “gone is the age of blood feuds,” he can make as dramatic a gesture, or at least something that commits him to peace far more than a Washington Post opinion editorial.

Paul Pillar’s perspective:

The new Iranian administration has opened a door to a better relationship, and one better for the United States, about as widely as such doors ever are opened. The United States would be foolish not to walk through it.

Honoring Shepard With The Truth

In today’s video from Jimenez, he addresses the criticism he faced after working on the 20/20 piece that first introduced the thesis of The Book Of Matt to the world in 2004:

Sure enough, Media Matters has already published a take-down of Jimenez’s book before it’s even released. And this is how the Matthew Shepard Foundation has responded thus far:

Attempts now to rewrite the story of this hate crime appear to be based on untrustworthy sources, factual errors, rumors and innuendo rather than the actual evidence gathered by law enforcement and presented in a court of law. We do not respond to innuendo, rumor or conspiracy theories. Instead we recommit ourselves to honoring Matthew’s memory, and refuse to be intimidated by those who seek to tarnish it. We owe that to the tens of thousands of donors, activists, volunteers, and allies to the cause of equality who have made our work possible.

The Book Of Matt: Hidden Truths About the Murder of Matthew Shepard comes out next week. Steve’s previous videos in the series are here. A reader reflects on it:

What made Matthew’s story a story is not the facts of his death, but the reaction after his death. Whatever happened, Jimenez adds new information to the context, but the actual events are trapped on a hillside 15 years ago.

When the first reports of what happened in Laramie became publicized, I was a closeted guy living in a mostly rural, conservative Midwestern town.  I felt Matthew’s death because of the coverage and the story. It provided a realization of my fears leftover from being assaulted in my early teens by two classmates suspicious that I was a faggot.

They rammed me up against a locker in a late morning break between classes and punched and kicked me a few times. They then pinned me into a corner and poured an entire bottle of cheap perfume over my head – an event that had helped keep me in the closet for the next 25 years.

Nearly five years after Matthew’s death, I was returning home after a one-year leave.  Just as I finished the overseas leave, I was part of an incident wherein another man and I intervened in the hate-based assault of a 19-year-old man by four men shouting homophobic slurs. The assailants had been alternating holding him and hitting him and throwing his possessions into the busy street.  The other guy who intervened also got injuries, including an apparent concussion, but I was mostly okay. We slowed it down enough until some bouncers at a nearby gay bar came over and ended it.  When we tried to report it, the police did not want to file a report and told us that they thought it was just a fight and should not be reported for its context.

The reality is that the extra fear caused by hate crimes deserves more thought than you give it.  I have been robbed and assaulted in another context that had not to do with being gay.  It was a more serious incident in terms of potential risk to my life, but the incident that I remember, that I can smell, hear and see to this very day is the assault of a young man named David on Oxford Street in Sydney, Australia.  The incident wherein the next day the police said, “Mate, they’re kids, so nothing will happen if we file the crime report.”  They said it happens all the time and there is nothing they can do about it.  It took two hours of me being an asshole in the police station before they agreed to write a crime report.  Matthew Shepard was with me that entire time.

A week later, after arriving back in the states, I was driving cross-country from San Francisco with a friend back to the Midwest.  We stayed one of the nights in Laramie, as it made the most sense for the trip.  That evening, I took a solo walk through town and looked up at the hillside where I know from the reports he spent his last hours.  Whatever the reason and true circumstances from the night he died, I knew that one of me, another imperfect gay soul, died alone on that hillside.  The reaction and story, however factual, is, like many American stories, a defining moment.

The next morning, when we drove out of Laramie (I didn’t sleep much that night), I knew that I was not going back in the closet.  I knew that I was moving into a new phase of my life.  Not four years later I was testifying in the Indiana legislature against a marriage amendment.  I don’t need the story of Matt to be perfect, but we cannot change the impact of his story still has on many of us.

Rapprochement With Rouhani? Ctd

Abbas Milani tries to decipher the new Iranian president:

How far will Rouhani’s new spirit  guide him? Just far enough to stabilize  a despotic regime? Or will he change the nature of the government? Unfortunately,IRAN-POLITICS-EXPERTS-ROWHANI U.S. policy does a poor job of anticipating both scenarios. On the one hand, sanctions are far too blunt. They have injured the regime, which is good, but they have also weakened the forces for democracy. A number of important political prisoners recently signed a letter explaining how sanctions have exacted a terrible cost on the average Iranian—and reinforced the conservative claim that negotiations with the Americans are futile.

Untargeted sanctions create the impression that the Americans are hardly sincere in wishing the best for the Iranian people. But there’s another, very different problem posed by U.S. policy. Iranians are nervous that progress on a nuclear deal will win the Iranians so much international goodwill that the regime will feel emboldened to brutally crack down even further. The United States must reassure the Iranian people that their human rights are not up for negotiation. A more nuanced U.S. policy will put Rouhani’s pragmatism to the test: Is he the real moderate deal, or do his flashy robes conceal more sinister intentions?

Yes, but we shouldn’t hope for too much. Getting a verifiable deal on transparent nuclear power and opening up the economy is enough for now. We have seen what so many Iranians want for their country. We need patience while they chart their own destiny. Laura Secor encourages Obama to meet with Rouhani:

The hopes now carrying Rouhani to American shores are as big as they are fragile. For thirty-four years, the United States and Iran have regarded each other balefully across what has seemed an unbridgeable divide. The flexibility required of both sides to reach each other across that chasm without losing their footing might be heroic indeed. But a handshake—the first between the Presidents of Iran and the United States in more than three decades—would be a great start.

Bloomberg’s editorial also supports engagement:

Whether President Barack Obama meets with Rohani at next week’s UN General Assembly — the White House hasn’t ruled out the possibility — or the U.S. engages Iran in some other fashion, Iran’s recent overtures are too intriguing to ignore.

Earlier Dish on Rouhani’s overtures here.

Kristol Calls For Israel To Attack Iran – Soon

It’s a remarkable screed in the Weekly Standard, a reminder that behind the urbane, calm exterior that we saw on CNN the other night, there is a dangerous, radical extremist within. As the US and Iran show signs of rapprochement, as the chance for testing Rouhani’s sincerity emerges, Kristol urges Israel to scupper any potential deal by pre-emptively launching an attack. He starts with yet another Hitler analogy, accusing Obama of appeasement and Rouhani of deception. It’s 1938 for about the twentieth time in the last couple of decades. But this time, unlike the 1930s, there’s hope:

As Iran moves closer to nuclear weapons, undeterred by the West’s leading power, a 21st-century tragedy threatens to unfold. Unless. Unless a dramatis persona who didn’t exist in 1936 intervenes: Israel. Ariel Sharon once famously said that Israel would not play the role of Czechoslovakia in the 1930s. Nor will it play the role of Poland. Despite imprecations from the Obama administration, Israel will act. One prays it will not be too late.

It is a strange course of events, heavy with historical irony, that has made the prime minister of Israel for now the leader of the West. But irony is better than tragedy.

This American is calling for a foreign government to ignore the American president and disrupt his foreign policy by an act of pre-emptive war. I guess I shouldn’t be surprised. And yet the shock still stings.