Month: December 2013

Chanakya Sethi analyzes India’s shameful court decision re-criminalizing homosexuality:

The majority passes a law that the minority believes discriminates against it. The minority goes to court seeking relief from the majority. But because the minority group constitutes a “minuscule fraction of the country’s population,” the court will defer to the will of the legislature—that is, to the will of the majority. That, in short, is how the court wrapped itself in the flag of judicial restraint and overturned a lower court decision that had struck down the country’s sodomy laws as unconstitutional.

Kaushal v. Naz Foundation was supposed to be India’s Lawrence v. Texas, the U.S. Supreme Court’s path-breaking decision striking down state anti-sodomy laws. Instead Kaushal is already being described in the Indian press as the country’s Dred Scott or Plessy v. Ferguson: “moments of deep national shame, blots on the judicial record, examples par excellence of judges at their very worst,” as one op-ed put it.

Shivam Viz provides more details on the basis of the decision:

In the end, the court’s decision rested heavily on two dubious assertions. The first was that homosexuals in India were too small in number to constitute a “class,” and could therefore not be subject to discrimination. “What is a bisexual?” Justice Mukhopadhyay wondered aloud during one hearing; when he was given an answer, he stated with confidence that they too were not a “class.” Though it was shown that Section 377 has been used mainly to prosecute gay men, the court’s judgment maintained that the prohibition against “unnatural” sex could apply even to marital relations, and was therefore non-discriminatory.

The second main element of the court’s decision—which refers, not incidentally, to “the so-called rights of LGBT persons”—was an assertion of judicial restraint. The proper venue to debate this law, Justice Singhvi said during one hearing, is the Indian Parliament. There was not a little irony to these declamations, because the Indian Supreme Court is renowned for its judicial activism: in recent years, it has forcefully intervened in a great many legislative matters, and Justice Singhvi himself has been a vocal defender of such activism.

The final judgment makes it clear that the issue was not restraint per se, but the judges’ belief that the criminalization of homosexuality did not cause sufficient harm to justify any action from the court. The Parliament should feel free to strike the law down, they suggested, but the Supreme Court need not do so.

Nitin Rao discusses India’s view of individual rights :

We need to understand that India has always valued groups and “society” over the individual. For example, if somebody is playing music very loudly in a bus, it would likely be seen as an aggressive action to request that they wear earphones. In a country where 90 percent of marriages are arranged marriages, romantic relations are seen as a decision made by families, rather than individuals.

The horrific 2012 gang rape of a 23-year-old intern in Delhi highlighted how the concept of individual rights still has a long road ahead to acceptance. After the horrific public sexual assault, a national discussion erupted in the media in which womens’ groups had to explain that the victim is not to blame. Sadly, India’s great balkanization by religion and caste has created an environment where group rights take precedence over individual ones.

Likewise, LGBT rights are not seen as individual rights in India. Once again, the country is sadly choosing to treat life and liberty, not as being unalienable rights, but instead as matters to be judged based on clout, numbers, and “contribution to the community.”

(Photo: On December 11th, 2013, the LGBT community of New Delhi, India protests against the Supreme Court order making gay sex a punishable offense. By M Zhazo/India Today Group/Getty Images)

A reader writes:

I’m a PhD student in virology at the University of Pennsylvania, and while I certainly don’t intend to (or need to) lecture you about HIV, your post contained a subtle inaccuracy of great importance. You wrote that “middle-class gay men can suppress the virus indefinitely with the cocktail.” It’s true of course that viral load can be suppressed and that life expectancies of HIV+ individuals on strict HAART regimens are close to, if not completely, normal, but that’s not the same as saying that anti-viral therapy will keep you healthy. HIV-associated neurological disorders (HANDs) are a significant problem among HIV+ individuals (up to 50% of cases in the US) and are only partially preventable and treatable by HAART. I’m sure you know people who suffer or have suffered from HAND, and I don’t want your blog to become a place where people go to learn that just because anti-retroviral therapy is highly effective, that there are no consequences of HIV infection as long as you have money and/or insurance. (I’m including links to some more papers on this topic: here, here, and here.)

Another asks:

Isn’t there a possibility that a HIV positive man might be reinfected with a new strain of virus and cause his current HIV drug regimen to fail? I thought there was always that risk.

Nope. Another quotes me:

“Bareback sex feels better for both partners.”

You’ve made similar statements before, in even less compromising terms. (“Infinitely better” I think?) And, well, you’re wrong. Maybe for some people, maybe even for most, but not all. I honestly have no preference either way, not even in terms of convenience. A condom adds a bit of hassle up front, but it saves my partner a whole lot of cleanup, so it seems like a draw there. Certainly no difference in sensation. I understand why barebacking would be fetishized – the subject is so wrapped in danger and mystery and taboo thoughts that of course some people will turn it into a kink. Humans are really good at turning things into kinks! But that doesn’t mean they can’t be used very happily by lots of people.

Another reader:

In addressing whether condom use should continue to be encouraged, you wrote, “The more important goal is for HIV-positive men to have sex mainly with other HIV-positive men, restricting the virus to a pool of the already infected.” When I met my husband in 2005 years ago, he had already been HIV positive for many years. I was (and still am) HIV negative. Sero-sorting is all very well and good in theory, and I’m sure that many people – like yourself – have successfully worked out their lives that way. In my case, I wasn’t going to let a virus cheat me out of an intelligent, funny, caring man.

Jeremy Scahill’s film and book project Dirty Wars: The World is a Battlefield examines US military policy abroad, with special attention to covert operations.  Last month, Stephen Moss reviewed the film:

The extent of the US military’s covert operations and the amount of “collateral damage” are shocking; the film shows that even US citizens have been the victims of non-judicial executions; and the argument that the war on terror is ultimately unwinnable because indiscriminate killings radicalise whole populations is persuasive. “Somehow, in front of our eyes, undeclared wars have been launched in countries across the globe; foreigners and citizens alike assassinated by presidential decree; the war on terror transformed into a self-fulfilling prophecy,” Scahill laments at the end of the film. “How does a war like this ever end, and what happens to us when we realise what was hidden in plain sight?”

Tom Gallagher elaborates on the book’s contents:

A book called Dirty Wars will naturally have no shortage of nasty stories.

One of the worst occurred on February 12, 2010, when US forces arrived in the Afghan village of Gardez, shot up a party celebrating the naming of the newborn son of an Afghan police officer and killed the father and six others, including two pregnant women. After a failed cover-up — during which family members reported seeing “U.S. soldiers digging the bullets out of the women’s bodies” in order to support a fabricated story that the women had been found already bound, gagged and executed when the Americans arrived — the U.S. military staged a very public meeting in which JSOC [Joint Special Operations Command] Commander Admiral William McRaven personally apologized for the atrocity to Hajii Sharabuddin, the head of the household. The story disappeared from the headlines and the war went on. Several months later, however, Scahill met with Sharabuddin who told him that “now we think the Americans themselves are terrorists.” You didn’t see that part on the nightly news.

Reviewing the film in June, Steven Boone expressed desensitization to some of what the camera captured:

We’ve been here before. Popular documentaries like Michael Moore’s “Fahrenheit 9/11” did their best to demonstrate that foreign kids suffering or perishing because of disastrous U.S. policy are “just like our kids.” Given the incessant, almost automatic dismissal of such murders of children in this country—by pundits, Congress members, White House press secretaries, American generals, soldiers, and average Joes and Janes—it’s hard to see any meaningful difference between the folks who danced in the streets when the towers fell and Americans who find collateral damage offensive only when the collateral is American. Casual dehumanization of foreigners has become the norm everywhere. It’s as if 9/11 rolled back the world clock a century.

Scahill, Rowley and co-writer David Riker (creator of the classic neo-neorealist indie “La Ciudad”) do their part to attack this backwardness at the root. Clear and graphic images of the piles of dead children a U.S. drone strike left in a Yemeni field say so much more than (to cite a quietly outrageous moment early on) a general smugly, idiotically speculating that a pregnant Afghan woman our soldiers gunned down might have been a combatant. (“I’ve been shot at by women.”)

A recent interview with Scahill is here.

We recently aired concerns that Google is acquiring a monopoly on mapmaking. Adam Fisher evaluates the “Wikipedia of mapping,” OpenStreetMaps (O.S.M.), as a “potential challenger to Google’s cartographic hegemony”:

Today, Google’s map includes the streets of every nation on earth, and Street View has so far collected imagery in a quarter of those countries. The total number of regular users: A billion people, or about half of the Internet-connected population worldwide. Google Maps underlies a million different websites, making its map A.P.I. among the most-used such interfaces on the Internet. At this point Google Maps is essentially what [Silicon Valley visionary] Tim O’Reilly predicted the map would become: part of the information infrastructure, a resource more complete and in many respects more accurate than what governments have. It’s better than MapQuest’s map, better than Microsoft’s, better than Apple’s.

“You don’t see anybody competing with Google on the level or quantity of their mapping today,” says [OpenStreetMaps founder Steve] Coast, who now works as a geographic-information professional. But, he adds, “that’s because it’s not entirely rational to build a map like Google has.” Google does not say how much it spends on its satellite imagery, its planes, its camera-equipped cars, but clearly it’s an enormous sum. O.S.M., by contrast, runs on less than $100,000 a year. Google’s spending is “unsustainable,” Coast argues, “because in the long run, this stuff is all going to be free.”

The O.S.M. map data is free now — but using it comes with a catch. Any improvement, or any change at all, that a developer makes to O.S.M.’s map must be sent back to O.S.M. It’s a clever tactic, forcing competitors of Google Maps to choose between fighting Google alone or joining a coalition that, if it prevails, will ensure that no private company will ever be able to establish a mapping monopoly.

A reader disagrees with Kevin Mahnken:

With all due respect, our form of government is a “representative democracy,” meaning that those who run the government “represent” us.  I don’t believe you can represent the people if you do not know the people and you cannot know the people if you don’t live with those people. Our government was not set up to vote on various policies or ideologies, it was set up to “represent” the will of the people. There are too many people out there who just want to be professional politicians and don’t care about where they are, they just want the power of being elected.  This stinks and does a disservice to our form of government.

Another disagrees:

I was interested to read Mahnken’s belief that carpetbagging is a good thing.  The reality is, Clinton and now Scott Brown are examples of politicians moving into areas with similar character and make-up to a place they’re actually from.  In Hillary’s case, New York was a cosmopolitan place full of movers and shakers like DC had been for the previous 8 years, and Kennedy likewise was moving from one Eastern Seaboard state to another.  Brown seems to be going a little further, but he’s still in New England.  Not a radical departure.

Another:

I applaud Mahnken for defending, in principle, the idea of carpetbagging. I agree that sometimes the truly best person for the job may be the candidate who happens to be from somewhere else, geographically speaking. I think where the Scott Brown example is more problematic is that he isn’t just a candidate who happens to be from another place; he is a defeated candidate from another place. Many New Hampshire voters are probably more reluctant to vote for him because he was a failed candidate in Massachusetts, not simply because he’s from Massachusetts.

(Photo: Democratic candidate for U.S. Senate from Illinois Barack Obama and his Republican rival Alan Keyes prepare to debate on October 26, 2004. By Scott Olson/Getty Images. From Wikipedia: On August 8, 2004 – with 86 days to go before the general election – the Illinois Republican Party drafted Keyes to run against Obama for the U.S. Senate, after the Republican nominee, Jack Ryan, withdrew due to a sex scandal, and other potential draftees (most notably former Illinois governor Jim Edgar and former Chicago Bears coach Mike Ditka) declined to run. The Washington Post called Keyes a “carpetbagger”  since he “had never lived in Illinois.” When asked to answer charges of carpetbagging in the context of his earlier criticism of Hillary Clinton, he called her campaign “pure and planned selfish ambition”, but stated that in his case he felt a moral obligation to run after being asked to by the Illinois Republican Party. “You are doing what you believe to be required by your respect for God’s will, and I think that that’s what I’m doing in Illinois”.)

Steven Poole is skeptical about an ever-growing “cult of ‘productivity'”:

In the vanguard of “productivity” literature and apps was David Allen’s “Getting Things Done” (GTD) system, according to which you can become “a wizard of productivity” by organising your life into folders and to-do lists. The GTD movement quickly spread outside the confines of formal work and became a way to navigate the whole of existence: hence the popularity of websites such as Lifehacker that offer nerdy tips on rendering the messy business of everyday life more amenable to algorithmic improvement. If you can discover how best to organise the cables of your electronic equipment or “clean stubborn stains off your hands with shaving cream”, that, too, adds to your “productivity” – assuming that you will spend the time that is notionally saved on a sanctioned “task”, rather than flopping down exhausted on the sofa and waking groggily seven hours later from what you were sternly advised should have been a power nap of exactly 20 minutes. If you need such “downtime”, it must be rigorously scheduled.

The paradox of the autodidactic productivity industry of GTD, Lifehacker and the endless reviews of obscure mind-mapping or task-management apps is that it is all too easy to spend one’s time researching how to acquire the perfect set of productivity tools and strategies without ever actually settling down to do something. In this way, the obsessive dream of productivity becomes a perfectly effective defence against its own realisation. As Samuel Johnson once wrote: “Some are always in a state of preparation, occupied in previous measures, forming plans, accumulating materials and providing for the main affair. These are certainly under the secret power of idleness. Nothing is to be expected from the workman whose tools are for ever to be sought.”

Update from a few readers:

As someone who’s practiced GTD for about 15 years (and it is a practice that takes years to perfect), I can say that Steven Poole gets it wrong.

It’s not about doing more, scheduling every minute, calling everything “work.” It’s a pretty ingenious method of accounting for everything – stuff you’d normally put on a to-do list and stuff that you normally store somewhere in your brain – that you’ve committed yourself to so you can make wise decisions about what you value and how you want to spend your time. The result is often that you do get more done. But just as often you become free to not do anything because you can relax, knowing you haven’t spaced out on something important.

The big thing I’m wrestling with right now is looking at everything on my lists and making myself say “no” or “later” far more often. The system has really made it possible for me to take a good hard look at just how overcommitted I’ve let myself become.

Another:

You can’t post about productivity, GTD, etc without mentioning Merlin Mann.  He coined the popular term “inbox zero,” which the Dish has covered a bit, and wrote a very popular productivity blog, 43Folders, during the aughts, but has since stepped back from that venture to be highly critical of the “productivity porn” industry.  Merlin now does a popular weekly podcast at 5by5.tv/b2w, where he talks somewhat about GTD principles, but mainly focuses on how to help people actually do creative work, rather than talk about the tools for doing creative work, which can be a highly attractive sideshow.

Previous Dish on “inbox zero” here and here.