Month: February 2014

The Death-Throes Of The Anti-Gay Movement

748px-Niels_Larsen_Stevns-_Zakæus

I know the danger to gay people remains great, and I don’t want to minimize the impact of living in a state where businesses of all kinds are empowered by law to put “No Gays Allowed” or “No Gays Served” in their best practices. But in America in the 21st Century, the movement that seeks to legislate outright discrimination against a tiny minority is doomed to bitter failure. It’s doomed because the principle of non-discrimination is now endemic in American culture – and among the younger generation the first article of their civil religion. Such a principle became embedded in the national identity in the Civil Rights era, where the evil of Jim Crow laws was exposed with fatal finality.

Now, the Christianist right is putting its full weight behind legal discrimination against any groups or individuals who might offend someone’s sincerely held religious conscience. Arizona’s Senate just passed a new bill expanding the concept of religious freedom from being the province of “religious assemblies and institutions” to a much broader category that includes “any individual, association, partnership, corporation, church, religious assembly or institution, estate, trust, foundation or other legal entity.” So rights once accorded to purely religious institutions are now for anyone – any business, any teacher, any pharmacist, any florist, any hotel-owner and on and on.

I’ve had my say on this, but it’s worth reiterating that this bill has absolutely nothing to do with Christianity. It is, rather, is an attack on Christian principles and a betrayal of the Gospels.

If there was one aspect of organized religion that Jesus opposed, it was its attempt to draw lines around the unclean, the marginalized and the sinners. Among his radical acts was immersing himself with sinners of all sorts – prostitutes, lepers, and collaborators with an occupying power. Segregation – the placing of a group of unholy people outside of mainstream interaction – was anathema to Jesus and should be to all Christians. To construct a legal regime in which those people are fair game for outright ostracism and segregation is a disgusting inversion of both democratic and Christian values.

I was struck recently by the massive show of support that Michael Sam received from his Missouri peers when the Westboro Baptist Church decided to picket the university with signs decrying “fag footballers and their enablers.” They formed a line 2,000 strong to block the protest from view. Many of the students backing Sam were devoutly Christian. Here’s how they explained their position:

Yes, practicing homosexuality is a sin. But so is lying, so is cheating, so is coveting. I sin every day. God hates the sin, not the sinner. If God hated all the sinners, he’d hate me!

When will the generation of bigots and Christianists cede to a new generation of citizens and Christians? How long do we have to wait? And how long do we have to tolerate a political party that, far from taking this on, merely aids and abets its poison?

(Painting: Zacchaeus by Niels Larsen Stevns. Jesus calls Zacchaeus, a tax collector for the Romans, down from his height in the tree and asks to stay with him in his house.)

Quotes For The Day II

“I have obviously failed to galvanize and prod, if not shame enough Americans to be ever vigilant not to let a Chicago communist-raised, communist-educated, communist-nurtured subhuman mongrel like the ACORN community organizer gangster Barack Hussein Obama to weasel his way into the top office of authority in the United States of America,” – Ted Nugent, last month.

“If [Greg Abbott] is good enough for Ted Nugent, he is good enough for me,” – Sarah Palin, yesterday.

WhatsApp? $19 Billion, That’s WhatsApp

https://twitter.com/MattZeitlin/statuses/436272165592125441

Facebook announced last night that it is buying WhatsApp, whose mobile product allows users to send unlimited text messages using data rather than SMS, for $16 billion in cash and stock plus another $3 billion in restricted stock. Why does Zuckerberg want the company so badly? Its user base, for one thing:

In December, WhatsApp announced it had reached 400 million active monthly users, with 100 million of them having joined since just September. It’s now up to 450 million monthly active users. According to Facebook’s Wednesday filing with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission, 70 percent of those people are active on a single day, and 1 million people download WhatsApp every day.

That’s 315 million people using WhatsApp every day. In the same filing, Facebook claims that the amount of data that passes through WhatsApp rivals “the entire global telecom SMS volume.”

The acquisition will also help the social media giant penetrate international markets where WhatsApp eats its lunch:

Facebook Messenger is big in the USA but not in other countries.  In key markets like India and South America WhatsApp is MUCH more popular than Facebook Messenger. And this is where, we think, the majority of the immediate real value is: the global turn to mobile is quite evident and Facebook wants to be a part of it as soon as it can.

John Cassidy looks at how Facebook was able to spend the equivalent of Honduras’ GDP (or 271 Boston Globes) on the deal:

If the owners of WhatsApp had demanded an all-cash payment, it’s highly doubtful that Facebook would have agreed to pay up to nineteen billion dollars. But Facebook has an extremely highly valued currency—its own stock—that it can use in acquisitions. As I pointed out in a post about Internet stocks a couple of weeks ago, Facebook isn’t the most overpriced one around, but it’s still some wonderful wampum; in the past eight months, it has tripled in value, and by the close of business on Wednesday, it was trading at a hundred and eleven times earnings and forty-one times its cash flow. (For comparison purposes, Apple trades at thirteen times its earnings and eight times its cash flow.)

For a company that is valued at roughly a hundred and seventy billion dollars, as Facebook was on Wednesday, issuing fifteen billion dollars in stock doesn’t seem like such a big step to take. In fact, the logic may go the other way: Why wouldn’t you do such a deal?

Larry Dignan explains why the acquisition was attractive to WhatsApp, “(beyond $16 billion in cash and stock of course)”:

Facebook doesn’t go crazy with integration. WhatsApp co-founder and CEO Jan Koum will join Facebook’s board. WhatsApp will run as it does today. And Facebook has no plans to integrate WhatsApp and its Messenger service. In other words, Facebook won’t force things. That approach is appealing to startups looking to be acquired.

Jay Yarow wonders if Facebook will maintain WhatsApp’s principled aversion to ads:

WhatsApp promises that it will never have advertising, even after being bought by Facebook. Facebook is almost entirely ad supported. WhatsApp charges users $1 annually. At least, in theory it does. It has 450 million users, but Forbes says it only did $20 million in revenue last year, so it must not be charging everyone. For Facebook, this will be an experiment to see if it can support a non-advertising based business. For WhatsApp, it’s odd that it wanted to join an ad-based company considering how much it hates ads. We suppose $19 billion makes it less odd, but still.

Yglesias questions the scalability of WhatsApp’s model:

Mobile phone operators aren’t really selling consumers some voice service, some data service, and some SMS service. They are selling access to the network. The different pricing schemes they come up with are just different ways of trying to maximize the value they extract from consumers. In a world without WhatsApp, selling SMS separately from data is the best way to do that. Then along comes WhatsApp to exploit a hole in the pricing system. But if WhatsApp gets big enough, then carrier strategy is going to change. You stop selling separate SMS plans and just have a take-or-it-leave-it overall package. And then suddenly WhatsApp isn’t doing anything.

The Martyr-State Myth

Greg Scoblete slams Eric Cantor’s claim that “given the opportunity, Iran’s leaders would make good on their call to wipe Israel off the map”:

What Cantor is clearly implying is that once Iran obtains a nuclear weapon (if they do decide to build one) they will use it to wage a suicidal attack against Israel. This is an extraordinary claim, given that no nuclear state has launched an unprovoked nuclear strike against another country no matter how bitter the rivalry. Of course, it’s possible that Iran’s leaders may decide to do something that’s clearly insane, but the weight of historical evidence against this claim is enormous and self-evident. Pakistan has not nuked India (or vice-versa). The U.S. and Soviet Union avoided nuclear war, despite some harrowingly close calls. States that obtain nuclear weapons, with the single exception of the United States during World War II, do not use them.

Larison piles on:

More than a few Iran hawks find the idea that Iran’s government would intentionally commit suicide more plausible than the idea that Iran’s leadership is capable of rational decision-making. Add in a major misinterpretation of the regime’s ideology, and you get the “martyr-state” myth that Cantor and many other hawks take for granted. This is how Iran hawks can imagine that a regime that is concerned above all with its own self-preservation would commit an unprecedented act of self-destruction: they ignore the overwhelming amount of evidence that undermines the myth, and then simply assert falsehoods as fact because there is no real political penalty to be paid for making things up about an unfriendly government. Thus the “martyr-state” myth survives and keeps being recycled among Iran hawks despite the fact that it makes absolutely no sense.

What Can We Do About Ukraine?

Jamila Trindle considers sanctions:

Future sanctions against Ukraine would almost certainly be far more limited than what has been in place against Iran, out of concern that the sanctions could hurt ordinary Ukrainians and push public opinion toward embracing an alliance with Russia.  Sanctions would likely focus solely on Ukrainian officials and their supporters.  They would also be less effective because Russia would likely not join in on measures targeting one of its closest allies. The current crisis began late last year when Ukrainians took to the streets after Yanukovych rejected an EU trade deal in favor of a bailout from Russia.

Sam Cutler, a policy advisor for sanctions law firm Ferrari & Associates, says sanctions alone are unlikely to force the government to ease its crackdown or negotiate with protesters. “It’s a way for politicians in the EU and the U.S. to say, ‘Look how much we’re doing,’ and to take a moral stand, but it has to be a complement to a broader policy,” Cutler said.

Hayes Brown looks at the actions that have been taken already:

The European Union on Thursday approved targeted sanctions on Ukrainian government officials, as well as an arms embargo on the country. The U.S. also announced on Wednesday evening that it was imposing a visa ban on 20 Ukrainian officials as part of their initial response to recent escalations. Experts, however, say that the announced embargos are unlikely to do much to change Yanukovych’s calculations. This is particularly true of the arms ban, since as Ukraine was a primary hub for manufacturing weapons during the Soviet Era they are awash in weapons.

Larison’s view:

I don’t see what constructive difference imposing targeted sanctions would have, but since imposing sanctions is almost always done just to express disapproval rather than achieve anything I suppose that is what the U.S. and EU will end up doing. All in all, there doesn’t seem to be very much that the U.S. can do that would be constructive, and it shouldn’t seek to have a larger role in trying to resolve the crisis.

Quote For The Day

“He said, ‘I will pray with you,’ but that’s all he’d do. That was it. I just saw red. I cursed at a priest. I called him a hypocrite. As he was leaving — I can’t repeat what I said, but it was bad … I’m thinking I’m going to rot in hell now. But after that, I became scared — fear settled in. I don’t have the rites, I didn’t get Communion. I believed in the sacraments; this is something we’re taught we need before we die… I’ve tried to be a decent person all my life. I’m not perfect, believe me. And I wouldn’t wish [being gay] on anyone. But you can’t be somebody you’re not. Otherwise you’ll end up 63 and alone,” – Ronald Plishka, denied last rites after a heart attack by a Catholic priest in a Washington hospital.

What The Hell Is Happening In Venezuela? Ctd

A reader updates us on the crisis:

The timing – coinciding with the once-in-a-generation freakout in Ukraine – is unfortunate, but you really need to have a second look at what happened last night in Venezuela. Basij-style pro-government paramilitaries on motorbikes shooting directly into protesters, the National Guard firing tear gas cannisters directly into residential buildings … there just aren’t any precedents for what we saw last night. Some of the videos and photos are … well, just staggering. It was very much what we’ve all been fearing would happen since Chávez first came to power 15 years ago. Worse still is the way the Western media is asleep at the switch. It’s as though we only have attention for one crisis like this at a time, and all the camera crews are already in Kyev.

Another reader is also frustrated that “none of the major media organs utter a word about Venezuela”:

Ukraine is not a NATO ally or a part of the EU, and Venezuela is a major source of oil of the United States. And in our hemisphere to boot. Another reminder that unless we’re talking about illegal immigration or drug cartels, the American MSM doesn’t give two shits about Latin America.

Update from another:

Although the sentiment of the last sentence may be true, it’s worth pointing out that Ukraine borders four NATO members, has been part of NATO’s Partnership for Peace since the early 1990s and has sent troops to Iraq, Afghanistan, Kosovo and BiH. There has been extensive cooperation between NATO and Ukraine both to build Ukrainian military cooperation and also to place this under effective civilian control. And of course Ukraine is not part of the EU but it was the cynical decision of Yanukovych regime to walk away from a landmark trade agreement with the EU that sparked the recent protests. The bottom line is that Ukraine matters to European security.

Without wishing to fisk your correspondent, one might also point out that Venezuelan oil exports to the US have plummeted with the growth of US shale oil and that the disturbances in Caracas are a fraction of the THREE-month stand off in Kyiv which saw many, many deaths today.

Another:

One of the reasons we’re seeing a lot more coverage of Ukraine than Venezuela is that the latter’s thugs have done a very thorough job of cutting off nonofficial communication with the outside world, better than their counterparts did in Syria or Iran at a similar stage of their recent upheavals. Kiev, in contrast, is practically smoking up my office and laying out its dead on my desk. It’s easier to empathize with the suffering you can see than with the suffering you can only imagine.

One more:

Please keep covering what is going in Venezuela. As a Cuban-born American, I’m inspired by the courage of Venezuelans in resisting the same oppression that turned Cuba into a virtual jail. #prayforvenezuela #sosvenezuela