Month: February 2014

Last week, Penguin agreed to remove all copies of Wendy Doniger’s The Hindus: An Alternative History from bookshelves in India and pulp them following a lawsuit by a Hindu nationalist organization that deemed the book offensive. Keating notes that Doniger is not the first author to have this problem:

Salman Rushdie, whose book The Satanic Verses is banned in India, pulled out of a literary festival in Jaipur after receiving death threats. Joseph Lelyveld’s biography of Mohandas K. Gandhi was banned in 2011 because it suggested he may have been bisexual.

If, as expected, the Hindu nationalist BJP comes into power after this year’s elections, there’s good reason to expect things might get worse.

Jonathan Shainin considers the shaky state of free speech in India:

Free speech has innumerable enemies in India, and comparably few principled defenders—against whom vast legal, political, and social obstacles are arrayed.

A writer, publisher, or newspaper editor can fight a case in court, provided he has the patience to endure the interminable delays of the legal system. In the end, he may even win, though the relevant laws have been interpreted, over the decades, to carve out larger and larger exceptions to the right of free expression enshrined in India’s Constitution. No political leader will dare speak in defense of a text under attack unless the book in question targets his enemies; supporting the freedom of unpopular speech only costs votes and never wins them. And the state does not offer much protection from physical harm. When death threats are phoned to your home, or a mob comes to vandalize your office, you’re on your own.

Nilanjana Roy wants the country’s liberal intellectuals to defend their rights:

For all of the support expressed over Doniger, the resentment at “the bullies,” the Indian liberal response has frequently been to ask why the creative class must go out looking for trouble. …  The creative classes in India, especially the middle-class and the elite among them, have bought a precarious immunity through gestures of appeasement. They have not bought freedom; and it remains to be seen whether that sense of safety will last.

The decision to cave is backfiring on the publisher:

The backlash over Penguin’s move last week has been huge, with major literary figures lining up to condemn the withdrawal of The Hindus from India. Penguin took the decision following a four-year legal battle with a Hindu nationalist group which claimed Doniger’s well-reviewed tome violated the Indian penal code – which prevents religious insult – as it “hurt the religious feelings of millions of Hindus”.

Now the Penguin authors Jyotirmaya Sharma and Siddharth Varadarajan have written to the publisher asking for their books to be withdrawn and pulped. “[We] have asked Penguin to pulp our books and revert copyright so we can deal with any would-be bullies on our own terms,” said Varadarajan on Twitter.

ADHD medications help children concentrate, but they don’t seem to offer any long-term benefits – academic or otherwise. Katherine Sharpe delves into the research:

How can medication that makes children sit still and pay attention not lead to better grades? One possibility is that children develop tolerance to the drug. Dosage could also play a part: as children grow and put on weight, medication has to be adjusted to keep up, which does not always happen. And many children simply stop taking the drugs, especially in adolescence, when they may begin to feel that it affects their personalities. Children may also stop treatment because of side effects, which can include difficulty sleeping, loss of appetite and mood swings, as well as elevated heart rate.

Or it could be that stimulant medications mainly improve behavior, not intellectual functioning. In the 1970s, two researchers, Russell Barkley and Charles Cunningham, noted that when children with ADHD took stimulants, parents and teachers rated their academic performance as vastly improved. But objective measurements showed that the quality of their work hadn’t changed. What looked like achievement was actually manageability in the classroom. If medication made struggling children appear to be doing fine, they might be passed over for needed help, the authors suggested. Janet Currie, an economist at Princeton University in New Jersey, says that she might have been observing just such a phenomenon in the Quebec study that found lower achievement among medicated students.

Previous Dish on ADHD here, here, here, and here.

In what is a truly depressing development, NRO’s Ryan Anderson insists the Kansas law permitting government officials and any individual person to discriminate against gay couples in civil marriages (which are banned in Kansas) is just a defense against oppression (which doesn’t yet exist). So NRO is now to the right of even the Kansas GOP on this. Anderson’s previous piece on the question actually describes the inclusion of gays and lesbians in routine anti-discrimination laws as “special privileges”, when every other minority group is protected by them, including religious believers. Anderson also claims the following:

Contrary to what some opponents of the bill have suggested, the Kansas policy would only protect religious individuals and organizations from being forced to provide services related to marriage, the celebration of marriage, or similar relationship. It would not allow businesses, individuals, or government employees from refusing to serve someone (or a couple) simply because of his or her sexual orientation.

But if a gay person were already in a relationship of even the vaguest sort, any vendor could decide to discriminate against them. Here’s the language of the Kansas bill, allowing anyone to refuse to provide

any services, accommodations, advantages, facilities, goods, or privileges; provide counseling, adoption, foster care and other social services; or provide employment or employment benefits, related to, or related to the celebration of, any marriage, domestic partnership, civil union or similar arrangement;

It seems pretty clear to me: any individual could refuse to provide employment to someone related to any living arrangement they disapprove of. That’s a massive category that could easily mean de facto publicly legislated discrimination against the tiny gay minority. That Anderson does not even consider the concerns of those of us worried by this vague, open-ended law or is in any way interested in the dignity or equality of gay citizens in Kansas (citizens who are currently denied any protection from discrimination in employment, and denied the right to any stable, lawful relationship as well) reveals the blind spot that so many on the far right have.

And he doesn’t explain why such a law should not also include marriages or relationships that are not gay and which nonetheless violate some aspect of religious conscience – like marriages that involved previously divorced people or those that violate some religious strictures against inter-faith marriage. If you’re really defending religious liberty and not just attacking gays, you’d think the law would be a lot broader in its targets.

National Review has four pieces up right now on marriage equality. All take it as a premise that civil marriage for gay people is a civilizational catastrophe and argue for a ramped up culture war against it. Those who once thought there could be some accommodation between gays and the GOP can only be further dismayed. Our liberties and dignity are meaningless to them – and there are close to no gay writers or thinkers on the right or center right that are allowed to participate in this debate. At some point, you begin to wonder whether this isn’t more than posturing. When they believe gays should be denied any legally supported relationship, when they oppose all anti-discrimination laws for gays (but are fine with them for every other minority), when they oppose hate crime laws for gays (but support them in every other category), you begin to realize that they are still living in the 1970s. If they cannot prevent us from being visible, they can at least put up walls to keep us from interacting with them in any way. And they wonder why the Jim Crow analogy seems so apposite to so many.

Wouldn’t that be an excellent idea? The choices an American president has to make today – from Mexico to Russia to Syria and Iran – are fiendishly tough, in the wake of Bush’s revelation of the severe limits on American military power. We could do with an airing of what exactly our options are in restraining Iran’s Revolutionary Guards or Putin’s neo-fascist regime in Russia. But we appear stuck in a miasma of public forgetfulness – a state of affairs which only a few, like Rand Paul, seem to want to challenge. Matthew Feeney wonders how Paul will fare:

A lot could change before the 2016 presidential campaigns begin in earnest. However, assuming there is no major shift in American opinion before Paul’s widely expected White House bid begins, it unfortunately looks like Paul’s positions on foreign policy, which ought to be taken seriously given the current state of American foreign affairs, will be mostly overlooked by an American public that continues to be largely indifferent about foreign affairs.

Larison isn’t so sure:

Normally, no politician can run and win on a platform defined mainly by foreign policy views, but when a politician holds views that line up with public opinion they will still get the attention of quite a few voters. Because hawks in both parties are hostile to what Paul represents, there will also probably be disproportionate attention paid to Paul’s foreign policy views by critics, which will make more voters aware of them and could have the unintended effect of driving some voters in Paul’s direction.

Millman expects that, should Paul get the nomination, that “the general election will turn on economic issues.” He imagines a Clinton-Paul race:

Hillary Clinton has almost no incentive to bring up foreign policy, except to contrast her considerable experience with Paul’s greenness.

She won’t run on the need to confront evil in Syria, or Ukraine, or wherever; she’ll run on competence, not ideology. Her overwhelming incentive is going to be to focus on Paul’s economic and budgetary views, and his leadership role in some of the most ignominious moments of the Congressional GOP’s budgetary hostage-taking. (That, and play identity politics.) That is the contrast she is going to draw, and Paul is going to have to own it.

Larison pushes back:

As an advocate for arming the Syrian opposition, pushing for regime change in Libya, and backing escalation in Afghanistan, Clinton routinely took the more hawkish side in every internal administration debate, and that put her on what proved to be the wrong side of some of the most important decisions of the first term. For that matter, the main reason that Clinton is ever credited with foreign policy competence is that she reliably takes the conventional and “consensus” position on every major issue. In other words, her claim to competence is that she sticks to a predictably hawkish line.

Millman goes another round:

My point was not that Clinton actually has a record of competence in foreign policy; I don’t think she does. I agree, in fact, with pretty much all of Larison’s criticisms of her foreign policy record. I just don’t think Clinton is going to run on a platform of “She’ll keep us at war.” Rather, she will claim that she has the experience to know how to negotiate effectively and get results without war, and the clout to build a broad coalition of international support when the use of force is necessary. Whereas, she’ll portray Paul as a naive ideologue who doesn’t understand how the world works. Her actual foreign policy preferences are quite close to Senator McCain’s, but she won’t make jokes about bombing Iran, and won’t present herself as the heir to “bear any burden, pay any price.”

For my part, I wonder if we are currently under-estimating the public’s interest. We’re in a period before mid-terms when foreign policy is usually dormant. It may perk up as the presidential contest looms on the horizon. And I have to say a contrast between Paul’s principled non-interventionism and Clinton’s restrained McCainism would be quite a tonic. And I suspect Paul would score a few points.

(Photo: General view of Independence Square during clashes between anti-government protesters and riot police forces in Kiev on February 19, 2014 in Kiev, Ukraine. By Alexander Koerner/Getty Images.)

One week into a battle between opposition and pro-government demonstrators, things appear to be escalating:

Venezuelan opposition leader Leopoldo López came out of hiding on Tuesday, as promised, and surrendered to the authorities to face charges of terrorism. Mr. López, a Harvard-educated former mayor of a wealthy section of Caracas, is the political face of ongoing demonstrations against President Nicolás Maduro’s government.

The protests began last Wednesday and turned violent almost immediately. Three people were killed on the first day, and on Thursday the government issued an arrest warrant for Mr. López. One more protester died and several were gravely injured since.

What the protests are about:

Venezuela is faced by economic, social, and political challenges: Inflation is at 56 percent, the currency is rapidly devaluing, shortages of staples like toilet paper and sugar are plaguing the nation, and the murder rate is one of the worst in the world.

What started out as roughly two weeks of small, student-led protests against the Maduro administration has turned into opposition-organized marches that involve stone-throwing and taunting met by tear gas and water cannons.

“These are legitimate issues that do need a popular voice and channel for expression,” says Christopher Sabatini, senior director of policy at the Americas Society in New York. “What makes the protests particularly volatile is that other avenues to express these demands have been closed down,” Mr. Sabatini says, referring to the closure of opposition media over the past several years and the shuttering of multiple newspapers nationwide more recently due to paper shortages.

Juan Carlos Hidalgo warns of a bloodbath:

People who fear the breakout of a civil war in Venezuela don’t understand that only one side is armed: the government and its supporters. The Maduro regime, whose security apparatus is closely controlled by Cuba’s secret services, has already engaged in brutish repression of protestors. The army and the National Guard are firmly aligned with the government and there is little or no chance that they might balk at exercising unrestrained violence against unarmed civilians. Moreover, armed gangs of government supporters, called “tupamaros,” act freely with the complicity of the security services and were supposedly behind the killings of a couple of protesters last week. It’s hard to have a civil war when only one side is armed.

Greg Weeks notes that “neither side seems interested in dialogue”:

The military has already declared itself on the government’s side, which makes this a very different situation from Honduras in 2009 or even Venezuela in 2002. Chávez worked for years to transform the military, and in the absence of any obvious splits (of course, plenty is going on that we don’t know about) a coup is unlikely. If there is no dialogue, then it seems the country waits for the protests to peter out. Even if there is financing top keep it going and organized, people get tired of having their lives disrupted. Will they tire out?

James Bloodworth thinks it’s time for the left to abandon its love affair with Chávez:

Between 2007 and 2011 there was a reduction in extreme poverty in Venezuela by some 38 per cent. Impressive no doubt. But the percentage of people who escaped extreme poverty in Brazil during the same period was 44 per cent, in Peru 41 per cent and in Uruguay 63 per cent. None of these countries possess anything like Venezuela’s vast oil wealth, yet all managed to lift their poorest citizens out of penury without the human rights abuses which have characterised the governments of Chavez and Maduro. Boring social democracy may be less romantic, but it has been far more successful at tackling poverty than the Chavez/Maduro model.

Not much:

Ahead of the 2006 midterms, Congressional Democrats outlined a fairly broad and thorough agenda and vowed to advance them through the House within the first 100 working hours of their majority in the event that they won. When they did win, then-Speaker Nancy Pelosi definitely let Bush be The Story for the next two years. But she also moved a bunch of items that lacked GOP support through the House to establish a Democratic agenda (including familiar items like the Employment Non-Discrimination Act, the Employee Free Choice Act, and two different State Children’s Health Insurance Plan expansions, both of which President Bush decided to veto). And moreover she managed to pass some actual laws, including two stimulus bills (can you imagine if Obama requested a stimulus bill now?) and marshaled overwhelming Democratic support (twice) for the bill that ultimately authorized TARP when then-minority leader John Boehner couldn’t muster half his conference to support the bailout President Bush demanded.

This year’s Republicans aren’t capable of anything like this. Winning in 2014 might not require them to be. But it might also leave them without much to tell the public if it watches Democrats actually doing things and begins to wonder what the GOP has to offer other than a single-minded hatred of Obamacare.

It’s hard not to feel extremely dispirited by the prospect of the next eight months. The country’s business is hostage to political gamesmanship and jockeying. Doing nothing about almost anything right now – for brazenly partisan purposes – is the GOP’s game-plan. It’s pure oppositionism – and we’ll likely see the entire pre-election period as one in which the Republicans do one thing only: sabotage and undermine and slander and oppose the ACA. So a law that has greatly expanded the number of insured Americans will be relentlessly described as a law that threatens the insurance of millions. This is not going to be a campaign for an alternative to the ACA – because the actual alternative looks a lot like what we’ve got, and a comparison of alternatives – an exploration of costs and benefits of various approaches – is not something the GOP wants.

The same with immigration reform. The kabuki theater of the past month has been a contest in cynicism, crafted entirely around the desire to bury this issue until after the mid-terms. The purported reason for not acting is a preposterous and self-evident falsehood – that Obama cannot be trusted to enforce the border. As Fareed recently noted,

the Obama administration has enforced immigration laws ferociously. It deported more than 400,000 people in 2012, 2½ times the number in 2002. In 2002, for every two people removed from the country, 13 became legal residents. In 2012, for every two removed, just five became residents. For these reasons, as well as the recession, the number of illegal immigrants has not increased in several years. (On the more general point, Dan Amira of New York magazine has compiled data that show that Obama has issued fewer executive orders than any president in 100 years.)

So these are transparent dodges of pressing national issues almost entirely for internal party politics and the mid-terms.

No, I’m not shocked. But I’m also not so cynical as to ignore the nihilism at the heart of today’s GOP. They are the reason we have gridlock; they are the reason we cannot reach some obvious fiscal compromise that could raise some taxes and trim some entitlements; they are the reason we cannot even have a debate about how to tackle climate change; they are the reason we cannot enact even minor gun control measures backed by huge majorities; they are the reason we cannot offer some relief to countless undocumented immigrants while reforming immigration to allow for more skilled workers. I won’t even begin on foreign policy, where, again, they are all opposition and no coherent policy (or divided by Rand Paul non-interventionism and Cheney-style neoconservatism).

Obama is getting the blame for all this; which, of course, is the strategy. But he doesn’t deserve it; which, of course, is the truth.