Month: June 2014

Going In For The Kill

In a spoiler-filled essay, Paula Marantz Cohen contemplates why recent TV series seem increasingly  inclined to kill off key characters without warning. She writes that “some reflection suggests that this may be what that audience subliminally wants. The shows are feeding our masochistic desire for a certain kind of intense realism”:

What I’m describing can be traced back to Alfred Hitchcock’s groundbreaking 1960 film, Psycho, in which the death of the marquee star, Janet Leigh, in the role of the protagonist, Marion Crane, occurred less than mid-way through the film. Hitchcock’s marketers made a point of asking audiences to keep this dramatic event a secret so that future viewers could experience the jolt of surprise when, relatively early in the action, a compelling character played by a famous and beautiful actress is stabbed to death in the shower. But even today, when people know the plot of Psycho, the death of Marion Crane still manages to arouse a powerful double response. “It just doesn’t seem right,” to quote someone I know who watched the film recently, “but it’s brilliant.” There, in a nutshell, lies the value of this maneuver. Wrong but brilliant — unfair but real.

For in fact, that’s what life is like. People we love deeply can drop dead when we least expect it, and a void can suddenly open that was once filled by a vibrant presence. In a television series, where the characters have been expertly developed so that we have invested in them over time — in some cases, a year or more — the effect is even more like life than in a movie.

The 800-Pound Gorilla In Education Policy?

According to the WaPo, the Gates Foundation spent more than $200 million winning political support for Common Core:

The Gates Foundation spread money across the political spectrum, to entities including the big teachers unions, the American Federation of Teachers and the National Education Association, and business organizations such as the U.S. Chamber of Commerce — groups that have clashed in the past but became vocal backers of the standards.

Money flowed to policy groups on the right and left, funding research by scholars of varying political persuasions who promoted the idea of common standards. Liberals at the Center for American Progress and conservatives affiliated with the American Legislative Exchange Council who routinely disagree on nearly every issue accepted Gates money and found common ground on the Common Core.

Common Core foe Diane Ravitch is distressed:

The idea that the richest man in America can purchase and — working closely with the U.S. Department of Education — impose new and untested academic standards on the nation’s public schools is a national scandal. A congressional investigation is warranted. The close involvement of Education Secretary Arne Duncan raises questions about whether the federal government overstepped its legal role in public education.

Freddie deBoer detects “a palpable sense of worry among a lot of education researchers and people in the education nonprofit world, around the Gates Foundation”:

They’re just so dominant in funding and, through funding, influence. That manifests itself in a fear of publicly criticizing the foundation and its policy preferences. That may be a small fear, it may represent itself subtly, but if you multiply it across the broad world of education research and policy, it can have a major impact on what gets studied, how results are reported, and what is considered realistic policy. It’s easy to make this sound like some kind of explicit corruption, but it’s not that simple or that easy to judge. It isn’t so much a matter of people saying “I want that sweet Gates cash, I better get in line on charter schools.” It’s a matter of identifying what kind of research gets funded, of worrying about funding in the future, of recognizing that plummeting state and federal research dollars can make private foundations like Gates the only game in town. It’s not sinister, on either side of the equation, but it can have pernicious effects.

Andrew J. Rotherham has a very different perspective:

1) There is money on all sides of this. Pro-and con.  The opposition did start out pretty diffuse and unorganized but that’s not the case now. I doubt there is parity between the pro-and anti-Common Core factions but this isn’t David and Goliath either.

2) In education there is very little change absent an infusion of marginal dollars and outside pressure. It’s not for nothing that we call them “Carnegie” units. That’s not a pro-Gates point or an anti-Gates point, it’s merely context about change in education. Related, Gates has spent a great deal on Common Core, but some context on all the other philanthropic dollars flowing into education would be useful, too.  The lion’s share, mostly from much smaller and localized foundations mostly buttresses the status quo. Philanthropic dollars aimed at leveraging broader changes have increased over the past decade but are still not the dominant force in overall education philanthropy.

Hillary The Indispensable?

Douthat’s Sunday column proclaimed Clinton the only thing holding the Democratic party together, pointing to Obama’s dwindling approval ratings and the party’s “ramshackle” coalition of constituencies:

If her party is Austria-Hungary, she might be its Franz Josef — the beloved emperor whose imperial persona (“coffered up,” the novelist Joseph Roth wrote, “in an icy and everlasting old age, like armour made of an awe-inspiring crystal”), as much as any specific political strategy, helped keep dissolution from the empire’s door …  But without her, the deluge.

I found it a sprightly piece – and certainly a helpful reminder of how Clinton’s ascendancy has marginalized many other potential Democratic leaders. But I tend to agree with Larison, that the diversity of the Democrats’ Austrian-Hungarian empire is a strength, not a weakness:

The Democratic Party has long been “a sprawling, ramshackle and heterogeneous arrangement,” but that hasn’t stopped it from winning the popular vote in five of the last six presidential elections.

It cobbles together majorities by being “sprawling” and “heterogeneous,” and doesn’t depend on a particular nominee to do this. The extremely narrow margin of Bush’s re-election in 2004 points to this. Democrats have a coalition of competing, sometimes opposing interest groups and constituencies, but then they usually don’t pretend to be anything other than that. One of the stranger conceits that many Republicans have about their party is that it is a so-called “real party”: it supposedly represents some coherent set of beliefs that makes it substantially different from being an “incoherent amalgam” of interest groups. Perhaps because Democrats don’t try to paper over the contradictions and tensions in their coalition as much, they are able to appeal to a wider variety of voters than their opponents.

Danny Vinik reminds Ross that the Republicans’ policy problem is much more damaging than the Democrats’ lack of an alternative to Hillary:

Whether you like his policies or not, Obama has governed. The same cannot be said of the GOP. For instance, as the Washington Post’s Greg Sargent has often written, House Republicans are unable to pass any type of immigration reform, because they cannot agree on what it should look like. Republicans never had any jobs agenda to help us recover from the financial crisis. On health care and tax reform, political promises have made it almost impossible for them to propose conservative ideas. Americans have not greeted Obama’s policy platform with cheers, but they recognize the dearth of policies in the current GOP agenda.

And I’m not sure that even the best collection of reform conservative ideas, even if they get a chance to be enacted, has a real appeal to voters. Ross responds by looking on the bright side:

The recent springtime for reform conservatism may be just a few shoots in a barren field … but that’s still more shoots than at this time four years ago, and nearly everything that’s pushed through the ground, whether it’s been Mike Lee or Dave Camp on taxes or Marco Rubio on the safety net or various senators on health care reform, would have been an improvement on the party’s non-message in 2012. The roster of presidential hopefuls may not be as impressive as it looked before Chris Christie’s scandal and Marco Rubio’s immigration reform detour … but we’re still very unlikely to see a replay of the “9-9-9″/Bachmann Overdrive nonsense, and much more likely to see a group of plausible nominees having a relatively-serious debate.

At some point, you’ve got to admire his optimism. But I’ll tell you this: the Republicans will have a far more interesting primary race than the Democrats. And while that can be bad news at times, it will ensure that the GOP is front and center on the question of “change”. What they don’t have yet is a candidate to pierce through the clutter, or a policy proposal that can address real problems and win wide support. Absent that, it will be ressentiment and Clinton-hatred all over again. Can’t wait.

The Amnesia Of Archbishop Carlson

Are you sitting down? Have you carefully placed your coffee cup away from your lips? Okay then:

Of course, he was lying:

According to documents released Monday by the law firm Jeff Anderson & Associates in St. Paul, Carlson showed clear knowledge that sexual abuse was a crime when discussing incidents with church officials during his time in Minnesota. In a 1984 document, for example, Carlson wrote to the then archbishop of St. Paul and Minneapolis, John R. Roach, about one victim of sexual abuse and mentioned that the statute of limitations for filing a claim would not expire for more than two years. He also wrote that the parents of the victim were considering reporting the incident to the police.

The man claimed he couldn’t remember 193 times in the deposition. And this is his view of how the church responded in the past to the terrible toll of child abuse:

“I think counselors made mistakes. I think people in general made mistakes. I think the archdiocese made mistakes. I think if you go back in history, I think the whole culture did not know what they were dealing with. I think therapists didn’t. I don’t think we fully understood. I don’t think public school administrators understood it. I don’t think we realized it was the serious problem it is.”

These were not mistakes. They were crimes. And at no point did Carlson call the cops. Rod makes an important point:

I think about Dante, one of the greatest Catholics who ever lived, who spared nothing in his excoriation of clerical corruption, all the way to the Pope, but who never wavered in his devotion to the Church. Surely one doesn’t have to have the intellect of Dante to understand that attacking the despicable behavior of priests and bishops, and demanding that they be held accountable, does not make one disloyal to the Catholic Church, but can even be a sign of greater loyalty. It is in the interest of the hierarchy to portray all critics as motivated by anti-Catholic bias, but it is not in the interest of the Church, and it is certainly not in the interest of children and families who were victims.

So why, one wonders, is Carlson still an archbishop?

The Calculus On Unconditional Welfare, Ctd

Reihan responds to Dylan Matthews on the merits of unconditional cash assistance to the poor, arguing that the findings that Matthews cites don’t carry over from international development to domestic welfare programs:

The trouble is that there is a big difference between the conditions that give rise to poverty in a domestic context, where brute survival is not generally at stake, and in a global context, where it is. My argument rested in large part on the legitimacy of the welfare state. Work requirements for the able-bodied poor help ensure that the beneficiaries of public assistance are perceived as deserving. This matters in societies in which a broad base of employed middle-income taxpayers help finance transfers. It matters less in societies in which transfers are largely funded by outsiders, via government-to-government transfers from affluent countries, or through the exploitation of point-source natural resources, like oil and gas. …

In weak states that aren’t funded by local tax revenues, the “legitimacy” question doesn’t arise in the same way, particularly when it comes to the disbursement of public assistance. The communities that benefit from direct assistance aren’t divided between those who fund direct assistance, and who work, and those who benefit from it, and who might or might not work. Rather, it is more common that the funds are coming from outside of the community, and virtually everyone “works,” albeit in the informal sector. That said, norms around “conditional reciprocity” do indeed obtain in many poor societies — but these norms operate through the kin-based social networks that the dominant mode of social organization in traditional societies. Modern societies, in contrast, are dominated by non-kin-based social networks, and the most successful states, or rather the states that do the best job of cultivating solidarity among citizens, appear to be, and this is my subjective judgment, those that build in norms of conditional reciprocity into their institutions.

Printing Part Of A Painter

Screen Shot 2014-06-05 at 10.41.14 AM

Diemut Strebe put 3D printing technology to work:

The Center for Art and Media in Karlsruhe, Germany, said Dutch artist Diemut Strebe, who is based in the U.S., has constructed a 3D replica of the severed ear of the late painter Vincent van Gogh using living cells from Lieuwe van Gogh, the painter’s great-grandnephew. Strebe grew the ear at Brigham and Women’s Hospital in Boston. The ear is kept alive in a case containing “a nourishing liquid,” the AP reports.

Taylor Berman adds:

Strebe had plans to use van Gogh’s actual DNA but those were thwarted when genetic material lifted from one of his letters turned out to belong to someone else. “The postman messed it up,” Strebe said. If you’d like to ask van Gogh’s regrown ear a question but can’t make it to Germany by July 6, good news: Strebe wants to bring the appendage to New York next.

Colbert’s take here. See more of Strebe’s work here.

Taliban On A Tear

Its Pakistan-based militants have launched two attacks on Karachi’s Jinnah International Airport since Sunday night:

On Tuesday, a number of gunmen on motorbikes opened fire on a training academy run by the Airports Security Force and located about a half mile from the airport. “We accept responsibility for another successful attack against the government,” Taliban spokesperson Shahidullah Shahid told Reuters, adding, “We are successfully achieving all our targets and we will go on carrying on many more such attacks.” …

The death toll from Sunday’s attack, meanwhile, has jumped. The BBC has updated its count to 38 dead, Reuters to 34, and the Associated Press to 36.

Saba Imtiaz highlights the security deficit that allows the Taliban to attack such high-value targets:

The attacks in Karachi underscore not just the intensity of the militants’ renewed campaign, but also Pakistan’s inability to effectively counter such threats in advance. Analysts and security experts have long bemoaned Pakistan’s inability to get its intelligence and security services to share intelligence.

Pakistan has a number of intelligence agencies, including the Inter-Services Intelligence agency and Military Intelligence, the civilian-run Intelligence Bureau, and the police’s Special Branch. A counter-terrorism strategy developed by the interior ministry this year envisages better coordination between intelligence and security agencies, but has yet to spur much change.

On Tuesday, Interior Minister Chaudhry Nisar Ali Khan told parliament that his ministry had warned the provincial government in March that the gate used by militants to attack the airport was not properly secured. Similar claims have surfaced after previous militants attacks in Pakistan.

Ishaan Tharoor analyzes the strength of the Pakistani Taliban:

What began as a low-level militancy in Pakistan’s tribal belt along the porous border with Afghanistan has now metastasized into a sprawling insurgency that has tapped into nationwide networks of criminal syndicates and other terrorist organizations. The Pakistani Taliban’s profile in Karachi has grown in recent years, highlighted by a spate of brazen attacks, including the 17-hour siege of a Pakistani naval base near the airport in 2011.

Despite its effectiveness, the Pakistani Taliban operates in a fashion that is “not as hierarchical as one terrorist group may be,” says Hassan Abbas, author of the new book “The Taliban Revival: Violence and Extremism on the Pakistan-Afghanistan Frontier.” Pakistan’s government, Abbas says, has struggled to adjust to the threat posed by the militants, who have claimed thousands of lives. “The Pakistani Taliban are as dangerous as al-Qaeda once was,” he says. “People think they’re just Pashtun tribals. But it has become a much more complicated crisis.”

Hillary, The Neo-Neocon?

Hillary Clinton Awarded The 2013 Lantos Human Rights Prize

Kim Ghattas paints Hillary Clinton as a secretary of state much more concerned than her boss with upholding American power and prestige around the world, and as her new book would have it, more realistic about the need to deal firmly with international threats:

Clinton was loyal and discreet, but within the confines of that loyalty, she sometimes chafed at Obama’s policy, perhaps never more so than over Syria. In Rabat in February 2012, we chatted after an interview that had focused on Syria’s revolution and Washington’s hands-off approach. She shook her head as she told me that Russia, Hezbollah, and Iran were all in, supporting Assad.

Her implicit question was: Where is the United States? We know now she was advocating internally for more robust support for the rebels, because she understood that America was leaving too much empty space for spoilers like Hezbollah to fill (there’s a separate debate to be had about whether it would have been the right policy). And with regard to dealing with Russia more directly, Clinton emphasizes in Hard Choices that she was more clear-eyed about Vladimir Putin than Obama, advising the president to turn down a summit with the Russian leader months before Obama ended up doing just that.

For me, it’s one fundamental worry about her: an instinct to meddle, and a barely reconstructed mindset about interventionism straight from the hubristic 1990s. Then there’s the question of Israel/Palestine and the settlements that continue apace. Aaron Blake pulls from the book one key foreign policy issue on which Clinton and Obama disagreed:

Clinton says that she differed with Obama on his push for a 2009 freeze on the construction of new Israeli settlements in disputed regions. Clinton suggests she wouldn’t have adopted such a hard-line stance and says that it increased tensions between the two sides. “I was worried that we would be locking ourselves into a confrontation we didn’t need,” she writes. Still, she says she toed the line as a loyal Cabinet secretary. “So that spring I delivered the President’s message as forcefully as I could, then tried to contain the consequences when both sides reacted badly,” Clinton writes.

The upshot: Obama’s occasionally rocky relationship with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is no secret. This sounds like Clinton saying she’s a little less likely to rock the boat with the United States’ top ally in the region.

My fear is that this is tantamount to surrender to the Greater Israel lobby and to the entire project of Greater Israel. Thomas Wright praises Clinton for using her term at State to “shape the international order.” But Chotiner shrugs at her record:

It’s true that she put an admirable focus on women’s rights, and played a role in isolating Iran. But the Afghanistan surge didn’t seem to have a huge effect; Syria policy has been a failure, even if the alternatives were all bleak; Iraq has collapsed since our departure (again, good alternatives did not clearly present themselves); she was probably too cautious about the Egyptian people’s overthrow of Hosni Mubarak, although that didn’t keep him in power; she backed the Libyan campaign, which currently must count as a mixed bag …

Still, even if you want to argue that Clinton had no huge successes, her tenure had no gigantic managerial failures either. Her competence has rarely been called into question by anyone except those on the extreme right still frothing at the mouth over Benghazi. (She could have handled the fallout more adeptly, it is true.) If it seems odd that her most high-profile job tells us so little about what sort of president she would be, remember that Obama’s Senate career told us very little about his presidency.

Here’s the record: support for the disastrous intervention in Libya and for getting involved in one side in the Syrian civil war. Christian Caryl notes that Burma isn’t the success story Hillary is trying to sell it as:

After the initial euphoria of Thein Sein’s early moves toward change, Myanmar has stagnated. Aung San Suu Kyi and her small group of pro-democracy colleagues sit in parliament, but they have little real power. Aung San Suu Kyi has launched a campaign to amend the current constitution, which was designed by the military to allow for a liberalization of national political life that would nonetheless leave it firmly in charge of the parliament and all the other national institutions that count. But so far the generals show no inclination to budge — leaving the pro-democratic forces little chance of fielding a viable candidate in next year’s presidential election. In a word: The military remains firmly in control. Democracy remains a theory.

Noah Millman hopes for a dovish opponent to challenge Hillary in the primaries:

Hillary Clinton is going to run as an extremely hawkish Democrat, because that’s who she actually is. This is not what the country needs, and probably not what the country wants, but it may well be what the country is going to get. If Clinton runs essentially unopposed in the Democratic primary, and faces a mainstream Republican in the fall, voters will likely have a choice between two hawks. …

There’s good reason, therefore, for voters who favor a more restrained foreign policy to hope that Clinton faces at least token opposition in the primaries focused primarily on that issue. Then there would at least be one forum where the topic would be raised, and raised seriously, for Clinton to address. In the best-case scenario, such opposition would get more press attention than it deserved, which would force Clinton to make some kind of gesture to placate the doves in her coalition.

I really don’t like that hawk-dove paradigm. The real paradigm should be between those who have fully absorbed the terrible lessons of the first decade of the 21st century and those who see it as a mere, unfortunate blip in the maintenance of American global hegemony. And it looks distressingly likely we have have a choice between two candidates who intend to return to the meddling, expensive and counter-productive past.

(Photo: Win McNamee/Getty)

Engaging The T, Ctd

A reader follows up:

In your response to my letter, you dismissed my argument, claiming that it’s important that all trans advocates be willing to discuss their genitals because “reassignment surgery is often intrinsic to a full trans identity.” I am going to ignore the issue of whether surgery is intrinsic and what the words “full trans identity” mean and instead deal with the bigger issues: who has the right to know about our genitals, and why this is considered a personal subject.

The only people who have the right to know about our genitals are our intimate partners, and potentially anyone who needs to provide medical care directly related to our genitals. Beyond that, it is personal, and I will attempt here to give a non-exhaustive list of reasons why it is personal.

Part of the reason our genitals are a sensitive subject is that even people who want surgery may be denied it due to gatekeeping, lack of funds, or other medical reasons. The Medicare ban on GCS [gender confirmation surgery] was only lifted two Fridays ago. This is important not just for those on Medicare, but more broadly for trans people in the US, as many insurance companies base their coverage on Medicare policies. Without the possibility of insurance coverage, GCS is out of reach for many, including many middle-class trans people.

Additionally, there are many trans people who do not feel the need to have GCS or opt not to have surgery for other reasons. We are not any less trans and our gender is not any less real simply because our genitals do not align with the picture someone might have in their head. In fact, nobody beyond our partners and physicians would not even know what our genitals are if people weren’t so insistent on asking (and sexually assaulting us in public, often under the guise of curiosity).

In addition to being a personal issue, the question of genitals is also a distraction from other, more important issues. When every interview with a trans person, even those on completely unrelated subjects, turns into questions about their genitals, it is derailing the conversation and distracting from other issues. It is not possible to have the conversations we need to have when all the interviewer seems to care about is genitals.

These are exactly the points that Laverne Cox explained in her interview, and this is why questions about genitals are an invasive distraction. And at a personal level, people’s desire to satisfy their curiosity does not supersede my right to keep information about my genitals private.

Another agrees:

I underwent sex reassignment surgery in my early 20s. For the subsequent 15 years, I have had to field questions about the most intricate details of my sex life and the function and appearance of my new plumbing. Complete strangers have offered me money to see or touch my vagina. Other men propose sex “so I can see what it’s like”. This is the harsh reality of being a MTF trannie – we get to experience all the lecherous advances that regular women do, plus the even more brazen and thoughtless objectification from those who see us as little more than fetish toys. I can completely understand high-profile trannies not wanting to go there.

The truth is, although getting surgery seems like the most important thing in the world during transition, after it’s over it becomes such an insignificant part of who we are. We are not defined by our junk. Post-transition we are just normal people with normal lives and everyday problems. I don’t want to talk to strangers about my genitalia any more than any other woman – or man – would. I’m no prude, but honestly, there are way more interesting things going on in my life.

As a general rule, I agree with you that the trans-whatever community has become overly neurotic and that it spends way too much energy policing language and trying to distance itself from “gay culture”, but wanting to take the public focus away from surgery is not a part of that. Sure, gay guys fuck other men, but they aren’t asked in high-brow interviews what it’s like to take it up the ass. Why should transsexual women be asked what it’s like to have a vagina? Leave that for the tabloids and the medical journals.

I’m really grateful for my readers explaining this in more detail and I better see now why a trans identity is what matters, not how radically that identity has been implemented physically. And of course I can see how those questions can seem invasive and violating. I get it better now. Which is why a provocative but sincere debate as we’ve been having here can lead to greater understanding.