Month: August 2014

Every Sex Worker Is Somebody’s Daughter, Ctd

by Dish Staff

Elizabeth’s post about sex workers as the theoretical “daughters” of those opining on the topic continues to cause a stir. Adam Ozimek argues against thinking of adults in this way, no matter the issue at hand:

Whether you’d want your kid to do something is a terrible, selfish, and self-centered way to think about policy. You hear this kind of argument when it comes to drug use too. “Do you really want your kid to be able to smoke pot?” But the laws of this country aren’t the rules of your household. Stopping your kid from smoking pot or becoming a prostitute isn’t our job, it’s yours. Quite frankly if you need the law’s help in that regard then I’m guessing you’re going to have other problems on your hands anyway.

Ozimek, perhaps spoiling for a Dish guest-blogger show-down, goes on to quote Freddie making such an argument:

On the left you hear things like this when it comes to labor standards, especially around the globe. For example, I recall Freddie deBoer once wrote of an NPR piece on labor conditions in China:

Would Ira Glass ever allow his children, when grown, to work 60 hours a week? In those factories? In those conditions? Of course not.

Here we have not only have every U.S. citizen being treated like your child, but every worker in China, a country of 1.3 billion people that is thousands of miles away. That’s quite a paternalistic reach.

Many readers also responded to Elizabeth’s provocative argument. And it turns out that no, not everyone is losing sleep over the possibility that their children are or might become sex workers. Some speak from personal experience:

My friend recently went to LA to shoot porn. Her parents were fully aware; and she went with her husband (she only shot solo stuff and “girl girl” scenes. Her parents gave their blessing; I’m not sure “approve” is the right word, but they definitely were not upset by her decision and they were happy she seemed so excited.

I suspect a lot of parents would be like this: your primary desire is your child to be happy and safe; and after a certain point you get convinced that both will be true within that industry.

That said, it WAS a very odd experience. This is a girl who had had sex with only one guy in her life, and one girl; yet her second day there she is taken to a shoot in a hotel room, meets another young nervous girl, and in 15 minutes is having sex with her on film. The fact that she loved it was beside the point; there is something very weird about having a third party arrange your sex partner for you, and you having sex with them within 15 minutes of meeting them.

My friend is also a cam model on one of “those” sites; and she could easily make $75k this year. This is working from home, maybe 15-20 hours a week, setting her own hours, doing something that she loves to do. What parent WOULDN’T want their child to be in a situation like that?

Another reader astutely notes that even non-controversial romantic situations have the potential to freak out one’s immediate family:

“I submit that virtually every honest person — those with children of their own, as well as those who merely possess a functional moral imagination — will admit to being appalled at the thought.”

Sure, and every one of us is appalled at the thought of our parents having sex, too.  That doesn’t mean sex for old people is wrong.  It just means we don’t want to think of it. We don’t like to contemplate the sexuality of the people we have a close non-sexual relationship with.  When we men don’t are appalled at the thought of our daughters having sex for money, it’s just a more advanced version of not wanting to think of them having sex at all.

And another makes a feminist libertarian argument:

I think the key thing to understanding this is the framing – Father, Daughter.  It’s an entirely paternalistic approach, treating these adults as if they were children. “I know better than you.” The gender aspect matters to a degree, since it touches on the tendency towards protectiveness/possessiveness towards the sexuality of daughters, but even if we were talking about a mother or a son, the key point is the same.  This sort of logic and thinking should not be what drives us.  Your children are not yours to make decisions for once they become adults, nor should it remain in that frame. Just because someone wouldn’t want their daughter (or son) to sleep with half the people at their college, doesn’t mean that we should outlaw sex.

We need a society where everyone’s choices are respected, not treated as perpetual children. Laws should be about reducing risk associated with those choices (focused on making sure no one else screws us over, literally or figuratively) not about making our choices for us.

A different reader – one with daughters! – argues that there are options worse than sex work:

What a lede – it just made me shout out, in the presence of both my kids “THAT’S NOT TRUE!”  Having a daughter as a sex worker is not my worst nightmare – there are many fates worse than being a sex worker, and being a sex worker can actually prevent some of them (dying homeless, being “forced” by finances into a bad marriage, starving while working “legit” fast food, etc.).  My daughters both agreed.  And then they added that most of the true hazards of the sex business come from its illegality.

Another reader dissents:

One does not have to be an uptight sexual prude to expect more from one’s daughter beyond having sex for money. Does this mean I do not respect sex workers? I respect them if they made their own choice to be in the sex business; but I often wonder if they truly did.

Why? Because I shared a rehab group therapy with a number of young women who worked the sex trade as teenagers and then young women. The experience showed me that none of them did sex work as an ambition; none said they sold their bodies as a deliberate choice to work in the sex trade. Most told how they started peddling their bodies for sex as strippers, or because a man offered to pimp them (one was 14 when her volleyball coach raped her, then turned her out). Sex work was a way to pay for drugs, and to feel loved for a bit. None spoke highly of the sex work they did. All were trying to end doing it, and those with daughters were very concerned their children might end up in sex work, because of how they got there.

Add to it none saw sex work as a viable way to make a living.

My stance on this front is: I do not want my daughter to aim so low in her life, that sex work becomes her only option, or an option at all.

The Ferguson Fishbowl

by Dish Staff

Earlier this week, Max Fisher shared his alarm at how the press have been treated in Ferguson, where at least 11 journalists have been arrested since the protests began:

This has a much deeper and more damaging effect than just suppressing media coverage. Arresting and intimidating journalists are inherently political acts, guaranteed by design to generate attention. Much as when it’s done in far-away conflict zones and authoritarian states, it’s about making a statement. It’s about demonstrating, to ordinary citizens even more than to journalists, that police believe they can exercise absolute control over the streets and anyone in them.

That police in Ferguson are targeting journalists so openly and aggressively is an appalling affront to basic media freedoms, but it is far scarier for what it suggests about how the police treat everyone else — and should tell us much about why Ferguson’s residents are so fed up. When police in Ferguson are willing to rough up and arbitrarily arrest a Washington Post reporter just for being in a McDonald’s, you have to wonder how those police treat the local citizens, who don’t have the shield of a press pass.

But Chris Hayes, who was himself threatened by a cop while reporting on the protests, nonetheless sympathizes with the police:

I think it’s a fair assessment to say police don’t really enjoy doing this job while being recorded all the time. That press freedom is beautiful is not the prevailing sentiment. In their defense, they’re in a high-stress, highly adrenalized situation. It’s dark. They’re hearing over the police radio “shots fired!” I heard that over a police radio. It turned out to be fireworks. But they’re worried they might be in danger.

Noah Rothman, meanwhile, casts aspersions on some of the media in Ferguson for essentially roleplaying:

Crowd control requires managing the press just as it does for protesters, and it is the height of irresponsibility for reporters to create the conditions, as some have, which would force police to view them as a threat proportionate to that of the protesters. While police would be well-advised to avoid making martyrs of journalists, even if some appear to welcome that condition, there is only so much leeway law enforcement can provide.

What is going on in Ferguson is complicated, but the press may no longer be playing a helpful role. In fact, they could be inflaming a tense situation even further. While that is debatable, what is indisputable is what the media has become: part of the story.

Josh Voorhees shakes his head:

[M]issing from such handwringing about the reporters’ ostensible loss of objectivity is the fact that the media had left the sidelines long before [the Washington Post’s Wesley] Lowery and [the Huffington Post’s Ryan] Reilly were handcuffed. The very reason that national reporters … packed their bags for Ferguson was to get answers. Answers to why a member of the Ferguson Police Department opened fire on an unarmed black teen in broad daylight. Answers to why city officials originally refused to identify the cop involved in the shooting or even say how many bullets he had fired. Answers to why police were responding to what originally were largely peaceful protests with military-grade riot gear.

In short, the media descended on Ferguson looking for the same thing that had led protesters to take to the streets: the truth. That’s the real reason the media is siding with the protestors: What the people in the streets of Ferguson want is the same thing the journalists were sent there to find.

And in the end, sometimes getting arrested just gives journalists an alternative method of access, which is what happened with Ryan Devereaux:

[Bild reporter Lukas Hermsmeier and I] were jailed with a cross-section of the Ferguson protesters. Most of our cellmates were African American and from Ferguson or surrounding areas, though there were also some white men in the mix, too. There were three recently discharged veterans in our group and one active duty service member. I don’t know how many—if any—of the men I was in jail with had participated in the violent, destructive protesting that I saw. But far from being the hardened criminals some might paint them as, these young men—most of whom had never met before last night—offered support for each other. They were kind to one another. …

The concerns these men raised—and the intensity that they have for this moment in Ferguson—runs very deep. Several cited the disproportionate number of traffic stops of young men of color as a specific problem. On a more fundamental level, their grievances centered on a perceived lack of respect from the police sworn to protect their communities, a sense that anything could be done to them and nothing would be done in response. One young African American man from the area positively beamed at being arrested for a cause; he likened it to going to jail with Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.

Follow all our Ferguson coverage here.

Foley’s British Executioner

by Dish Staff

The unidentified jihadist who murdered James Foley in the video released yesterday spoke fluent English with a London accent, likely placing him among the hundreds of UK citizens who have traveled to Syria or Iraq to join up with ISIS. That revelation could motivate the UK to step up its involvement in the fight against the Islamic State:

“We’ve been saying for a very long time that there are significant numbers of British nationals in Syria, increasingly in Iraq, and one of the reasons why what is going on in Syria and Iraq is a direct threat to our own national security is the presence of significant numbers of our nationals who may at some stage seek to come back to the UK with the skills, the tradecraft that they’ve learned working with these terrorist organisations, potentially posing a threat to our domestic security here in the UK,” [Foreign Secretary Philip] Hammond said.

Hammond said Britain was committed to helping the Iraqi government fight Isis and that, although the Iraqi government “has made it clear that it does not need and actually wouldn’t welcome western boots on the ground”, it did want help with surveillance and technological equipment. Asked if Britain would send soldiers to Iraq to train Iraqi forces, Hammond said this was “certainly something that we would consider”.

Josh Halliday rounds up some expert analysis of why the killer’s nationality is significant:

Prof Peter Neumann, director of the International Centre for the Study of Radicalisation at King’s College London, said the militant was chosen to front the video to cause maximum impact in the west.

“This is significant because it signifies a turn towards threatening the west. They are saying we’re going to come after you if you bomb us,” he said. Neumann said British fighters had been carrying out “horrific acts” like beheadings, torture and executions for a year and a half, but this appeared to be the first with a western victim. …

Dr Erin Saltman, a senior researcher at Quilliam Foundation, said the footage was geared towards disaffected Islamist extremists in the west who would be able to empathise with the British-accented militant. “The video is quite a shock mainly because the two characters are an American and a Briton. That’s done very deliberately,” she said. “As soon as you have a fighter with a Middle East accent it becomes very easy to disassociate with that and say they’re brutal, they’re barbaric. But when you have a British citizen, raised in the UK, this is somebody we can empathise with.”

Jihadism expert Shiraz Maher calls British jihadists “amongst some of the most vicious and vociferous fighters who are out there”:

Maher warned that the self-proclaimed caliphate was likely to carry out more atrocities because of western efforts to help people in the region. “Unfortunately, the way the Foley video is framed, it makes it very clear now that IS (Isis) will react against any western involvement or intervention into the conflicts either in Syria or Iraq and that, of course, given that we are now helping minorities in Iraq – the Yazidis, the Kurds, for example – they regard that not just as an assault on them but they regard that ultimately as a declaration of war against Islam itself.

“And therefore, that is the sort of narrative we have, of course, heard from al-Qaida in the past. That will license them to attack targets and individuals and western interests as they see fit.” Maher said British and other Sunni Muslims initially went to Syria because of an “existential threat” to their faith from Shia Muslims, and their presence has since swelled Isis ranks and allowed it to increase its territory and influence.

Ed Morrissey responds to the possibility that the executioner or his compatriots may be former Guantánamo Bay detainees:

The orange jumpsuits are obviously referencing Guantanamo Bay, but the British seem concerned that there’s more than just symbolism now in play with ISIS. The US began releasing British subjects from Gitmo during the Bush administration under international pressure to shut down the facility, as well as releasing other detainees to their home countries, all of whom pledged to ensure that they would not return to the fight. We’ve seen plenty of recidivism since then, and all to this same end — to rejoin the jihad against the West and the nations in this region, and to recruit others to do the same.

It won’t be a surprise if the jihadist turns out to be a former Gitmo detainee, but it is a bit of a surprise that the UK doesn’t keep a close enough watch on those former detainees to account for their whereabouts immediately. After all, they have already been identified as threats, picked up in the battle zones far from home, which is how they ended up in Gitmo in the first place.

To Be A Christian In Modern America

by Matthew Sitman

Benedetto,_Mauro_e_Placido

For awhile now I’ve been intrigued by Rod Dreher’s advocacy of the “Benedict Option” for contemporary Christians, which looks to St. Benedict, founder of a monastic order in the wake of Rome’s collapse, as inspiration for how Christians should respond to the current cultural situation. Here’s a good summary of the Benedict Option from Rod’s essay about it late last year:

Why are medieval monks relevant to our time? Because, says the moral philosopher Alasdair MacIntyre, they show that it is possible to construct “new forms of community within which the moral life could be sustained” in a Dark Age—including, perhaps, an age like our own.

For MacIntyre, we too are living through a Fall of Rome-like catastrophe, one that is concealed by our liberty and prosperity. In his influential 1981 book After Virtue, MacIntyre argued that the Enlightenment’s failure to replace an expiring Christianity caused Western civilization to lose its moral coherence. Like the early medievals, we too have been cut off from our roots, and a shadow of cultural amnesia is falling across the land.

Rod goes onto describe various communities – in places like Eagle Creek, Alaska and Clear Creek Abbey, Oklahoma – living out their faith in traditional ways, largely set apart from modern American culture. In the midst of our cultural catastrophe, the Benedict Option is a way for Christians to live virtuous lives uncorrupted by what’s around them, resisting any kind of assimilation into mainstream society.

Last week Samuel Goldman argued for an alternative, the “Jeremiah Option,” drawing on the experience of the Jews exiled in Babylon, and pitched as a corrective to Dreher’s ideas:

Without being rigorously separatist, these [Benedict Option] communities do aim to be separate. Some merely avoid morally subversive cultural influences, while others seek physical distance from mainstream society in rural isolation.

But a neo-Benedictine way of life involves risks. Communal withdrawal can construct a barrier against the worst facets of modern life—the intertwined commodification of personal relationships, loss of meaningful work to bureaucratic management, and pornographic popular culture—yet it can also lead to isolation from the stimulating opposition that all traditions need to avoid stagnation.

I think those hesitations are largely right, and as a Christian, I’d add that I have to wonder what these kinds of communities do to reach out to the poor, the sick, and the lonely in the world around them. I’m not sure hunkering down is what Jesus called us to, and when, for example, a member of the Alaska community I mentioned says that “If you isolate yourself, you will become weird,” I wonder how living in a remote Alaska village is not isolation. Christians are given the Great Commission, not the Great Retreat. I’m not trying to demean the people Rod profiled, but rather express that I can’t quite understand Christianity in the same way. Jesus always seemed to wandering around, telling strange stories, mingling with the kind of people Benedict Option types might prefer to avoid.

Given the above, you won’t be surprised that I nod along when Goldman elaborates on what distinguishes the Jeremiah Option from the Benedict Option:

The Benedict Option is not the only means of spiritual and cultural survival, however. As a Catholic, MacIntyre searches for models in the history of Western Christendom. The Hebrew Bible and Jewish history suggest a different strategy, according to which exiles plant roots within and work for the improvement of the society in which they live, even if they never fully join it.

This strategy lacks the historical drama attached to the Benedict Option. It promises no triumphant restoration of virtue, in which values preserved like treasures can be restored to their original public role. But the Jews know a lot about balancing alienation from the mainstream with participation in the broader society. Perhaps they can offer inspiration not only to Christians in the ruins of Christendom but also to a secular society that draws strength from the participation of religiously committed people and communities.

Goldman gets at something important here when he notes that adherents to the Benedict Option look forward to “a triumphant restoration of virtue,” rather than the simpler and more humble desire to help the society in which they live. I certainly harbor no longings for Christendom. There’s no golden age I’m trying to restore. While not being uncritical of modern life, I’m not in rebellion against it – and thus don’t seek to escape it. I also resist the notion that Christianity is fundamentally about morality, at least not in the ultimate sense. Christianity is premised on our inability to be moral, and it’s most important idea is that of grace, or God’s one-way love for us, which isn’t premised on how much we have our acts together. So I’m suspicious of religious movements that value purity above all else, which, in a way, I think the Benedict Option does. Withdrawal from mainstream culture can only mean that a desire for purity has trumped the risks of engagement.

But most of all, Christianity teaches us that God is love, that God loved the world and so should we – a notion that I find difficult to square with retreating into a remote community waiting for the world to burn. I actually am hopeful about Christianity’s place in modern life, and seeing the brutality, violence, and indifference to suffering all around us, I can’t help but think the message of Jesus will retain it’s power. But that hope is premised on living in the world, not apart from it, while also letting go of apocalyptic rhetoric and the acute sense of persecution so many Christians feel. One of my favorite passages comes from a letter written by the novelist and playwright Thornton Wilder, where he argued that “The revival in religion will be a rhetorical problem — new persuasive words for defaced or degraded ones.” I’m far more interested in that project, in finding ways to think and talk about Christianity, as well as live it, that avoid the well-worn tropes of American religious life, than I am in waiting out the supposed new Dark Ages.

(St. Benedict orders Saint Maurus to the rescue of Saint Placidus, by Fra Filippo Lippi, 1445, via Wikimedia Commons)

ISIS Murders James Foley

by Dish Staff

ISIS released a video yesterday purporting to show the beheading of American journalist James Foley and threatening to do the same to his colleague Steven Sotloff if the US does not immediately cease its air campaign against the militant group:

A propaganda video circulated on Tuesday showed a masked Isis fighter beheading a kneeling man dressed in an orange jumpsuit who is purported to be James Wright Foley, a photojournalist who went missing in Syria in 2012. The masked executioner spoke in English, with what sounded like a British accent, and said the slaying came in response to the air strikes ordered by President Barack Obama against Isis 12 days ago.

Isis, whose chief spokesman came under US state department sanctions on Monday, warned of further revenge – including on another man purported to be a captured US journalist, Steven Sotloff – and in the video the victim was made to read a statement blaming the US for his own murder. Foley has been missing in Syria since November 2012, where he went to report on the bloody struggle to overthrow dictator Bashar al-Assad. He was initially thought to have been captured by forces loyal to the Assad regime.

So how did he end up in the hands of ISIS? Christopher Dickey wonders:

In Syria, he was picked up by gunmen from what the Federal Bureau of Investigation called an “organized gang” shortly after he left an Internet café on November 22, 2012. In May 2013, GlobalPost President Philip Balboni said that “with a very high degree of confidence, we now believe that Jim was most likely abducted by a pro-regime militia group”—that is, one loyal to President Bashar Assad—and that he was being held near Damascus by the Syrian Air Force intelligence service. “Based on what we have learned,” said Balboni, “it is likely Jim is being held with one or more Western journalists, including most likely at least one other American.”

Several groups fighting against Assad have claimed that there is—or was—a tacit collaboration, at least, between his intelligence services and ISIS, since it served the savage Assad regime well to claim it was fighting a terrorist enemy even more brutal than its own forces.

Uri Friedman remarks that Foley, before his capture, was part of a dwindling cohort of journalists reporting directly from Syria:

“We have never been prouder of our son Jim,” Foley’s mother posted on Facebook on Tuesday evening. “He gave his life trying to expose the world to the suffering of the Syrian people.”

That exposure is growing fainter by the day. Foley appears to have died while working in what is now the most dangerous place in the world to be a reporter—a country where dozens of journalists have been killed and kidnapped in recent years. As the Syrian conflict has grown more indiscriminately violent; as the Syrian government has targeted journalists, censored local news coverage, and barred foreign journalists from the country; as ever-stronger extremist groups have started seizing members of the press (and not even bothering to make demands for their release), news outlets around the world have pulled their staff from the country. Many Syrian journalists and citizen-journalists have been silenced.

Max Fisher knew him:

There will be many efforts in the coming days to derive meaning from Jim’s death. Some will say ISIS had him killed to punish the US for its recent air strikes against them in Iraq, some will say it was to egg the Americans on, and others will attribute it to simple madness. I would rather derive meaning from Jim’s life. As a journalist, I want to celebrate his dedication to truth and understanding. But that would sell him short. It is clear even just by secondhand accounts from the family that would do anything to help him, even when he insisted on returning to a war zone, and from the friends who were so enriched by knowing him, that Jim’s value was so much more.

Owen Jones is struck by the effectiveness of ISIS’s propaganda:

Everything about the video of Foley’s alleged murder was intended to chill. It is unlikely that Islamic State (Isis) selected an executor with a strong London accent for no reason. It was the Iraq war that first popularised the execution video but hearing the blood-curdling threats and dogma of Isis recited in tones that are all too familiar is itself a message.

Terrorism by definition aims to spread terror to achieve its political ends. One of the reasons Isis has outmanoeuvred its rivals is because it has embraced social media so effectively. By publicising its atrocities online, it tells would-be opponents what will happen if it is resisted, and this partly explains why so many have fled rather than confront Isis forces. The ruthless use of social media has proved instrumental in the toppling of entire cities. This operation is being gladly assisted by those in the west who portray Isis as a unique, undiluted evil that needs to be bombed out of existence, granting the militant group the mystique it clearly craves and relies on.

Shane Harris looks at how social media companies have tried to scrub references to the video:

Less than an hour after the video was first posted to YouTube, the company removed it. But the same video was soon posted by a different YouTube user, and it remained accessible for at least another half an hour. The company eventually removed the video from the user’s account, but it didn’t suspend the account itself, and within minutes, the user had posted it again. Twitter suspended the user’s account after he included a link to the video in his feed. …

But the social media companies are fighting a losing battle. They depend on users to flag offensive content or material that violates their terms of service — videos of murder undoubtedly do — but they don’t proactively police the photos, videos, and messages posted to their sites. The companies also have to determine whether posting violent rhetoric or messages constitutes promoting terrorists’ messages or is an act of free speech, and the distinction is not always clear.

How We Turned Our Cops Into Soldiers, Ctd

by Dish Staff

A reader with more than two decades of experience in law enforcement offers his perspective on police militarization:

For the record, I’m a supervisor with a medium-sized police department in Midwest who has also worked in a small town. I’ve been a patrol officer, a detective, and now a supervisor. At heart, I’m an old fashioned beat cop who enjoys walking down a main street and talking to people. I’ve never served in my department’s tactical team, nor am I a veteran.

I’ve seen a lot of changes in my career so far. One of the biggest is the nature of the threat that we face on the street. When I was in the police academy, we prepared for criminals who had cheap handguns and little training. The types of weapons that we face have changed dramatically; the police have simply evolved to meet those threats. I’ll give you a couple of examples:

Iexplore111 (1)During the 1997 North Hollywood shootout, bank robbers armed with illegally modified fully automatic weapons exchanged more than 2,000 rounds with responding LAPD officers. The robbers, who wore ballistic vests, were killed after a 44-minute exchange of gunfire. Seventeen LAPD officers and seven civilians were injured in the battle. The after-action review led to changes in the weapons carried by LAPD officers as well as departments around the country. The agencies moved away from shotguns in squad cars and toward military-style assault rifles that could penetrate body armor. Those rifles aren’t cheap – they often cost more than $2,500 each, plus $500 to $1,000 for the equipment to keep them secured inside of the squad car. If I were the head of a cash-strapped police department, I know I would love to get those weapons from a program that transitions D.O.D equipment to local law enforcement.

The second incident that changed law enforcement profoundly was the 1999 Columbine school shooting. Previously, law enforcement dealt with situations like this by sealing off the area and waiting for special tactical teams to arrive. At Columbine, law enforcement realized that it’s not enough to simply lock down the area; rather it’s necessary to go in, find the killer or killers, and neutralize them before they kill any more. Since 1999, I and countless other police officers have undergone days and days of training in “active shooter response.” I won’t bore you with the details, but suffice it to say that the training involved would seem quite militaristic to the public. The skills and tactics we use are very different from what I learned in the academy, and along with that, we have specialized tools. For example, there is an M-4 assault rifle in each of my agencies’ squad cars.

I get that this is militaristic. Going through a school or mall looking for a shooter utilizes tactics any soldier would recognize from operations in Iraq or Afghanistan. We use them and the equipment because it works. The problem that we face in our field is that these tactics often creep into all aspects of our work. The more you become comfortable with the new reality, the more you need to recognize that it’s a reality you only rarely face.

This leads me to my biggest point regarding the Ferguson police department: We need to stop looking at the officers and start looking at the leaders. Everyone above sergeant has set the tone in this organization. They have done the hiring, and they were leading the efforts to deal with the protesters. There may very well be rogue officers causing issues, and if so, it should likely be no shock to the administration. Problem persons in law enforcement agencies fester for years because it can be challenging to fire an officer, especially if he or she is a military veteran. The one constant in every agency that I’ve been a part of is that the chief of police down to the lieutenants set the tone and direction of the department. The sergeants get the message out to the patrol officers and enforce the message. We haven’t heard the police chief of Ferguson say his officers are out of control – because they are doing what he wants them to do.

More Dish on the war zone that is Ferguson, Missouri, here.

(Image of a illegally modified automatic AR-15 used in the North Hollywood shootout via Wikipedia user YEPPOON)

Palestinians Live What Israelis Fear

by Freddie deBoer

Funeral of eight Palestinians from the al-Louh family in Gaza

The emails filling my box about Israel function as a remarkable document. They are a record of seemingly reasonable people who have completely lost track of basic moral reasoning. And that represents itself nowhere more consistently or powerfully than here: treating what could possibly happen to Israelis as more important than what already is happening to Palestinians. It’s such a profoundly bizarre way to think, that only this maddening issue could bring it about.

“Hamas denies Israel’s right to exist!”

Indeed– and Israel not only denies Palestine’s right to exist, it has achieved the denial of a Palestinian state in fact. What kind of broken moral calculus could cause someone to think that being told your existing state should not exist is the same as not having a state of your own?

“Israelis will become second class citizens!”

Arab Israelis already are second class citizens, and Palestinians in the territories no citizens at all. They are denied freedom of movement, freedom of the press, freedom of assembly. They are systematically discriminated against for jobs, especially in government. They lack adequate representation in government. Their leaders are kicked out of Knesset meetings for questioning the IDF. Racist, ultra-nationalist mobs marched through their streets, chanting “death to Arabs!” Their weddings to Jews are the subject of vicious protests. They live side-by-side with racist teenagers who unashamedly trumpet ethnic warfare. They must live in a society where men like Avigdor Lieberman, an explicit racist and literal fascist, serves in a position of power and prominence. Where Meir Kahane is memorialized by groups receiving state funds, where the JDL’s thugs march, where Lehava preaches against miscegenation. A society where the Deputy Speaker of the Knesset openly calls for ethnic cleansing. Palestinians live in a society where a tiny fraction of government funding is spent on their communities or their people. Where human rights organizations like B’Tselem are oppressed by the state. Where they have to endure Kafkaesque application processes to prevent their homes from being bulldozed, if they are given that opportunity at all. Where they live under fear of reactionary, fundamentalist Orthodox settlers who call for death to the Palestinian race.

“Israel is diplomatically isolated unfairly!”

Palestine is diplomatically isolated in a way Israel cannot imagine. The United States uses its veto power to unilaterally deny even the possibility of full membership status for Palestine in the United Nations. The US has used its foreign aid programs and incredible diplomatic leverage to marginalize Palestine and protect Israel. Israel enjoys the protection of the most diplomatically powerful country on earth; Palestine cannot even claw out formal recognition of its borders.

“Israelis will be rounded up and put into camps!”

Palestinians are already in camps, open-air prison camps like Gaza, tiny, beleaguered cantons that lack access to drinkable water or transportation infrastructure, blockaded from receiving food and essential supplies, prevented from fishing their own waters, their movements harshly restricted, forced to go through humiliating and threatening checkpoints to get to work. They travel in segregated buses. They are frequently denied access to Eastern Jerusalem, the center of Palestinian commercial and cultural  life. They endure constant calls for “Greater Israel,” the call for ethnic cleansing to establish a unitary ethno-nationalist state. They live in unrecognized villages in the Negev and the North which the Israel state provides no services for. They, unlike Israeli Jews, have no “right to return.” They endured the Nakba.

“Israelis will be killed by terrorist violence!”

Palestinians are killed by terrorist violence. They are subject to spasms of outrageous violence, as the IDF kills them by the hundreds with bombs, tanks, and guns. The vast majority are civilians, many children. Their homes are destroyed, their neighborhoods demolished, their entire villages wiped out. Their hospitals and schools and universities and places of worship are bombed by Israel. Palestinians are subject to routine violence and degradation from IDF troops, who make light of this fact on social media. They are at risk from right-wing Israeli mobs who attack them at their protests and deny them their rights to protest. Their nonviolent protesters are thrown into prison. Their homes are bulldozed out of revenge.

Do I need to go on?

Everything that defenders of Israel insist will happen if Palestinians gain power, Palestinians are now enduring, or worse. Every humanitarian disaster that you imagine will occur with the creation of a Palestinian state is happening now. It’s just happening to the people of Palestine. And so this is the question for my many, many critical emailers: why do you shed more tears for what you imagine might happen to Israel than for what is happening to Palestinians?

Israel is one of the safest countries in the Middle East. Its people enjoy prosperity and security. The most powerful country on earth protects and enables it no matter what its behavior. In every meaningful sense– in terms of  physical security, in terms of functioning government and democracy, in terms of human and political rights, in terms of economics and employment, in terms of respect and protection for culture and religion, in terms of life expectancy and health, in terms of education and happiness, in terms of pure self-determination– Israel is one of the most well-off nations on earth, and Palestine, one of the most beleaguered. So then why calls for the defense of Israel so outnumber calls for the defense of Palestine? The only answer that makes sense is this: the belief, whether subconscious or knowing, that an Israeli life is worth more than a Palestinian life. That is the enduring, tacit, obvious belief that underlies this entire discussion, the thing people think but do not say.

(Photo: Palestinians stand over the bodies of eight Palestinians from the al-Louh family, who were killed when an Israeli airstrike hit their house, during a funeral in Deir al-Balah town of Gaza City on August 20, 2014. Eight members of the same family, including three young brothers and a pregnant woman, were killed early Wednesday by an Israeli strike in the town of Deir al-Balah, in the central Gaza Strip. By Mohammed Talatene/Anadolu Agency/Getty Images)

“Friends” And Neighbors

by Dish Staff

Extroverts

Olga Khazan highlights new Facebook-based research on users’ personalities:

For the studies, [computer scientist Andrew] Schwartz and his co-authors asked people to download a Facebook app called “My Personality.” The app asks users to take a personality test and indicate their age and gender, and then it tracks their Facebook updates. So far, 75,000 people have participated in the experiment. Then, through a process called differential language analysis, they isolate the words that are most strongly correlated with a certain gender, age, trait, or place. The resulting word clouds reveal which words are most distinguishing of, say, a woman. Or a neurotic person. In the six studies they’ve published so far, they’ve found that, for example, introverts make heavy use of emoticons and words related to anime, but extroverts say “party,” “baby,” and “ya.”

Above is the word cloud for extroverts. Facebook introverts may want to consider Nextdoor, a neighborhood-centric social network that promises more offline interaction. Ben Popper explains:

The company’s success parallels a troubling trend. The rise of social networks means many people have hundreds or even thousands of digital connections to old friends, co-workers, and acquaintances. But increasingly that wealth of online companionship corresponds with a loss of close relationships to the real-life human beings in our neighborhoods. A third of Canadians and half of Americans admitted in studies that they don’t know the names of any neighbors. In the UK, one in three people couldn’t pick their neighbors out of a police lineup.

Two new books, Marc Dunkelman’s The Vanishing Neighbor and Susan Pinker’s The Village Effect, chronicle these trends and their impact on our bodies and our body politic. Dunkelman sees it at the root of America’s increasingly polarized politics and disaffected voters. For Pinker, a sociologist, the effects run deeper. She notes that the more overlapping relationships among friends, family, and neighbors, the better a person’s prognoses with the most life-threatening diseases and the lower the instances of debilitating illness like dementia. Getting to know your neighbors is statistically shown to produce a longer, healthier life.

Give ’em Enough Rope

by Freddie deBoer

There’s a movement afoot among  writers whose work has appeared at Thought Catalog, the tween slambook of the grown-up internet. These writers are trying to have their work pulled from Thought Catalog not because the site is a disgrace but rather because ape-faced racist Gavin McInness wrote a piece justifying transphobia there.

Now, I have no problem with people trying to get their work removed from Thought Catalog. Lord knows, if there was anything on that website under my byline, I’d be working like to hell to get it pulled, transphobia or no. You don’t want to associate with McInness, I get that. But I think that we should all consider: this is the perfect example of why we shouldn’t censor and don’t need to. Go ahead and Google around or plop the link to his piece into Twitter. The large majority of the reactions he’s gotten have been some combination of anger or ridicule. His argument hasn’t gotten any traction. On the contrary: it’s gotten a lot of people talking about transphobia and how mainstream it can still be. His piece has been undone by the reaction to it. That’s the way it’s supposed to work. If we were to forbid him from expressing his opinions, we wouldn’t know how dopey he and they are.

Now Thought Catalog has pulled a pretty phony move, plastering a big disclaimer on front of their article. (After counting those sweet troll bait clicks, natch.) You can supposedly click through but I’m not able to load the actual piece that way, and had to consult a cached version. That strikes me as a weenie move; you published it, you got the attention, now leave it up for people to laugh at. And again, it’s unnecessary. I mean, this Tweet demolishes McIness in a way that’s far more effective and far more cutting than deleting his piece ever could:

mcinness

Ferguson Isn’t A Black Issue

by Dish Staff

Amy Zimmerman addresses the outcry over hip-hop stars not weighing in enough:

When a celebrity speaks out about an important issue, it increases visibility—this is a good thing. Nevertheless, the expectation that every African-American star or hip-hop hero must weigh in on Ferguson is a problematic one. Demanding that every beloved black celebrity respond to this issue would be like asking every white celebrity to take to social media whenever a white person, be they a criminal or a victim, makes the nightly news. The next time a mentally unstable white man opens fire on the public, you can be sure that the judgment of the world will fall firmly on that individual, not on Lena Dunham for failing to release a cogent and heartfelt press release.

Expecting every black celebrity with a hit single or an extensive Twitter following to address Ferguson implies that Michael Brown’s murder is a minority issue instead of a human rights one. Furthermore, demanding that any one person who is not directly implicated in the atrocity weigh in on it anyway distracts from the brave protestors, articulate journalists, and passionate public figures who are voluntarily taking on the responsibility of ensuring that Michael Brown’s prematurely silenced voice is heard.