Month: August 2014

Robin Williams, RIP

by Dish Staff

When Admitting Your Sins Is Good For Business

by Dish Staff

According to Theodore Johnson’s fascinating study of three West African countries that formally apologized for their role in the slave trade, Ghana’s 2006 mea culpa was “largely a business decision”:

It formed part of a strategy to forge a stronger tourism economy, and closer ties to America, by making it easier for black Americans to visit, emigrate, own land, invest, and start businesses in Ghana. The initiative, called Project Joseph after the biblical character sold into slavery by his brothers, sought to portray Ghana to black Americans as Israel presents itself to the Jewish diaspora. Ghanaian tourism companies even offer “ceremony of apology” packages that black Americans can purchase to accompany visits to ancient slave castles.

Explaining that healing and reconciliation would play a prominent role in the 50th-anniversary celebrations of the country’s independence in 2007, Emanuel Hagan of Ghana’s Ministry of Tourism and Diasporean Relations told a local news organization that the history of slavery was “something that we have to look straight in the face because it exists. So, we will want to say something went wrong, people made mistakes, but we are sorry for whatever happened.” And Ghana’s efforts worked. Around 10,000 black Americans visit the country every year, and around 3,000 now live in Ghana’s capital—triple the number estimated to have lived in the entire country in 2007.

How Sexually Fluid Are Women Really? Ctd

by Phoebe Maltz Bovy

My earlier post on female sexual fluidity-or-lack-thereof has caused some controversy on Twitter. Some are upset that I’m questioning the caller’s own label:

People should, of course, identify as they see fit, and that includes Zen Heathen. I’d merely point out that a) the caller expressed 0% sexual interest in men (we don’t learn what she thinks about the 10% of the time she’s not thinking of women – for all we know it’s that she has to pick up her dry-cleaning – and she could well be with a man because of the social pressures to be with one), and b) if you’re pairing off with someone, and their variant of bisexuality involves preferring the gender you are not virtually all the time, this is maybe a red flag. Or maybe not – by all means, if you find the one person of a particular gender you’re attracted to, enjoy! – but people certainly think so when it comes to men.

Others point out that fantasies don’t necessarily reflect what people want:

This is a fair point. What was clear from the call, but not my post, is that this is a woman who has wanted to date women for years but been too shy. That’s a little different from someone simply having this or that pop into their head during sex. I’d also repeat here, though, that I wonder how blasé and hey-people-fantasize we’d be if this were a man fantasizing 90% of the time about other men. I’d also, while I’m repeating myself, reiterate that fetishes, etc., are different from sexual orientation. Someone might fantasize about scenarios or individuals they’d want nothing to do with in real life. But always picturing men, or always women, or close-to-always, would seem to indicate something.

Oh, and allow me a starstruck moment: Savage himself replied!

Since these other responses arrived only after Savage’s tweets, I for a moment wasn’t quite sure what he meant by “shit storm”-producing “#bisexual activists.” Then I was accused of not believing anyone could be bisexual by a bunch of Twitter users, all because I didn’t think this one woman sounded like she had any interest in men, and of hating bi people and gay people and women and… I think I see what he meant:

https://twitter.com/MegKBax/status/498892998865084416

Noted.

So how might Savage have answered the call differently, without bi-erasing anyone’s experiences? He might have done what another Twitter user suggests:

The idea isn’t for the caller to be officially declared a lesbian (as if such a thing were possible), but for her to consider – and, if she sees fit, to reject! – the possibility. She is, after all, soliciting advice. But the main thing I’d have emphasized is that this call would have been received entirely differently if it had come from a man. I mean, there might have been a nod to the possibility that the man was bisexual, but a nod would also surely have been given to the ever-so-slight chance that a self-identified bisexual man with a female partner, but who can’t stop thinking about Idris Elba, is in the closet. I find it hard to believe that – outside whichever limited sphere of bisexual activists – anyone would object to throwing “gay” out there as a possibility.

Not Again

by Dish Staff

Mark Berman summarizes the big news out of Ferguson, Missouri:

An unarmed black teenager named Michael Brown was shot and killed Saturday by a police officer in suburban St. Louis. People protested Saturday and Sunday, with large crowds of protesters and police facing off multiple times since the shooting. Some rioting and looting also broke out late Sunday night. Federal authorities are monitoring the shooting as groups and officials call for investigations.

The circumstances surrounding the shooting appear to be somewhat unclear. Police said Saturday that the shooting followed an encounter involving a police officer, Brown and another person Saturday afternoon, but additional confirmed details are scarce. Jon Belmar, chief of the St. Louis County police, said that the episode began with “a physical confrontation.” Belmar did not explain what prompted the confrontation, but he said that the officer was pushed back into his squad car during the episode and that one shot was fired from the officer’s weapon inside the car. Brown was shot multiple times – “more than just a couple,” Belmar said – on the street nearby, and all shell casings matched the officer’s gun. It’s not known yet why the officer shot him, nor why lethal force was used.

Jonathan Capehart hears echoes of the Trayvon Martin shooting:

When I wrote first wrote about Martin’s killing, I said that one of the burdens of being a black male was bearing the heavy weight of other people’s suspicions. The McBride murder shows that such suspicion knows no gender. I also wrote about the lessons my mother taught me growing up. How I shouldn’t run in public, lest I arouse undue suspicion. How I most definitely should not run with anything in my hands, lest anyone think I stole something. The lesson included not talking back to the police, lest you give them a reason to take you to jail – or worse. …

When you’re black and especially male – in the United States – you have to go to these seemingly overboard, extra lengths in the off-chance they might save your life. But none of those things would have helped me if I were in the shoes of Michael Brown or Renisha McBride or Trayvon Martin. We don’t know yet if Brown was asked for identification, but we know the other two weren’t. Perhaps their assailants saw all they needed to know. What frightens me more than anything in the world is that the chances are very high that one day I might be in their shoes and might meet their tragic end. The so-called victims of the nonexistent “war on whites” have absolutely NO idea what living under that kind of siege, that kind of very real threat, is like.

Capehart also has some choice words for the looters:

This is not how you protest the shooting of an unarmed teenager. This is not how you show support for his grieving family. This is not how you make authorities understand your anger and concern. This is not how you get others to join your cause. Perhaps I’m being too generous when it comes to those knuckleheads who used a tragedy to trash businesses and scurry off with bottles of wine, among other things. Perhaps I’m giving the looters too much credit by presuming they actually care about what happened to Michael Brown and how to prevent it from happening again. But there are plenty of people who do care and want answers. The actions of selfish and opportunistic looters must not distract us from getting them.

Meanwhile, Bill Chappell examines the rise of #IfTheyGunnedMeDown:

The use of different photos to portray shooting victim Michael Brown, who was killed by a police officer Saturday, prompted an interesting phenomenon on Twitter Monday: Users are posting “dueling” photos of themselves – one where the subject looks wholesome, and another where the same person might look like a troublemaker – with the hashtag #IfTheyGunnedMeDown. Behind the trend is the question of which photo the media would seize upon, if the posters had a run-in with police. For some, it’s another way this episode calls to mind the shooting death of Trayvon Martin – and the various photos used to portray both the teenager and his killer, George Zimmerman.

James Poniewozik calls #IfTheyGunnedMeDown a “a simple, ingenious DIY form of media criticism”:

It was a brilliant media critique, and while Twitter and other platforms may have no magical power to stop shootings or catch warlords, one thing they are very good at is catching the attention of the media. Journalists pay attention to Twitter–disproportionate attention, maybe–and that makes it a very, very good place to deliver the modern version of a letter to the editor. You could say similar of #YesAllWomen, or of the #BringBackOurGirls hashtag of earlier this year: no, it didn’t have the power to free the Nigerian schoolgirls abducted by Boko Haram, but it did put the story on homepages and newscasts often resistant to overseas news, especially from sub-Saharan Africa.

Yesha Callahan sighs:

It’s safe to say that Brown has become a victim of what I like to refer to as the “Trayvon Martin effect” in the media. Trayvon, who was killed by George Zimmerman, was depicted as a gold-grill-wearing, weed-smoking teenager in the photos used by the media. There were no photos of Trayvon smiling with his family members or being just your average happy teen, which his family members said he was. Similarly, the photos of Brown that have been picked up by the media included him throwing up a peace sign, which conservative media has translated into a “gang sign.” You’d be hard-pressed to find mainstream media showing Brown at his high school graduation or with members of his family. … Unfortunately, because of Ferguson police, we’ll never be able to see a photo of Brown attending his first day of college today.

The Corruption Of The Tea Party

by Dish Staff

Dougherty decries it:

It’s easy to write them off as just another bunch of opportunists. But the endemic corruption of this movement should trouble the American right, if not the American conscience. The conservative diagnosis of Washington’s brokenness is that Americans have outsourced the task of self-government to a managerial class in Washington, a corruption that has transformed our nation’s capital into “the Beltway,” a shorthand for D.C.’s toxic culture of cronyism.

The populist right’s instinctive response — the Tea Party — immediately became just another added layer of cronyism. A grassroots corruption. Really, a weed. If the American people have outsourced their self-government to Washington, the conservative movement made another dirty deal, allowing itself to be entertained in outrage carnivals run by for-profit activists. Excepting the exceptions, the populist right’s response to dishonesty and graft was to generate another set of swindlers who wear flag-lapel pins, lie to their faces, and help themselves to the cash.

Rescuing The Yazidis

by Jonah Shepp

More than half of the 40,000 Yazidis trapped on Mount Sinjar by ISIS militants have managed to escape through a safe passage opened by Iraqi and Syrian Kurdish militias, but many still remain in danger:

The refugees, all members of the Yazidi sect, began streaming back into Iraqi Kurdistan on Sunday after a perilous journey past Islamic State militants who had vowed to kill them and had surrounded their hideout on Mount Sinjar after storming the area. The day-long trek took them first over a mountain range into Syria, then through the Peshkhabour crossing three hours north-west of Irbil, where Kurdish officials were rushing to provide food and shelter.

Fleeing Yazidis said their escape had been aided by the YPG, a Syrian Kurdish rebel faction, and by US air strikes on Islamic State (Isis) positions which had forced the jihadists to withdraw for around six hours on Saturday. Their retreat gave a window for thousands of Yazidis, all desperately low on food and water, to begin streaming down the mile-high mountain and north across the Nineveh plains, which have been an ancient homeland of Iraqi minorities.

It’s important to remember that “rescuing” the Yazidis means, for now, sending them to save havens far from home. They are refugees, part of a massive wave of displacement, and will require consistent support while in exile and at some point (hopefully) in returning to their homes. I stress this because refugees have a tendency to get buried in our consciousness of protracted conflicts, especially in the Middle East. Esther Yu-Hsi Lee tallies the Iraqis displaced in the current conflict, who number over 1 million:

Just this week alone, the rapid advance of ISIL forces in several cities of Iraq has forced the internal displacement of about 195,000 refugees, including adherents of the religious Yazidi sect, Palestinians, and Turkmen living in Iraq — a move that has sent neighboring countries and international agencies scrambling to accommodate the refugee crisis within Iraq. …

Overall, nearly 200,000 internally displaced people have fled away from major cities, like Qaraqosh, the largest Christian city captured by ISIL this week, with the greatest concentration of people fleeing towards the northern provinces of Dahuk, Erbil, and Kirkuk, and Sulaymaniyah, near Turkey. Between January and July, there were at least 1.2 million displaced refugees within Iraq. And in June, the United Nations upgraded Iraq’s crisis to a level 3 humanitarian disaster — the most severe rating it has.

There’s really no overstating how catastrophic this situation is. Hundreds of thousands of refugees is one thing; hundreds of thousands more refugees, on top of multiple, unresolved refugee crises involving millions of people, is quite another. The sheer scale of the displacement is hard for us as Americans to comprehend, which makes it equally hard to appreciate the outsized role refugees have played in the history of the modern Middle East and the conflicts playing out there today. Some Arab communities, particularly the Palestinians, have suffered the trauma of being shuffled from one conflict zone to another over the course of three generations. That has to take a toll on one’s psychological wellbeing as well as one’s worldview: it’s really no shocker that people in such an intractable predicament are prone to radicalization and have a hard time building democratic states and civil societies.

Obama’s Iraq Strikes And Executive Power, Ctd

by Dish Staff

Republicans are making somewhat incoherent political hay out of Obama’s decision to carry out air strikes on ISIS targets in Iraq, arguing on the one hand that his objectives are too broad and on the other that they’re too narrow. But on the third hand – and you don’t read this very often on the Dish – Ted Cruz has a point here:

Cruz said he does not believe the 2002 Authorization for Use of Military Force in Iraq or the War Power Act provide Obama the authority to continue airstrikes against ISIS. “I believe initiating new military hostilities in a sustained basis in Iraq obligates the president to go back to Congress and to make the case and to seek congressional authorization,” Cruz said. “I hope that if he intends to continue this that he does that.”

As Yishai Schwartz points out, however, the administration doesn’t think it has authority to re-intervene in Iraq under the AUMF either. Instead, as Jack Goldsmith observed last week, they appear to be claiming a constitutional power to do so. In Schwartz’s view, this is extremely dangerous:

The problem, however, with relying on the Constitution alone is that this constitutional power is vague and open-ended. What exactly can’t the president order under his authority as commander-in-chief?

Especially after the Bush presidency’s extreme claims of executive war powers, Obama and many of his legal advisors are wary of relying on this vague and unrestricted constitutional power. If anything, they would like to see it clearly limited and defined. So the administration is caught in a dilemma: as Islamists butcher minorities in Iraq, it sees a moral and humanitarian imperative to act. But without specific congressional permission, a purely humanitarian intervention would set a virtually open-ended precedent for an American president to act militarily anytime, anywhere.

Furthermore, Ilya Somin doesn’t buy the argument that the need for immediate action hindered Obama from seeking Congressional approval for the intervention:

[T]his case – like the 2011 Libya intervention – is not a situation where a crisis developed so quickly that the president had no time to seek congressional authorization for the use of force. ISIS has been gaining ground against Iraqi government and Kurdish forces for many weeks, and its murderous and genocidal intentions have also been clear for a long time. President Obama had plenty of time to seek congressional authorization during that period. To be sure, some specific aspects of the tactical situation have only emerged recently, such as ISIS’ siege of thousands of Yazidi civilians on a mountaintop. But the possibility that ISIS would threaten large numbers of civilians in a position where local forces could not save them was readily foreseeable long before then.

He’s also deeply skeptical of the notion that air strikes don’t count as “war”:

To be sure, Obama also assures us that he will not deploy US ground forces against ISIS. During the 2011 Libya conflict, the administration argued that an intervention limited to air strikes alone does not require congressional authorization under the War Powers Act of 1973 if it does not “involve sustained fighting or active exchanges of fire with hostile forces.” Similar reasoning can be used to claim that such air strikes do not qualify as a “war” that requires congressional authorization under Article I of the Constitution. But such strained arguments did not pass the laugh test in 2011, and have not improved with age since then. The use of airpower in a “long-term campaign” clearly qualifies as warfare under any reasonable definition of the term.

P.M. Carpenter, on the other hand, wonders whether Obama promised a long-term campaign at all:

Perhaps my reception of Obama’s words was wildly imperfect, but what I heard in “we’re [not] going to solve this problem in weeks; this is going to be a long-term project” was this: untangling the political mess created by Maliki and his sectarian brutes is likely to span months. Not our military involvement, but rather the mess itself is the “long-term project.”  A months-long U.S. air campaign increases almost exponentially the odds of a downed, captive pilot, and I can’t see President Obama taking that risk.

Mental Health Break

by Chris Bodenner

One of the top nominees from our cover-song contest that hasn’t been aired yet is José Gonzalez’s acoustic rendition of “Heartbeats” by the Swedish synth-pop band The Knife. Gonzalez’s austere video is here, but the Sony Bravia version is far more visually stunning:

The Knife’s version – with its vintage footage of suburban kids on skateboards and trippy digital crows – is probably even better. And for another great video from the Swedes, don’t miss their drag queen-led performance for “Pass This On”:

There Goes The Neighborhood School

by Dish Staff

Former New Schools For New Orleans chief executive Neerav Kingsland applauds DC’s proposal to move away from traditional school zoning:

Historically, having neighborhood schools kept black students from learning alongside white students; poor students from attending school with wealthy students; immigrant students from studying with native-born students – and the list goes on. A city of neighborhood schools is a city that says where you live determines which schools you can attend. The implications are clear: Poor families will not have access to the schools of the wealthy. In this sense, predictability is code for “I want school choice based on my ability to buy a house rather than school choice based on an equitable process.”

Adam Ozimek seconds him:

As Kingsland argues, neighborhood schools are “bastions of exclusion, not inclusion.” This is ironic, given that the motivation of universal and free K-12 is that it should be a force for equalizing educational opportunity.

There is no other institution in the country where equality of access is more broadly supported, even if this agreement is limited to the abstract. While liberals want to turn more institutions and markets into forces for equality, we are currently failing to do so in K-12 education despite the near total government control and significant amount of agreement on the principle of equality. It’s surprising then that there isn’t more movement to make public schools truly public, and not just another housing amenity sold to the highest bidder.

Meanwhile, Linda Lutton notes that Chicago’s neighborhood schools are struggling with declining enrollment:

In 2000, 74 percent of Chicago’s elementary kids went to their assigned neighborhood grammar school. Today, just 62 percent do– and that number is falling. The figures show how much the system shifted over the decade that included Renaissance 2010, a program that gained national attention by opening dozens of new grammar schools and closing dozens of neighborhood schools deemed low-performing or under-enrolled. …

“Neighborhood schools in the traditional and historical sense are under pressure, and more in some places than others,” says Jeffrey Henig, who studies the politics of education reform at Teachers College in New York City. While the neighborhood school is still a strong concept in suburban America, it’s taken a “body blow” in cities like Chicago that are trying to improve their school systems through school choice, Henig says.