Leaders of Hong Kong’s protest movement are mulling whether to keep going, shift tactics, or retreat after two months of street demonstrations failed to persuade authorities to hold an open election for the city’s leadership in 2017:
The Hong Kong Federation of Students will decide in the next week whether to call on protesters to pull up stakes from camps which straddle some of the Chinese-controlled city’s main thoroughfares and have tried residents’ patience. Chan Kin-man, joint founder of the “Occupy Central” protest movement that has called for the students to pull back, said the federation had a “very major decision” to make. …
Benny Tai, another joint founder of Occupy Central, reiterated calls for students to leave and pondered where the disobedience movement could go next. “Blocking government may be even more powerful than blocking roads,” he wrote in the International New York Times. “Refusal to pay taxes, delaying rent payments by tenants in public housing … along with other such acts of non cooperation, could make governing more inconvenient.”
Whichever way the movement goes from here, Rachel Lu calls this round for Beijing:
Everyone in Hong Kong will probably emerge from the Occupy movement a bit bruised, either physically or mentally, but some in Beijing might be smiling. China’s central government has stood fast on the core issue — that Beijing will vet the slate of nominees for Hong Kong’s chief executive in the 2017 election. Years (if not decades) of “united front” work, a term used by China’s ruling Communist Party to describe efforts to hew non-party elites close to its goals, seem to have paid off. Beijing has proven that it knows how to pull the right levers in Hong Kong to wield considerable influence — all of the local government officials toed the line, tycoons spoke out against the occupation, and grassroots groups staged counterprotests. When one businessman took the position that Leung should resign, he was swiftly removed as a delegate to the Chinese People’s Political Consultative Conference as a form of discipline and censure.
The ranks of the pro-establishment camp will likely tighten, while the opposition pro-democracy camp is left in disarray amid infighting.
“This is really, really bad. It means, of course, that when I dismissed Richard Bradley and Robby Soave’s doubts about the story and called them ‘idiots’ for picking apart Jackie’s account, I was dead fucking wrong, and for that I sincerely apologize. It means that my conviction that Sabrina Rubin Erdely had fact-checked her story in ways that were not visible to the public was also wrong. It’s bad, bad, bad all around,” – Anna Merlan, Jezebel. Award glossary here.
Ask yourself: What would it take, really, for your average white cop not to see your average black male young adult as a potential threat? Because we can pass all the ex-post facto laws we want, and we can even convict the occasional police officer, which does happen from time to time. But that’s not where the problem starts. The problem starts in that instant of electric mistrust when the cop reaches for his gun, or employs a homicidal chokehold. That moment is beyond the reach of legislation, or of any punishment that arrives after the fact.
Are we trying to create a humanity devoid of any racist bias, or are we trying to stop cops from shooting black men?
The two aren’t the same. A world without racism would be a world without dirt. A world where episodes like what has happened just this year to Garner, Brown, John Crawford, Akai Gurley, and Tamir Rice is much more plausible. We need special prosecutors, body cameras, and, if you ask me, an end to the war on drugs.
As such, we must be pragmatic. I know the people protesting Michael Brown’s death nationwide are sincere. But it’s easy to forget that in cases like this, sincerity is supposed to be forward-focused. It’s all too human for people to end up mistaking the heightened emotions, the threats, the media attention, the catharsis, as progress itself. But drama alone burns fast and bright. Think about how Trayvon is already—admit it—seeming more like history than the present.
He insists that “Ferguson was the spark, but Garner was ‘it'”:
Here is where I am quite sure Reverend King and Bayard Rustin would be planning not just statements and gestures, but boycotts. The recording of Garner’s death has the clear, potent and inarguable authority of the Birmingham newsreels. We must use that. Yes, use—we are trying to create change, not just perform.
A reader points to a performance:
I’ve never emailed you, though I am a long-time reader and admirer (and, more recently, a subscriber). But if you want something to lift your spirits a bit about Garner, take a look at this. It’s a protest organized by the Black Law Student Association at Yale Law School and joined by much of the law school community. During this silent protest, hundreds of students, faculty, and staff joined hands and created a human chain between the law school and New Haven’s Courthouse. Everyone then staged a “die in” for 4 1/2 minutes. It was a remarkably moving event, all the move moving given that it was organized entirely by young people who’d been buffeted by the news of Ferguson and the Garner verdict and are doing their best to be successful law students at a top law school. Want to know something else? Not only did the New Haven police facilitate the protest, but the Chief of Police showed up in support, cheering the dean of the law school as he passed.
(Photo: On December 4, 2014 in Oakland, California Michaela Pecot wears a sign on her hat that reads ‘I can’t breathe’ in front of City Hall on the second night of demonstrations following a Staten Island, New York grand jury’s decision not to indict a police officer in the chokehold death of Eric Garner. By Elijah Nouvelage/Getty Images)
I have no doubt that Asian Americans suffer from racism and oppression in this country. No doubt at all. However, they don’t suffer from systematic exclusion from American colleges in general or from elite colleges specifically. On the contrary: in both cases, Asian Americans represent a higher percentage of college students than they do the population writ large.
This is, frankly, codswallop. DeBoer ignores the fact that Asian-Americans admitted to selective schools must have higher academic qualifications than Whites! This, not crude proportional representation, is the very essence of discrimination.
Of course, DeBoer’s “out” is that he doesn’t believe in academic qualifications or merit, because he doesn’t believe that “standardized tests and grades can be objective and separated from socioeconomic context.” But the fact is that test scores/grades are the most accurate predictor of academic success that we have. The fact that they correlate with socioeconomic status doesn’t change this fact. Far less does it mean that anyone, least of all Asian-Americans, simply absorb academic ability through some sort of magical force field that permeates their homes.
There is a subtle subtext to being Asian-American in this country that goes something like this:
even if you were born in the Midwest and speak English without an accent, mainstream American will always consider you somewhat of an outsider, a foreigner, or, at best, robotic, automaton-like, part of an undifferentiated mass. Therefore, you must work very hard to excel in areas in which your ability will be obvious and objectively verifiable. Under no circumstances should your prospects depend on people (read: White people) liking you personally or finding you relatable (e.g. sales, entertainment, middle management, or even practicing law in front of a judge or jury).
This (fading) subtext, in part, explains the high prevalence of Asians-Americans in technical and STEM fields and in higher education in general. It may also have socioeconomic benefits for Asian-Americans, on average. But it is perverse to visit race-based collective punishment on the basis of hard work. This, frankly, is part of what grinds my gears: DeBoer’s sanctimonious, hand-wringing concern for “real people” over “abstractions.” We are real people.
2. It is true that good universities (including my alma mater among many others) have world-class academic departments while practicing affirmative action on an university-wide admissions-level. But the critical point is that no physics, chemistry, or any other rigorous academic program practices affirmative action at a departmental level – classes are graded and standards applied without taking race into account. This inevitably generates racial disparities.
This is why STEM graduates, as an overall class, are demographically different from university graduates in general (in a way that makes them, yes, more closely resemble the student body of Cal Tech). This is also a large problem with affirmative action practiced at the admissions level: at some point, the race-based, thumb-on-the-scale must be lifted, with predictable results. Advocates rarely acknowledge this.
For example, passage rates for medical board exams show racial disparities for underrepresented minorities – this on top of the fact that medical schools don’t practice strong affirmative action (Blacks and Latinos are significantly under-represented at med schools to begin with). Thus, if we look at the data, it seems that the ability to earn a medical license cannot be “objective and separated from socioeconomic context,” under Freddie’s criteria. Should affirmative action apply here as well?
The standard liberal position on this issue is untenably crude and not comprehensively thought through.
A number of comments suggested that Caltech could easily implement affirmative action without compromising the rigor of their program. Harvard has some of the nation’s best science departments and they practice affirmative action, so why can’t Caltech?
I have no idea if the broader point stands, but this argument isn’t particularly convincing. Remember: everyone at Caltech has to take a core curriculum of mathematics and physics. The relevant question is not how diverse Harvard is, but how diverse the math and physics majors at Harvard are.
There is a relatively well-known phenomenon of women and minorities who begin college with plans to major in a STEM field sorting out of these fields as they progress towards their degrees. Here is one recent paper. There are undoubtedly many forces at work here: discrimination and a lack of role models to name a few. But at the margin, it’s at least possible that affirmative action could play a role.
If you enter university less mathematically well-prepared than your peers, it’s inevitable that you’ll struggle in certain courses. We’d like to think that we grade against an objective standard, but there’s always an implicit curve: we determine what is reasonable to expect of an undergraduate from the undergraduates we teach!
I would by no means characterize the humanities as “soft” or “easy” subjects: indeed my classics and philosophy courses as an undergrad were extremely challenging. But it is certainly true that some majors are less demanding than others and the easier majors tend not to have a quantitative focus. If minority students know they will be disadvantaged relative to their peers in certain disciplines, they may well switch majors. The end result may be fewer minorities in the sciences: at a slightly lower-ranked institution, say a top state school or liberal arts college, these students very well might not have switched out of the sciences. Indeed, the overall quality of instruction is likely higher at such schools than it is at Harvard. (On a personal note, I am extremely glad that I didn’t attend a brand-name undergrad institution; if I had, I sincerely doubt that I would have become a professor.)
If using affirmative action to increase the number of minorities with Harvard degrees means fewer minorities in the sciences, which should we choose? I honestly don’t know, but it’s a question worth thinking about.
Described by its U.S. distributor, the University of Chicago Press, as a “truly strange polemic” from 1854 that’s “[s]ure to be popular in the hipper precincts of Brooklyn,” it contains a lecture on the beauty and importance of the whiskered chin. The volume’s author, an Ipswich muck-a-muck and chief bank cashier named Thomas S. Gowing, lays out a vigorous Victorian defense against “the unnatural custom” of the razorblade. The beard “has in all ages been regarded as the ensign of manliness,” while “the absence of Beard is usually a sign of physical and moral weakness.” His argument appeals at times to history and liturgy, dwelling on a dictum in the Bible, thou shalt not mar the corners of thy beard, that’s often cited by Hasidic Jews in support of growing sidelocks. But Gowing’s just as wedded to claims by certain doctors that beards prevent sore throats and filter filthy moisture from the air. More than that, he says, the beard provides a natural framing for the manly face, “covering, varying and beautifying, as the mantling ivy [does for] the rugged oak.”
Since the book will be given and received in jest, perhaps one needn’t worry that it’s racist. Gowing holds the white man as a paragon of beardliness and contrasts him with the smooth-faced men of certain “degenerate tribes wholly without, or very deficient.” (These latter have “a conscious want of manly dignity, and contentedness with a low physical, moral, and intellectual condition.”) Nor should readers be upset by Gowing’s fulminations on the “effeminate Chinese.” Remember that he put this down on paper just two years before the British navy launched its largely unprovoked bombardment of Canton.
I take issue with the view that the Garner case is a rebuttal of the argument for body cams. Isn’t it compelling that we have this video to show us all what really happened? The public can now make up its own mind what it means. We don’t have to rely on eyewitnesses who are historically unreliable. From the scene with Garner, we would probably have at least six different descriptions from civilians of how he was taken down and two or three different ones from cops. But we don’t need that; we have the video.
Just because the grand jury returned no indictment doesn’t mean the video was a failure. Without the video, can’t you imagine that there would be plenty of pundits calling Garner a thug, emphasizing that he resisted arrest? But there is only a smattering of that. Instead we get things like Bill O’Reilly saying that Garner “didn’t deserve that.”
Another adds:
Three or four more videos like the Garner video? I guarantee we will get some legislation passed.
Another runs through other reasons why cameras would be a net benefit:
First, the most important goal of body-cam reforms is not to provide evidence of police abuse after it happens. It is to change the culture of policing so that the police, knowing they will be held accountable for their actions, will not commit the abuse in the first place. It also changes the behavior of the citizens being policed, making things less likely to escalate all around.
This is not a fantasy. These positive effects have been observed in reality in places where body-cam reforms have been implemented. For example, the Rialto, CA police department found a 50% reduction in use-of-force incidents and a 90% reduction in citizen complaints after implementing body cameras. Those are astounding results.
In Garner’s case, I’m sure you noticed how hostile the police were to the man with the camera. They did not want to be videotaped. They did not think they should be videotaped. I think it is entirely probable that officer Pantaleo would have acted differently if the camera in question had been on his lapel, rather than in the hands of a bystander being aggressively shooed away by the cops. People act differently not just when they know they’re being recorded, but when they know that they are supposed to be recorded. It changes the culture.
Second, imagine that we had no video of this incident – not even from the bystander. Is there any doubt that it would now be just as murky a case as Ferguson? There would not have been nearly as much public outcry, and what objections there were would have been waived away by people taking the police’s word as gospel and sliming Garner as a violent thug who made the cops fear for their lives. Just compare the video of Tamir Rice’s killing to the police’s account of the incident before they knew there was video if you doubt that cops will lie their asses off in the absence of a video.
Video evidence can only be a good thing in these cases. The widespread consensus that Garner’s killing was wrong would not exist without this video. In all likelihood, neither you nor I would have even heard about the incident. It would have been just another of these everyday injustices that go unnoticed and unpunished every day.
Perhaps you can remember another recent incident in which there was a horrific attack but a perpetrator got off virtually scot free. People attacked the system, people defended the system, but in the end nothing changed. The there’s a video, and there’s talk of a coverup, of the grave injustice, of the callousness of a system that would fail to punish the person who did such an obvious thing.
I’m talking of of Ray Rice. It was patently obvious that Rice was guilty of assault. You don’t need to see a video to know that his fiancee was knocked unconscious – it was part of the story. But apparently if you’re Roger Goodell (or other defenders of the slap on the write), that’s more or less ok until the public sees the tape.
This is precisely the problem that I have with some folks on the right now suddenly discovering that the police are capable of extraneous violence. The facts are so clear, so obvious, yet since there’s not a video, “I stand with law enforcement”. All you have to do is – and I don’t think I’m exaggerating here – talk to a person of color in any minority neighborhood in literally anywhere USA to hear stories just like Eric Garner’s, minus the asthma and videotape. They could look at the claims of police brutality, instead of waving it away with claims of “race baiting”. But if there’s video, somehow now they’re the great defenders of the public from an out-of-control police force.
Update from a reader with a gloomy cynical take:
Busy afternoon, but a brief response to your reader who wrote: “Three or four more videos like the Garner video? I guarantee we will get some legislation passed.” Sadly, I disagree. The point of the Albert Burneko piece you excerpted yesterday, as well as many contributions by Ta-Nehisi Coates, is that the system that failed to bring the Garner case to trial is not broken, but working exactly as designed. The system was designed by politicians to do exactly what it is doing, and the politicians were elected by the people, who intended that they design precisely this system.
Fox News is covering this matter in a way you describe as “the baldest racism I’ve seen in awhile on cable news.” They are doing so because they are the cable news network of the people who elected the people who designed the system that failed to achieve an indictment in Staten Island. I believe that we will see polling, probably early next week, that indicates a division of public opinion in the Garner case, and that this division will fall more or less along the same racial lines as the polling on the Ferguson matter.
I believe the existence of a videotape presenting exactly what happened will make little difference here, as I believe the exact circumstances in any given case make little difference to the holders of these opinions. The video in question may have stiffened the spine of a few folks like Charles Krauthammer and Andrew McCarthy, but Fox News knows its audience. They don’t need a videotape to decide what happened when a hero met a thug in the hellscape of urban NYC.
We don’t need more videotapes. Conor posted plenty in his excellent summation. Later the same day as that post, the Tamir Rice video was released. Here’s the one from the John Crawford Wal-Mart shooting in August in Ohio that Connor missed. This video did not persuade the grand jury in that case to order up any indictments either. This isn’t a matter of three or four more tapes. Everyone knows what’s on the damn tapes.
This too shall pass. We will move onto something else, so much more quickly than seems possible. Like Sandy Hook, we will scream and we will rend and we will finally change the subject, having achieved nothing. The politicians want nothing achieved, because the voters want nothing achieved. And the beat, as you say, will go on.
A lawyer for the University of Virginia fraternity whose members were accused of a brutal gang rape said Friday that the organization will release a statement rebutting the claims printed in a Rolling Stone article about the incident. Several of the woman’s close friends and campus sex assault advocates said that they also doubt the published account.
Officials close to the fraternity said that the statement will indicate that Phi Kappa Psi did not host a party on Sept. 28, 2012, the night that a university student named Jackie alleges she was invited to a date party, lured into an upstairs room and was then ambushed and gang-raped by seven men who were rushing the fraternity.
The officials also said that no members of the fraternity were employed at the university’s Aquatic Fitness Center during that time frame — a detail Jackie provided in her account to Rolling Stone and in interviews with The Washington Post — and that no member of the house matches the description detailed in the Rolling Stone account. The attorney, Ben Warthen, who has represented Phi Kappa Psi, said the statement would come out Friday afternoon. He declined to comment further …
Will Dana, Rolling Stone’s managing editor, also released a statement with new doubt. “In the face of new information, there now appear to be discrepancies in Jackie’s account, and we have come to the conclusion that our trust in her was misplaced,” he said in a statement.
We should see what today’s statement says, and what remains of Jackie’s story – which might still be true in some respects. But this is a huge black eye for Rolling Stone. How an editor ran this piece without even speaking to its author is beyond me; how fact-checkers did not discover some of these obvious discrepancies immediately is also astounding. I guess when you’re on a crusade, “fake but true” will do.
It kind of stunned me that Chris Hughes did not even attend the TNR editorial meeting this morning. If you’re going to do something this drastic, shouldn’t you at least have the decency to show up and deal with the fallout? Then this:
In an address to what remained of the New Republic staff on Friday, Vidra sought to quell the fears and provide encouragement, sources there said. Hughes, who was not in Washington for the meeting, assured the remaining staff, “I care about tradition.” They did not take questions.
No questions? Since when has anything at TNR not been haggled over to death? When you consider that Frank Foer also had to call Hughes to confirm that another person had already been hired as editor, the cowardice of all this is gob-smacking.
A reader adds an essential update:
This is completely off-topic, but it offends my geek sensibilities. The Lizza reference is completely ass-backwards. Not only was the only King present at the Red Wedding (King Robb) one of the stabbed, not the one doing the stabbing, but also the person that arranged the stabbings was not a king, was not present, and indeed the whole underlying message of the whole scene was just how much can be accomplished with the kind of skullduggery that comes with money, connections and soft/hard power. I.e., presumably, what Chris Hughes did.
Ryan needs to go watch Game of Thrones again, I think. Then read the books. And get a clue.
Ben Casselman and Andrew Flowers examine police stats on Eric Garner’s neighborhood:
The New York City Police Department collects data on criminal complaints by precinct, broken down by the level of the alleged offense — felonies, misdemeanors and “violations,” which are minor crimes such as harassment, disorderly conduct and possession of marijuana. We can use felonies per capita as a measure of the serious crimes people are most concerned about. Violations per capita, meanwhile, is a measure of broken windows-type offenses, which usually involve more discretion from the police. (The data we’re using lumps together cases where a police officer witnesses a crime directly and cases where a member of the public calls in a complaint. A police spokesman said most violation-level offenses are witnessed by an officer.) As the chart [above] shows, there’s a strong relationship between the two: Neighborhoods with more felonies also have more minor violations. That’s what we’d expect in a city using the broken windows approach.
But look at the red dot representing Staten Island’s 120th precinct, which includes Tompkinsville. It’s significantly above the trend line, meaning it has a higher rate of violations than expected based on its underlying crime rate. From 2008 to 2012, the precinct averaged 11 violations annually per 1,000 residents; based on its felony rate, we’d only expect about seven. Only one of New York’s 76 precincts has a larger disparity.
NASA’s Orion spaceship, which failed to launch yesterday, successfully made it today – watch the launch and journey here. Nicholas St. Fleur describes its significance:
During its grueling four-and-half-hour test mission, NASA’s Orion space capsule must shoot 3,600 miles away from Earth, orbit the planet twice, and brave a thick belt of cosmic radiation. Upon re-entry it must withstand a 4,000-degree Fahrenheit fireball created by atmospheric friction decreasing its speed from 20,000 miles per hour to 300 mph. Once it slows to that speed, the craft must deploy 11 parachutes in order to slow down to 20 mph, before plunging into the Pacific Ocean.
It’s a mouthful of challenges, but if Orion triumphs it may one day take astronauts on adventures beyond Earth’s orbit—and potentially to Mars. … This mission is the first of three trial runs that the Orion mission must overcome before NASA deems it safe enough for human space travel.
Jesus Diaz is psyched about this mission and other recent ones:
So yes, I look at Orion rising against the deep blue, I hear the cheers coming out of my mouth and countless others, I see the millions of people watching this apparently insignificant event—just a spacecraft that is empty going up and splashing on the Atlantic Ocean—and it feels like the 60s all over again. The path is open again, a sunbeam illuminating its gates, now clean of the vines that had grown through all these years of abandonment.
The Orion launch has been be a triumph of engineering, hiccups and delays aside. But the Empire may not love the sequel. SpaceX is planning a historic launch of its own next year – the rocket is called the Falcon Heavy. Yes, Musk named his rocket after the Millennium Falcon of Star Wars, and he promises it will take twice as much payload into space as the one Nasa launched on Friday, and at one-third the cost. So far his claims about SpaceX have come true, and soon he’ll be fighting, with the lobbyists and the politicians who play favorites, for satellite contracts worth hundreds of billions of dollars. Combine that kind of force with Elon Musk’s capsule full of actual people returning to space – under a Nasa contract to deliver astronauts to the International Space Station – and you have a private startup that can beat Nasa or any other government agency back to the moon, if it so chooses.
Return of the Jedi, indeed.
Update from a reader:
The quote you included from Joe Pappalardo betrays a deep misunderstanding about SpaceX’s role in space exploration and its relationship to NASA. I work for a nonprofit space advocacy organization – The Planetary Society – and I direct its Advocacy and Space Policy program. I do this sort of stuff for a living.
The idea that SpaceX is a purely private, Silicon Valley-esqe startup is fueled by our society’s current swoon for tech culture, frustration at the lumbering pace of NASA, and Elon Musk himself. But it’s not true. SpaceX is a contractor whose business depends almost exclusively on NASA money. NASA provided hundreds of millions of dollars of crucial development money for SpaceX’s Falcon-family of rockets and Dragon crew capsules, and billions of more dollars in contracts for delivering crew and supplies to the space station. Without NASA, there would not be a SpaceX today.
Orion costs more than SpaceX’s hardware because it is tasked with carrying humans far deeper into space than anything SpaceX is developing. You get more radiation. You need to carry more life support. Your heat shield needs to be bigger for reentry. Your safety requirements are higher. And so forth. You can’t really compare the two, because they’re built for entirely different goals and under entirely different contracting regimes. SpaceX is doing what has been done before. Orion is pushing the envelope.
This isn’t to diminish SpaceX’s capabilities and achievements, but to baldly state that SpaceX can send humans to the Moon or Mars for cheaper than NASA, without any actual proof of capability (not to mention a business model, which is conspicuously absent at the moment), undermines the difficulty of what NASA is trying to do. It’s also just flat-out wrong.
Another notes:
Jesus Diaz may have been psyched, but he put Orion down in the wrong ocean; it was the Pacific, 250 miles west of Baja, California. Just rocket science, Jesus.
The Dish 