Author: Andrew Sullivan

A reader goes out on a limb:

Never have I been more grateful for your anonymous reader-contributor policy …

George Will is wrong in many of the ways people are saying, but he does have a point that no one wants to really face: the power to silence other potential participants in a discussion is a privilege and a powerful one. In our post-Civil Rights era culture, grievance is the optimal position to be in while in argument. Victimhood is desirable when it allows you to win the narrative.

I am not saying this privilege is worth being raped for and that people are intentionally getting raped to win their arguments about gender, but given how often people are silenced by the victimhood of their verbal sparring partner (maybe I see it more because I live in liberal California?), I see why Will had this thought.

I’ll go further:

the story he excerpts, at least in excerpt form, doesn’t sound like rape. The guy is being an asshole for not respecting his recent ex’s wishes but she ultimately cooperated. It’s shitty, yes. It should be discouraged, yes. But “rape”? The point Marcotte and many bloggers make is that it doesn’thave to be “forcible” to be rape; even the absence of consent is rape. Well, okay yes but don’t be surprised when people stop taking “rape” as seriously when it is no longer defined as physically forcing yourself on someone.  I think that’s also one of Will’s two or three somewhat valid points amidst his mountain of old-school BS: the self-proclaimed fighters-of-rape-culture want us to conflate these more ambiguous “absence of consent” situations with the more conventional understanding of rape as a forcing of oneself on another. I think that’s probably a legitimate goal but I don’t think Will is out of line for calling folks on it.

The fact that there are men who are falsely accused of rape doesn’t “cancel out” that women are raped but when one considers the intense fear many men have of being falsely accused of rape, one starts to understand the origins of Will’s thinking as more than just enforcing patriarchy.

I have more on this in the form of anecdote, but I think I’ll wait to see where the discussion goes before I share it.

Another voices a very different view:

Hook-up culture IS rape culture.

There is no place on Earth more progressive than Swarthmore. Every far-left piety is accepted without question, much less criticism. (You’d think that students would be challenged with contrary views to help them burnish their intellectual armor so that when they left Swarthmore they’d be equipped to grapple with people who disagree with them, but you’d be mistaken). “White Male Privilege” means that white guys are automatically wrong, “Rape Culture” is Serious You Guys, and sex is only consensual if the woman has no regrets about it. If under these conditions, women are still getting raped – and not by the College Republicans or Future Patriarchs of America, but by members in good standing of the Privileged-Oppressed Alliance – then the fundamental underpinnings of the college model are completed fuçked, and need to be scrapped.

You want to see “Rape Culture”? Take hundreds of 17 to 22 year-olds, remove them from their parents, give them unrestricted and unsupervised access to alcohol and each other’s bodies, tell them that they’re mature enough to handle adult choices, and teach them that there’s no virtue in sexual restraint. Sprinkle some talk about condoms and consent, and send them back to their coed dorms. THAT is “Rape Culture.” Women are going to get raped, because many eighteen-year-old men aren’t mature enough to understand what “no” means or manage their urges, and many 18-year-old women aren’t mature enough to spot red flags. For all practical purposes, Hookup Culture IS Rape Culture.

You want to get serious about preventing rape? Single-sex dorms, no visitors after ten, doors ajar when there are visitors, room checks by RAs, consumption of alcohol banned, sexual contact beyond first base punished by warning, then formal reprimand, then suspension, then explusion. Yeah, college will be less fun. But you’ll learn more, and there’s no chance that progressive, sensitive, feminist men will ever rape you in your dorm room.

Things may change at Swarthmore. I hope rape victims get better support, because it does sound like the administration’s first instinct has been to wish the problem away when confronted with a rape allegation. (That goes for allegations that are fatuous on their faces; it’s not up to some dean to decide). Regardless, my advice to a relative or friend attending Swarthmore would be to walk down the hill to the police station, and not to trust a system designed to adjudicate academic offenses to competently handle criminal offenses.

But they’re not going to adopt my idea. In loco parentis isn’t coming back, because Swarthmore would never dream of telling eighteen-year-olds who were smart enough to be admitted that they don’t know everything (this being a campus where the prevailing belief is that someone who holds the same position on same-sex marriage that Barack Obama did until May of 2012 is too bigoted to be allowed to speak), or that they’re not yet mature enough to manage decisions about what goes into or comes out of their pelvises.

John Oliver explains why:

Bershidsky longs for FIFA to kick out Sepp Blatter, who he claims “has run soccer’s governing body like an old-school dictatorship” since 1998:

Blatter has been no visionary in sports terms. His tenure has yielded a few minor rule changes, notably one that penalizes players for pulling off their T-shirts after scoring a goal. Some changes were quickly reversed. In 2007, for example, FIFA banned games at stadiums more than 8,200 feet above sea level. It then raised the limit to 9,840 feet and was forced to grant an exception to Bolivia’s main stadium. By contrast, Blatter’s predecessor, Joao Havelange, boosted FIFA’s membership from 142 to 204 federations, and recast the rules in ways that made the game more dynamic and enjoyable to watch — and less rough.

Blatter has also done little to combat the corruption that flourished under Havelange, who was proved to have taken bribes and forced out as FIFA’s honorary president last year.

The Economist identifies deeper problems with the organization:

It would be good to get rid of Mr Blatter, but that would not solve FIFA’s structural problem. Though legally incorporated as a Swiss non-profit organisation, FIFA has no master. Those who might hold it to account, such as national or regional football organisations, depend on its cash. High barriers to entry make it unlikely that a rival will emerge, so FIFA has a natural monopoly over international football. An entity like this should be regulated, but FIFA answers to no government.

All the same, more could be done. The Swiss should demand a clean-up or withdraw FIFA’s favourable tax status. Sponsors should also weigh in on graft and on the need to push forward with new technology: an immediate video review of every penalty and goal awarded would be a start.

Catherine Addington feels the “fundamental problem is that FIFA is self-regulating, which is to say that it doesn’t self-regulate”:

The only things to keep it in check are vaguely uncomfortable sponsors and only nominally responsible participating governments. (Fans for their part have no other organization to turn to. FIFA has a monopoly on international soccer.) Even FIFA’s upcoming Congress, in which each country has an equal vote, is unlikely to make waves. With few checks and balances in sight, FIFA is under no obligation to be transparent about either its policies or its finances.

FIFA has done the impossible: they have made Brazilians hate soccer. But as Brazilians’ anti-government protests over the past few years have shown, this is about much more than soccer. That’s why this World Cup, and the inevitable spilling over of these anti-cronyism tensions, are crucial to watch, even for those uninterested in soccer. FIFA is running an experiment to find out just how many platitudes people will put up with from the crony capitalists running a global entertainment industry.

Noah Feldman eviscerates the Vergara ruling:

So how did California’s teacher tenure laws violate the state constitution? The court’s two-part reasoning was thin to the point of being emaciated. First, it observed that the state constitution guarantees a right to education and guarantees equal protection of the laws. Second, it “found” that teacher tenure laws can tenure ineffective teachers – which it said was a violation of California children’s right to education.

The logic of this holding is pretty obviously flawed. All sorts of policies and rules affect the quality of what goes on in the classroom. Do all policies that reduce the quality of education violate the state constitution? Obviously not – or the court would have to take over the state school system and review every lesson plan for effectiveness. There was also no precedent supporting this expansive reading of the state constitution.

Eric Posner remains unimpressed by Judge Treu’s reasoning:

One of the reasons that employers – and not just public schools, but regular commercial firms, as well as universities and many private schools – offer job security is that employees value it so much. They’re willing to accept a lower salary in return for job security. The employer faces a tradeoff: it loses some ability to control employees, but it saves a lot of money, which it can use for other things. And so with the schools. If California is no longer allowed to offer job security, it will either need to pay teachers more (leaving less money to spend on students) or hire fewer teachers. Is that going to advance education? The court has no idea, indeed doesn’t seem to have given any thought to these issues.

The long and the short of it is that a judge is in no position to make these tradeoffs.

Kevin Carey – generally a supporter of education reform – argues that the courts are “an inherently problematic venue in which to resolve fundamental education questions”:

Deciding whether schools are providing children with a good enough learning environment requires us to decide what we want our children to learn and what kind of citizens we want them to be. That, in turn, flows from our convictions and values about the nature of just and civilized society. Such questions can never be resolved with legal finality. They represent the unending project of debate in an open society, the balancing of sometimes irreconcilable priorities that we manage with democratic and inherently political institutions. Which means that we should expect more Vergaras in the future – and expect to never be fully satisfied with the result.

Jill Barshay notes that the research underlying the ruling is controversial:

Many researchers are questioning whether test-score gains are a good measure of teacher effectiveness. Part of the problem are the standardized tests themselves. In some cases, there are ceiling effects where bright students are already scoring near the top and can’t show huge gains year after year. In other cases, struggling students may be learning two years of math in one year, say catching up from a second-grade to a fourth-grade math level. But the fifth-grade test questions can’t capture the gains of kids who are behind. The test instead concludes that the kids have learned nothing. In both of these cases, with top and bottom students, the teachers would be labeled as ineffective. Morgan Polikoff of the University of Southern California and Andrew Porter of the University of Pennsylvania looked at these value-added measures in six districts around the nation and found that there was weak to zero relationship between these new numbers and the content or quality of the teacher’s instruction. Their research was published in May 2014, after the Vegara trial ended.

Freddie sighs:

Teacher attrition is sky-high, with best estimates of between 40 to 50 percent leaving the profession within five years of starting. That amounts to something like a thousand teachers quitting for every school day of a given year. Anecdotally speaking, most successful, Ivy League striver-types do not consider teaching as a serious option. But why would they, when there’s so many more remunerative, less stressful, less emotionally grueling, and better respected options out there? If your argument is that a profession’s problems stems from a talent deficit, you should be doing everything to make the job more attractive, not less.

But Ed Morrissey suggests the ruling could be a mark a turning point:

Treu’s ruling does not rely on the US Constitution, and it has yet to be endorsed by a state appellate court as of yet. It is a signal, though, that people are fed up feeding tens of billions of dollars into educational systems that produce poor results, and that disgust over the priorities of the people within the system has reached a level where even the judiciary can no longer ignore it. California’s legislature had better take this lesson and apply it regardless of whether the ruling holds up on appeal.

And Eric Hanushek sees nothing but positives:

A small percentage of teachers inflicts disproportionate harm on children. Each year a grossly ineffective teacher continues in the classroom reduces the future earnings of the class by thousands of dollars by dramatically lowering the college chances and employment opportunities of students. There is also a national impact. The future economic well being of the United States is entirely dependent on the skills of our population. Replacing the poorest performing 5 to 8 percent of teachers with an average teacher would, by my calculations, yield improved productivity and growth that amounts to trillions of dollars.

In a glowing review of Obvious Child, Teo Bugbee compares the film’s frank approach to abortion with Hollywood’s enduring skittishness about the subject, calling it “the movie that Hollywood should have been making 40 years ago”:

Obvious Child is not “the abortion movie” that its own marketing and reception might lead you to anticipate. [Writer-director Gillian] Robespierre and star Jenny Slate have made a movie about a woman, not an abortion. There are no impassioned speeches about women’s rights, no bad guys protesting outside the clinic, and no after-the-fact breakdowns. Donna’s life does not revolve around her choice, and neither does the movie. It is at every turn more relaxed, more confident, and more rewarding than what we as an audience have been conditioned to expect from this kind of movie—the kind with a capital-I “Issue” at its heart. Maybe the most political thing about Obvious Child is that it makes abortion feel as if it isn’t an issue at all. …

Hollywood likes to think of itself as a liberal stronghold, pushing America forward one very important Oscar picture at a time. But for the last thirty years Hollywood has remained conspicuously silent as women’s rights have been rolled back bill by bill, Supreme Court ruling by Supreme Court ruling. The last major release to feature an abortion was Tyler Perry’s For Colored Girls in 2010—since that film’s release, over 3 million legal abortions have been performed in the United States alone.

Discussing the film with Robespierre, Sarah Erdreich also highlights the film’s honest approach:

Obvious Child is also refreshing in that — unlike other films or television shows that depict abortion — it goes into detail about how much an abortion, even a first-trimester one like Donna’s, will cost. And according to Robespierre, including that information was deliberate. “We wanted to show an honest portrayal of what it’s like in a health center. And the cost was really important, because it was a real moment for Donna’s character to feel something … about where she was at that moment, feeling kind of alone and lost and scared. Donna is complex and she’s trying to figure out so many things all at once. The financial part of the decision is what sort of hit her full on.”

Esther Breger admires the way it avoids being an “issue movie” and instead offers a fresh spin on romantic comedy:

The story isn’t one we’ve seen onscreen before, but it’s fitted into the structure of a surprisingly conventional rom-com, from initial meet-cute to final romantic gesture. The traditional romantic comedy is dead, you may have heard, killed by the international market and Katherine Heigl and—most of all—the changing nature of modern romance. …

But if the rituals of courtship have become more stable, they’ve grown even more bewildering, as anyone who has read The Love Affairs of Nathaniel P. can attest. (That novel begins with an awkward encounter with a former flame who Nathaniel ignored after accompanying to Planned Parenthood.) Obvious Child is covering the same territory, mining the ambiguities of modern dating for plausible obstacles to love. What’s the etiquette when you’re on a second date with the guy whose abortion you’re getting? (What’s the grammatically correct way to even construct that sentence?) What are the expectations for him? This isn’t exactly the stuff of You’ve Got Mail, even if it, amazingly, shares that movie’s sweet spirit. There’s a frankness here that put Knocked Up‘s gross-out humor to shame.