Author: Andrew Sullivan

It Pays To Go To College

College Value

Leonhardt contends that college is still a smart investment:

The pay gap between college graduates and everyone else reached a record high last year, according to the new data, which is based on an analysis of Labor Department statistics by the Economic Policy Institute in Washington. Americans with four-year college degrees made 98 percent more an hour on average in 2013 than people without a degree. That’s up from 89 percent five years earlier, 85 percent a decade earlier and 64 percent in the early 1980s. …

The much-discussed cost of college doesn’t change this fact. According to a paper by Mr. Autor published Thursday in the journal Science, the true cost of a college degree is about negative $500,000. That’s right: Over the long run, college is cheaper than free. Not going to college will cost you about half a million dollars.

Yglesias isn’t so sure:

Suppose I got someone to make a chart showing the incomes of prime-age BMW drivers versus average Americans.

It would reveal a large BMW earnings premium. I could even produce a chart showing that the children of BMW drivers grow up to earn more than the average American. But that wouldn’t be evidence that BMWs cause high wages, and that the BMW Earnings Premiums extends across multiple generations. It would be evidence that high-income people buy expensive cars and that there’s intergenerational transmission of socioeconomic status.

To understand whether college is “worth it” — or, more precisely, which colleges are worth it to which students — we would need some much more fine-grained data.

Leonhardt fends off this type of attack:

[T]he detailed research on the value of college comes to the same conclusion as the straightforward data comparing the pay of graduates and nongraduates. For the vast majority of people, college pays off. Correlation and causation, in this case, run in the same direction.

I’d argue that you do not need complicated academic research to demonstrate this point, either. Just look at market behavior. Virtually everyone with the resources to send children to college does so — including those who say they’re skeptical of its worth. And large numbers of low-income parents say that one of their highest goals in life is to send their children to college. In this case, the collective behavior of millions of people says as much about the value of education as any regression analysis.

Ben Casselman adds a caveat:

Most of the benefits of college come from graduating, not enrolling. Indeed, as Leonhardt pointed out, the wage premium for people with some college but no degree has been stagnant, even as debt levels have been rising. That means that people who start college but drop out may be worse off than people who never enrolled in the first place. Any attempt to answer the “Is college worth it?” question, therefore, has to grapple with not only the value of a degree, but the likelihood of obtaining one.

For many students, the odds aren’t good. Less than 60 percent of full-time students who are enrolled in college for the first time graduate within six years.

Are Egyptians Snubbing Sisi?

Egypt’s presidential election was supposed to end yesterday, but it was extended through tonight after voters failed to show up in the vast numbers the putative victor Abdel Fattah el-Sisi needs to claim a broad mandate. Turnout, however, still remains low:

On Wednesday, state and privately owned media loyal to Sisi put the turnout at between 37 and 46 percent of the electorate of 54 million. In a speech last week, Sisi had called for 40 million votes, or 80 percent of the electorate. The electoral commission said that over Monday and Tuesday, the scheduled two days of polling, just 37 percent of eligible voters cast ballots – a number well below the nearly 52 percent who voted in the 2012 election that brought Islamist leader Mohamed Morsi to power.

The lower turnout than Sisi had sought will sound a warning that he had failed to rally the level of popular support he hoped for after toppling Morsi, Egypt’s first freely elected president, following street protests last year. Reuters news agency reported on Wednesday that polling stations in the capital city of Cairo and Egypt’s second city of Alexandria showed that the turnout was lower than anticipated with only a trickle of voters casting their ballots.

This lackluster showing comes despite a full-court press to draw voters to the polls:

Over the past two days, the Egyptian government has pulled out all the tricks at its disposal to boost turnout. After the first day of voting, it declared Tuesday to be a national holiday, freeing state employees to head to the ballot box. Egypt’s Transport Ministry made the trains free to make it easy for voters to travel to polling stations, and some of Cairo’s largest malls shut down early so patrons and employees could go vote. Prime Minister Ibrahim Mahlab, meanwhile, threatened to fine registered voters who abstained from casting a vote.

The reason for voter apathy, however, may be inherent in the campaign itself. Sisi’s victory has appeared inevitable for months — he had already been meeting with foreign delegations even before the formality of the election. Moreover, the career military man ran a campaign that was almost completely absent of policy details, giving even voters inclined to support him little idea of how he would govern the country.

Jesse Rosenfield takes the pulse in the capital, finding that those who are turning out are mostly voting for Sisi:

Pro-Sisi residents in the cramped, narrow streets are welcoming as long as only their perspective is being heard. “Sisi is from the Egyptian army and the army is the best to form the government,” says 61 year old Said Shahada, who ekes out a living selling Pepsi products and is hoping for economic reforms that benefit the poor.

However, the atmosphere grows distinctly hostile when I cross the road to speak with 31-year-old construction worker, Farahat Tamer, who is boycotting the vote. Originally from Upper Egypt, he moved to the neighborhood for work six years ago and contends that few people from his home town will cast a ballot. “The regime of [ex- President Hosni] Mubarak has been taken out [but] my biggest fear is something worse is coming,” he says as Sisi supporters in the area become increasingly aggressive.

Creative Destruction Is So Cute

This video of Google’s driverless car prototype is pinging around the blogosphere:

[youtube http://youtu.be/CqSDWoAhvLU]

Megan Garber describes the car as “a cross between a Volkswagen Beetle and a Disneyland ride”:

Google’s prototypes aren’t meant to convey ideals so much as they’re meant to convey … familiarity. Friendliness. The reassurance that comes, implicitly, with being part of “the great multitude.”

They are, like the Model T before them, strategically banal. … We consumers of technology, as unapologetic adopters of status quo bias, tend to like the changes foisted on us to be incremental. And when new devices—new approaches—violate the status quo, we tend to dismiss them in a way that recalls the 19th-century anxieties. We call them “creepy.”

As Google’s then-CEO, Eric Schmidt, put it to The Atlantic‘s James Bennet in 2010: “Google policy is to get right up to the creepy line and not cross it.”

Adam Raymond observes that, more “than the convenience or the impressive technology, Google is talking about how safe its invisible chauffeur is”:

The car has backup steering and braking mechanisms should the primary systems fail. The front is made of a soft material so pedestrians safely bounce off and the windshield is plastic. There’s a giant stop button onboard, speeds top out at 25 miles per hour, and every time one of these hits the road, two Google employees are monitoring it and ready to take control at any moment. These things still have tons of tests ahead of them to ensure they can navigate the ever-changing environment of city streets, but CEO Sergey Brin says it’ll only be a few years until robot cars have swarmed the roads.

Victoria Turk also comments on Google’s safety focus:

This car isn’t built for cool points; it’s designed to push the idea that self-driving cars are totally safe and not scary at all. Google says it itself in a blog post detailing the car prototype. “It was inspiring to start with a blank sheet of paper and ask, ‘What should be different about this kind of vehicle?’ We started with the most important thing: safety,” they wrote.

According to the Associated Press, Google co-founder Sergey Brin compared riding the bubble car to using a chairlift when he announced it at a California tech conference on Tuesday evening.  Point being, it’s not exactly a Ferrari, and it’s not meant to be.

When A Low IQ Can Save Your Life, Ctd

Florida can no longer use a single IQ test to determine whether or not a convict is “intellectually disabled” and thus ineligible for the death penalty:

[Yesterday’s SCOTUS ruling in Hall v. Florida] impacts borderline cases where a defendant’s IQ score falls within the test’s margin of error, making it harder to impose the death penalty in those situations. It’s the first time the Supreme Court has expanded on a landmark 2002 decision that excluded mentally disabled people from capital punishment. It may also ultimately save the life of Freddie Lee Hall, who has spent over 35 years on death row after being convicted of a 1978 murder.

Until now, Florida and other states have adhered to policies that establish a strict cutoff, based around IQ scores, in determining eligibility for the death penalty. In Florida’s instance, the state previously said any inmate with a score higher than 70 could be put to death. But during arguments, Hall’s lawyers insisted there’s plenty of evidence showing him to be mentally disabled — despite IQ scores that put him above the crucial 70 mark. Joined by mental health organizations, they also argued that Hall’s tests didn’t factor in the inherent five-point margin of error built into IQ assessments. That extra wiggle room would give inmates (including Hall) the chance to continue arguing their case of mental instability.

Justice Kennedy wrote for the five-justice majority. Serwer situates the ruling in the context of his past opinions:

Kennedy is the author of several key decisions narrowing the death penalty. In the 2005 case Roper v. Simmons, Kennedy wrote the opinion barring capital punishment for people who commit crimes as minors. In 2007, Kennedy wrote the opinion in Kennedy v. Louisiana, holding that applying the death penalty in rape cases violated the Eighth Amendment.

“This case continues a long line of Kennedy opinions establishing boundaries on the death penalty,” said Adam Winkler, a law professor at UCLA School of Law.“While he often prefers states rights to federal power, he is foremost a believer in the Constitution’s limits on all government power to deny people basic dignity. Dignity is a principle he’s referred to repeatedly, in both the gay rights and death penalty contexts.”

But such limiting cases irk Noah Feldman:

The trouble is, each time the Supreme Court limits the death penalty, it offers an implicit justification for preserving it in most cases. The decision in this case accepts the argument that it’s inhumane to execute people who don’t fully comprehend what they’ve done or why they’re being punished. In so doing, it implies that a murderer who does comprehend his crimes deserves to die.

The court presumably also allied itself with statistical rationality. But as Justice Samuel Alito points out in his dissent, some IQ tests have a standard error lower than 5. Of course, the very definition of “standard” error depends the level of confidence we want to have. Some common confidence intervals are 68 percent, 90 percent and 95 percent — but strictly speaking, these are all based on consensus. While it’s true that the error can be standardized, a standardization isn’t “a statistical fact,” as Kennedy puts it. It’s a statistical convention.

“To understand why the Court’s ruling in Hall v. Florida is just,” Andrew Cohen states, “it’s instructive to review just how hard Florida has tried to execute Hall over the decades”:

The plaintiff came to death row in 1978 after killing a pregnant woman and a deputy sheriff. Before Atkins [v. Virginia], the Florida Supreme Court had declared that Hall had been significantly “mentally retarded” his whole life but that he still was eligible for the death penalty because there was no constitutional rule precluding such executions. Then, in Atkins, the Supreme Court by a vote of 6-3 recognized just such a rule, declaring that the execution of the intellectually disabled was a violation of the Eighth Amendment. So Florida promptly changed its tune and declared that Hall was not mentally disabled enough after all.

Under the state’s post-Atkins standard, overwhelming evidence that Hall is functionally illiterate, is unable to understand adult conversation or activities, and was developmentally disabled as a child was irrelevant to determining whether he fell under the Atkins exception. This was so in Florida because his IQ-test scores hovered between 60 and 80, often above the arbitrary cutoff of 70 that the state had adopted. To make matters more definitive, at least from the state’s perspective, officials refused to account for any standard error of measurement embraced by the scientific community.

In this way Florida—and states like Georgia and Texas, too—flouted the Atkins rule by rendering its mandate almost unrecognizable. Can’t lawfully execute the mentally disabled? No problem, they concluded, we’ll just change the definition of disability. That will be much harder to do after Tuesday’s ruling.

David Dow dismisses the ruling as too little, too late:

When the Supreme Court has a dozen or more opportunities to uphold the rule of law but doesn’t, when it has a dozen or more cases where it could remind the lower courts that it, and not they, are the final interpreters of the Constitution but doesn’t, the fact that it finally gets around to acting in a case like Hall doesn’t really mean very much. Florida got away with lawlessness for years. Texas is still getting away with it. A Court that acts only when its actions will have virtually no impact is a lackey, not a leader.

Emily Bazelon tackles the dissent, penned by Alito, in which the court’s conservatives “see themselves as sticking up for state legislators in the face of the encroaching power the majority is giving to scientists”:

“The Court’s approach in this case marks a new and most unwise turn in our Eighth Amendment case law,” [Alito] writes in dissent, joined by Chief Justice John Roberts and Justices Antonin Scalia and Clarence Thomas: Why? The Eighth Amendment forbids cruel and unusual punishment. The court reviews old practices through the lens of “evolving standards of decency.” Often that means counting states—if only a few states retain a challenged practice, then it’s time to let it go. But in this case, Alito says, the Kennedy majority deferred entirely to the experts. … Pages later, he doubles down with this populist framing: “what counts are our society’s standards—which is to say, the standards of the American people—not the standards of professional associations, which at best represent the views of a small professional elite.”

Oh, those dreaded elites, otherwise known as scientists who know what they are talking about.

Recent Dish on the subject here.

Our Delayed Departure From Afghanistan

AFGHANISTAN-UNREST-MILITARY-US-NATO

Obama is leaving 10,000 troops in Afghanistan after combat operations end later this year. Crowley summarizes the rationale for the decision:

Americans are much more able to conduct counterterrorism operations than the Afghan security forces. Perhaps just as important, the residual U.S. troops will be right across the border from Pakistan’s notorious tribal areas, where the most dangerous al-Qaeda-affiliated operatives are still based. Since the U.S. has no military presence in Pakistan, the ability to continue drone missions from Afghanistan will be enormously valuable.

A continued U.S. presence will also have symbolic and diplomatic value, as the former U.S. ambassador to Kabul, Ryan Crocker, told TIME in February. At a moment when there was talk of a residual force numbering in the very low thousands—or even none at all, given that Afghan President Hamid Karzai refused to sign a post-2014 military agreement with the U.S. (his successor is expected to do so)—Crocker said a robust American force was a valuable way of “signaling to friends and foes alike that we’re in this for the long run” in a region that America has abandoned before.

Though the plan is to get all troops out by the end of 2016, Crowley notes that it’s possible “America’s troop presence could be extended by a future agreement in the final days of Obama’s term, especially if the Afghan government feels vulnerable and Washington sees signs of a local al-Qaeda resurgence.” Michael O’Hanlon feels that the residual force will exit too quickly:

Almost as soon as that enduring force of 9,800 is postured properly in the country, it will have to plan for its own termination and begin to dismantle its new capabilities. The president’s plan to cut that number of U.S. troops in half in the course of 2015 means that most of these regional bases will be closed almost as soon as they get into their new groove. And the decision to then go to zero American troops, beyond the confines of Kabul proper, by the end of Obama’s presidency will take away drones and commandos that could be used against al Qaeda in Afghanistan or Pakistan, as well as whatever residual other help Afghan forces may still need then.

He would prefer those bases stay open longer, perhaps indefinitely. Larison rejects staying in Afghanistan forever:

There will always be excuses to keep U.S. forces in the country even longer, and there will be a dedicated group of politicians and pundits that will never accept that it is time for U.S. forces to leave. For these people, any deadline is too soon, because most of them don’t really think that the U.S. should withdraw in the first place. If there is anything to object to in the president’s decision, it is that he offered a pointless sop to his hawkish critics. He has chosen to keep a residual force in Afghanistan beyond the end of this year for no real purpose except to be able to say that there will briefly be a few thousand troops staying behind for a little while longer.

Max Fisher thinks “the administration is tacitly confirming what everybody already knew: the war against the Taliban is not one that the US believes it can win, so we’re going to stop trying”:

This is not necessarily welcome news for Afghans. One of the main issues in this year’s Afghan presidential election was whether or not the country should sign the Bilateral Security Agreement, which allows the US to keep troops in the country. Hamid Karzai opposed the BSA; the two candidates who came out on top in the election both vocally supported it. Many Afghans I’ve met, whatever their politics, are outspoken about wanting the Americans to stay, not because they are blind to the invasion force’s mistakes or missteps but because they see it as the security bulwark against something much worse: the Taliban.

So while this may be good news for Americans, who are understandably sick and tired of a war that has cost them so much and yielded so little, do not mistake it as therefore good news for Afghans.

Waldman fears that, even with fewer soldiers in the country, we will continue to suffer casualties:

Afghanistan is already the longest war in American history. Come October, Americans will have been fighting and dying there for 13 years. What’s more, we don’t know what will happen if there’s a bloody struggle for power as we begin drawing down. Are the Taliban or some other faction going to target American personnel, on the theory that if they raise the cost of our presence, it will make us more likely to leave completely, thereby making it easier to overthrow the government? It’s always possible. Perhaps we’ll look back and call the end of this year the end of the war, but with thousands of troops remaining there for another two years, it might still look like a war

And Dalia Sussman finds that public opinion is generally in line with Obama’s decision:

In an ABC News/Washington Post poll conducted in December, the public favored, by 55 to 41 percent, keeping some troops in Afghanistan for training and anti-insurgency operations, rather than removing all forces from Afghanistan in the year ahead. That’s not to say that Americans think the war has been worthwhile. In the same poll, 66 percent said that considering its costs to the United States versus its benefits, it has not been worth fighting; 50 percent said they feel that way strongly.

(Photo: Mine resistant armored vehicles and other machinery waiting to be transported out of Afghanistan are seen in the background with a Boeing C-17 Globemaster III cargo plane at Bagram Airfield in Parwan on May 27, 2014. By Brendan Smialowski/AFP/Getty Images)

New York Shitty Update

So now I’ve relocated to Washington, I get to visit the Big Rotten Apple to meet with the Dish team and friends on a regular basis. My last two trips were classic NYC hell. The first was a new hotel I booked into a few weeks ago. There was no available room when I got there at 6.30 pm forcing me to wait half an hour in the lobby; the thermostat didn’t work, repeatedly, so the room was stifling; on my first night, I was awakened at 4.30 am by a fire alarm; on my second night, I was awakened at 8.30 am by a power-drill in the next door room.  At which point, I bailed. Oh, and I left behind my best pair of shoes in my room, which, of course, the hotel never found. There are far, far better hotels in Cedar Rapids at one fifth of the price.

So this time, we booked an airbnb in Brooklyn.

Why not see if the amateurs are better than the incompetent pros? But it was classic NYC. The cab driver took me twenty blocks in the wrong direction and my only hope was Google Maps. After directing the cabbie, I arrived to find the loft oppressively hot, and with no air-conditioning (despite its listing). It also had no drapes or shades so I was woken woken up at dawn today, and then, after trying to get back to sleep, by pneumatic drilling at a vast construction site next door. All in all: five hours sleep. If I’m cranky today, you know why. So I’m moving to a generic chain hotel today. Wish me luck, as I struggle with the shitty wifi that is another of this city’s memorials to the 20th Century.

Walking around Williamsburg last night, I was also reminded of one of the unique charms of NYC in the summer: vast piles of rotting garbage piled on the sidewalks, with that sweet yet nauseating smell of decomposing groceries sitting in the humid fetid air, and rancid food juices oozing over the sticky sidewalks. With my windows open to counter the stuffiness, I could occasionally catch a whiff of the stench outside.

People actually like living in this chaotic, fetid monument to incompetence? Beats me.

Maya Angelou RIP

Garden Party Celebration For Dr. Maya Angelou's 82nd Birthday

Ronda Racha Penrice pays homage:

[For Angelou,] a poet, memoirist, dancer, singer, actress, playwright, producer, director, teacher, civil rights activist and women’s rights advocate, there were no limits to her outlets for creative expression or her capacity to champion justice and equality. Her life was a testament to the power of possibility as well as an affirmation of courage and daring.

Emma Brown captures the sweep of that life:

As a child growing up in the Jim Crow South, Maya Angelou was raped by her mother’s boyfriend; as a young woman, she worked briefly as a brothel madam and a prostitute. From those roots in powerlessness and violence, she rose to international recognition as a writer known for her frank chronicles of personal history and a performer instantly identified by her regal presence and rich, honeyed voice.

From her desperate early years, Ms. Angelou gradually moved into nightclub dancing and from there began a career in the arts that spanned more than 60 years. She sang cabaret and calypso, danced with Alvin Ailey, acted on Broadway, directed for film and television and wrote more than 30 books, including poetry, essays and, responding to the public’s appetite for her life story, six autobiographies. She won three Grammy Awards for spoken-word recordings of her poetry and prose and was invited by President-elect Bill Clinton to read an original poem at his first inauguration in 1993, making her only the second poet in history, after Robert Frost, to be so honored.

As Margalit Fox notes, Angelou never intended to be known for her autobiography:

[S]he remained best known for her memoirs, a striking fact in that she had never set out to be a memoirist. Near the end of “A Song Flung Up to Heaven,” Ms. Angelou recalls her response when Robert Loomis, who would become her longtime editor at Random House, first asked her to write an autobiography. She demurred at first, still planning to be a playwright and poet. Cannily, Mr. Loomis called her again. “You may be right not to attempt autobiography, because it is nearly impossible to write autobiography as literature,” he said. “Almost impossible.”

“I’ll start tomorrow,” Ms. Angelou replied.

The effects of that decision are still being felt:

Joanne Braxton, a professor at the College of William and Mary, says Angelou’s willingness to reveal the sexual abuse she suffered as a child in I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings was unprecedented at the time. The critical acclaim and popularity of the book opened doors for both African-American and female writers. “Maya Angelou brought about a paradigm shift in American literature and culture,” Braxton says, “so that the works, the gifts, the talents of women writers, including women writers of color, could be brought to the foreground and appreciated. She created an audience by her stunning example.”

In addition to being a poet, author, artist, teacher, and activist, Angelou was a prolific tweeter. Evan McMurry is struck by her final message:

This tweet, sent five days ago, may be Angelou’s final public statement after seven decades of them:

For a writer who so transformed her own experiences into an autobiographical art at once personal and communal – those 400K followers were there for a reason – that tweet could serve as an epitaph.

(Photo: Poet Dr. Maya Angelou and musician Common attend Angelou’s 82nd birthday party with friends and family at her home in Winston-Salem, North Carolina on May 20, 2010. By Steve Exum/Getty Images)

Update from a reader:

Beyond Angelou’s poetry and prose, she had an uncanny ability to focus compassion for others, and in this case, for one’s self that I’ll also remember about her. You can see the impact it had on Dave, not to mention Tupac:

Iconoclasts: Maya Angelou and Dave Chappelle from DERTV on Vimeo.

Francis In The Lion’s Den

I found Pope Francis’ words and acts in Israel and Palestine to be typically finessed. What a contrast with Benedict’s often-clumsy way with public appearances! And the obvious need for two states for two peoples was beautifully reflected in his every move. Of course, this being Israel/Palestine, as Max Fisher observed, few were content to leave his acts as symbols:

Take, for example, the discussion around Pope Francis’s visit to the Israeli wall that runs through the Palestinian city of Bethlehem. This was perhaps the one moment in the trip with real, palpable significance. There was something jarring about seeing the all-white pope standing next to the graffiti-covered wall, which Francis prayed at for four minutes, calling attention to one of the conflict’s most painful features and to the costs of the Israeli occupation. It mattered.

The significance of the moment, so clear on its face, was quickly extrapolated to say much more than it seems certain that Pope Francis meant to say. Some pointed out that Francis was standing near graffiti that read “Free Palestine,” so therefore he must have been giving “symbolic approval to Palestinian hopes for an independent state.” It seems plausible that Francis would support an independent Palestinian state, but it seems unlikely that his proximity to certain graffiti communicates this. At a later meeting with Netanyahu, Francis only nodded politely when Netanyahu said that the barrier was necessary to protect from terrorism, turning down an opportunity to say otherwise. …

Isn’t this the ultimate metaphor for the Israel-Palestine discourse? Pope Francis does something legitimately symbolic, but he is alternatively praised and condemned for things he didn’t say based on over-extrapolative readings of some graffiti that someone else wrote that just happened to be in the area.

It’s important to remember, I think, that one of Saint Francis’ legacies was negotiating peace with a Muslim power in Egypt:

The events of Francis’ later life, particularly his three-week dialogue with Sheikh al-Malik al-Kamel the Sultan of Egypt, had a profound affect on Francis, the Sultan and the Christians and Muslims living then that are still being felt today… Having seen Muslim prayers while in Egypt he declared for his followers: “You should manifest such honour to the Lord among the people 573px-Giotto_-_Legend_of_St_Francis_-_-11-_-_St_Francis_before_the_Sultan_(Trial_by_Fire)entrusted to you that every evening an announcement be made by a town crier or some other signal that praise and thanks may be given by all people to the all-powerful Lord God.” … And instead of seeking converts among Muslims, in missionary work he charged his followers: “[The brothers] are not to engage in arguments or disputes, but to be subject to (serve) every human creature for God’s sake.” …

And what did knowing St. Francis of Assisi do to Sultan al Malik al Kamel? Ten years later, in 1229, by diplomacy alone and by no act of warfare, he ceded control of Jerusalem, Bethlehem and a corridor from there to the sea to the Christians, saving only the Dome of the Rock and the al-Aqsa Mosque for the Muslims, and the temple area for the Jews.

That kind of breakthrough is unlikely, of course, to say the least. But the power of God’s love is also something I wouldn’t uniformly bet against. Meanwhile, Emma Green stresses that the Pope was in the Middle East to talk about the plight of Christians, not long-standing problems like the Israeli-Palestinian conflict:

[Christians are] the forgotten stakeholders of Jerusalem: People like the nuns who live on the Via Dolorosa, the road Jesus walked to his crucifixion; the Franciscan priests who maintain the Garden of Gethsemane, where Jesus prayed before his death; and, perhaps most importantly, the shrinking number of Arab Christians who live in Israel, the Palestinian Territories, and surrounding countries. On the Vatican-run website dedicated to the pope’s trip, there are several sections about the persecution of Palestinian Christians, emphasizing that they are “faced by an exclusivist Islamic movement that often refuses to recognize Christians as co-citizens with equal rights, equal obligations, and equal opportunities.”

Gershom Gorenberg scores the symbolism contest in favor of the Palestinians, but wonders what good it will do:

Here lay the pilgrim’s dilemma: Israel’s offered symbols of the past to justify current policies. The Palestinian script offered symbols of current suffering as a reason for urgent change. The latter script is more mediagenic. And the pope who has cast himself as champion of the downtrodden was apparently more comfortable with it.

But then, how much is the symbolism worth? Pope Francis’s critics have already raised this problem: For all his gestures of understanding for gays or single mothers and his criticism of capitalism, he hasn’t yet changed the powerful, patriarchal institution that he leads, and offers little indication that he will do so. A similar criticism pertains to Abbas’s diplomatic strategy: Palestine can be recognized by scores of countries, but so what? On the ground, there is no state.

Neocon Caroline Glick does her usual hysterical dance. I welcome Pope Francis to the legions of us who are suddenly deemed “anti-Semitic” because we want a just two-state solution:

Had Francis actually cared about the cause of peace and non-violence he claims to champion, Francis might have averred from stopping at the barrier, recognizing that doing so would defile the memory of the Ohayons and of hundreds of other Israeli Jewish families who were destroyed by Palestinian bloodlust and anti-Semitic depravity. Instead, Francis “spontaneously” got out of his popemobile, walked over to a section of the barrier, and reverentially touched it and kissed it as if it were the Wailing Wall. The graffiti on the section of the barrier Francis stopped at reinforced his anti-Semitic position. One of the slogans called for the embrace of the BDS campaign.

 

Similarly, Sarah Posner holds that while the visit was unavoidably political, it isn’t likely to make a difference:

The conflicts over Jerusalem’s religious sites are, it’s true, religious. But religion isn’t going to solve those conflicts; the solutions, should they ever come, will be political. Pope Francis knows that: that’s why he prayed at the separation wall. It’s also why he said it was not “his place” to dictate a political outcome for Jerusalem. Political imagery is easy to execute. Political outcomes are difficult (some might say in this case impossible) to negotiate. The choice of venue for praying, as we well know here in America, is very political. The real question isn’t whether Francis was being spiritual or political. It’s whether his spiritual-political overtures can have any discernible impact there at all.

On the other hand, Christopher Hale calls Francis “the world’s best politician” and argues that his gestures in the Holy Land were more than symbolic:

While celebrating an open-air Mass in Bethlehem, Francis unexpectedly invited Israeli President Shimon Peres and Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas to the Vatican for a June meeting of prayer and dialogue. Within an hour, both had accepted. Francis’s successful overture was especially remarkable considering the failed efforts by the United States earlier this spring to get both sides to the table to begin negotiated peace talks. However, this could be the boost that Secretary of State John Kerry needed to revive this peace process, which has been largely dormant for the past four years. …

[T]o reduce June’s meeting to an act of mere symbolism fails to understand the role religion can and should play in addressing difficult political and ethnic issues. Throughout world history, religious prophets have creatively navigated tense situations to advance peace and justice. Within the past century, Gandhi, Martin Luther King and St. John Paul II showed us that religious witness can win a war without raising a hand.

(Painting: St Francis before the Sultan (Trial by Fire) by Giotto.)

What The Hell Just Happened In Europe? III

A fascinating take from Noah Millman. The elections were not about Europeans uniformly turning on the project, but mainly about Britain and France freaking out about their sovereignty:

According to The Economist, extreme Euroskeptic parties gained 63 seats in the European parliament as a result of these elections. Of those, 31 – 50% – were from France and the UK. By contrast, all of the states who have joined the EU since 1986 put together added only 9 extreme Euroskeptic seats. Germany’s Euroskeptic representation also increased – from zero to 7 seats – but that’s still only 7% of the German delegation. A far cry from France’s or the UK’s over 30% showing.

Solving Europe’s core structural problems might well make the EU more popular in Germany, and also more popular in Poland and Belgium and Spain. But those same reforms would probably make it even less popular in France and the UK, because they would necessitate a sacrifice of even more national sovereignty in exchange for reducing the democratic deficit.

Similarly, immigration pits the interests of National Front and UKIP voters against the interests of citizens of EU members like Poland and Romania that benefit from the free movement of labor.

“Traditional Masculinity Has To Die” Ctd

A reader writes:

You posted a tweet with the hashtag #yesallwomen (no issue with that), but then you refer to the sad events this past weekend as “in the wake of the misogyny-fueled rampage near UCSB.” While I agree that Rodgers hated women, if you look at anything he’s put online, he clearly hates other men as well. In fact he seems to hate everyone, including members of his own family. He hated people for many, many reasons, including “you” appearing to be “better” than him. This was true if you had a nicer car than he did, as well as if you had a girlfriend – doubly so if Rodgers found her attractive.

He snapped this past weekend. He had a lot of targets. For whatever reason he started with his roomates, then he went to target some of the women who stood in for women who have turned him down. No doubt given enough time he would have gone after other people he was jealous of.

It is reckless to refer to this as a women’s only issue or to pretend that the only victims or targets were women. By framing it as you did, you imply that. He was a young man who had serious mental issues and had been doing his best to avoid the treament his family was trying to get him. That is the real issue – that, and how he got himself a gun.

Another quotes me:

“What we need is not grandiose and thereby doomed projects of cultural re-education, but a more powerful appeal to men to be gentlemen, to see maleness at its best as a tamed wildness.” Some of the most misogynistic men I have ever met considered themselves to be perfect gentlemen. They claimed that because they would never treat a woman like all those other assholes do, would never ever take her for granted, that they were better. But in reality they felt owed, just like Rogers did.

My ex is a prime example.

When we broke up, after years of me trying to explain, he clearly still didn’t understand why I didn’t just love him back. He was, according to him, the perfect boyfriend! He deserved my love. This totally disregards the fact that he had no respect for my intellect or my ability to think for myself. He treated me like a fragile doll and never understood that I just wanted to be treated like a person. I’m in no way perfect and did not want to be held to his incredibly unrealistic standards. But he always opened the door for me and bought me whatever I insinuated I would maybe eventually like to own. In return, I owed him love, right?

He would be deeply insulted to be called a misogynist. But that’s what he was/is. He never saw me as a fully formed person. I am a woman, so I am different. I am “less than”. I am a trophy to be earned or bought. And he was what you would call tame. I can only imagine what he would have been like if he was “wild”.

A male perspective:

By the end of your counterpoint to deBoer, I think you’ve actually ended up in very nearly the same place as he is (“we need … a more powerful appeal to men to be gentlemen, to see maleness at its best as a tamed wildness”). And if your desire is an appeal for bros to be gentlemen, then I think you’re pretty well asking for an end to (modern American) “traditional masculinity” as we know it. If you’re a gentleman, you don’t exhibit an over-the-top, hyper sense of “aggression, dominance and power.” If you wish to tame those very base instincts, then you’re ending up with a very different version of masculinity than “Murrican dudebro.”

Maybe it’s more of a “macho American” thing, but I was definitely brought up with the societal expectation of being more sexually aggressive. And that’s not just making the first move with a woman; outside of my mom, I was never really pushed back on for chasing girls or ogling them (without considering if it caused them any discomfort). I’m only in my early 30s, but I look back on the teenage me as a not-very-nice person. I’m sure everyone feels that way, but I feel it far more acutely now that my best friends are women.

Forget “expected male” behavior. If all we are is a pack of randy cocks whose excuse is “well it’s testosterone,” then we shortchange ourselves and insult our own capabilities. And forget “taming.” A “tame” animals merely tolerates the presence of humans. I don’t want to merely tolerate women; I strive to be their equal.

Update from a reader:

It seems a tad harsh for your reader to accuse her ex-boyfriend of misogyny for mimicking the classical virtue of chivalry as an attempt to get her to love him back. Based on what she reported, he was guilty of nothing more than ineptitude or incompetence.

Is every male failure, especially in their interactions with women, now an expression of misogyny? What hope do we have when we become contemptible and loathsome women-haters merely by not knowing what we’re doing?

I feel such a conflation not only trivializes the word “misogyny” but all male-female relations. We can now decide whether a male is relating successfully to women by measuring him on this simplified misogyny scale. I have a feeling that male-female relations are actually much more complex than that, given the whole thing is clouded over with issues of self-worth and self-esteem, which men deal with just as intensely – if differently – than women.

The entire discussion all seems besides the point. As other readers have pointed out, Rodgers problem wasn’t being rejected, and it wasn’t women. He had a severe neuropsychiatric disability and mental illness. The argument could be made that in his illness he internalized some of the worst aspects of our culture, and his mental illness amplified those aspects towards violent ends. However, this doesn’t justify cherry-picking aspect of his pathology and ignoring all others.

We need laws in place to empower mental health professionals and law enforcement to stop episodes like this in their tracks, to protect people from those whose mental illness leads them to make tragic, irreversible decisions, and to protect the mentally ill from themselves. That’s the primary, urgent, life-or-death discussion we should be having right now. Trying to pigeonhole this tragic story into a story about misogyny distracts us from this conversation.

Another:

In reference to the reader you quoted regarding Rodger’s hatred of men, yes, he hated other men, but that was quite clearly secondary:

I hated all of those obnoxious, boisterous men who were able to enjoy pleasurable sex lives with beautiful girls, but I hated the girl’s even more, because they were the ones who chose those men instead of me. It was their choice. They are the ones who deprived me of love and sex.

He didn’t just snap this past weekend. It had been premeditated for a long time, and he was quite specific about why he started with his roommates:

On the day before the Day of Retribution, I will start the First Phase of my vengeance: Silently killing as many people as I can around Isla Vista by luring them into my apartment through some form of trickery. The first people I would have to kill are my two housemates, to secure the entire apartment for myself as my personal torture and killing chamber. After that, I will start luring people into my apartment, knock them out with a hammer, and slit their throats.
[…]
This First Phase will represent my vengeance against all of the men who have had pleasurable sex lives while I’ve had to suffer.

His “Second Phase” represented his “War on Women”, beginning with the sorority house. Women were undoubtedly the main focus of his hatred. He certainly didn’t have any rants about men comparable to this:

Women are like a plague. They don’t deserve to have any rights. Their wickedness must be contained in order prevent future generations from falling to degeneracy. Women are vicious, evil, barbaric animals, and they need to be treated as such.

He then goes envisions his perfect world:

The first strike against women will be to quarantine all of them in concentration camps. At these camps, the vast majority of the female population will be deliberately starved to death. That would be an efficient and fitting way to kill them all off. I would take great pleasure and satisfaction in condemning every single woman on earth to starve to death. I would have an enormous tower built just for myself, where I can oversee the entire concentration camp and gleefully watch them all die. If I can’t have them, no one will, I’d imagine thinking to myself as I oversee this. Women represent everything that is unfair with this world, and in order to make the world a fair place, they must all be eradicated.