Author: Dish Staff

A C-Section Gone Medieval

by Dish Staff

The victims of a brutal procedure are finally getting some justice:

Petrified and in agony, Mary had been subjected to a symphysiotomy – a controversial operation that was seldom used in the rest of Europe after the mid-20th century, but which was carried out on an estimated 1,500 women in Ireland between the 1940s and 1980s. The procedure involves slicing through the cartilage and ligaments of a pelvic joint (or in extreme cases, called pubiotomy, sawing through the bone of the pelvis itself) to widen it and allow a baby to be delivered unobstructed.

Critics blame the continued use of the operation on a toxic mix of medical experimentation, Catholic aversion to caesarean sections and an institutional disregard for women’s autonomy.

They claim it has left hundreds of surviving women with life-long pain, disability and emotional trauma. For some in Ireland, it is yet another scandal perpetrated against women and girls, joining revelations over the Magdalene laundries (where “wayward” women were abused), the deaths of children at mother-and-baby homes and sex abuse in the Catholic church.

Not everyone agrees with this analysis: some doctors and historians argue that these criticisms fail to account for wider changes in medical culture. But this year the mothers who believe they were wronged finally got some encouraging news. In July, the UN Human Rights Committee called for the Irish government to hold an investigation into the issue. And last week saw the deadline pass for applications to the state’s ex gratia redress scheme, which offered women who have been through the procedure compensation sums of between £40,000 and £120,000. More than 300 women are said to have applied.

Their supporters say the moves are not before time. Mark Kelly of the Irish Council for Civil Liberties says that, despite having interviewed victims of torture, “this remains just one of the most appalling things that we have come across”. Nigel Rodley, chair of the UN Human Rights Committee, called the use of the operation without patients’ informed consent a “systematic assault”.

Will Torture Return?

by Dish Staff

Frederick Schwarz Jr. fears so:

[B]y making the story narrowly about how torture didn’t work in these instances rather than that torture doesn’t work at all and, more fundamentally, that it should never be used by any White House because it is immoral and illegal––as well as harmful to America’s reputation and the safety of American captives––there is greater risk a future administration faced with peril will say: “Well, we can do it better.”

Itamar Mann compares America to Israel:

The endurance of forceful interrogation in Israel, even after the Israeli Supreme Court seemingly banned it, reflects an inability to abolish such methods.

This reality has been documented by several important Israeli human right organizations, chiefly the Public Committee Against Torture, who initially brought the 1999 case to court. The most important question about torture and other abusive interrogation is not whether it is “civilized” or not. It is what kind of political reality it makes possible, and what kind of political reality it preserves. In the Israeli context, this was and remains an intractable political reality of undemocratic military control over a civilian population.

Thirteen years after 9/11, leading legal academics decry America’s “forever war” (as Harold Koh called it). The perpetrators of torture remain immune from prosecution. And somewhat surprisingly, last week CIA director John Brennan refused to say that the agency will no longer engage in torture. All these reflect a similar inability to move forward. The future of torture in America is all but guaranteed.

Do We Trust Cops Too Much?

by Dish Staff

Police Confidence

Last week, Scott Clement flagged a poll finding that recent events “might have actually increased white Americans’ belief that their local cops treat blacks fairly”:

There’s been no such boon in confidence among African Americans, though. Just 12 percent express a great deal of confidence in local police’s equal treatment of blacks and whites — a number that is squarely within the 10-to-17-point range in previous surveys. Only one-third have at least a “fair amount” of confidence in their neighborhood police, compared with 78 percent of whites.

Josh Marshall thinks “people who are part of or sympathetic to the movement tied to Michael Brown, Eric Garner, Tamir Rice and others sometimes miss just what deep wells of support and trust police have in the population”:

Police officers are consistently among the most trusted professions in the country, as attested in numerous public opinion surveys. That said, respect and trust and deference to police is heavily tied to public perceptions of the threats they protect us from. And as we’ve discussed, crime rates have been falling rapidly for two decades.

After the Garner non-indictment, Damon Linker advocated against giving officers the benefit of the doubt:

How many bad apples are there? And which ones? We have no idea — and our asinine, knee-jerk deferral to the police, our unwillingness to hold them accountable before the law when they make a questionable call to use deadly force, ensures that we will never know. And it also ensures that the bad apples will receive the message that they have free rein to do whatever they want, with nearly complete impunity.

Until this changes, all of our lofty encomiums to individual liberty and limited government will amount to nothing but empty air.

Breaking Into Prison

by Dish Staff

Maya Schenwar reflects on what she’s learned from exchanging letters with prisoners:

Prison is built on a logic of isolation and disconnection. Letters between pen pals are almost always exchanged for the opposite purpose and with the opposite effect: connection.

The act of pen-palling mirrors the mindset shift that will be necessary to rethink how our society “does justice” on a much larger scale. My conversations, correspondences, and relationships with prison-torn families have taught me that separation breeds more separation, that the coldness and isolation of prison breed the coldness and isolation of violence. And I think about how the one-on-one relationship, in which the prisoner emerges as a person (with thoughts, a personality, a history, hopes, dreams, nightmares), might serve as a model for the beginnings of a person-based, connection-based justice system.

Previous Dish on a reader with a pen pal in solitary confinement here.

So, Jeb Bush Is Running

by Dish Staff

Noah Millman expects “Jeb Bush will be a very formidable candidate whose entry will seriously change the shape of the race.” And that we “have every reason to believe that the most-likely choice the voters will be presented with in 2016 will be Bush versus Clinton”:

The 2016 primaries on the Democratic side will feature Hillary Clinton ignoring a handful of protest candidates who never get any traction. And on the Republican side they will feature Jeb Bush coopting his most formidable opponents on his way to defeating a Rand Paul insurgency that more closely resembles Eugene McCarthy in ’68 than Ronald Reagan in ’76. And the general election will be the most-depressing of our lifetimes.

Kilgore sizes up the race:

Bush is now the Establishment fave who has taken the most overt steps towards running for president, which puts some extra pressure on Chris Christie since Bush’s PAC will at a minimum put the arm on many potential campaign donors in a way that will tend to commit them.

As fate would have it, McLatchey put out a new national poll this very day showing Jeb running second to Mitt Romney … and taking the lead if Mitt stays out. This will be enough for many Establishment types, who can be expected to begin calling Jeb the “frontrunner.” But truth is, he’s only running at 14% (16% if Mitt doesn’t run), and in a trial heat against Hillary Clinton, he’s trailing 53-40, which doesn’t exactly burnish the “electability” credentials he’d definitely need to convince conservatives to ignore his policy heresies and his family’s reputation for playing them for fools.

Larison downplays Jeb’s chances:

Certainly there would be no better way to announce that the GOP remains in thrall to the Bush era than to choose another Bush as standard-bearer. The problem with this isn’t just that it would reward dynasticism, but that it would be rewarding an especially incompetent dynasty. That’s why I assume that there will be enough Republican voters that won’t go along with a Bush revival. For one thing, they don’t have to, and for another Bush isn’t likely to be the best or most compelling candidate in the 2016 field.

Allahpundit gives Bush better odds:

Even as I write this, conservatives are scoffing on Twitter that Bush is way overhyped and will flame out badly in the primaries. I disagree … There are a lot — a lot — of low-information “somewhat conservative” voters who won’t particularly care that Jeb supports Common Core or immigration reform; he’ll have hundreds of millions of dollars behind him to give him a rosy glow on early-state TV sets. He probably can’t win Iowa, especially if Christie or Romney runs and splits the centrist vote with him, but I’m not sure why he can’t win New Hampshire, South Carolina (which just reelected Lindsey Graham, remember), and of course Florida. He’s smart and polished and he’ll have big-name establishmentarians like Rove slobbering all over him in the media for months to come. How many times do we need to see a McCain or Romney nominated before we internalize the reality that yes, Jeb Bush has a decent chance?

Paul Constant also takes Jeb seriously:

We will have two candidates with eminently familiar names spending hundreds of millions of dollars on advertising every two weeks, trying to convince us simultaneously that their brand of nostalgia is the best. If this election really does turn out to be a marketing battle between the Clinton brand and the Bush brand, I could see Americans tuning out of the election process in droves. Nothing will make people feel sicker about participating in politics than the sense that they’re pawns in a battle between two wealthy arms of American aristocracy. This matchup could bring the lowest turnout we’ve ever seen in a national election, and we all know that when turnout is down, Republicans win elections. I believe President Jeb Bush is absolutely a very real possibility.

Jonathan Bernstein chips in his two cents:

Republicans haven’t had to live with extreme uncertainty about their nominee for a long time; and some may be very tempted to just settle for the next Bush in line. And by all accounts, Jeb is simply a better politician than either his brother or his father (or, for that matter, his grandfather).

On the other hand, this field looks a lot more like the impressive 1980 candidate group in which George H.W. Bush finished as the far-back runner-up than it does the uninspiring 2000 array that George W. Bush trounced. What’s more, W. checked off all the conservative boxes; Jeb doesn’t. His positions on education (supporting Common Core) and immigration reform (he’s for it) may not disqualify him from the nomination, but both will draw serious opposition, and there are several potential candidates who could exploit that.

Beutler wonders how Jeb will handle immigration:

[T]he central question facing Republicans at the outset of the primary will be what the next president should do not about immigration in the abstract, but about Obama’s deportation program specifically. Most candidates will be pledge to end it. To test his formula, Bush will have to promise not just to end it, but to replace the executive actions—which he called “extraconstitutional”—with a more legitimate legislative scheme.

It’s not a replacement, though, if it doesn’t create a legal status for the people who will benefit from Obama’s deferred action plan. And if he pledges to create such a status, the right will abandon him.

Waldman welcomes that debate:

Bush doesn’t just support comprehensive immigration reform, he talks about the subject in a very different way from most other Republicans. In a speech earlier this year, he described undocumented immigrants this way: “Yes, they broke the law, but it’s not a felony. It’s an act of love, it’s an act of commitment to your family.” And there’s no question that Bush feels this sincerely. He wrote a book on immigration reform (which his opponents’ aides are no doubt scouring for quotes that can be used against him). His wife is an immigrant from Mexico. He speaks Spanish. His kids look Hispanic. He’s not going to suddenly change his position on immigration.

What this means is that by being one of the top-tier candidates in the race, Bush instantly changes the immigration debate in the primaries. It isn’t that any of the other candidates are going to move to the left, but the discussion will not just be about who wants to build the highest border fence. There will be at least one person talking about immigrants in human terms.

Haley Sweetland Edwards focuses on Jeb’s other big vulnerability – his support for Common Core:

Louisiana Governor Bobby Jindal, who is often listed among the potential Republican presidential hopefuls, used to support Common Core, but now is so publicly against it that he has launched lawsuits against his own state and the U.S. Department of Education, claiming that the standards are a violation of state rights.

While most of that is shameless political theater, it still leaves Jeb Bush in a tricky position: in order to win the Republican nomination, he’s going to have to win over the Republican conservative base, which hates Common Core with the fire of a thousand suns. The easiest way to do that would be to disown Common Core. But that’s not likely to be in the cards.

With Jeb running, Vinik thinks Rubio is toast:

If there is one loser from Bush’s decision to explore a presidential run, it’s Senator Marco Rubio, also from Florida. Bush has deep connections to the donor base in Florida thanks to his eight years running the state. If Bush does choose to run—and the signs clearly point that way now—it will leave little room for Rubio to mount his own presidential campaign.

Rich Lowry sees an opening for Cruz:

The Texas senator wants a pure establishment–Tea Party fight and a Jeb candidacy does the most to tee that up by potentially squeezing out the candidates who have some appeal to both wings. So Jeb getting in would be the biggest windfall for Cruz since the shutdown fight, without which he wouldn’t be in such a strong position (it gave him an enormous boost among the grassroots and a huge e-mail list).

Jim Newell speculates about Christie’s ability to raise money:

Chris Christie, who, if he runs, will be vying for the same pile of dough — let’s call it the “Wall Street Journal CEO Council” money. Christie is in a difficult situation now. He wants to run for president and is willing to torture however many pigs as necessary to prove his mettle. But all those people who begged him to run in 2012 may be more interested in Jeb Bush, their private equity blood brother and considerably less of a loudmouth.

Relatedly, Cillizza hears that fundraising was one reason for Jeb jumping in early:

[S]everal people I talked to suggested that with a 2016 primary price tag, likely somewhere between $150 million and $200 million, even a Bush has to start raising money sooner rather than later.  “It allows the organization of the donor community,” noted one Republican. “The Bush network grinds into gear and gets big commitments.” (An interesting side point worth considering: Does the “Bush network” exist in anything close to its 2004 form? “Most of these people haven’t raised money in a long time,” said one unaligned consultant.)

Finally, Aaron Blake views “biggest question from here on out is not so much who leads in the polls, but who runs”:

If Marco Rubio, Chris Christie and Romney all run, that cuts into Bush’s chances, because he draws from the same pools of supporters and donors. That’s not so much the case with Carson, Mike Huckabee, Rand Paul and Ted Cruz.

Would You Report Your Rape? Ctd

by Dish Staff

Another reader adds his story to the powerful thread:

I want to offer a male perspective from someone who has been through something similar, in order to say it’s not just women who have these reactions. As a young teenager I was sexually abused by a teacher/coach, someone who had become like a father-figure to me (I’ve never met my real father, who left before I was born). It happened a few times, but I was eventually able to avoid him when the teacher transferred to another school.

I never told anyone until I was 19 or so, when I just couldn’t deal with my depression on my own and finally told certain friends and family. My mom reported it to the original school and contacted the police. They were sympathetic but didn’t do anything to follow up or take away his position. Mine was the only reported case. I did write a letter for the police and have it filed as a report, but I never followed up. I spoke briefly with a police investigator on the phone who was pretty clear that since it was several years prior, and my word against his, that it would be a tough case to push forward. I told myself that if other reports came up then I would testify or participate in whatever investigation was necessary, but didn’t want to go any further if it was just me, and ultimately didn’t ever follow up on it.

Later in my early-20s I did get counseling for my depression. The counselor wanted to pursue the police case again, since the individual was still a teacher in the school system.

I was doing better psychologically and she felt obligated to by law, as well as her personal desire to see the man behind bars. With my permission, she contacted a police investigator again. I spoke with him initially on the phone, but ultimately I still couldn’t handle it. I stopped seeing the counselor and did not follow up any more with the police. It wasn’t necessarily a conscious decision. It was like everything would shut down. I became so anxious that I went numb and just couldn’t face it. When pushed, I would answer questions and was open about it. But my subconscious reaction was to avoid the situation as much as possible.

I am not a weak man or someone afraid of confrontation. I served in the military, including a tour in Iraq. I have seen and faced some tough situations, but I never suffered the fear and anxiety that I faced when trying to report what happened to me or the idea of confronting my abuser. For the most part I do not suffer from PTSD related to my Iraq experiences. But I do, even still, suffer from PTSD related to my sexual abuse and find it difficult to have long-term, intimate relationships. I am in a far-better place then I was, but it is still there.

I know that if other reports came up that my abuser had done similar things to someone else, then I would gladly testify and confront him, do whatever I could do put that person behind bars. I’m not sure I could do that for myself though, and would still find it very hard to face him. I still feel guilty that I didn’t do more to report and push the case, as your other reader stated, and pray that no one else was ever abused because I didn’t have the courage or ability to follow through. I can understand completely why a woman wouldn’t want to report her rape, or might only report it to the school, but not push for a criminal case. That seems to be the natural reaction.

I agree with you completely that there has to be some defense process for the accused, even at the school level, but at the same time many schools and police need to be more assertive in pushing for investigations and going to the next step. Many victims just won’t be able to be their own advocates.

A Different Kind Of Digital Server

by Dish Staff

Annie Lowrey witnesses the slow transition towards robot waitstaffs:

The advantages for the restaurant are clear. Tablets are cheaper than human waiters, even given how cheap those human waiters are. (The federal tipped minimum wage is just $2.13 an hour.) They nudge consumers to spend a little more than they would otherwise, encouraging them to get appetizers, desserts, or fancier drinks. They also reduce time spent per visit by making the ordering process quicker, leading to higher table turnover and ultimately higher revenue.

I suspect that eventually the advantages for restaurant patrons might come to outweigh the early disadvantages as well. Many of the problems I witnessed at Newark were problems of unfamiliarity. How do you use this thing? Why don’t you come help me? Where is the waiter? Over time, those questions should fade.

Dick Cheney’s Moral Standard, Ctd

by Dish Staff

Damon Linker is perturbed at what Cheney – “along with a distressingly large number of Americans – understands by patriotism: a willingness to do just about anything to advance the interests of the United States and decimate its enemies”:

Cheney’s hardly the first person to defend such a position. Machiavelli advocated a version of it in The Prince. It’s been favored by some of the most ruthless nationalists and totalitarians in modern history. And it’s expressed in Book 1 of Plato’s Republic by the character Polemarchus (the name means “leader in battle”), who defines justice as helping friends (fellow citizens) and harming enemies (anyone who poses a threat to the political community). This is what patriotism looks like when it’s cut off from any notion of a higher morality that could limit or rein it in. All that counts is whether an action benefits the political community. Other considerations, moral and otherwise, are irrelevant.

The problem with this view, which Socrates soon gets Polemarchus to see, is that amoral patriotism is indistinguishable from collective selfishness. It turns the political community into a gang of robbers, a crime syndicate like the mafia, that seeks to advance its own interests while screwing over everyone else. If such behavior is wrong for an individual criminal, then it must also be wrong for a collective.

Chait helpfully dismantles Cheney’s defense of torture. And Waldman focuses on his refusal to define the term:

[E]ven after this repeated questioning, we still don’t know how Dick Cheney or any other torture advocate defines it. Why not? It seems pretty clear. There is simply no definition that anyone could devise that wouldn’t apply to things like stress positions or waterboarding. Try to imagine one. Torture is the infliction of severe physical or mental suffering to obtain information or a confession — but only if it leaves a mark? Or only if it’s done by non-Americans? Any such definition would be absurd on its face.

So when people like Cheney are asked what the definition of torture is, they say, “September 11!” When asked what definition of torture wouldn’t apply to the particular techniques the CIA employed, they just repeat, “We didn’t torture” over and over. They not only defend torture as a means of obtaining intelligence, they sing its praises and insist that it was spectacularly successful, all without having the courage to call the thing by its true and only name.

Froomkin is concerned that, for Cheney, his Meet The Press appearance “was still a win – at least in the short term, until history passes a more considered verdict”:

Because our elite political media is unwilling to call out the morally abhorrent self-interested ravings of a torturer, Cheney’s statements effectively push the envelope for what is treated as legitimate debate. So while we finally have this long-awaited Senate Intelligence Committee report, full of achingly detailed descriptions of abuse and lies even more depraved and duplicitous than any of us had imagined, the media just sees the “revisiting of a debate” about torture.

Previous Dish on Cheney’s MTP appearance here. Andrew’s take here.