Category: Keepers

The New Jersey governor’s remarks about growing concerns that the balance between security and liberty has shifted too much toward security were revealing in one respect. They suggest that he sees no trade-off between liberty and security at all. Christie is the walking antithesis of New Hampshire’s motto: “Live Free Or Die”. His view, it appears, is: “Live Unfree Or Die”.

There is, of course, a solid argument for tilting the balance in favor of security over liberty. That’s why I couldn’t quite muster the outrage of many of my libertarian and liberaltarian friends about PRISM. Too much relaxation of security could lead to a successful attack which could make future defense of pre-9/11 liberty even harder to defend. This is a tough area, especially for those of us not privy to intelligence about various threats. But there is none of this in Christie’s remarks, and I fear that this is one of his hallmarks – total, black-and-white certainty in areas where gray is inherently the dominant color. Note also the anti-intellectual populism at work:

“These esoteric, intellectual debates — I want them to come to New Jersey and sit across from the widows and the orphans and have that conversation. And they won’t, because that’s a much tougher conversation to have. The next attack that comes, that kills thousands of Americans as a result, people are going to be looking back on the people having this intellectual debate and wondering whether they put …”

He stopped himself at that point for some reason. But look: it’s a very strange thing for a Republican to call constitutional rights “esoteric”.

They aren’t. They’re basic. In a democracy, they are as core a set of values as we have. To reduce the difficult trade-off between preventing terror and maintaining civil liberties to a stark conversation with the victims of 9/11 is to load the emotional dice so heavily you are dismissing the entire debate as worthless. It’s Cheney-esque.

Then there’s this canard:

“President Obama has done nothing to change the policies of the Bush administration in the war on terrorism. And I mean practically nothing,” he said. “And you know why? Cause they work.”

We now know that the central anti-terrorism policy of the Bush administration was a program of brutal, indiscriminate torture of suspects. The second pillar was the invasion and occupation of two countries for a decade. Obama has abolished the former and, by the end of his term, will have ended both wars, whose consequences are still being felt in a bankrupted federal government, a wave of terrorist blowback and a collapse of America’s global credibility and moral standing.

The silver lining in this is that, for the first time in a while, these unreconstructed Cheney-style bromides are being challenged within the GOP, by Senator Paul in particular. And on a core question in our democracy – do we sacrifice our core liberties because of a network of religious terrorists? – we now know where Christie stands. Against freedom. And for his own power.

(Photo: Jessica Kourkounis/Getty Images.)

I was reading TNC’s take late last night – and his superb comments section at the Atlantic – and realized that my first post was missing something important.

It may well be gay confirmation bias that misled me a bit. The thing about most gay hook-up sites is that they are almost entirely anonymous fantasy platforms which may, in a very small percentage of actual exchanges, lead to, you know, sex. The same can be said about straight sites like OKCupid et al. Everyone is there for roughly the same reasons – varying from voyeurism to romance to sex – and everyone, apart from the ruthless Darwinism of sexual attractiveness, is on an even footing. It’s a form of erotic play, really, almost all of the time. The pay-off is, in many ways, not even the point. It is to enter a world of sexual titillation and distraction.

This, I now better understand, is not what Weiner was doing. For some reason, I missed this essential piece in the NYT about the nature of the chats and sexts. Weiner wasn’t on those sites; he was using Twitter and Facebook and texts. He sent pics to women who had not already consented to sex-talk:

Ms. Cordova, who had traded messages with Mr. Weiner, a New York Democrat, about their shared concern over his conservative critics, said she had never sent him anything provocative. Asked if she was taken aback by his decision to send the photo, she responded, “Oh gosh, yes.”

The whole piece – and its granular detail – shifted my perspective on this. I think he went past the line of “consenting horned-up adults” into a form of sexual aggression, the kind of guy who won’t leave you alone at a bar. He did so with known and usually much younger admirers, not strangers in a fantasy scenario. He went from casual conversation to dick pics in an instant. I should have more closely examined the details of the exchanges before filtering them through my gay frontal cortex.

Second, that disproportion of power between him and his interlocutors, while not illegal, is still creepily Clintonian.

That’s an ethical and moral judgment about a man’s character – and I sure don’t think Weiner should drop out of the race rather than let the voters make their decision. And in public life, these character judgments are by no means the only factor in assessing a politician (who are almost all, by definition, psychologically damaged in some way. Clinton was a very good president on policy – but he remains a self-centered, sociopathic prick of the first order. You can trade one aspect for the other in politics the way you wouldn’t in your personal life. But the reason I endorsed Dole in 1996 was my view that Clinton had proven himself incapable of the kind of self-control we need in a president. I thought and wrote that he was a walking scandal waiting to explode. That would have costs for the entire country. And I was right.

TNC also makes an important point about cruelty. When you ask forgiveness of followers, donors, voters and relatives, and they give it, you do not let them down a second time after absolution. TNC:

I believe that how you treat people matters. It is folly to embarrass your pregnant wife before an entire nation. To do the same thing again is cruelty.

I’m not sure what the details of the Abedin-Weiner marriage are so wouldn’t go that far with such certainty. But, yes, Weiner’s inability to stop after his first episode cannot be viewed entirely through the prism of his own human weakness. He’s not a private person, and he could have chosen to remain one while he still struggled with being human. He chose ambition even though it would almost certainly mean cruelty and embarrassment to others. I don’t want him to drop out; I don’t think his behavior is in any way as bad as Eliot Spitzer’s criminal hypocrisy or Mayor Bob Filner’s sexual harassment, or Bill Clinton’s endless lies and sexual abuse of women. But I wouldn’t vote for him.

There’s a place for sexting – when it’s totally consensual and adult, when you’re not embarrassing a spouse, and when you’re not actually running for a major public office.

(Photo: Anthony Weiner listens to a question from the media after courting voters outside a Harlem subway station a day after announcing he will enter the New York mayoral race on May 23, 2013 in New York City. By Mario Tama/Getty Images)

It’s worth noting, I think, that yesterday, a little before before the new Weiner “news” broke, we had a post that explored online dating and hook-ups. For increasing numbers of people, this is their primary arena for sexual flirting, dirty-talk, “selfies”, fantasy, and – much more rarely – actual sex. As Ross Douthat noted, this trend is not a gradual one:

College has also dipped since 2000 as a place to meet, but only modestly; bars and restaurants have ticked upward, and the internet, predictably, has exploded.

With countless interactive hook-up sites, and ever more apps that combine sexting with GPS, a huge proportion of the current and future generations will have sent pics of their boobs or butts or junk as a form of sexual play, fantasy, virtual interactive pornography, and, to a lesser extent, getting laid. That’s simply the reality. Humans are sexual beings, and given a new obsessive-compulsive toy to play with, the Internet, their first instinct was to see how they could use it to get off. Porn and virtual sex sites not only power the web, they helped create it.

I see nothing here that any sane society would try to stop or regulate. Men are more prone to this instant, impulsive, fantasy-driven sexual gratification (testosterone is a powerful drug), but women are also involved. And if you display every detail of every sext-chat in public, both parties will be as embarrassed as if someone had taped the sex talk in their bedroom and broadcast it on the radio.

But embarrassment is not shame. And as long as both parties are adults acting consensually – and in virtual space, no coercion is really possible – I fail to see any scandal. In fact, I see it as a way to blow off steam, without the risk of STDs or pregnancy. It can indeed distort one’s view of sexuality; it can objectify people with ruthless efficiency; it can make actual sex more difficult (see our NO-FAP thread). But it’s nothing different than another arena for us to court, display and preen our sexual selves. It was ever thus.

Obviously, running for mayor of New York City exponentially increases the risk of exposure and embarrassment.

But even then, for any married man, the core ethical question, it seems to me, is whether the behavior is with his spouse’s awareness and consent – or not. As I’ve argued before, couples should be allowed some flexibility in managing their marriages, as they see fit. No one outside a marriage can fully know what’s in it, or what makes it work. For my part, I favor maximal privacy for all married couples in navigating the shoals of sex and life online and off.

Monogamous, monogamish, and open relationships are all up to the couples themselves and all have risks and advantages. But ultimately it is up to the spouse to decide if there has been a transgression or not, and whether to forgive and move forward or not. The truly awful spectacle yesterday was seeing Huma Abedin being forced to undergo another public humiliation as the price for her husband’s public career. But she clearly stated she was not abandoning her husband. And for me, as for us, that should close the matter.

And let’s be clear, there is no victim here. A flirty, horny 22-year-old who talks a great sex game is not a victim. She’s a player – and good for her. This nonsense about her being “immature” and Weiner being “predatory” is belied by the facts. She knew he was married when she sexted him and he returned the favors. The only salient question is whether, having lied in the first place about sexting, Weiner was caught deceiving the public again by claiming he had stopped sexting and re-built his marriage, while the compulsion was clearly not over. That’s a question of public trust, and there’s little doubt that Weiner has squandered it. On the question of lying, the NYT’s harrumph this morning is a valid one. Once a politician has deceived people, he gets a second chance. When he deceives them a second time on the same issue, he loses whatever public trust he might have hoped for.

But I see no reason why that trust should not be tested where it should be: at the ballot box. Weiner should not, er, withdraw prematurely. He should do us all a favor, if his wife agrees, and plow on until we can all smoke a collective cigarette. In this new Internet Age someone has to be the person who makes sexting not an excludable characteristic for public office. If it becomes one, then the range of representatives we can choose from in the future and present will be very, very different in experience and background than the people they are supposed to represent.

And so I’m more than sympathetic to Amanda Hess’s yawns:

What would the American public find if it combed through all of your Facebook messages, Twitter DMs, and Gchat history? If it had an exclusive peek into your webcam, or could scroll through your iPhone pics at will? This great nation is littered with hard drives full of poorly lit topless pics, broken promises to former lovers, and messages that sounded sexy at the time but look very stupid now. Anthony Weiner’s sexts don’t make him look like a sexual predator or even a freak. They make him look very, very ordinary.

Ambers has mixed feelings:

It wouldn’t bother me if Weiner continued to sext after his resignation so long as he admitted that, to him, such behavior was not immoral, not wrong, and not a violation of whatever boundaries he and Huma Abedin have set for their marriage. Also, discreet. He had to be discreet. Instead, he insists that the behavior is wrong, that he learned his lesson, and that his wife has forgiven him. What lessons has he learned? Not clear.

Ambers is right about the core contradiction. Weiner’s concession that he did something wrong – when he never had sex with anyone other than his wife – undermines his entire position. He’s also shrewd to home in on the way in which Weiner used his public persona for sexual power. This was not sexting anonymously with strangers for fantasy and fun. It was sexting liberal activists who get turned on by healthcare reform (poor dears). Hence the ethical issue:

It’s unseemly that he seemed to promise his paramour a blogging job in exchange for getting rid of the incriminating messages, which surely must have signaled to her the enormous power that she held over him. That a potential mayor is willing to put himself in this position, a position where he basically plea-bargains against blackmail, is a strike against his competence.

It sure is. But let’s not pre-empt this. Let’s recall that Weiner, unlike Eliot Spitzer, committed no crime, and had sex with no-one but his wife. It seems absurd that the one with actual, serious transgressions should sail through, via cable TV news, to public life again and the other, whose sin is primarily online flirting, should be ritually drummed out of a race.

The future of Weiner’s marriage and career is in the hands of his wife and the voting public, respectively. One has made her choice. Let the people, with all the facts at their disposal, make the second.

(Photo: Anthony Weiner, a leading candidate for New York City mayor, stands with his wife Huma Abedin during a press conference on July 23, 2013 in New York City. By John Moore/Getty Images.)

… if you tell your children to be wary of all young black males they might meet:

The advice was not about race per se, but instead about the tendency of males of one particular age and race to commit an inordinate amount of violent crime.

It was after some first-hand episodes with young African-American males that I offered a similar lecture to my own son. The advice was born out of experience rather than subjective stereotyping. When I was a graduate student living in East Palo Alto, two adult black males once tried to break through the door of my apartment — while I was in it. On a second occasion, four black males attempted to steal my bicycle — while I was on it. I could cite three more examples that more or less conform to the same apprehensions once expressed by a younger Jesse Jackson. Regrettably, I expect that my son already has his own warnings prepared to pass on to his own future children.

That’s the gist of Victor Davis Hanson’s new piece in National Review. All young black men are guilty until proven innocent – a sentiment with which New York’s chief cop apparently agrees (especially if he can gussy up his racial profiling with minor pot possession, thus making the future of any young black male that little bit harder). I don’t think anyone in this debate, including the president, has denied the disproportionate amount of crime committed by young black men (primarily against other young black men). The question is how we should personally deal with that fact while living in a multiracial society. Treating random strangers as inherently dangerous because of their age, gender and skin color is a choice to champion fear over reason, a decision to embrace easy racism over any attempt to overcome it.

It’s also spectacularly stupid.

I can fully understand and appreciate TNC’s incandescent, yet reasoned, rage at the piece. Do yourself a favor and read it in full. But Ta-Nehisi’s core point is that making such blanket warnings about an entire group of human beings is just dumb if you actually care about the safety of your kids. It puts the race/gender/age category before all other obvious contexts: neighborhood, street, school, college, inner city, distant suburb, daytime, night, crowded places, dark streets, and the actual observed behavior of the young black man. As TNC notes:

This is the kind of advice which betrays a greater interest in maintaining one’s worldview than in maintaining one’s safety.

Indeed. And what ever else may be said about Victor Davis Hanson, he is far from stupid.

The interesting question to me is how this sentiment is different from that of John Derbyshire, who wrote almost the exact same column as Victor Davis Hanson did a little over a year earlier, framed around exactly the same trope – mocking the “Talk” parents give to African-American boys by explaining the “Talk” non-black parents give to non-black kids. Derbyshire’s rant was in a different magazine, but he was still fired from National Review for it. The difference is that Derbyshire tells his children to avoid all “blacks”, while Hanson focuses on advising his children solely about young black men. Any young black men they don’t know.

Is that the distinction National Review will now cling to as the acceptable face of prejudice?

(Thumbnail image: Screencap from The Hunted And The Hated)

I’m not sure the role of public editor at the NYT includes the gossipy reporting of staff envy, resentment and resistance to the emergence of an Internet star in their midst. But Margaret Sullivan sure delivered – and she, at least by her account, was a defender of the 538 blog on the NYT site.

Still, if you wondered how the old-guard of journalism really regards the upstarts of the web, it’s a revealing piece:

His entire probability-based way of looking at politics ran against the kind of political journalism that The Times specializes in: polling, the horse race, campaign coverage, analysis based on campaign-trail observation, and opinion writing, or “punditry,” as he put it, famously describing it as “fundamentally useless.” …

A number of traditional and well-respected Times journalists disliked his work. The first time I wrote about him I suggested that print readers should have the same access to his writing that online readers were getting. I was surprised to quickly hear by e-mail from three high-profile Times political journalists, criticizing him and his work. They were also tough on me for seeming to endorse what he wrote, since I was suggesting that it get more visibility…

The Times tried very hard to give him a lot of editorial help and a great platform. It bent over backward to do so, and this, too, disturbed some staff members. It was about to devote a significant number of staff positions to beefing up his presence into its own mini-department.

I’m thrilled Nate got his new gig at ESPN. But it isn’t good news for journalism that the NYT could not really digest his work. In the first place, Nate (who’s become a friend since the Dish first featured his work in the 2008 campaign) is about as real, sweet and modest as anyone can be without turning into mush. His ego is as well concealed as mine sometimes swivels like a Drudge police siren. So personality clashes were almost certainly not an issue – or not Nate-generated.

But fear was: fear that his analysis could render moot some of the horse-race journalism that the NYT still does and does well. It’s a misplaced fear. Campaigns are narratives driven by human beings – no statistical analysis could begin to describe them adequately. There’s no reason the two approaches cannot work together and inform each other. But the pretensions and defensiveness of the old media guard seem to have made that a tough compromise to settle on – to the detriment of NYT readers. And when the top brass actually started spending resources on the upstart, then jealousy took over. What usually happens, ahem, is that the lone blogger attached to a media company gets brought in for traffic, buzz, innovation, etc. and is then promptly ignored, or taken for granted, while the old guard tolerates him or her, and all the actual resources and investment go to the established institutional structure. Institutions tend not to like individuals who can dominate attention in a way others do not. It weakens their sense of control – something that remains in their minds even as it has largely evaporated from the media world.

Jill Abramson rightly, in my view, took a different tack, trying to build 538 into something bigger and worth investing in. But the knives in Nate’s back were too plentiful to remove – and ESPN clearly outbid them and had no bitter dead-enders carping about the newbie. Besides, ESPN had already proven its willingness to invest in one key blogger/writer, Bill Simmons, and create a whole site within a site around him. Marc Tracy listened to an ESPN conference call on the news and talked to Silver directly about the Simmons model:

The calls were most useful for drawing out the shape and ambitions of Silver’s future site, whose model, as he and Skipper said many times, is Bill Simmons’ Grantland. “That Grantland precedent was as close as anything in media,” Silver said. It, too, will be editorially independent, and it will be similarly staffed, at least once FiveThirtyEight is fully staffed up post-relaunch ([ESPN president President John] Skipper pegged Grantland’s staff in “the low dozens”). It was clearly very important to Silver that he did not have to guess whether ESPN could build a Grantland-like site around him—that, instead, ESPN (and ESPN acting under the influence of Skipper) is what built Grantland.

Travis Waldron also considers the Grantland model:

Grantland is an important aspect to the story, since it provides the model for the new FiveThirtyEight. The site has been an unabashed success in the two years since it launched, so it’s no surprise ESPN wanted to duplicate it, and Silver’s site sounds like it will end up as Grantland with more numbers. Silver and Simmons are a lot alike, big names with devoted online followings who will bring traffic and readers and influence, and Silver repeatedly stressed the editorial independence ESPN has given Simmons as important to why he took the job. And while he guaranteed the new FiveThirtyEight would cover sports, politics, and economics, the rest is up in the air and dependent on who he hires, much like Grantland’s beats developed more through the voices that came aboard — think Wesley Morris’ movie reviews and cultural critiques or Jonah Keri’s baseball coverage — than through a specific plan to cover certain aspects of sports.

I thought Nate’s role at the NYT was one real bright spot in the evolution of journalism at the Times. So, it now seems, did plenty of others. And that was the problem. The good news is that the NYT needed Nate much more than he needed them, and what matters is getting an audience to write what you love to write about. At ESPN, he has all the resources he needs and none of the extraordinary resentment and envy so many old-school editors and journalists feel toward the blogstars.

Did I mention how great it is to answer to no-one?

(Photo: Nate Silver, Founder & President of fivethirtyeight.com speaks onstage at The Signal & The Noise during the 2013 SXSW Music, Film + Interactive Festival at Austin Convention Center on March 10, 2013 in Austin, Texas. By Amy E. Price/Getty Images for SXSW.)

“Some of my Republican colleagues are already saying we won’t raise the debt limit unless there’s repeal of ObamaCare. I’d love to repeal ObamaCare, but I promise you that’s not going to happen on the debt limit. So some would like to set up another one of these shutdown-the-government threats. And most Americans are really tired of those kinds of shenanigans here in Washington,” – Senator John McCain.

What stands out to me – again – is the nihilism of it all. A candidate ran for president on a platform for a right-of-center plan for universal health coverage, much more incremental than the Clintons’ proposal, far less statist than Nixon’s, and adopting several conservative ideas – such as the healthcare exchanges which already seem to be bearing fruit in lowering premium prices.

He got it through the Congress, was re-elected solidly, his own party won the popular vote in both Houses … and the GOP in the House is effectively threatening to sabotage the economy and the government’s fiscal stability to cut off its funding. What do they intend to do about tens of millions of people without insurance (or more than ten million people living in this country without papers)? Not a single thing – except bromides against big g0vernment that could have been uttered (and were) in the 1980s.

Whatever else this is, it is emphatically not an opposition party in a democratic system.

It is a nullification party, unable to pass anything itself but endless, fruitless repeals of the ACA, incapable of supporting immigration reform as well as health reform, eager to deny the president even his own executive officials, and abusing the filibuster to make any kind of progress in addressing what few deny are real problems. This is a protest movement – not a democratic opposition. It’s acting out, not opposing.

And its only rationale is to drag this president down, even if it means, as it has, that their own reputation is at record lows. And they are having some small effect as Americans understandably look at Washington’s mess and throw up a little in their mouths.

What can the president do? He’s decided to go out on the trail again urging more action on the economy and rightly touting his economic stewardship as the most effective in the West since the crisis began. He’ll be trying to reach precisely those Americans who need health insurance when the new law comes into effect.

It turns out the election meant nothing to the GOP. Their contempt for the public as a whole – and not just their primary voters – is palpable. And their positive contribution to the issues facing this country and the world are non-existent.

(Photo by Getty. Graphs of Obama’s and the Congress’s approval ratings, from Pollster’s poll of polls.)