The Dish – Page 110

Blogging As Being

by Will Wilkinson

Greetings Dishlickers! I’m just thrilled to have the chance to share this space with Michelle Dean whilst Andrew is away Andrewing. I’ve been a fan of the Dish since its early days, if not its inception. My personal blog, The Fly Bottle, goes back to November 2001, and I keep the whole thing online as a matter of principle, despite its damning evidence of a once-serious interest in Ayn Rand, because it is, in its still-evolving totality, a record of my intellectual and moral identity, and I fear that if I did not maintain its public existence I would begin to shade the truth about myself to myself, the better to conform to whatever idea about myself I am currently in the grip of, and would start to believe I had always been the way I’d prefer to imagine I had always been. And we don’t want that.

Anyway, when I began blogging, I was a doctoral student in philosophy at the University of Maryland, and if not for the diversion of blogging, there is a decent chance I would now be an associate professor of philosophy at South Tulsa State Polytechnic or some other similarly esteemed institution. As it happens, I bailed on the dissertation and blogged my way into a job at the Cato Institute, where for six years I did think tanks things and pursued an agenda of making libertarianism palatable to liberals, which I guess didn’t go over well with absolutely everyone, and in 2010 I left Cato. By this time, I was telecommuting from Iowa City, where my now-wife, Kerry Howley, was working on her MFA at the University of Iowa’s amazing Nonfiction Writing Program. It looked to me that Kerry’s transition from political journalism to a more satisfying literary mode of writing was going well (it went very well), and I decided I wanted an MFA in creative writing, too.

So now I’m in my last year at the University of Houston’s illustrious creative writing program, working on a tricky novel about love and betrayal among political bloggers and free-market think tank wonks in the golden age of mid-Oughts D.C.

Between MFA-ing, keeping our 7-month-old son from tipping over, and teaching humanities at the University of Tennessee, Chattanooga, where Kerry is an assistant professor of English, I haven’t had much time for blogging, though I do post occasionally at the Economist‘s Democracy in America blog. Yet I miss blogging terribly—about as much as I hate the word “blogging.” Blogging has been so much a part of my life that when I am not doing it, or doing something like it, I feel a little diminished, even slightly spectral, as if impersonal but immediate dialectical engagement were the vital principle of authentic human existence. I could hardly be happier, then, to have this chance to slip out of the vague unreality of my blessed unvirtual life and experience for a few days the spurious sense of solidity that I know will come from opining irresponsibly from Andrew’s towering soapbox.

I’ll start here. Michelle’s cat is, I agree, very attractive. But not as attractive as my dog.

A Global Response To Global Warming

by Dish Staff

Brad Plumer unpacks the UN climate deal stuck in Lima, Peru:

Over the next six months, each nation will be required to submit a plan for how it will address future emissions. These plans will form the basis of a major new climate agreement to be negotiated in Paris at the end of 2015 and take effect by 2020.

The actual content of each country’s plan, however, is entirely voluntary. In principle, countries are supposed to pledge to do more on climate than they’ve already been doing. But there are no rules about how emissions actually get restrained or what the timetable should be.

Rebecca Leber looks at how the agreement was watered-down:

To ensure more than 190 countries were on-board, particularly the developing world, negotiators weakened much of the requirements for individual countries in the final 30 hours.

Lima set out to establish a minimum guidelines for what information countries must disclose about cutting carbon pollution. The seemingly small detail is important because it lets countries compare apples to apples, and potentially push for more cuts. Except now the review process won’t be as vigorous as it could be, thanks to a single word change. Now, most of the information for these plans will be voluntary, rather than mandatory, because the text says countries “may” include detailed information, rather than “shall.”

In the end, some of the toughest decisions were simply postponed until Paris.

Eric Holthaus declares that the “U.N. process isn’t where the action is on climate anymore”:

Progressive cities, transformative industries, and mass protests have the best chance of providing the tipping point that’s needed. These talks are a distraction from the kind of urgent, on-the-ground work that needs to happen in order to steer the world’s economy toward a carbon-free path and prepare for the impacts of increasingly extreme weather.

But Erik Voeten sees the accord as significant:

While new numerical commitments may work for smaller, more cohesive groupings of countries, such as the European Union, the global approach has since shifted to a different strategy, which is based on the realization that the main push for climate-friendly policies must come from within countries. The purpose of international agreements and institutions is to help those domestic groups that favor emission curbs, not to set central standards that the international community can’t enforce. This fits the insights from political scientists that the effect of many treaties depends on domestic politics.

So how does the Lima agreement help domestic groups that favor carbon reductions? A first, and very important, feature is that it brings the issue on the agenda in every U.N. member state. Every country has agreed to develop a national action plan, although the language on what exactly needs to be in that plan was watered down during the negotiations. Still, anyone who has ever participated in or studied an activist movement knows that getting an issue on the agenda is a major hallmark.

Some environmental groups are unhappy:

The target of the United Nations-hosted climate process is to limit the rise in global temperatures to under 2 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels. But the architecture of the emerging plan rests on a series of nationally decided commitments that are unlikely to ensure the steep emissions cuts that experts say are needed to meet that target. Environmental watchdogs said the Lima deal would not achieve the stated aim. “The outcome here does little to break the world from a path to 3 degrees warming or higher,” Oxfam said in a statement.

Robert Stavins responds to such criticisms. He argues that “these well-intentioned advocates mistakenly focus on the short-term change in emissions among participating countries … when it is the long-term change in global emissions that matters”:

They ignore the geographic scope of participation, and do not recognize that — given the stock nature of the problem — what is most important is long-term action. Each agreement is no more than one step to be followed by others. And most important now for ultimate success later is a sound foundation, which is what the Lima decision can provide.

(Photo: Environmental well wishes are seen written on a wall on December 13, 2014 in Lima, as work continued on the final draft of a UN climate agreement. By Cris Bouroncle/AFP/Getty Images)

Dick Cheney’s Moral Standard

by Dish Staff

Like Andrew, Conor Friedersdorf is deeply troubled by it:

Once 9/11 happened, Dick Cheney ceased to believe that the CIA should be subject to the U.S. Constitution, statutes passed by Congress, international treaties, or moral prohibitions against torture. Those standards would be cast aside. In their place, moral relativism would reign. Any action undertaken by the United States would be subject to this test: Is it morally equivalent to what Al Qaeda did on 9/11? Is it as bad as murdering roughly 3,000 innocent people? If not, then no one should criticize it, let alone investigate, charge and prosecute the CIA. Did a prisoner freeze to death? Were others anally raped? Well, what if they were?

If it cannot be compared with 9/11, if it is not morally equivalent, then it should not be verboten.

That is the moral standard Cheney is unabashedly invoking on national television. He doesn’t want the United States to honor norms against torture. He doesn’t want us to abide by Ten Commandments, or to live up to the values in the Declaration of Independence, or to be restrained by the text of the Constitution. Instead, Cheney would have us take Al Qaeda as our moral and legal measuring stick. Did America torture dozens of innocents? So what. 9/11 was worse.

Tolkien On Adapting His Novels

by Dish Staff

With the last installment of The Hobbit about to hit American theaters, The Telegraph pulled a long profile of J.R.R. Tolkien from their archives. The entire piece makes for fascinating reading, but his thoughts on turning the novels into films seem worth noting:

Tolkien receives innumerable offers for film rights, musical-comedy rights, TV rights, puppetry rights. A jigsaw-puzzle company has asked permission to produce a Ring puzzle, a soap-maker to soap-sculpt Ring characters. Tolkien worshippers are outraged by these crass approaches. “Please,” wrote a 17-year-old girl, “don’t let them make a movie out of your Ring. It would be like putting Disneyland into the Grand Canyon.”

The song cycle, the only commercial venture so far, began when Donald Swann, half of the “At the Drop of a Hat” team, set to music six of the poems which punctuate the Ring. One is in Elvish.

When we asked Tolkien how Elvish should be sung, he replied, “Like Gregorian chants.” Then, in a wavering churchly counter-tenor, he intoned the first lines of the farewell song of Galadriel, the Elf Queen:

Ai! laurië lantar lassi súrinen,

Yéni únótime ve radar aldaron!

He feels strongly that the Ring should not be filmed: “You can’t cramp narrative into dramatic form. It would be easier to film The Odyssey. Much less happens in it. Only a few storms.”

Torture’s Partisan Divide

by Dish Staff

It’s massive:

Jane Mayer fears that “torture is becoming just another partisan issue”:

This wasn’t always the case—it was Ronald Reagan who signed the U.N. Convention Against Torture, in 1988. But polls show both a growing acceptance of the practice and a widening divide along party lines. “It’s becoming a lot like the death penalty,” [political science professor Darius] Rejali said.

The 1975 Church Committee report, which was conducted following revelations of, among other things, covert operations to assassinate foreign leaders, was, until now, the best-known public airing of C.I.A. practices. According to Loch K. Johnson, a professor of political science at the University of Georgia, who was a special assistant to Senator Frank Church, its findings were broadly accepted across the political spectrum. “No one challenged it,” he said.

She argues “there was a way to address the matter that might have avoided much of the partisan trivialization”:

In a White House meeting in early 2009, Greg Craig, President Obama’s White House Counsel, recommended the formation of an independent commission. Nearly every adviser in the room endorsed the idea, including such national-security hawks as Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, Secretary of Homeland Security Janet Napolitano, and the President’s chief of staff, Rahm Emanuel. Leon Panetta, the C.I.A. director at the time, also supported it.

Obama, however, said that he didn’t want to seem to be taking punitive measures against his predecessor, apparently because he still hoped to reach bipartisan agreement on issues such as closing Guantánamo.

And look at how well that turned out. Allahpundit, looking at the above chart, ponders the partisan split:

Both sides are way more comfortable with sleep deprivation and hitting a prisoner than they are with sticking one in a de facto coffin for a week or rectally feeding hunger-strikers. You can tease out a certain logic to that. Practices that the average joe can relate to, like being slapped or deprived of sleep, are more acceptable; practices that are more baroque, like trapping a guy in a box for days on end, or that involve some sort of sexual humiliation, like forced nudity or threats of sexual violence, are out of the ordinary and more likely to be seen as sadistic. (Note how there’s more support in both parties for actual violence against a detainee than threatening to use physical or sexual violence against him. It’s the “sexual” part of the question that produces that result, I bet.)

The one outlier is waterboarding, another baroque practice but one that’s acceptable to many Republicans and a bit more acceptable to Democrats than the box is. Why is that? Maybe it’s because waterboarding’s become familiar over time after so much public debate about it. Maybe it’s because GOPers know it’s closely linked to Bush and Cheney and feel a partisan tug to defend it. Or maybe it’s that lots of righties remain unconvinced that being waterboarded is as terrible as it’s supposed to be, at least compared to being enclosed in a coffin-sized crate for days.

As things stand, Steve M. bets that the next Republican president will torture:

I don’t know if the gloves are going to come off again on the first day of the next GOP presidency, but if we have a Sidney siege with a Republican in the White House and any of the perpetrators are captured alive, it seems likely to me that the waterboarding equipment is coming out of mothballs.

Waldman wants the question raised during the next primary:

My guess is that if asked directly, the GOP presidential candidates would say, “That’s all in the past.” But at the very least, we ought to get them on record now making clear whether they would ever consider using torture again.

Cat Lady Conquers Political Blog

by Michelle Dean

I am both flattered and apprehensive to be playing the role of one half of Andrew Sullivan for you this week. (The other half belongs to Will Wilkinson.) I’m going to be presumptuous and say I suspect I’m here to represent the left-hand portion of Andrew’s psyche. I started out, years ago, writing mostly for The Awl. More recently I’ve been writing for Gawker and The Guardian. Though I’ve had my fair share of mud thrown at me online, few have ever accused me of anything like libertarianism. Or even centrism. Blame it on my being born and raised in the heathen socialist wilds of Canada, if you like.

Introductions are awkward so let’s keep this short: I do a lot of culture writing, some of it criticism, some of it journalism. But given the choice, I’d write mostly about the dead. I like history. I also like books, though my preference skews to old, weird books. I know way too much about the history of American magazines. And I really like old headlines.

When forced to consider more contemporary matters, I usually natter on about feminism and women’s issues, about crime and criminal justice, and about the law more generally. In a previous life I was a lawyer of the worst kind, meaning a corporate lawyer at a white-shoe law firm. I’ve felt the need, since, to pay off some karmic debts.

At the moment I’m in the process of finishing a book about women critics and intellectuals from Dorothy Parker to Janet Malcolm. I call it Sharp: The Women Who Made An Art of Having an Opinion. It’ll be published sometime in 2016.

I also have what most of the internet seems to agree is a very attractive cat. I promise not to write about her too much this week.

That Other Rape Crisis

by Dish Staff

Rape on college campuses is undoubtedly a real and serious problem, but as Michael Brendan Dougherty reminds us, it pales in comparison to rape in prisons, where victims get no publicity, no sympathy, and no justice. Hell, we even joke about it, even in children’s cartoons (as seen above):

In prison, men may become the victim of repeated gang rapes. Prisoners can be locked into cells with the men who prey on them. Some live under the constant threat of sexual assault for decades. Their efforts to report their rape are ignored or even punished, both by prison personnel and an inmate culture that destroys “snitches.” The threat of rape is so pervasive it causes some inmates to “consent” to sex with certain prisoners or officers as a way of avoiding rape by others.

Acceptance of prison rape is a stinking corruption. No conception of justice can include plunging criminals into an anarchic world of sexual terror. And obviously it thwarts any possibility of a rehabilitative justice that aims to restore criminals to lawful society. Inmates are not improved or better integrated into society through physical and psychological torture. Prison rape also vitiates any sense of retributive justice, since rape is not a proper punishment for a crime. Allowing prison rape is just a vindictive horror, and when accepted under the name of punishment makes criminals the victims of justice.

Sadly, some Senators are looking to defang the Prison Rape Elimination Act:

PREA required states to certify by May of 2014 that they were in compliance with the standards, or promise that they would eventually comply. States that refuse to do either can be penalized with a loss of five percent of their federal funding for prison-related purposes. But a proposal that originated in the Senate Judiciary Committee would almost completely eliminate financial penalties for states that defy the rape prevention law. The proposal, written by Senator John Cornyn, Republican of Texas — the most vocally defiant state — was agreed on by the committee in an after-midnight session in September and was attached to an unrelated bill.

The bill carrying the PREA amendment failed to pass, but members of the National Prison Rape Elimination Commission, a federal body that spent years developing the PREA standards, say efforts are already underway to reintroduce the amendment during the next legislative session.

A reader’s story of prison rape posted here. Update from another:

Thanks for posting that piece on prison rape. I thought you might be interested in the following scene from Rectify, a TV drama about a death row prisoner who is exonerated after nearly two decades in jail. It features the main character, Daniel, talking to his stepbrother, Ted, about his experience of being raped in prison. This scene conveys a sense of visceral agony that reports and columns cannot and it helped me realize the extent to which prison rape is a silent crisis:

For a riveting memoir on the subject, check out Fish by T.J. Parsell, who was gang-raped upon entering prison at the age of 17.

A Mixed Bag For Marijuana

by Dish Staff

Congress’s spending bill interferes with the legalization of pot in DC. But Josh Voorhees focuses on another provision in the bill, which “stops the Justice Department from spending a dime to prosecute patients or medical marijuana dispensaries that are acting in accordance with state law but running afoul of federal ones”:

In shear terms of people impacted, the medical provision will dwarf that of the more publicized D.C. ban, even assuming the latter survives a potential legal challenge. The District is home to roughly 640,000 people; California, one of 23 states where medical pot is legal, is home to more than 38 million. Forcing the federal government to respect state medical marijuana laws has long been a goal of the legalization movement, but one that had previously proved unattainable.

He finds it telling that “a sweeping provision that could fundamentally reshape how the federal government treats medical marijuana slipped through with hardly a peep”:

That just goes to show how far the battle lines have shifted in the favor of the pro-pot crowd and suggests that, in spite of the potential setback in the District itself, the future for their side in Washington is a brighter one.

Jon Walker isn’t as excited:

Having Congress not longer actively opposing medical marijuana is a big victory for the reform movement, but not a complete solution. The provision is only a short-term and incomplete fix. Medical marijuana is still technically illegal under federal law which will continue to causes issues with things like taxes for medical marijuana business. The provision also only applies to this one year funding bill.

David Borden unpacks the new rules:

What will this mean on the ground? It should mean that DEA and other branches of the Dept. of Justice can no longer threaten medical marijuana providers (or more theoretically, patients) with arrest or prosecution, and that landlords should no longer face the threat of asset forfeiture for property being rented to medical marijuana businesses. But the precise language, which focuses on states’ implementating medical marijuana systems, could be argued as applying more narrowly, giving reassurance to state officials about their participation but not going further. Another concern is that a prosecutor could argue, for example, that a given marijuana business is not operating in strict accordance with a state’s law. Our perspective in the movement is that that determination should be up to state authorities, not federal, but that’s not necessarily the perspective of federal law enforcement. Those are some reasons why it remains to be seen just how thoroughly and reliably the protections that the new law provides will turn out to be, and these questions are being debated right now.

Meanwhile, Walker urges Obama to intervene on DC’s behalf:

If the Obama administration uses their power to move marijuana to Schedule II or III, this legal impediment on D.C. taxing and regulating marijuana would theoretically be removed. Potentially, there might still be a legal fight over whether raw marijuana would count as a tetrahydrocannabinols derivative, but one can argue that legal term is meant to apply only to newly-discovered and potentially dangerous synthetic tetrahydrocannabinols derivatives, which are often being sold as “incense.” Once again, if both the D.C. Council and the Obama administration share support for this interruption of the law, any legal challenge is unlikely to succeed.]

And Dylan Matthews, who voted for legalization in DC, wants his vote counted:

It’s easy to dismiss the importance of ensuring marijuana legalization in DC. Pot policy tends to be treated as a laughing matter, and DC is admittedly the third smallest state/quasi-state by population. But it’s still, substantively, among the most important riders in the CRomnibus. DC had a higher marijuana possession arrest rate in 2010than any other state (perhaps understandably, as it’s the only city-state): 846 arrests per 100,000 residents, which works out to about 5,091 arrests total.

That’s over 5,000 people a year paying fines, doing community service, and going through probation; it’s over 5,000 people who’ll forever have to check the box on job applications asking if they’ve ever been arrested, among many other consequences for employment, government benefits, child custody, and more. DC also has the second biggest gap between black and white arrests of any state: 1,489 arrests per 100,000 black residents versus 174 per 100,000 white residents. Black Washingtonians are over eight times likelier to be arrested for the same crime, when there’s no evidence of any racial gaps in actual marijuana usage.

(Photo: A man purchases medical marijuana, the first legal sale, at Capital City Care in Washington, DC on July 29, 2013. By Linda Davidson / The Washington Post via Getty Images)

“Cat Lovers Killed Cat Fancy”

by Dish Staff

That’s what Abraham Riesman concludes in his post-mortem for the magazine:

In their defense, they had no idea they were doing it. But in recent years, the nature of cat adoration (and I must offer full disclosure here: I am the parent of two cats) has changed radically. Though Cat Fancy tried to adapt, it never totally broke free from its origins in a different era of cat enthusiasm. To understand the seismic shift in cat culture, you can start by picking apart Cat Fancy‘s name. It used to be much more than a whimsical reference to the enjoyment of felines. When the magazine launched in 1965, animal lovers were very familiar with something called “the cat fancy.” The term referred to a connoisseurlike approach to cats: following professional cat shows, maintaining directories of cat breeders, and recognizing the importance of purebred bloodlines. “Back then, the people who had all the knowledge tended to be the people who were showing cats, breeding cats, everything like that,” said Melissa Kauffman, senior editorial director for I-5. …

[R]eaders of Cat Fancy in its early decades would likely be aghast at the shape of today’s cat passions. Modern feline icons like Grumpy Cat and Lil Bub are mutts with genetic deformities. They wouldn’t have made it past the front door at a Golden Age cat show. And their many public appearances are filled with fans who would disdain anyone who gets a cat from a breeder rather than a shelter.

Here’s what Cat Fancy‘s replacement, Catster, looks like:

https://twitter.com/BoingBoing/status/540688579933241345

Riesman again:

But beyond the covers, what will Catster the magazine be? Much of that won’t be clear until the first issue hits stands in February, but all evidence indicates that it will be extremely photo-oriented, very lighthearted, filled with lists and confessionals, and committed to treating cat ownership as a lifestyle rather than a hobby or a medical burden.

“Catster is for the cat-selfie generation,” Huey-Steiner said. “It’s for people who consider cats an integral part of their social lives. It’s about fun things and knowing that cats rule the roost.” That means lists like “19 Crazy Cat Superstitions” and “Litter-Box Accidents Waiting to Happen,” as well as pieces like “How to Cat-ify Your Cubicle.” There will still be some breed information and veterinary advice, but neither will be a major focus. And then there’s the celebrity aspect. “We want to capitalize on the role that cats play in the lives of celebrities, whether that’s somebody like a Taylor Swift and how she talks about her cats or someone else,” Huey-Steiner said. “You’d never see that in Cat Fancy.”

(Image of Cat Fancy‘s cover from February 1969)

The History Of French Self-Hatred

by Dish Staff

Alexander Stille describes Éric Zemmour’s book, Le Suicide Français, as “a wildly over-the-top broadside condemnation of everything that has happened in the past fifty years, such as birth control, abortion, student protests, sexual liberation, women’s rights, gay rights, immigration from Africa, American consumer capitalism, left-wing intellectualism, the European Union”:

In Zemmour’s view, both the traditional French left and right (really, everyone but the French far right) have, through a mixture of blindness and cowardice, allowed for the dismantling of a national edifice based on paternal authority. It is highly revealing that Zemmour uses the term “virilité,” or virility, some twenty-three times in his five-hundred page book, suggesting a certain fixation.

The popular success of “Le Suicide Français” is in keeping with a well-established tradition: it takes its place on a long shelf of books that have declared the decline or death of France.

As early as 1783, as Sean M. Quinlan notes, in “The Great Nation in Decline,” the French began to churn out tracts like one which laments that “a flagging, weak and less vivacious generation has replaced, without succeeding, that brilliant [Frankish] race, those men of combat and hunting, whose bodies were more robust, cleaner and of greater height than those of today’s civilized peoples.” The French defeat in the Franco-Prussian war, in 1871, set off a spate of self-flagellation, with writers decrying a declining birth rate, an inferior education system, and moral bankruptcy. Although nostalgists like Zemmour consider the late nineteenth century a golden age, when France emerged as an imperial power and a center of cultural greatness, his counterparts in that period saw a cesspool of effeminacy and decline. One of the big books of 1892 was “Degeneration,” whose author, Max Nordau, was Hungarian but lived most of his life in Paris. He excoriates Émile Zola and writes that the Impressionists can only be understood in terms of “hysteria and degeneracy.”

Stille tries to put things in perspective:

France is no longer an empire, but it is a prosperous medium-sized country with an extremely high standard of living. It is no longer the world’s cultural center, but it has far more influence than most societies. France remains among the top twenty countries by virtually all measures of the World Bank’s Human Development Index. Life expectancy in France has increased from fifty to nearly eighty-two years in the past century, even as France’s global role has shrunk. Aging population, declining birth rates, slower growth, a more skeptical attitude toward authority, and greater gender equality—those are all typical of advanced, post-industrial societies, not unique to France.