Category: The Dish

Suicide Leaves Behind Nothing, Ctd

by Dish Staff

A few more readers share their stories:

A close friend – also a funny, intelligent, well-liked guy – killed himself four years ago. One of his (and my) best friends said at his memorial:

Bob was one of the smartest people I ever met. He never did anything without thinking all the way through. I hate his last decision and I don’t agree with it, but I have to believe that he did the right thing – for Bob.

This was a revelation for me. I think when we speak about suicide as a failure of ego, or the end of a losing battle, or a selfish choice, etc. we do a dishonor to the dead. Bob did a thing he chose to do: suicide is a conscious act. In denying the logic of that act we deny the dead the very last agency they had.

I know there are biochemical reasons for depression and in that sense we can say a suicidal person lacks volition, but this seems even harsher to me:

not only can a depressive not control their emotions or thoughts, they can’t control their behavior. Perhaps they can’t, but how does it help them to remind them of the fact? Are they zombies? If they were “fighting” depression, is this how they’d want to be remembered: the depression “won?” A suicidal person is making a choice, and it’s usually not a choice about us, the survivors.

In circumstances where someone seizes the reins of their own death deliberately, publicly, and without the stain of depression – living wills, advance directives, hospice care, denying care, assisted suicide – we don’t beat our chests about their selfishness. Indeed we rarely use the word “suicide,” and often speak about their “brave choices.” People usually disagree about these choices as well, but they seldom deny that the person making them has the appropriate agency to do so. The difference is striking.

Another reader quotes John Tabin:

Those who’ve never been suicidal may not realize how hollow the insistence that “there’s always hope” can sound.  The very essence of depression is the absence of hope.

In my own experience, it’s worse than that.  It’s the conviction that hope itself is poisonous.  That it’s a lie you have to burn your insides to tell yourself.  That it’s every bit as big a lie as hopelessness.

On a different note, another thing people don’t understand about severe depression is that it’s a physical experience.  Aside from the lack of energy, which seems to be universal, the physical aspect is different for different people.  For some people I’ve known, depression physically hurts.  For me, it takes the form of a hollowness in the stomach.  At my worst, in the bout that eventually led to my diagnosis, I could not eat at all.  The very idea of food made me sick.  I ended up in the hospital with an IV, having all sorts of tests done, and losing 20% of my body weight.  It was months before I could eat any but the blandest of foods.

Severe depression is both mentally and physically exhausting.  You just have nothing left for anybody.  No intelligence, no humor, no counsel, no sympathy, no love, no hate, no words, no nothing.  Those things belong to persons, and you have no personhood left.  You are an empty sieve.

Whenever I hear people say suicide is the most selfish act a person can take, I just shake my head.  By the time a “person” has reached the point of realizing — not “thinking,” because that’s not how they experience it —realizing existence is meaningless hurt for which the only solution is nonexistence and they can no longer stand the pain, they have no personhood left.  There’s only the most tiny and shriveled remnants of a self in there: a desiccated pea in an empty cavern.

It’s not selfish at all.  Not in any sense in which we use the word, anyway.

Read the whole thread on depression and suicide here.

Holding Cops Accountable

by Dish Staff

Michael Bell’s powerful article on the shooting of his son demonstrates just how hard it is:

I have known the name of the policeman who killed my son, Michael, for ten years. And he is still working on the force in Kenosha.

Yes, there is good reason to think that many of these unjustifiable homicides by police across the country are racially motivated. But there is a lot more than that going on here. Our country is simply not paying enough attention to the terrible lack of accountability of police departments and the way it affects all of us—regardless of race or ethnicity. Because if a blond-haired, blue-eyed boy — that was my son, Michael — can be shot in the head under a street light with his hands cuffed behind his back, in front of five eyewitnesses (including his mother and sister), and his father was a retired Air Force lieutenant colonel who flew in three wars for his country — that’s me — and I still couldn’t get anything done about it, then Joe the plumber and Javier the roofer aren’t going to be able to do anything about it either.

Ed Krayewski criticizes how “none of the establishment activists who have attached themselves to the situation in Ferguson seem to be doing anything to focus people’s attentions on the systemic problems behind police brutality, starting with the propensity of most fatal police shootings to be ruled justified in a process shrouded in government secrecy and privilege”:

We shouldn’t have to read these kinds of stories and speculate about what happened, there ought to be a transparent process trusted by the public that can come to an understandable conclusion, whether you end up agreeing or not.

 Instead, cops and prosecutors act almost like a team during investigations of police shootings—it shouldn’t be surprising given that they do operate as a team in pretty much every other part of their jobs. And police generally control the narrative of a shooting, painting themselves in the most positive light possible and victims in the most negative light possible. Without an engaged national media they often get away with it.

Suderman examines Missouri’s standard for deadly force:

So, the suspect doesn’t have to be armed, and doesn’t even have to present an immediate threat. Instead, if an officer believes that there’s no other way to make the arrest happen, and also believes that the suspect has attempted to commit a felony, the officer is justified in using deadly force. If a cop wants to arrest someone, and has a “reasonable” belief that the person has even tried to commit a felony, he or she is allowed to kill.

That seems like a rather lax standard, and one that would give a pass to practically any arresting officer who could plausibly claim to have believed that the suspect had attempted or committed a felony offense.

LaDoris Hazzard Cordell wants more restrictions on the use of force:

First, police departments must broaden the definition of reasonable use of force. In 1989 the U.S. Supreme Court in Graham v. Connor defined the reasonable use of force as force “judged from the perspective of a reasonable officer on the scene, and its calculus must embody an allowance for the fact that police officers are often forced to make split-second decisions about the amount of force necessary in a particular situation.” That definition has been interpreted narrowly by law enforcement agencies across the country to mean that the reasonableness of the force is limited to an examination of only the amount of force used in the moment. The conduct of officers right before the use of force is never examined. Under this definition, officers who provoke individuals and officers who escalate situations get a pass.

The definition of what constitutes the reasonable use of force must be expanded to include the circumstances leading up to the use of force, so that the inquiry into the misconduct sweeps in whatever the officer did prior to the decision to  use force, along with the conduct of the victim.

Max Ehrenfreund considers what Obama should do:

Thursday, Rep. Hank Johnson (D-Ga.) proposed a bill that would prohibit the Pentagon from transferring some military-grade equipment under this program. Obama doesn’t have to wait for Congress, though. In the meantime, he has at least two options: instruct the Pentagon to to keep more of its armored vehicles and automatic weapons to itself, and require applicants for Homeland Security grant money to report more precisely how they use the funds.

But Waldman expects such steps to have a relatively minor impact:

The militarization of the country’s police forces is something that has been growing for a couple of decades, fueled first by the War on Drugs and then by the insane idea that the police in every hamlet in every corner of the country needed to be able to wage battles against Al Qaeda strike teams. Congress could turn off the spigot that pours this equipment into these communities, but unless the federal government starts repossessing the equipment it already distributed (highly unlikely, to say the least), police departments all over the country will still be awash in military gear.

And that’s the biggest challenge: the problems the Ferguson case highlights are widely distributed, through thousands of police departments and millions of interaction between cops and citizens. The federal government can respond in a limited way to what we’ve all seen, but its actions will go only so far.

The Tyranny Of The Anonymous

by Jonah Shepp

Jack Shafer rails on news outlets for being way too generous with anonymity for their sources:

An Aug 13 Times piece noted that U.S. administration officials “spoke on condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to speak publicly.” This justification has become so popular in modern journalism that when you drop it into Nexis, the database burps and informs you that the query will return more than 3,000 stories containing the passage or something very close to it. If a lower anonymity bar than “was not authorized to speak publicly” exists, I cannot imagine it. Very few people are authorized to speak publicly in government, corporations, and institutions. Does that mean that anybody who has accepted a muzzle can expect anonymity from the press? The huge numbers coughed up by Nexis support that notion.

Another anonymity justification that rattles Nexis’ foundations is the source who “spoke on the condition of anonymity because of the sensitivity of the topic.” On Aug. 12, the sensitive-topic source was an Iraqi official speaking the Washington Post. And what sort irreplaceable information did the official impart? “We are entering a potential clash. … On the ground, [there are] tanks and armored vehicles. It’s a very complicated situation with the army.” Yes, yes, tanks, armored vehicles, and a complication situation! Very sensitive information. For giving the paper these gems, the source deserves placement in the Post‘s witness protection program.

I learned a lot about the perniciousness of anonymous sources while working as a newspaper editor in Jordan, a country whose press isn’t censored or brutalized as it is in, say, China or Iran, but isn’t exactly “free” either. I can’t tell you how many times I had some variant of the following conversation:

Me: Who’s this “source in the ministry who declined to be named”?

Reporter: Well, actually, it’s the minister himself. But he doesn’t want to announce this officially yet, so he asked me not to use his name.

Me: That’s dishonest.

Reporter: I know, but if I quote him by name he’ll get mad at me and stop answering my phone calls.

Me: …

…and so of course we’d quote the minister anonymously. The lame explanations Shafer cites (“not authorized to speak to the press” and “because of the sensitivity of the topic”) appeared in the paper daily, and still do. But that’s not because The Jordan Times is specifically lacking in journalistic integrity: rather, journalistic integrity is simply not an option in a country where the anonymous government source is often the only source available, and where looking for other, better sources can get a journalist in all sorts of legal or extralegal trouble.

Of course, hardly anybody in the government is “authorized to speak to the press”, but leaking information – or misinformation – through anonymous sources is a great way to establish a veneer of transparency without any real accountability. It’s also a great way to mislead the public that a source is speaking against the government’s wishes, when in fact he is revealing exactly what he’s been instructed to reveal. One of the most important lessons I took away from that experience is that crafty, illiberal governments can still exercise significant control over an ostensibly “independent” press, through vague laws, self-censorship, “soft containment”, and anonymity as the rule rather than the exception. The payoff comes in the form of praise and aid from Western governments for whom press freedom in name alone is too often good enough.

In light of that lesson, the scourge of government anonymity in the American press is even more unsettling. While Shafer’s right to criticize the NYT and the WaPo for lowering the bar here, what worries me most is that the leak-by-anonymous-source method of engagement with the media has become standard operating procedure in Washington. A government that can’t tell the public what it’s up to without hiding behind vague statements from nameless officials is simply not to be trusted, and a press that goes along with it is not quite as “free” as we’d like to think.

Ferguson From Abroad

by Dish Staff

National news in the US is world news everywhere else, and the continued chaos in Ferguson, MO, is drawing some international attention, including a brief Twitter lecture from the Iranian Supreme Leader on America’s moral bankruptcy. Zack Beauchamp finds that more than a little ironic:

The Iranian government itself does not treat minorities particularly well. Take Iran’s Kurds, for example. About 6.5 million Kurds live in western Iran, but not in peace. A 2009 Human Rights Watch report documents widespread restrictions on Kurdish free speech (like banning books), denial of due process rights to Kurds suspected of political dissidence, and torture of Kurdish detainees. Dozens of Kurds are on death row, often convicted of political offenses.

But here’s the catch: Khamenei, awful as he may be, still has a point about Ferguson. Despite the staggering hypocrisy of his tweet, he’s correct that the police conduct in Ferguson is unconscionable and racist. The United States doesn’t, or shouldn’t, want human rights-abusing enemies to be able to point to things like this to whitewash their own abuses.

It’s not just Iran, either. Josh Kovensky takes note of how Ferguson is being covered in the Russian media:

An RT article, “Protests Against Police Tyranny have Spread Across the Main Cities of the USA,” suggested that the nation is on the brink of chaos as the “rage of Americans … spreads across the entire country.” Sputink i Pogrom, a nationalist newsmagazine, tweeted out, “What do you think? Should Russia grant Obama asylum in Rostov after the Ferguson Maidanites occupy Washington?” And Svobodnaya Pressa, a popular Russian news website, ran an article calling the Ferguson protests “AfroMaidan,” in reference to Euromaidan protests in Kiev, Ukraine, earlier this year. 

In that Svobodnaya Pressa article, Sergei Bespalov, the docent of the humanities division of the Russian Academy of Agriculture and State Service, attributes the events in Ferguson in part to the “fact” that white Americans have “prejudice towards African-Americans … in their blood.” Bespalov predicts further unrest, adding that “if [Obamacare] is cancelled, this could … provoke racial conflicts,” and that “a significant part of African-Americans and Latinos could perceive [Obamacare’s cancellation] as a challenge from the white majority.”

This coverage harkens back to the way Ameircan racism was portrayed in Soviet propaganda during the Cold War, Karoun Demirjian adds:

The United States’ problems with racism have long been a favored topic for Russians, dating back to the heyday of the Soviet Union. During the 1920s and 1930s, Soviet leaders pointed to the existence of Jim Crow laws in the United States as a way of asserting the moral superiority of the Soviet Union. Racism, which was illegal in the Soviet Union, was deemed a systematic byproduct of capitalism. In the civil rights era, especially, the Soviet Union used American anti-black racism as fodder to challenge the United States’ claims to leadership of the “free world.”

Soviet and modern-day Russia alike have had their own problems with racism as well, of course – to the point where Russia was recently rated by one publication as one of the worst countries for people of color to travel in. But that stigma doesn’t cause the Russian government to pull any punches with the United States over the situation in Ferguson – or to refrain from using it as an opportunity to highlight America’s race problems to their fullest extent.

In light of this international scrutiny, Max Fisher’s tongue-in-cheek “if it happened there” version of the Ferguson story is particularly relevant:

Missouri, far-removed from the glistening capital city of Washington, is ostensibly ruled by a charismatic but troubled official named Jay Nixon, who has appeared unable to successfully intervene and has resisted efforts at mediation from central government officials. Complicating matters, President Obama is himself a member of the minority sect protesting in Ferguson, which is ruled overwhelmingly by members of America’s majority “white people” sect.

Analysts who study the opaque American political system, in which all provinces are granted semi-autonomous self-rule, warned that Nixon may seize the opportunity to move against weakened municipal rulers in Ferguson. Missouri’s provincial legislature, a traditional “shura council,” is dominated by the opposition faction. Though fears of a military coup remain low, it is still unknown how Nixon’s allies within the capital will respond should the crisis continue. Now, international leaders say they fear the crisis could spread.

How We Turned Our Cops Into Soldiers

by Dish Staff

The NYT has a great visualization on the surplus military gear being funneled to police departments. Here is one map, of several:

Assault Rifles

 

Shirley Li provides background on the 1033 program, the “Department of Defense initiative that channels surplus military equipment to state and local police departments.”:

The 1033 program reached as far as it did because of its attractive promise of sophisticated military-grade equipment and easy access, Cato Institute Project on Criminal Justice Director Tim Lynch told The Wire. “Police in these small police departments, they go to their chief and say, ‘Look, the Pentagon’s going to give away this equipment. If we don’t grab it now, the next county will. We need it just in case,'” Lynch said. “No police chief will say no, so they acquire it and put it in a warehouse so most people, even people in the city council, aren’t aware of it.” …

“I think the 1033 program should be shut down,” he told The Wire. “I think that will restore some common sense to these agencies around the country because when they have to spend their own money, it changes the dynamic. They have to decide whether they need a new police car or a new officer or an armored vehicle from the Pentagon.”

Ingraham looks at how the wars have put the program on steroids:

In 2006, the Pentagon transferred roughly $33 million worth of goods to local agencies. By 2013 that number had risen more than tenfold, to at least $420 million. Much of this can be explained by the winding down of wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. As those missions ended, more surplus goods became available for domestic use.

Military Gear

In 2012 the Pentagon transferred 27 mine-resistant vehicles and other armored combat vehicles to local law enforcement agencies. That number jumped more than sevenfold the following year. In 2014 so far, heavy armored combat vehicles account for nearly half of the total dollar value of gear transferred to local agencies.

Annie Lowrey explains why the police were militarized:

It all starts back in 1990, a time when the country found itself with less demand for military equipment abroad and new use for it back home. Within our shores, the drug wars were escalating; gang violence was surging; and sociologists were warning of sociopathic child “superpredators.” At the same time, the military was starting to shrink as the Cold War ended. Put two and two together and you get the 1033 program, which transferred assets from the military to the police. (Here’s a capsule history.) … But here’s the thing. Since 1990, according to Department of Justice statistics, the United States has become a vastly safer place, at least in terms of violent crime.

Drum adds:

We’ve spent the past two decades militarizing our police forces to respond to problems that never materialized, and now we’re stuck with them. We don’t need commando teams and SWAT units in every town in America to deal with either terrorism or an epidemic of crime, so they get used for other things instead. And that’s how we end up with debacles like Ferguson.

Police militarization was a mistake. You can argue that perhaps we didn’t know that at the time. No one knew in 1990 that crime was about to begin a dramatic long-term decline, and no one knew in 2001 that domestic terrorism would never become a serious threat. But we know now. There’s no longer even a thin excuse for arming our police forces this way.

Ezra joins the conversation:

Police get all this equipment and, as a condition of the program, need to use it within a year. What they don’t get is training. The ACLU’s Kara Dansky, who authored an important report on police militarization, told Vox she was “not aware of any training that the government provides in terms of use of the equipment,” or of “any oversight in terms of safeguards regarding the use of the equipment by the Defense Department.”

So police have all this military equipment, very little training on how to use it, and a requirement that they deploy it within a year. But the problems they were supposed to use the equipment against have either eased or vanished.

Ken Snyder, a reader over at Rod Dreher’s place, spotlights the role that the public has played:

[T]he important point is that I think this is what we citizens wanted. We want the police to be ready and able to deal with terrorists and active shooters. So these are the police that we want, but only in very specific situations. So citizens are shocked to see that equipment and, if not tactics, that same mindset applied in situations like Ferguson, and the many examples that are shared across web sites and local media. But once the police have this equipment, training, and mindset, as a practical matter, the citizens of a particular community don’t get to decide when they utilize it. We leave that up to the ‘experts’ who have ‘all of the information’. I think in some ways this is just another facet of the ongoing discussion in our country about NSA spying, etc: we want security, but at what price?

 

 

 

 

Israel Is Singled Out By Israel’s Defenders

by Freddie deBoer

One of the strangest and most fundamentally disingenuous lines of criticism used to attack critics of Israel’s brutal occupation of Palestine is that we are “singling Israel out,” that we pay special attention to Israel in a world of bad actors, and that this is indicative of obsession and, of course, anti-Semitism. The accusation is illegitimate on its face; America’s relationship to Israel, in terms of monetary aid, military aid, cooperation between intelligence services, and diplomatic protection at the UN and elsewhere, is unlike any other in the world. Read The Intercept’s exhaustive reporting on the incredible degree to which the United States supports Israel’s government and military. There is no relationship in American diplomacy –none– that is comparable to that between the United States and Israel. It is a wholly unique connection, unique in the depth of our support and in how unconditional that support is. The incredibly powerful Israeli lobby in American politics, which has earned very close to unanimous support for the Israeli government in Congress, has singled out Israel through those efforts. That’s just reality.

Our moral responsibility to Israel is different from that of antagonist nations because we have a hand in Israel’s actions. George Scialabba summarized this case recently:

The anti-imperialist/anti-totalitarian distinction is misleading because, broadly speaking, one side (Cockburn’s) is protesting crimes that their readers can readily, as citizens, do something about, and in fact are ultimately responsible for, while the other side (Berman’s) is not. Abuses by Castro and Chavez, and crimes by Saddam and Iran’s ayatollahs, are undoubtedly real. But the U.S. government did/does not support those regimes and was/is not responsible for their crimes.

I would argue that this is both basic political theory and basic morality. We bear moral responsibility for those things that we can control. I am a citizen of the United States, and the United States makes Israeli apartheid possible. I am therefore responsible for it in a way that I am not responsible for the theocratic thugs in Tehran or Saudi Arabia. It’s just a fundamental failure to understand the meaning of responsibility to suggest that we are too focused on Israel in comparison to other bad actors. And it’s the self-same lobby that accuses us of singling Israel out that has done everything to make this relationship unique.

So too with our media. It’s bizarre to read pieces like, for example, this insufferable piece of ethnic discourse policing by Shmuel Rosner, arguing that American Jews have a responsibility to censor themselves when it comes to Israel, and maintain the view that it is Israel’s critics who are singling Israel out. Rosner asks American Jews to treat Israel differently than any other issue in the broad sweep of our democratic conversation. He is charging them with prioritizing the ethnic and religious priorities he has invented for them over their democratic responsibilities. Shmuel Rosner has singled Israel out. Is Rosner guilty of anti-Semitism? Or consider this piece by Tim Murphy of New York Magazine. Murphy’s piece asserts that, in New York politics, Israel is the third rail, and he quotes many New Yorkers who feel that way. Is he making it up? Are they? Is he anti-Semitic to acknowledge this dynamic? If this is an accurate depiction of a fundamental difference in how Israel is discussed, how are critics of Israel the ones doing the singling out?

I know many fearless and combative political people who simply never speak or write about Israel. They have weighed the risks, they tell me, and find them too dangerous to make speaking out worth it. That is a kind of singling out, and one which comes not from critics but from the toxic rhetorical environment that Israel’s most aggressive defenders have created, through the constant conflation of criticism of Israel with anti-Semitism. I have often asked professors and mentors about how to engage politically while building an academic career. I have been counseled in many different ways on this question. But what is striking is the number of professors and mentors, Jewish and not alike, who have said to me “just not Israel.” Engage, debate, invite controversy– but not about Israel. Yes, I suppose they are singling Israel out. But they are not doing so to cast aspersions on the country. Rather they are trying to counsel me in a way that they think is a matter of simple professional self-defense.

Maybe all of these people who say that criticizing Israel represents a particularly dangerous form of controversy are anti-Semitic, I don’t know. I think, instead, that Israel is “singled out” because Israel’s many powerful defenders have made the topic of Israel singular, singular in the broad sweep of American politics– singularly ugly, singularly toxic, singularly dysfunctional, singular risky.  And I also believe that Israel is singled out because of the singular hopelessness of its brutal, racist occupation, and the vast architecture of political and rhetorical defense that has been erected to justify it. It’s the bleak reality of the ritualistic punishment and oppression of a living people, in the name of defending “the region’s only democracy.” That’s singular.

ISIS Driven Out Of Mosul Dam

by Dish Staff

US airstrikes have helped Kurdish forces recapture the Mosul Dam area from ISIS militants:

“Mosul Dam was liberated completely,” Ali Awni, an official from Iraq’s main Kurdish party, told AFP, a statement confirmed by two other Kurdish sources. Early in the day US aircraft, for the first time including land-based bombers, carried out 14 strikes. Later, US Central Command confirmed further strikes had been carried out by “fighter and attack aircraft”.

In a letter to Congress, outlining the rationale and justification for the strikes, Obama said the integrity of the dam was crucial to the security of the US embassy in Baghdad. The US has consistently cited the security of US personnel in Baghdad as cover for its military operation to support the Kurds. Sunday’s first strikes were the first time that bombers as well as fighter jets and drones had been involved in the current air campaign, which began on 8 August alongside drops of humanitarian aid to Yazidi refugees marooned on Mount Sinjar.

If these reports are accurate, they come as a huge relief, considering the mass destruction the jihadists could cause by blowing the dam up. But Azam Ahmed adds (NYT) that ISIS’s mines are still barring access to the dam itself:

 A commander for the Kurdish pesh merga forces in the area, Gen. Omer Ibrahim, said that ISIS fighters had abandoned the dam complex and retreated to a nearby front. But the complex itself was heavily mined, meaning the pesh merga could not fully enter it and prolonging the push to fully occupy the dam. … Although a series of American airstrikes on ISIS positions near the dam had allowed Kurdish forces to reclaim nearby villages and to approach the area, Kurdish officers said the militants had slowed the progress of the military forces by planting roadside bombs.

This CENTCOM statement also appears to imply that the battle is still ongoing:

Bobby Chesney comments on the legal justification the administration is giving for our involvement:

Both humanitarian and force-protection themes appear in today’s Mosul Dam notification, of course, but the context for each is different. The dam is far from Erbil, and its fate poses no direct threat to US personnel there; the force-protection argument instead is linked to US personnel downstream in Baghdad. That’s not wholly unreasonable; my limited understanding is that a failure of the dam would cause significant problems in Baghdad. …

Perhaps more significantly, isn’t all of this argumentation pretty distant from the much more obvious motivation for this operation–i.e., that possession of the Dam was simply intolerable insofar as it substantially bolstered the ability of ISIS to control territory while also serving as a threat that could be held over Iraqi/Kurdish forces should they succeed (when the attempt inevitably comes) in ousting ISIS from Mosul? As the situation continues to unfold, I predict we will see situations in which US air support will be needed and will be provided, but that will be even more remote from the force-protection and humanitarian arguments that currently have been placed front-and-center; there have been many hints, after all, that a more robust US role may be in the offing once al-Maliki is gone.

Greenwald Derangement Syndrome And Political Mind Reading

by Freddie deBoer

Edward Snowden is a hero, in the truest sense. At the age of 29, he sacrificed a comfortable, fulfilling life, working a stable and well-paid job in Hawaii, and exposed himself to great risk—most certainly including risk to his life—out of personal conviction. Even if I were not convinced that Snowden had made the United States a more informed, more democratic, and in fact, safer country through his controlled leaks to Glenn Greenwald, Laura Poitras, and Barton Gelliman, I would admire his commitment to principles above self-interest. As it stands, I think that he has done a tremendous service for his country, in a way that the apostles of patriotism constantly invoke, and for his troubles he has been forced from his home and family, under a state of constant legal and physical threat, and reviled by many.

Many or most of my fellow travelers on the left, in my experience, support Snowden. It’s not hard to imagine why, given that he has exposed the inner workings of a key cog in the violent, invasiveGERMANY-US-RUSSIA-INTELLIGENCE-NSA-PARLIAMENT apparatus of American empire. Yet there has also been a strain of leftism that has been deeply suspicious of Snowden and sought to question, or out-and-out discredit, his work. I don’t mean natural skepticism, which we should bring to bear on any public figure, but active hostility and fear-mongering. (I’m also not talking about die-hard Democratic partisans, who object to Snowden under the simple logic that Snowden has harmed a Democratic president and is thus the enemy. I’ve spent far too much of my life debating that kind of partisanship, so I’ll just set it aside—that’s their logic, they stick to it, fine.) My interest here is instead focused on those who criticize Snowden neither because he’s undermined the national security state, as is typical of “terrorism experts” and various imperial stenographers, nor because he’s hurt Obama and Congressional Democrats. I’m talking about those who think Snowden should be distrusted or rejected because he’s, alternatively, a secret libertarian, an open libertarian, a quasi-libertarian, a crypto-libertarian, or similar.

You can find this argument all over. For a balanced, fair take, here’s Salon’s Andrew Leonard. On the other side of the ledger is this piece by Sean Wilentz of (of course) The New Republic, still the go-to magazine for establishment whining and the fetish for “legitimacy,” which at TNR tends to refer to those political opinions that have had the blessings of establishment power.  But a little Googling will show you that the subject of Snowden’s libertarianism, whether real or imagined, has attracted a great deal of attention from those who identify as part of the broad left-wing.

My response to the claim that Edward Snowden is a libertarian is simple: I don’t care. At all. It’s simply immaterial to me. I have no particular interest in his broader ideological or political beliefs. Snowden is not a candidate for President or Congress. He’s not my political czar or my personal friend. What has distinguished Snowden has been his actions, the action of releasing a small portion of a vast trove of secret government documents to the public, in order to reveal to us the extent to which our national security system has trod on our rights and on our freedom. It is of little consequence to me whether he believes in socialism or fascism or anything in between, so long as the fruits of his efforts leave us more informed and better able to at least understand how the military state has harmed us. I don’t know why that indifference to his broader politics would be surprising to anyone. I respect and value his actions, and I feel that we owe him a great debt. If he proposes political ideas that I find immoral or unwise, I will say so. There is no contradiction there.

When we’re discussing Snowden, of course, we’re also discussing Glenn Greenwald.

Since he first burst onto the scene as a vicious critic of the George W. Bush administration and its War on Terror, Greenwald has been a divisive figure, capable of moving ordinarily reserved writers into fits of anger. Like Snowden, Greenwald has been cast as a libertarian many times, and as with Snowden, this is frequently represented as a reason for a socialist like myself to fear and mistrust Greenwald. I will admit that, with a political writer and journalist like Greenwald, there is a greater reason to consider his broader politics than there is with Snowden. It’s never been clear to me that he remotely fits the libertarian profile that he has frequently been assigned. But more, Greenwald has always been a writer who has restricted his professional work to a small range of issues, involving foreign policy, surveillance, and civil liberties. On those topics, I substantially agree with him. If he turns around and writes against universal health care or union rights, I’ll register my disagreements with him, in print, as I do with any other issue or any other writer. I don’t see anything complicated about that.

Peter Frase wrote a brilliant piece on these issues at the socialist magazine Jacobin, where I have also been a contributor. As Frase writes, “there seems to be an instinct among some on the Left to suppose that defending the possibility of government requires rejecting any alliance with libertarians who might criticize particularly noxious aspects of the existing state. Or, to be a bit more subtle, that any critique that emphasizes government authoritarianism merely distracts us from the critique of private power.” Like Frase, I find that a reductive misunderstanding of the nature of the state and the purpose of socialist practice. But beyond the specific political questions involved, I become frustrated and impatient with this line of thinking because of what it implies about political behavior. To a degree, politics will always involve finding alliances and building coalitions. But those alliances are also necessarily conditional and limited. With all the endless contentious political issues people argue about, the odds of any two people agreeing on every issue are very slim. So we work together on what we can and we disagree on what we disagree about. I could never vote for Rand Paul, for any number of reasons. But when he writes an op/ed calling for the de-militarization of America’s police force, that’s useful and valuable, and I can say so without being a member of the Rand Paul fan club. The notion that we obligate ourselves to permanent alliances with everyone we find common cause with is a juvenile, destructive vision of politics—and one, incidentally, that makes meaningful change nearly impossible, in a country where the rich dominate politics on both sides of the aisle.

More, there’s the seemingly growing phenomenon of people involved in political arguments arguing about what one side or the other truly believes, rather than about what’s true, what’s moral, or what’s best. Every day, I read people insisting that they believe one thing while their interlocutors insist that they secretly believe something else. Someone misspeaks, or someone else misunderstands them, and suddenly the argument is over what that someone really thinks instead of the merits of the argument. Awhile back, I realized that I had come to hate my own political writing, simply from an aesthetic standpoint. I had grown to spend so much time defending myself about things I didn’t say and don’t believe that I had no time or energy to argue the things that I did say and do believe. So I’ve come to lard so much of my writing with statements about what I’m explicitly not saying that it’s a stylistic mess. I feel like I have no choice. But even so, I constantly get commenters and emailers saying “You believe X,” when I have directly and unambiguously said “I’m not arguing X.” It’s exhausting and pointless.

Trying to define what the other side thinks, or trying to read their minds to find the evil hiding within, is a road that has no ending. There is no way for anyone to prove what they really believe. And while we are busy trying to define our own beliefs, we are leaving the important work of politics undone. I know how to argue. I know how to press my case. I know how to advocate for what I believe in. I don’t know how to prove to someone that I’m not secretly harboring beliefs that I say I don’t have, and I have no patience for hunting secret libertarians. The issues that the Snowden affair has brought up concern the most basic questions of democratic society, of individual rights and collective responsibility. We have plenty to argue about already. So let’s just argue. It’s a lot less aggravating, and a lot more useful for all of us.

(Photo: Outside the Reichstag building in Berlin on May 8, 2014 a demonstrator holds a poster depicting fugitive US intelligence leaker Edward Snowden during a demonstration in favor of an appearance by Snowden as a witness in German NSA hearings. By Adam Berry/AFP/Getty Images)

Cashing In On Convicts?

by Dish Staff

Josh Kovensky evaluates the economics of prison labor, arguing that minimum wage should apply behind bars:

[T]he reason that prison labor saves money is that inmates aren’t treated like the rest of the country’s labor force. [Former prisoner Bob] Sloan, for instance, has seen a shift in prison labor since he left his program. “It’s no longer dedicated to improving skills of inmates but directed to getting the highest profits [prison labor organizations] can get.” These prisoners lack virtually all of the basic rights that Americans “on the outside” take for granted: minimum wage, worker’s compensation if injured in an accident, the right to unionize. It may seem like this is saving us money, but in fact our economy loses out because of it. Estimates vary, but some analyses show that prisoners’ potential economic output could add up to $125 to each US citizen annually, if inmates worked at the minimum wage. So not only does this present problems on basic humanitarian grounds, but the economic benefits of prison labor would be even greater if the prisoners were afforded the same working rights as America’s free population. …

There’s a certain hypocrisy that exists with regard to prison labor. The population is fine to have offenders out of sight and out of mind, so long as the effects are invisible. But there are countless people who want to reform and receive little benefit for doing so, and countless more who remain unemployed even while wanting to learn a skill that might help them break whatever cycle of crime and poverty in which they find themselves trapped. A lot of human potential rots away in our nation’s jail cells. As [economist Tom] Petersik observed, “When a fire is approaching our home, that guy sitting in a cell becomes our best friend. So you sit back and think, are we using these people effectively in the first place?”

“Hogmeat And Hoecake”

by Dish Staff

dish_southernpork

Jennifer Jensen Wallach reviews Sam Bowers Hilliard’s recently reprinted Hog Meat and Hoecake: Food supply in the Old South, 1840–1860, admiring the author for examining “patterns in eight states of the former Confederacy to learn what Southerners ate and how effective they were at producing their own food”:

Swine, he shows, appeared on regional tables in the colonial period, and it remains today one of the most obvious markers of Southern-style cooking. “If the ‘king’ of the antebellum Southern economy was cotton, then the title of ‘queen’ must go to the pig.” And yet, Hilliard explains, the meanings assigned to different foods change over time, and although many relished the meat, antebellum Southerners were sometimes ambivalent about their dependency on pork, deeming it a coarse, indigestible food more appropriate for the beleaguered enslaved population than for the purportedly delicate white Southern belle. Despite the consternation of medical professionals such as John S. Wilson, who despaired in 1860 of the quality of fare served in the “great Hog-eating Confederacy, or the Republic of Porkdom”, nineteenth-century Southerners ate about 150 pounds of the meat annually. Because plantation owners were reluctant to set aside land for grazing cattle that could be used to grow cotton, beef was in short supply and thus rarely eaten by the enslaved population or by poor whites. Mutton served, according to Hilliard, as merely an “occasional diversion” in a pork-focused diet.

Corn was the other foundational element in the Southern diet, and the persistence of cornbread on contemporary Southern menus indicates that this pillar is still intact. Antebellum Southerners grew as much corn as they did cotton, and the grain was a staple across the class and caste spectrum. Although wheat was grown in the Southern hills and rice was cultivated in Louisiana and along the Atlantic Coast, neither grain challenged the South’s identity as “corn country”. Hilliard’s subjects rounded out their meals with garden crops such as sweet potatoes, cowpeas, turnips and watermelon, foods that are still subjected to endless variations in nouveau Southern cooking. Southerners, both enslaved and free, also hunted for venison and smaller game, including possums, raccoons and squirrels, animals yet to be rebranded as sources of “heritage” foods worthy of a place on the menus of high-end restaurants.

Update from a reader: “It has long been a Southern truism that ‘We eat every part of the pig but the oink.'”

(Photo of Central BBQ Sign in Memphis via Southern Foodways Alliance)