Category: The Dish

Trophy Children, Ctd

Lots of reader pushback on Molly Knefel’s case for participatory awards:

Instead, that kid [who doesn’t get a trophy] is supposed to get the message: If you didn’t score a lot of points, no one gives a shit about you. And if that makes you sad, or if you feel that it’s not fair, get used to it. The world is a sad and unfair place. Score more goals next time. This message has always felt at odds, to me, with the equally ubiquitous platitude that children are the future. If children are the future, then why are we so gung ho about preparing them to be treated unfairly?

I don’t know, maybe because the world IS unfair and we’re realists and not delusional purveyors of utopian fantasy?

So kids who ARE good at something have to live with the satisfaction that scoring a goal is enough, but the kid who sucks (like me) NEEDS a trophy to keep him from feeling bad about himself more than the kid scoring the goal? NO. Why can’t we celebrate the exceptional? When a kid does something well we’re supposed reinforce it by telling him it’s just what’s expected so don’t get too excited because there’s no awards in life for being exceptional? But, um … there are. From the Oscars to the Olympics to the Nobel Peace Prize.

Another adds, “Knowing that life is not fair, and that your achievements are not handed to you, makes earning them sweeter.” Another key point:

Giving trophies to everyone is practically like giving away none, because with the ubiquity comes devaluation.

I’m a lifelong mediocre jock. Somehow my spirit has never been broken when I come in 14th out of 25 in a bicycle race, or my soccer team fails to make the playoffs. I do it because it is fun, and that is its own reward. I keep one 35-year-old trophy on display. It’s for being “most improved” on a wrestling team. It was one of two trophies given out that year, along with “most valuable” which went to a Columbia-bound stud. I earned that sucker because I worked my ass off that year – and was lucky. If the rest of the team got trophies as well, I guarantee you that they would all have ended up in landfills long ago.

Another asks Knefel:

Do you really think kids are unaware they’re being patronized? Do you think they’ll value a participation trophy, or feel a sense of accomplishment?

I was a mediocre baseball player as a kid. I got many participation trophies, which I promptly forgot. They’re probably in a box somewhere in my parents’ basement. I knew I wasn’t a great athlete and the trophies were just a pro forma thing, so I didn’t value them. On the other hand, I was always one of the top students in my class. I felt a genuine sense of accomplishment at high grades because I felt I had earned them, not simply been given them.

Participation trophies may be fine for three year olds, but as kids get older we should stop trying to GIVE them self esteem, or teach them that they’re entitled to their desired result, and not getting it means they’ve been treated “unfairly.”

And another:

Expecting a child who has made no notable contribution to a soccer team to be moved by the receipt of a trophy is to assume that in addition to being a poor soccer player, that he is also daft. I was a non-athlete as a child who was nonetheless forced onto the occasional youth sports team. Getting a trophy would have been an absurdity. What I do remember fondly was 15 minutes that a substitute coach once spent with me trying to improve my skills at connecting bat and ball. And with some success. But then, trophies are easier than actually spending time with kids improving skills, aren’t they?

Another shares an excellent idea:

Having coached youth baseball and basketball for several years now while being staunchly opposed to participation trophies, I’ve adopted a solution my coaching mentor came up with. I create personalized mementoes for every player by taking a baseball (or miniature basketball) and writing the year, team name, player name and number and a personalized message about the season. I often get assistant coaches to write something as well. It doesn’t take long, but it is an appropriate way of acknowledging participation and more importantly, team membership. Giving a trophy for participation is like using a crescent wrench as a hammer. It does a sub-par job and devalues the tool for its intended purpose.

A lone dissenter so far:

I was glad to see Molly Knefel defend giving trophies to an entire team.  Major pet peeve for me when people trot this out as one more thing that is wrong with kids (parents) today, mostly from people who don’t have kids.  These days children are fast tracked into a sport as early as age 5.  Little Tommy is on travel baseball, and little Sally is spending 8 hours practicing gymnastics.  And then there are the kids who are still “just rec”, as in they are on the recreational team, as in they are not good enough for a competitive team, or their parents can’t get them to all the the practices (often held while working parents are, well, working).  These kids KNOW they aren’t as good, or as lucky, and they don’t need a trophy withheld to beat it further into their heads that they are less than.

So give the kids a break. A participant trophy for an 8 year old does not destroy the fabric of society.  It just makes a kid feel special for a moment, for finishing what he or she started, for being a member of a team, or for doing their best despite challenges.  Let’s spend more time criticizing the parents who must boastfully remind others that their kid IS on a competitive team while they look down their nose at other children or are simply participating in a recreational team.

One such parent cries:

Bullllllllshhhiiiittttttt.

Look, I’m probably the most Liberal of all your readers, but as the father of an insanely talented 12-year-old daughter, I cannot abide this Everyone Wins mentality. And not because I’m against the theory of “Hey, you showed up and kicked that ball and your leg didn’t fall off, have a trophy!”, but because I hate to see the dilution of true talent in the face of egalitarian praise.

Case in point: My daughter is a genuinely talented singer (said no other proud parent, ever) who was excited to compete in her school’s talent show. Having just come off a local theater run of “Annie” in the lead role, she was sort of feeling badass and wanted another chance to shine before an audience. But this was less a talent show in the traditional sense and more a Display of Talent For Its Own Sake, where EVERYONE WAS A WINNER and even the truly crap acts (sometimes especially the crap acts!) got raucous cheers of support from their peers. So when my TRULY talented and extra-special daughter (said no other proud parent, ever) sang her song and killed it, the applause level was exactly what it had been for the kid whose mother had dressed him in a homemade snowman suit and sent him out to sing “In Summer” from Frozen, an act that would, in my day, have gotten me beaten half to death by bullies outraged by my daring to offend their ears with such a tragic display.

So I asked my daughter, afterwards, if her peers had been coached ahead of time to whistle and hoot and clap and shout and rave for every act, and she confirmed my suspicion: The music teacher had indeed required that everyone be treated as American Idols and wildly applauded, regardless of how badly they stank the place up. “How do you feel about that?” I asked my TRULY talented daughter. She shrugged, trying to be diplomatic about it, but said, “What was the point?”

Indeed. There is excellence (like my Truly Talented Daughter), and there is mediocrity, and if we as parents continue blending the two in a blinding array of ecstatic applause, the gifted among us may just all wonder what the point of shining is.

But seriously, my daughter kicks ass.

Chart Of The Day

Capital Flight

Tim Fernholz wonders whether sanctions are increasing capital flight from Russia:

Russia’s had a real problem with capital flight in recent years, as its wealthiest citizens and corporations have moved assets to tax havens and wealthy economies to avoid instability and political interference in Russia. (The erstwhile shareholders of Yukos, the oil company that the Kremlin seized and broke up in the mid-2000s, just won a $50 billion compensation claim in the Hague.) That left Putin plaintively asking oligarchs to bring back their cash, please. No dice: Capital flight has increased this year, already exceeding each of the last two years in preliminary data for the first two quarters of 2014. Is that the fault of the sanctions? In part—few investors want their money to be trapped if a new iron economic curtain is raised.

Our “Best Hope” To Rein In The NSA?

Jason Koebler offers a primer on the new bill that has tech companies and some civil libertarians excited:

On Tuesday, Sen. Patrick Leahy introduced the USA Freedom Act, a bill that would completely end mass surveillance under Section 215 of the Patriot Act – a loophole in the law that effectively let NSA agents scoop up metadata and other information about American citizens. If this sounds at all familiar, it’s because earlier this summer, the House of Representatives also passed the USA Freedom Act – after a House committee completely gutted any teeth it had and also added in new loopholes that would let bulk surveillance continue unscathed. Leahy’s bill looks much closer to the one that many civil liberty groups initially endorsed before the House had at it, and it’s expected to go straight to the Senate floor, where it will have less chance of being ruined by back room White House dealings or in closed committee hearings.

Andrea Peterson details the bill’s contents:

The legislation would curb bulk collection of domestic phone records, provide new transparency measures and add an adversarial component to the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court. The Senate bill would replace bulk collection with the ability to collect call record details within two hops on a daily basis when the government can demonstrate a “reasonable, articulable suspicion” that search terms are associated with a foreign terrorist organization under section 215 of the Patriot Act. This would limit the government from being able to broadly collect information by geographic region, such as by Zip code or area code, which critics feared might be the case in the version of the Freedom Act that passed the House earlier this summer. …

Leahy’s new version of the Freedom Act would require the government to report how many individuals’ information has been collected under certain surveillance authorities and how many of those are likely Americans – as well as the number of queries run on Americans in some databases, with exceptions for figures not possible to generate with current technology. It also expands how private companies can publicly report on government requests for information.

Russell Brandom is among the enthused:

Even before the bill was public, it was hailed by the New York Times as “a breakthrough in the struggle against the growth of government surveillance power,” and being named by reformers as congress’s best hope for a meaningful response to NSA overreach. Looking at the bill itself, you can see why. The table of contents is a laundry list of the major NSA authorizations detailed in the Snowden leaks. Leahy’s bill puts major restrictions on the FISA court, pen registers, and business records requests (the method used to collect bulk metadata from phone companies, among other things). It would also add new transparency measures to National Security Letter requests, allowing companies to report how many customers have been affected in more detail than ever before.

But political scientist H. L. Pohlman sees reason for concern:

[T]here is one crucial provision that the civil libertarians that support Leahy’s bill have overlooked. Namely, that the bill includes the same language contained in the House bill that created a “backdoor” authority to collect phone records that evade all the limitations just listed. I noted this provision in a post on this site last May, and called it my “most serious concern” with the House version. … The bottom line is that Leahy’s bill is a continuation of the intelligence community’s efforts to at best confuse – and at worst, mislead – the American people (and perhaps their legislative representatives) through the clever use of legalese.

Similarly, Jennifer Granick notes:

As surveillance reform followers know, one of the most serious problems with content surveillance taking place under section 702 is that the NSA, CIA and FBI use selection terms connected to US persons to search through repositories of data collected from targeting foreigners, a practice called “back door searches,” since ordinarily investigators would need a particularized warrant based on probable cause to get access to that information.

USA Freedom would not end back-door searches. It would require NSA and CIA to count the number of times they do it and report to Congress. But it exempts the FBI from the reporting requirement. Wha?! As the public recently learned, FBI is searching these databases for evidence it uses in criminal prosecutions, the FBI doesn’t currently count how often it searches for Americans, and the number is, according to Director of National Intelligence James Clapper, substantial.

Meanwhile, Dustin Volz evaluates the the bill’s political future:

[I]t remains unclear if Leahy has the votes in a historically gridlocked Senate that will have most of its attention diverted to the midterm elections when lawmakers come back to Washington. Senate Intelligence Committee Chairwoman Dianne Feinstein has been an influential backer of the NSA’s surveillance programs, and early indications are that she and other defense hawks are less than receptive to Leahy’s new proposal. The California Democrat, according to several sources, wants to push a data-retention mandate that would require phone companies to keep customer data for a certain amount of time that would exceed current requirements set at 18 months. Multiple privacy advocates said such a mandate would amount to a “poison pill” and would likely prompt a cascade of groups to drop their support for the Freedom Act.

However, Leahy has several factors working in his favor. For one, the administration is on board with his version of the Freedom Act, an alliance that could undercut protests from Feinstein’s cohort. And Sen. Ted Cruz is among the 13 original cosponsors, marking a partnership that could shore up GOP support. The Texas Republican and potential 2016 presidential hopeful has been remarkably quiet on NSA spying before endorsing Leahy’s measure.

And Julian Hattem observes, “One way or another, Congress has to pass some kind of NSA bill”:

The legal authority for the agency’s phone records program expires next June. Without reauthorization, that leaves the possibility that the program could be cut off entirely, an outcome that intelligence officials have said would leave the nation vulnerable to attacks. The looming deadline could force lawmakers to put their heads together over the August recess and find a way to advance the bill before the end of the year.

The Fruits Of Liberal Intervention, Ctd

Frederic Wehrey cautions against buying into the conventional wisdom about what’s going down in Libya:

Outside observers are often tempted toward a one-dimensional reading of Libya’s turmoil. It is easy to trace Libya’s breakdown as a political struggle between Islamists and liberals: The Muslim Brotherhood-affiliated Justice and Construction Party and more rejectionist, jihadi factions like Ansar al-Sharia versus the “liberals” under the National Forces Alliance (NFA). Another level of conflict seems to be regional: A contest between the towns of Zintan and Misrata for economic power and political leverage in Tripoli, or amongst federalists and their opponents in the long-marginalized east. Yet an additional layer is between remnants of the old order – ex-security men, long-serving and retired officers, former Gaddafi-era technocrats – and a newer, younger cadre of self-proclaimed “revolutionaries,” often Islamists, who were either exiled and/or imprisoned during the dictator’s rule.

Elements of all these dimensions are at play, but none of them alone has sufficient explanatory power. At its core, Libya’s violence is an intensely local affair, stemming from deeply entrenched patronage networks battling for economic resources and political power in a state afflicted by a gaping institutional vacuum and the absence of a central arbiter with a preponderance of force. There is not one faction strong enough to coerce or compel the others.

Meanwhile, Friedersdorf lays into the hawks who supported our role in overthrowing Qaddafi:

When Ivo H. Daalder and James G. Stavridis declare that the cost of intervening in Libya was “$1.1 billion for the U.S. and several billion dollars overall,” I can’t help but think that GiveWell estimates that one of the most efficient mosquito-net charities saves a life for every $3,400 that it spends. That’s 882,352 lives saved for the cost of the Libya campaign. Given present conditions in Libya, how confident are we that the NATO-aided ouster of Qaddafi saved even half that many lives? Development aid is far from perfect, but my instinct is that it saves lives more reliably than wars of choice and virtually never results in violent blowback.

Most of all, I am struck by the willingness of prominent interventionists to have publicly declared their instincts in Libya vindicated when the country’s future remained very much in doubt, as if they couldn’t conceive of an intervention that would result in more lives lost than the alternative even as the possibility of that outcome was extremely plausible. As in Iraq and Afghanistan, the Washington, D.C. foreign-policy establishment seemed to perform no better at foreseeing how events would unfold than non-expert commentators who simply applied Murphy’s Law. At the very most charitable, the common interventionist claim that Libya vindicated them in their dispute with non-interventionists was wildly premature. Perhaps the lesson to take from the NATO campaign is that even the most thoughtful interventionists have no idea how geopolitical events will unfold.

Can Israel “Win” This War? Ctd

Brent Sasley says yes to that question:

When the dust settles, Israel will also have restored some of its deterrence against its enemies. Against Hamas specifically, it demonstrated it’s gotten over what we might call Cast Lead Syndrome: recoiling from the type of international opprobrium that war generated against Israel because of the scale of Palestinian deaths. In that conflict, between approximately 1,100 and 1,400 Gazans were killed, depending on what source one looks to for casualty figures. Yet already in Operation Protective Edge, more than 1,000 Palestinians may have been killed. Though Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has become a cautious administrator since his first term in office, the temptation to keep going to destroy Hamas’ tunnel infrastructure has overcome his reluctance to use large-scale force. And the Israeli public has rallied behind him.

In a debate among Brookings experts, Michael Doran contends that whether or not Israel is “winning”, Hamas is definitely losing:

Six months from now, many Palestinians, especially those in Gaza, will ask themselves what all the pain and destruction that Hamas brought down on them was worth. Their disgruntlement will not weaken Hamas’s grip on power, because it is a dictatorship supported by foreign money. But the organization, as it stands before its people and lectures them on the need for more sacrifice, will surely clock the sullen faces that stare blankly back. As for the “support” that Hamas gets from public opinion in other parts of the Arab world that will certainly dissipate. Of course, it’s never been worth much anyway, throughout modern Arab history, because it never translates into lasting change in the behavior of states, the true power brokers in the region. Meanwhile, Hamas will have lost considerably on the battlefield.

But Shadi Hamid is not so sure:

Even if Hamas “loses” in the ways that you describe, it seems to me that they’re likely to at least be better off than they were before the conflict started.

It’s hard to envision any ceasefire arrangement that won’t include easing the blockade in some way (Hamas has little incentive to agree to a ceasefire that doesn’t alleviate the humanitarian crisis in Gaza). The West Bank surge in pro-Hamas sentiment isn’t just about public opinion; it’s about closing the gap between Hamas and Fatah. If the developments in the West Bank underscore anything, it’s the real, and growing, desire for Palestinian unity. Last week on MSNBC, Mustafa Barghouti said that a new uprising had started. He may be getting ahead of himself, but if a ceasefire doesn’t hold in the coming days, there will be more instability in the West Bank (and corresponding anti-Palestinian sentiment) and that can only strengthen Hamas hand during post-ceasefire negotiations over contours of unity government. Also, the expectation, which I suppose is implicit in these Israeli deterrence operations, is that at some point Palestinians will blame Hamas more than they blame Israel. But, there’s little to suggest this is how most Palestinians process the results of Israeli military operations.

Aaron David Miller considers Hamas the winner, so far:

It’s impossible to predict a winner or loser at this stage. Israel is determined to prevent a Hamas victory or even a stalemated outcome that might appear to represent one. The situation is, as they say, remarkably fluid. But three weeks in, if I had to do a tally now, I’d say Hamas has taken round one in what is likely to be an ongoing struggle. And here’s why:

Survival counts as a win: As in previous confrontations, the organizational imperative dominates Hamas’s tactics and strategy. Against a militarily and technologically superior Israel, Hamas can afford to waste a couple of thousand rockets and lose a few dozen tunnels, but the main goal is keeping both its military and political leadership intact, and not giving into Israel’s superior firepower. Indeed, in a way Hamas wins just by not losing.

And even if Hamas is utterly destroyed in this war, Scott McConnell worries about what would come next:

Suppose Israel succeeds in destroying Hamas. How many terror cells will it have created thoughout the Middle East? Will those cells content themselves in mounting operations against Israel? Or would they also seek vengeance against the superpower which enables, and could even be seen as encouraging, Israel’s annihilation of them. In 2002, a not-very-sophisticated home-grown sniper traumatized the Washington metropolitan area for weeks. If the predictions of one of America’s leading anti-terror officials are correct, Israel is setting the table for much more complex terror operations, in which American civilians will become targets. Sad as it is to contemplate, if that happens, people all over the Mideast will believe we are only getting what we deserve.

Previous Dish on what an Israeli “victory” would entail in the Gaza war here.

The Worst Ebola Outbreak In History, Ctd

Keating looks at why the current epidemic has been so severe:

As political scientist Kim Yi Dionne notes, a number of factors have combined to make this the most deadly Ebola outbreak in history, and most of them are political rather than biological.

For one thing, none of these countries has experienced an outbreak of the disease before, so knowledge of it is low. For another, the fact that it’s spread to multiple countries makes a coordinated response more difficult. (Liberia has now shut almost all of its borders.) As Dionne notes, all three countries have poor health infrastructure, due in part to years of civil war in Liberia and Sierra Leone. Liberia has just .014 doctors per 1,000 people, and a common joke is that JFK Medical Center, Monrovia’s main hospital, has long had the unflattering nickname “Just For Killing.”

Which is why a major Ebola outbreak in America is unlikely. Olga Khazan tries to determine how this outbreak started:

Researchers still don’t know the exact cause of this particular outbreak, but it might have to do with the local practice of eating bats for food, according to Jonathan Epstein, an epidemiologist at EcoHealth Alliance. “It’s unclear whether it occurred due to butchering a bat, exposure to bat bodily fluids, or eating some food or fruit that was contaminated by saliva, urine, or feces from the bat, which may contain Ebola virus,” he said. Pig farms in Africa also often attract bats, which also may have been a cause.

Once the infected person begins to show symptoms—flu-like aches, nausea, and vomiting—local customs continue to play a big role. There aren’t enough doctors or supplies available to treat all the Ebola patients in the area, but even if there were, many locals are suspicious of Western medicine.

John Herrman reflects on the West’s detachment from these kinds of diseases:

I’ll read almost anything about infectious diseases, and in retrospect, most of this reading was cold and sociopathic. Richard Preston’s The Hot Zone was an escapist thriller; The Great Influenza was an apocalyptic period piece; The Coming Plague was an engrossing feat of science fiction world-building, about a planet that contrives, almost at random, new and hideous microscopic monsters to destroy sophisticated life, and that will not give up until it has succeeded. Nature finds a way, a narrator intones, except that this narrator is a doctor who has spent her whole life watching people die in pain and confusion, and I’m just sort of dozing off, because I’ve been reading too long and it’s time for bed.

This is of course an insane way to read about deadly diseases. It is also standard in areas of the world where these rare viruses feel utterly remote. It provides comfort that your incidental version of civilization at least shields you from the most vividly horrific diseases.

An Ebola vaccine is still at least a few years away:

There are quite a few preventative vaccines in development, with three to five that have been shown to completely protect nonhuman primates against Ebola. Some of these vaccines require three injections or more and some require just a single injection. Most of them are being funded by the U.S. government, so they’re in various stages of development, but none of them are ready to be licensed.

The hang-up point with these vaccines is the phase I trials in humans. That’s where scientists get frustrated because we know these vaccines protect animals and we don’t quite understand the regulatory process of why things can’t move faster. I can’t give you an answer as to why it’s taking so long.

The Economist maps current and former Ebola hot-spots. All the Dish’s coverage of the latest epidemic is here.

We Won’t Make Israel Make Peace

After John Kerry’s efforts to broker a ceasefire in the Gaza war crashed and burned, Zack Beauchamp asks why the $3 billion in aid we give Israel every year doesn’t seem to buy us any leverage:

Talk to Middle East analysts, and you get a clear sense that the US really could box Israel in a corner if it wanted to. “In theory, of course the US has enormous leverage over Israel,” says Nathan Thrall, a senior analyst at the International Crisis Group. But in “the very unlikely event” that “the US were to threaten the very alliance with Israel,” he says, it’d put immense pressure on an Israeli Prime Minister to bend.

Clearly, the United States doesn’t want to do that. But it has successfully pressured Israel before. For instance, the Bush administration forced Israel to back off an arms deal with China in 2005 by threatening to cut off military cooperation on certain projects. The US refused to give Israeli aircraft friend-or-foe codes during the Gulf War, effectively keeping Israel out. It refused to give American support for an Israeli strike on Iran’s nuclear program, which amounted to vetoing it.

So it’s not that the US can’t ever push Israel. It’s that American policymakers aren’t willing to threaten the foundations of the US-Israeli relationship — aid, diplomatic support, and the like — over a ceasefire in Gaza or even a final status peace agreement.

Drum, on the other hand, is skeptical that the US could do anything to make peace between parties whose objectives are fundamentally incompatible. As long as that’s the case, he argues, we should just stop trying:

Quite famously, we all “know” what a deal between Israel and the Palestinians needs to look like. It’s obvious. Everyone says so. The only wee obstacle is that neither side is willing to accept this obvious deal. They just aren’t. The problem isn’t agreeing on a line on a map, or a particular circumlocution in a particular document. The problem is much simpler than that, so simple that sophisticated people are embarrassed to say it outright: Two groups of people want the same piece of land. Both of them feel they have a right to it. Both of them are, for the time being, willing to fight for it. Neither is inclined to give up anything for a peace that neither side believes in.

That’s it. That’s all there is. All the myriad details don’t matter. Someday that may change, and when it does the United States may have a constructive role to play in brokering a peace deal. But that day is nowhere in the near future.

I can see Kevin’s grim point. But as long as we are financing and subsidizing Israel’s wars, we are not neutral. Only if we cut off our aid can we afford the luxury of viewing the entire conflict as irresolvable. Everything else is complicity.

Correction Of The Day II

It’s an honorable apology and correction. But it’s hard not to see in the eight tweets that David sent out questioning the integrity of these harrowing images of grief and murder a desperate need not to see what is in front of our noses. The mind-boggling trauma and terror that Gazan civilians are now experiencing is so very hard to watch, when this country is partly financing it. For those attached to Israel, the experience must be particularly wrenching. Denial is a perfectly understandable response when confronted with nearly 250 dead children.