Category: Updates

Amazing video from @TheAlexanderBOK – demonstrating again, how the NYPD needs accountability: https://t.co/rYLSgqpSiX // watch to the end

— Bill Fitzgerald (@funnymonkey) December 31, 2014

The New York Post reports that “NYPD traffic tickets and summonses for minor offenses have dropped off by a staggering 94 percent following the execution of two cops — as officers feel betrayed by the mayor and fear for their safety”:

[O]verall arrests [are] down 66 percent for the week starting Dec. 22 compared with the same period in 2013, stats show. Citations for traffic violations fell by 94 percent, from 10,069 to 587, during that time frame. Summonses for low-level offenses like public drinking and urination also plunged 94 percent — from 4,831 to 300. Even parking violations are way down, dropping by 92 percent, from 14,699 to 1,241.

The Post obtained the numbers hours after revealing that cops were turning a blind eye to some minor crimes and making arrests only “when they have to” since the execution-style shootings of Officers Rafael Ramos and Wenjian Liu.

Scott Shackford snarks:

Well, we can only hope the NYPD unions and de Blasio settle their differences soon so that the police can go back to arresting people for reasons other than “when they have to.”

The NYPD’s failure to arrest and cite people will also end up costing the city huge amounts of money that it won’t be able to seize from its citizens, which is likely the real point. That’s the “punishment” for the de Blasio administration for not supporting them. One has to wonder if they even understand, or care, that their “work stoppage” is giving police state critics exactly what they want—less harsh enforcement of the city’s laws.

No doubt police are hoping that citizens will be furious when police don’t do anything about the hobo pissing on the wall in the alley or won’t make the guy in apartment 3b turn down the racket at four in the morning. And they’re probably right to a certain degree. But if they think the city is going to turn into sheer anarchy over the failure to enforce petty regulations, they’re probably going to be disappointed.

Update from a reader:

Nice to see the NYPD are not responding like petty, petulant, spoiled children and have instead taken up a constructive debate over their grievances with the mayor. It would be sad to think that they were so thin skinned as to compromise the integrity of their positions because their soft, touchy-feely side was bruised when the mayor expressed how he cautioned his child in dealing with the police.

Another piles one:

It’s anecdotal, but we went away for Christmas and left the car on the street. At $45, one street-cleaning ticket is cheaper by far than putting it in a garage. Then I changed my return, putting us in line for two tickets. I got back yesterday anticipating a $90 bill—and found nothing on the windshield. Suspecting the wind might have blown the tickets away, I checked online. Zip.

I’m selfishly pleased by that. But if this horseshit “wartime footing” stance by the NYPD union extends even to traffic cops, then the life-and-limb ramifications of minimal law enforcement are appalling. The NYPD is using New York citizens – its bosses, its responsibility, and the folks who pays its salaries – as the ante in its poker match with the mayor. In the past, I’d have expected the citizenry to pretty quickly side with the cops, be it simply out of self-interest. But I think this time the NYPD may have made a bad bet. One of their men killed a man and walked. Then, when even gently criticized, they took the city hostage rather than eat a bite of crow, or even swallow a bite of pride. This time may be different, and I very much hope it will be.

In an interview discussing a new volume of essays he edited about the French philosopher, Daniel Zamora portrays Foucault, especially in his later years, as more friendly to and fascinated by neoliberals Hayek and Friedman than many of his votaries on the academic left want to believe. Zamora claims to have been “astonished by the indulgence Foucault showed toward neoliberalism”:

[H]e saw in it the possibility of a form of governmentality that was much less normative and authoritarian than the socialist and communist left, which he saw as totally obsolete. He especially saw in neoliberalism a “much less bureaucratic” and “much less disciplinarian” form of politics than that offered by the postwar welfare state. He seemed to imagine a neoliberalism that wouldn’t project its anthropological models on the individual, that would offer individuals greater autonomy vis-à-vis the state.

Foucault seems, then, in the late seventies, to be moving towards the “second left,” that minoritarian but intellectually influential tendency of French socialism, along with figures like Pierre Rosanvallon, whose writings Foucault appreciated. He found seductive this anti-statism and this desire to “de-statify French society.” Even Colin Gordon, one of Foucault’s principal translators and commentators in the Anglo-Saxon world, has no trouble saying that he sees in Foucault a sort of precursor to the Blairite Third Way, incorporating neoliberal strategy within the social-democratic corpus.

Dan Drezner nods, telling conservatives and libertarians to take a second look at their unlikely ally:

One of the virtues of teaching at a policy school is that Foucault is not quite as central to scholarly conversations as in traditional humanities departments. That said, Zamora’s observation rings true — which is why conservatives should embrace him and his work. From a conservative perspective, the great thing about Foucault’s writing is that it is more plastic than Marx, and far less economically subversive. Academics rooted in Foucauldian thought are far more compatible with neoliberalism than the old Marxist academics.

In some ways, Zamora’s book is an effort by some on the left to try to “discipline” Foucault’s flirtation with the right. It will be interesting to see the academic left’s response to the book. But Zamora also reveals why free-marketeers might want to give Foucault another read and not just dismiss him with the “post-modern” epithet.

Update from a reader:

This being an area I am quite familiar with, let me just say that there is very little new in Zamora’s “discovery.” Only the petty bourgeois of identity politics in US academia could ever embrace Foucault as “left-wing.” And they sure did, bereft that they were of any context or any economic culture (let alone knowledge).

It’s not that Foucault is “right-wing” or “left-wing.” I am not even sure that he could be pegged on some sort of “progressive vs conservative” scale.  On the one hand, he once stated that everything that is historically constructed can be politically changed. On the other hand, he blurted out the mother of all elisions in Discipline and Punish (if I remember well): talking of the invention of biopolitics, the thrust by the modern state to catalogue, normalize and regiment living beings (with a particular focus on humans), he wrote “this all took place on the backdrop of the industrial revolution.”

And that was that for economic forces. One sentence! The gall of that man! It’s hilarious. It was a dig at a certain naive and mind-numbing strand of Stalinist historical materialism in vogue in France at the time (the irrelevant and awful Althusser, Sartre, Bourdieu: in the late ’60s-early ’70s Foucault was cleverly waging a positional war against the grand poobahs of France’s intelligentsia).

Of course this played very well in US comp-lit departments, where all things economic or material are sneered at. Now you could be a true armchair radical, no need to worry or study actual economics and the history of capitalism. Boring. Besides, Foucault himself thought it was useless. And that way, as a tenured radical on a US campus, you did not have to question the society, the economic incentives and the motivations that had lead you there in the first place. That is, the booming market for mass education in the late-sixties. Suddenly any small-town middle-class American, low on cultural capital but armed with good grades, could legitimately compete for a tenured job at any University nearby.  Fucking boomers.

Not saying it’s all bad, but hey, you must take the bad with the overall good.  Incredible development in human capital comes with a few philistines. It’s a small price to pay.

(Photo of painted portrait of Foucault by thierry ehrmann)

Reflecting on the senseless murder of two officers, a reader passes along the disgusting video seen above:

I follow my local precinct on Twitter, to get neighborhood news. And a week or so before the murders, they posted a link to a video with protestors chanting for cops to be killed. I think it was going around in police circles.

I think we have to understand the police response in this context. They felt very much under attack by the mayor, who didn’t have their back against the protestors. And they saw this video, and many of them said someone was going to kill a cop. And then someone killed two cops.

My sympathies are very much with the protestors in general (though not these protestors). When I saw the video, I thought the cops were being hysterical. I thought, of course no one is going to do anything to the cops; no one ever does anything to the cops. And I was totally wrong.

Another reader is disappointed with our coverage of police issues:

I’ve been a cop since 2006 and will be the first to admit that some cops are evil and have no right wearing the badge, but good cops despise those cops. In the aftermath of the Michael Brown and Eric Garner deaths, a narrative was pushed painting all cops as racists bent on murdering black males. While you haven’t been as anti-cop as others, you have contributed to the narrative.

With every other topic you examine, you report or post emails from as many different points of view as possible. Most times you post emails from readers or professionals directly involved in the topic; however, I’ve yet to see a single point of view from a cop.

Additionally, after a grand jury failed to indict Darren Wilson, you published articles stating how rare it is for grand juries to not indict people. It gave the perception that police get away with murder because of their position. You completely ignored the fact that at the very same time in South Carolina, three white cops were indicted for shooting unarmed black men.

I have no issue with questioning police tactics or use of force policies. In fact, I believe it’s an important component of a free society. What I take issue with is not giving an equal voice to the overwhelming majority of cops who are good people. This leads me to my last point.

On Saturday, two NYPD cops were executed simply because of the uniform they wore. They were sitting in their patrol car when they were ambushed. The murderer, whose name doesn’t deserve mentioning, killed those cops to “avenge” Michael Brown and Eric Garner.

It had taken almost two days for you to post about the shooting. I read the post and realized it’s not a condemnation of the shooting; the deaths of two cops is almost secondary to its point. The article is a condemnation of Giuliani and Union President Lynch for suggesting an anti-cop attitude may have contributed to the murders. The rebuttals to Giuliani and Lynch argue that they have no right to feel that way because the protestors are just expressing themselves.

You referred to police turning their backs on de Blasio as “antics.” Lynch has been accused of smearing, ranting, and being divisive to the point of savagery. In one fell swoop, you and your fellow journalists defend de Blasio’s and the protestor’s right to free speech while condemning Giuliani’s and Lynch’s use of it. You haven’t taken a second to allow a cop or their representatives to explain why they feel the way they do. I can tell you for a fact that every cop I know feels there is an anti-cop movement taking place.

Update from a reader, “Are you SURE that video is real?”, pointing to another viral video of protesters allegedly chanting violent anti-cop messages:

A Fox affiliate in Baltimore aired a segment on Sunday showing footage from a “Justice For All” demonstration in Washington, D.C. in which it edited a chant to sound like protestors were shouting “kill a cop.”

“At this rally in Washington, D.C. protestors chanted, ‘we won’t stop, we can’t stop, so kill a cop,'” the WBFF broadcast said.

But the full footage, flagged by Gawker on Monday via C-SPAN, revealed that the chant was “we won’t stop, we can’t stop, ’til killer cops are in cell blocks.”

by Dish Staff

Most frequent guests ever on The Colbert Report (1/3) @sullydish 9 @neiltyson 8 @GovMikeHuckabee 7 @fakedansavage 6

— DataLab (@DataLab538) December 18, 2014

A reader writes:

I didn’t know before I saw the episode last night that Andrew was going to be in the star-studded finale of the Colbert Report.  When I saw him there, it felt like a friend had made it into the inner circle.  I was more excited to see him than any of the other guests, like he was “one of us”.  Just sending this because I wonder if other Dishheads felt the same way.

In his review of the series finale, James Poniewozik calls Colbert “America’s greatest, most genuine phony”:

That Colbert was able to be “Stephen Colbert” at such a high level for some nine years was the 56-game-hitting-streak of American comedy, a feat we may not see equalled again. He kept it up in part by taking the show on the road. He brought his act to the White House Correspondents’ Association Dinner, got Doritos to sponsor his favorite-son run in the 2008 South Carolina primary, and — in what was probably his high-water mark — in 2011 went through the process of founding a real SuperPAC. It was simultaneously an epic work of performance-art satire and genuine public-service education.

Before the finale, Colbert was already in the process of letting go of “himself”; on Wednesday’s show, he held a yard sale of Report memorabilia, unloading a copy of his correspondents’ dinner speech to a crying baby, selling a bottle of “Ass Juice” to a lucky bargain hunter. He seemed at peace, and why shouldn’t he be? He’s going on to something new, taking over for David Letterman at CBS. And while that’s generated much interest in what Colbert will do as himself, I’m not too concerned.

Update: A reader flags this post of Andrew’s from October 18, 2005, titled “Pure Genius”:

Last night’s Colbert Report, of course. O’Reilly fileted. My only worry is: how can he keep it up?

by Dish Staff

Karen Tumulty tweeted yesterday that, “with exception of 2012, you’d have to be 38 or older to have lived thru an election with no Bush or Clinton running for prez.” Aaron Blake discovers that it’s even worse than that:

[G]oing back a full half-century – i.e. to 1964 – there have been only three elections (midterm or presidential) in which a Bush or a Clinton hasn’t been on the ballot somewhere for something.

Stretching back to George H.W. Bush’s first bid for U.S. Senate in 1964 (he lost), that’s 23 out of 26 elections. The only exceptions are 1972, 2010 and 2012. That most recent two-election drought was broken when George P. Bush – Jeb Bush’s son – ran for Texas land commissioner this year (he won).

Greenwald believes that a Clinton-Bush match-up would illustrate “the virtually complete merger between political and economic power, of the fundamentally oligarchical framework that drives American political life”:

If this happens, the 2016 election would vividly underscore how the American political class functions: by dynasty, plutocracy, fundamental alignment of interests masquerading as deep ideological divisions, and political power translating into vast private wealth and back again. The educative value would be undeniable: somewhat like how the torture report did, it would rub everyone’s noses in exactly those truths they are most eager to avoid acknowledging.

Even Douthat, who isn’t against political dynasties in principle, has misgivings about a Clinton-Bush race:

[T]here really would be something historically unusual about having the same two families alternate in the American presidency for, potentially, twenty-eight out of thirty-six years. The closest analogue would be the Roosevelts, Teddy and Franklin, who served for about twenty out of the 20th century’s first forty-five years, and they were related in a much looser way, rather than being part of the same marriage or nuclear family. In the main, the American presidency has resisted dynastic control, and the dynasts have tended to be among the less-enduring of chief executives: The Adamses were both one-termers, likewise the Harrisons (a one-monther, in William Henry’s case!), and for all their fame the Kennedys only occupied the Oval Office for the three short years of J.F.K.’s not-entirely-brilliant presidency. And they have also tended to be well-spaced: Twenty-five years from Adams to Adams, more than fifty years between the Harrisons, twenty-four between T.R. and F.D.R.

So it’s hard not to look at Bush-Clinton dominance, however shaped by randomness, as distinctive to our era, and therefore probably somehow connected to stratification and elite consolidation and other non-ideal patterns in American life generally. At the very least, it’s striking how many non-pedigreed men — Truman, Ike, Nixon, Carter, Reagan — won the White House during the golden years of the American middle class, compared to the mix of family ties and Ivy League resumes (dynasty woven into meritocracy, as it inevitably is) that has defined the office’s leading aspirants in recent decades.

Update from a reader:

Oh, please. Conflating the Clintons and the Bushes is ignorant and offensive. The Bushes are on their fourth generation of power and their third presidency. The Clintons are a married couple. Hilary did not inherit anything, nor did Bill. A Washington power couple is not a dynasty. Put these two families in the same sentence when Chelsea’s granddaughter is running.

(Photo: Former US President George H.W. Bush greets his former Vice President Dan Quayle as former First Lady Barbara Bush stands by after inaugural ceremonies at the US Capitol on January 20, 2005. Also pictured are Florida Governor Jeb Bush his wife Columba and former President Bill Clinton and his wife Sen. Hillary Clinton, D-NY. By Don Emmert/AFP/Getty Images)

by Michelle Dean

A reader compares the Sony hacking to this year’s sexting hacks:

I was a Sony Pictures employee up until two months ago. I worked as a television producer on the Sony lot for the previous two years. On a daily basis, I passed by Amy Pascal and Michael Lynton and the others whose private emails have now been leaked (contrary to Michelle Dean’s disdain that they’re just “big fancy business people,” they’re actually very cool, approachable people), and I have been warned that my private information has very likely been leaked as well – as have any present and former Sony Pictures employees going as far back as 1995. (!)

Let’s first remember what this hack is about: Private documents and emails were illegally stolen and leaked to the public, with more leaks threatened, in order to blackmail Sony out of releasing a film – they have specifically demanded that Sony not release “The Interview.” Put another way, foreign hackers are blackmailing Americans out of exercising their First Amendment rights. And now the media outlets that continue to print the salacious details revealed in these stolen documents are complicit in that blackmail scheme, having given the leaked information the damaging attention that the hackers wanted. The media crossed the line when the reporting shifted from the story of the hack itself and the criminal investigation, to printing every salacious email they could find.

This is not a Snowden leak where it can be argued that this is information about our government that is vital to American citizens. As Sorkin pointed out, these hacks reveal no laws broken by Sony. So this is nothing more than sleazy tabloid journalism using documents stolen by criminals. It is the complete lack of ethics of The Fappening all over again. It doesn’t matter how we got the information, there’s page-views to get! Is this the norm now?

And the worst part is, in the few stories that I’ve read on this, I have seen nothing that would shock anyone in the entertainment industry: Film executives and producers talk bluntly about scripts and actors and personalities because that is the business that they are in. They have to be both passionate and direct, or they aren’t doing their jobs.

Let’s flip the script, so to speak: All of your personal information, emails, your employees’ medical records, payrolls, etc. are leaked by foreign hackers, who threaten to release more if you publish a controversial story. The FBI is investigating. How would you feel about all of your fellow bloggers printing every salacious, taken-out-of-context detail of every email you’ve sent for the past 20 years, making it front page news every day for three straight weeks, and counting? Would you really blame YOURSELF?

To answer the reader’s last question first: I would, at least a tiny bit. But then I’m the self-lacerating sort. And I also tend to see things in questions of degrees.

Of course I would be unhappy to see journalists publish people’s unredacted medical records and social security numbers, which I would agree are analogous to the sext leaks of early September. And I completely sympathize with the panic employees caught up in this mess might feel about that. As far as I know, no one has yet printed things like that but it’s not much comfort.

My point was more limited than this reader imagines. I was simply pointing out that business executives do not have a clear-cut expectation of complete privacy in emails that related to business negotiations and transactions. That goes for the “cool, approachable” executives, too. Business people are regularly called onto the carpet by their lawyers and shareholders to account for their actions in managing the company. It’s just part of the deal along with the rich severance payout.

Is that an abridgement of their First Amendment rights? I’m not so sure. I think it’s just about being a responsible executive.

These emails may not show “illegal” activity per se, in that nothing in them hints at criminality. But they do have the potential to incur big costs for the company in later disputes and litigation. And shareholders do, by the way, have some interest in knowing how the company’s management behaves. The public interest here may not be as clear-cut as in the Snowden matter but these aren’t simply “private” matters. And as an experienced big fancy business person (I think she can survive a tongue-in-cheek remark), I’m sure Pascal knows that intimately.

Update from a reader:

Michelle Dean was right to feel sorry for the in-house counsel at Sony who has tried to prevent everyone there from sending sensitive e-mails – clearly, the message hasn’t gotten through there based on that note from a former Sony employee. News flash to everyone in the US: your company, not you, owns your e-mails! When you hit “delete” on an e-mail, it means “saved forever on a server and/or hard drive somewhere”. Anyone in this day and age who thinks they have any expectation of privacy in any e-mail exchange is sorely mistaken.

When you communicate by e-mail, it feels like a conversation, but it’s like etching something into stone. I tell everyone at my company that for any e-mail you write, imagine seeing it blown up on a giant screen in courtroom somewhere, and you having to explain what you meant by it. I’ve sat through that exact scenario hundreds of times, and have seen offhand e-mails written in the middle of the night create hundreds of millions of dollars in liability for a company, and countless deposition and trial time being spent talking about one or two sentence e-mails. I’ve also seen sexually explicit e-mails (and photos/videos) that would make anyone blush, and these have been viewed and discussed in open court.

I also don’t understand the reference to “First Amendment Rights” by the former Sony employee. Where is the US government involved in stopping anyone at Sony from saying anything? The authorities should go after whoever hacked into the system, and convict them of a crime if they can be caught, but the people who wrote these e-mails assumed the risk when they decided to write an e-mail instead of picking up the phone (or walking down the hall). With everything that’s happened the last few years, including Snapchat hacks etc., it’s amazing to me that people are still surprised when their e-mails get exposed for the world to see.

Forward thinking companies are automatically deleting all e-mails after a short period of time (i.e., 90 days), both to save storage money and to avoid situations like this. Microsoft was at the forefront of this, and has been extremely pleased with the results. Sony (and all of the other studios) may want to consider a similar policy, which would have avoided most of the most embarrassing leaks.