Category: Updates

What’s The Point Of Body Cams? Ctd

A reader writes:

I take issue with the view that the Garner case is a rebuttal of the argument for body cams. Isn’t it compelling that we have this video to show us all what really happened? The public can now make up its own mind what it means. We don’t have to rely on eyewitnesses who are historically unreliable. From the scene with Garner, we would probably have at least six different descriptions from civilians of how he was taken down and two or three different ones from cops. But we don’t need that; we have the video.

Just because the grand jury returned no indictment doesn’t mean the video was a failure. Without the video, can’t you imagine that there would be plenty of pundits calling Garner a thug, emphasizing that he resisted arrest? But there is only a smattering of that. Instead we get things like Bill O’Reilly saying that Garner “didn’t deserve that.”

Another adds:

Three or four more videos like the Garner video? I guarantee we will get some legislation passed.

Another runs through other reasons why cameras would be a net benefit:

First, the most important goal of body-cam reforms is not to provide evidence of police abuse after it happens. It is to change the culture of policing so that the police, knowing they will be held accountable for their actions, will not commit the abuse in the first place. It also changes the behavior of the citizens being policed, making things less likely to escalate all around.

This is not a fantasy. These positive effects have been observed in reality in places where body-cam reforms have been implemented. For example, the Rialto, CA police New York City Public Advocate Displays Police Wearable Camerasdepartment found a 50% reduction in use-of-force incidents and a 90% reduction in citizen complaints after implementing body cameras. Those are astounding results.

In Garner’s case, I’m sure you noticed how hostile the police were to the man with the camera. They did not want to be videotaped. They did not think they should be videotaped. I think it is entirely probable that officer Pantaleo would have acted differently if the camera in question had been on his lapel, rather than in the hands of a bystander being aggressively shooed away by the cops. People act differently not just when they know they’re being recorded, but when they know that they are supposed to be recorded. It changes the culture.

Second, imagine that we had no video of this incident – not even from the bystander. Is there any doubt that it would now be just as murky a case as Ferguson? There would not have been nearly as much public outcry, and what objections there were would have been waived away by people taking the police’s word as gospel and sliming Garner as a violent thug who made the cops fear for their lives. Just compare the video of Tamir Rice’s killing to the police’s account of the incident before they knew there was video if you doubt that cops will lie their asses off in the absence of a video.

Video evidence can only be a good thing in these cases. The widespread consensus that Garner’s killing was wrong would not exist without this video. In all likelihood, neither you nor I would have even heard about the incident. It would have been just another of these everyday injustices that go unnoticed and unpunished every day.

More on the Rialto example here. One more reader:

Perhaps you can remember another recent incident in which there was a horrific attack but a perpetrator got off virtually scot free. People attacked the system, people defended the system, but in the end nothing changed. The there’s a video, and there’s talk of a coverup, of the grave injustice, of the callousness of a system that would fail to punish the person who did such an obvious thing.

I’m talking of of Ray Rice. It was patently obvious that Rice was guilty of assault. You don’t need to see a video to know that his fiancee was knocked unconscious – it was part of the story. But apparently if you’re Roger Goodell (or other defenders of the slap on the write), that’s more or less ok until the public sees the tape.

This is precisely the problem that I have with some folks on the right now suddenly discovering that the police are capable of extraneous violence. The facts are so clear, so obvious, yet since there’s not a video, “I stand with law enforcement”. All you have to do is – and I don’t think I’m exaggerating here – talk to a person of color in any minority neighborhood in literally anywhere USA to hear stories just like Eric Garner’s, minus the asthma and videotape. They could look at the claims of police brutality, instead of waving it away with claims of “race baiting”. But if there’s video, somehow now they’re the great defenders of the public from an out-of-control police force.

Update from a reader with a gloomy cynical take:

Busy afternoon, but a brief response to your reader who wrote: “Three or four more videos like the Garner video? I guarantee we will get some legislation passed.” Sadly, I disagree. The point of the Albert Burneko piece you excerpted yesterday, as well as many contributions by Ta-Nehisi Coates, is that the system that failed to bring the Garner case to trial is not broken, but working exactly as designed. The system was designed by politicians to do exactly what it is doing, and the politicians were elected by the people, who intended that they design precisely this system.

Fox News is covering this matter in a way you describe as “the baldest racism I’ve seen in awhile on cable news.” They are doing so because they are the cable news network of the people who elected the people who designed the system that failed to achieve an indictment in Staten Island. I believe that we will see polling, probably early next week, that indicates a division of public opinion in the Garner case, and that this division will fall more or less along the same racial lines as the polling on the Ferguson matter.

I believe the existence of a videotape presenting exactly what happened will make little difference here, as I believe the exact circumstances in any given case make little difference to the holders of these opinions. The video in question may have stiffened the spine of a few folks like Charles Krauthammer and Andrew McCarthy, but Fox News knows its audience. They don’t need a videotape to decide what happened when a hero met a thug in the hellscape of urban NYC.

We don’t need more videotapes. Conor posted plenty in his excellent summation. Later the same day as that post, the Tamir Rice video was released. Here’s the one from the John Crawford Wal-Mart shooting in August in Ohio that Connor missed. This video did not persuade the grand jury in that case to order up any indictments either. This isn’t a matter of three or four more tapes. Everyone knows what’s on the damn tapes.

This too shall pass. We will move onto something else, so much more quickly than seems possible. Like Sandy Hook, we will scream and we will rend and we will finally change the subject, having achieved nothing. The politicians want nothing achieved, because the voters want nothing achieved. And the beat, as you say, will go on.

(Photo of a police cam from Getty Images)

One Step Closer To Mars

NASA’s Orion spaceship, which failed to launch yesterday, successfully made it today – watch the launch and journey here. Nicholas St. Fleur describes its significance:

During its grueling four-and-half-hour test mission, NASA’s Orion space capsule must shoot 3,600 miles away from Earth, orbit the planet twice, and brave a thick belt of cosmic radiation. Upon re-entry it must withstand a 4,000-degree Fahrenheit fireball created by atmospheric friction decreasing its speed from 20,000 miles per hour to 300 mph. Once it slows to that speed, the craft must deploy 11 parachutes in order to slow down to 20 mph, before plunging into the Pacific Ocean.

It’s a mouthful of challenges, but if Orion triumphs it may one day take astronauts on adventures beyond Earth’s orbit—and potentially to Mars. … This mission is the first of three trial runs that the Orion mission must overcome before NASA deems it safe enough for human space travel.

Jesus Diaz is psyched about this mission and other recent ones:

We sent an amazing rover to Mars in a seemingly impossible mission that had the entire world watching with baited breath. A few weeks ago, we landed on a comet. This week, we sent another spaceship to return material from an asteroid. Today we launched the spaceship that will take humans back to the Moon, asteroids, Phobos, and Mars.

So yes, I look at Orion rising against the deep blue, I hear the cheers coming out of my mouth and countless others, I see the millions of people watching this apparently insignificant event—just a spacecraft that is empty going up and splashing on the Atlantic Ocean—and it feels like the 60s all over again. The path is open again, a sunbeam illuminating its gates, now clean of the vines that had grown through all these years of abandonment.

Joe Pappalardo offers a more critical take:

The Orion launch has been be a triumph of engineering, hiccups and delays aside. But the Empire may not love the sequel. SpaceX is planning a historic launch of its own next year – the rocket is called the Falcon Heavy. Yes, Musk named his rocket after the Millennium Falcon of Star Wars, and he promises it will take twice as much payload into space as the one Nasa launched on Friday, and at one-third the cost. So far his claims about SpaceX have come true, and soon he’ll be fighting, with the lobbyists and the politicians who play favorites, for satellite contracts worth hundreds of billions of dollars. Combine that kind of force with Elon Musk’s capsule full of actual people returning to space – under a Nasa contract to deliver astronauts to the International Space Station – and you have a private startup that can beat Nasa or any other government agency back to the moon, if it so chooses.

Return of the Jedi, indeed.

Update from a reader:

The quote you included from Joe Pappalardo betrays a deep misunderstanding about SpaceX’s role in space exploration and its relationship to NASA. I work for a nonprofit space advocacy organization – The Planetary Society – and I direct its Advocacy and Space Policy program. I do this sort of stuff for a living.

The idea that SpaceX is a purely private, Silicon Valley-esqe startup is fueled by our society’s current swoon for tech culture, frustration at the lumbering pace of NASA, and Elon Musk himself. But it’s not true. SpaceX is a contractor whose business depends almost exclusively on NASA money. NASA provided hundreds of millions of dollars of crucial development money for SpaceX’s Falcon-family of rockets and Dragon crew capsules, and billions of more dollars in contracts for delivering crew and supplies to the space station. Without NASA, there would not be a SpaceX today.

Orion costs more than SpaceX’s hardware because it is tasked with carrying humans far deeper into space than anything SpaceX is developing. You get more radiation. You need to carry more life support. Your heat shield needs to be bigger for reentry. Your safety requirements are higher. And so forth. You can’t really compare the two, because they’re built for entirely different goals and under entirely different contracting regimes. SpaceX is doing what has been done before. Orion is pushing the envelope.

This isn’t to diminish SpaceX’s capabilities and achievements, but to baldly state that SpaceX can send humans to the Moon or Mars for cheaper than NASA, without any actual proof of capability (not to mention a business model, which is conspicuously absent at the moment), undermines the difficulty of what NASA is trying to do. It’s also just flat-out wrong.

Another notes:

Jesus Diaz may have been psyched, but he put Orion down in the wrong ocean; it was the Pacific, 250 miles west of Baja, California. Just rocket science, Jesus.

Meme Of The Day

A reader’s take on it:

#CrimingWhileWhite is basically white people copping to crimes they committed and either weren’t arrested for or were let off with relatively minor punishment. It’s been a bit watered down considering how long it’s been trending, but my point isn’t so much the hashtag as what it means about crime statistics.

Your recent Chart of the Day was designed to demonstrate that blacks “commit” crimes at lower rates than whites perceive, though still at a disproportionately high rate for their (our) population. I think what #CrimingWhileWhite suggests is that not only do blacks commit crime at a lower rate than perceived, but that they are arrested for “criminal” behavior at a much higher rate than whites. In short, white people can engage in behavior that is technically illegal and not get ticketed or arrested and therefore their behavior is not recorded as a crime for statistical purposes. Whereas black people, especially poor black people, who engage in similar behavior are rarely extended that courtesy and as such they do become statistics.

For example, the reported rate of marijuana usage of is virtually identical across ethnic groups at around 11-13%. In fact, among young people, 18-25 years old, blacks use marijuana at a lower rate than whites. However, blacks are arrested for marijuana possession 3.5 times more often than whites. In the District, the arrest rate for blacks is a staggering 8 times as for whites! It doesn’t take long to criminalize an entire group of people when the game is rigged like that.

So when you casually stipulated that it’s natural that police officers might be wary of young black men because they do tend to engage in criminal activity at a higher rate than non-blacks, keep these statistical realities in mind. What someone living in Dupont Circle or Adams Morgan might take for granted being able to do in peace, e.g. have an ounce of weed and a pipe, would result in a felony possession charge for a poor black kid in Baltimore. I don’t need to say more about the effects of a felony charge on a person’s future employment and economic prospects.

I know you’ve been an outspoken advocate of marijuana decriminalization and I applaud your efforts on that front. But the deck is stacked against black and brown people in America and has been since its very founding.

Update from a reader:

I hate things like #CrimingWhileWhite. They are as unscientific as Hannity using a web poll of his own viewers to show that he is right about something. You don’t know if the person is lying or not, you don’t know if their friend mouthed off or not, you don’t know if their friend was carrying more or not, and you don’t know if the friend already had a rap sheet. And mostly you don’t know about the times that a black person got off with a warning because the cop was tired, it was the end of his shift and he just wanted to go home. Or the number of times the white person didn’t get off with a warning for the same action.

On the other hand, I do like the data that shows that while whites smoke pot as much as blacks they don’t get arrested as often. That’s actual data that shows the same point. #CrimingWhileWhite just make people feel good and reinforces existing perceptions but isn’t anything one can base a reasoned decision on.

GE Brings Vox To Life

The enmeshment of the new media site with corporate interests – in which Vox writes ad-copy for big companies, while also claiming to cover them objectively – is not new to Ezra Klein:

GE provided crucial support for media startup Vox.com, an explanatory-journalism site launched by former Washington Post blogger Ezra Klein, with whom it already had a working relationship. While Mr. Klein was still at the Post, GE courted him and others for a news website and marketing campaign in development. When Mr. Klein left to join Vox, GE and its ad dollars followed. The GE site, launched after Mr. Klein left the Post, aggregated video clips and content featuring the blogger, along with Fox News’s Bret Baier, Politico’s Mike Allen and others, discussing and expounding on the news.

The advertiser had “absolutely zero influence” on Vox.com’s editorial content, said Jim Bankoff, chief executive of parent company Vox Media. But both GE and Vox have a similar audience in mind: young, relatively affluent and policy savvy. For GE, the purpose of the relationship was to get GE in the minds of policy makers and lawmakers on Capitol Hill. “We want to target the DC millennials,” said Linda Boff, who heads GE’s global brand marketing. The Vox sponsorship ended in August.

The merger of corporate interests and what’s left of journalism is only getting deeper. And the younger generation of liberal journalists is leading the way, and is shocked, shocked that anyone might question the appearance of blatant conflicts of interest. But a reader wants to make a distinction:

In your post “Ezra Sells Out“, you seem to be confusing Vox, which is Ezra Klein & Co’s media venture, with Vox Media, the overarching company that owns Vox.com along with a number of other media outlets like Polygon and Curbed.

I don’t disagree with the brunt of your post, but it seems a bit underhanded to title the post “Ezra Sell Out” when it is likely that Ezra Klein probably does not have much agency in the story here. I just think using Ezra’s name here implies that he’s responsible for this, when really this decision is being made by Nelson and Bankoff, who run Vox Media at large.

Fair point. Another reader:

Sure, you may have confused Vox Media with Ezra’s Vox news venture.  But perhaps you should dig a bit deeper into Vox Media.  Forget the CEO; he’s just a hired gun.  Who really owns Vox Media?  Who, to put it a better way, is the Andrew Sullivan of the Vox Media empire?  Perhaps not Ezra (though both he and Mathew Yglesia are listed on the Vox Media leadership page as Vox Founders) but rather … Jerome “MyDD” Armstrong and Markos “Daily Kos” Moulitsas.  For all their screaming, shrieking, progressive liberal “corporations are not people” expose the truth reputations, they ought to know better.

And of course, is it not just a hair bit ironic that in one company you have perhaps the four giants (Kos, MyDD, Ezra, Yglesias) of the early progressive blogosphere?   One could only imagine the feigned outrage they would project if, say, Glenn Reynolds and PJ Media started drafting ad copy for the Koch Brothers, Halliburton, and the NRA and then claimed to be completely unbiased.

Meanwhile, it’s worth looking back at our coverage of Vox when it was first announced back in January:

[Vox Media CEO Jim] Bankoff told Ad Age that he has no intention of “tricking anyone” with alternative forms of advertising such as sponsored content or “native” ads — which other new-media growth stories such as BuzzFeed have said they believe are a key part of the future of content. Instead, the Vox CEO said he is counting on Vox’s ability to produce better-quality display ads that will bring in more revenue than the standard banner or site takeover. As he described it:

“We really are in the process of reinventing what brand advertising can be on the web… we believe it can be engaging and beautiful and well integrated [and] fully transparent — we’re not trying to trick anyone like some native ads do…

The beat, it goes on …

Hathos Red Alert

I think I’ll stay sitting down, thank you very much. But is this an indication that the Clintons will pivot toward those white working class voters turned off by the Obama years? Was Schumer’s line on healthcare reform a trial balloon for a way for the Clintons to distance themselves from Obama while arguing that they have the experience to help more people get better jobs, as in the 1990s? I guess we’ll soon find out. Update from a reader:

Another site I was reading pointed out that the video has been up since Nov. 16 and has only had 349 views. And earlier PM Carpenter had highlighted an article by Dana Milbank about her Georgetown appearance yesterday:

When it was time for Clinton’s appearance to begin Wednesday morning, half of the 700 seats in the place were empty. After a half-hour “weather delay,” diplomats and VIPs filled a few more chairs, but more than 300 remained vacant when the former secretary of state and first lady walked in…. Roughly half a dozen people rose to applaud, and for a terrifying moment it appeared they might be the only ones standing. But slowly, lazily, most of the others struggled to their feet…. Several began trickling out before the 40-minute appearance was over.

Hillary fever. Catch it!

 

Why Do NYC Cops Use Banned Chokeholds?

Chokeholds

Roberto A. Ferdman asks:

The answer might be because the department is not enforcing the rule stringently. A recent study (pdf) by the review board says that:

Put simply, during the last decade, the NYPD disciplinary decisions in NYPD administrative trials of chokehold allegations failed to enforce the clear mandate of the Patrol Guide chokehold rule. In response to these decisions which failed to hold offending officers accountable, the CCRB and NYPD Department Advocate’s Office [internal affairs] failed to charge officers with chokehold violations pursuant to the mandate of the Patrol Guide chokehold rule.

By failing to properly punish officers who have used a banned method of apprehension, the department effectively shapes the understanding of the rule by officers, the study says.

Josh Voorhees is unsurprised that Pantaleo wasn’t indicted:

While the officer’s use of the banned maneuver received significant scrutiny in the court of public opinion, it likely received much less in the court of law. As Eugene O’Donnell, a professor at the John Jay College of Criminal Justice, argued earlier this week, there is a difference between an act that is banned in the NYPD’s rulebook and one that is deemed criminal. “There is no explicit law that criminalizes the use of a chokehold on someone either by a police officer or someone else,” wrote O’Donnell.

Grand jury proceedings happen behind closed doors, so we may never know exactly what convinced at least 12 of the 23 jurors to vote against an indictment of any kind. But by deciding—despite the damning video—that there was not enough evidence to justify the case going to trial, the jurors are effectively declaring that Garner’s death was, at worst, a horrible mistake, one that might amount to misconduct but that falls short of murder or manslaughter.

Update from a reader:

I’m a lawyer in NYC (I hate it nearly as much as you do). You quoted Vorhees quoting a John Jay professor claiming “There is no explicit law that criminalizes the use of a chokehold on someone either by a police officer or someone else.” That’s just wrong. Section 121 of the Penal Law (pdf) provides:

§ 121.11 Criminal obstruction of breathing or blood circulation

A person is guilty of criminal obstruction of breathing or blood circulation when, with intent to impede the normal breathing or circulation of the blood of another person, he or she:

a. applies pressure on the throat or neck of such person; or
b. blocks the nose or mouth of such person.

Criminal obstruction of breathing or blood circulation is a class A misdemeanor.

The Garner grand jury certainly could have indicted for that.  Note too that it doesn’t matter whether it was a chokehold, meant to impede breathing, or a headlock, meant to impede blood flow.  Both are crimes.  I’ve seen some chatter on Fox News making a big deal out of the difference, Hannity included.

The NYT lists some “of the most notable deaths since 1990 involving New York Police Department officers.” Friedersdorf provides further context:

Even with the NYPD’s history of killing people with chokeholds that violate policy, hundreds of non-lethal violations of that policy every year, indisputable video evidence of multiple officers blithely ignoring the fact that a colleague was violating that policy, and their subsequent dishonesty about the chokehold when filing a report on the incident, Police Commissioner Bill Bratton still had the brass to say earlier this year that “he would not support a law to make chokeholds illegal, insisting that a departmental prohibition is enough.” He also said, “I think there are more than sufficient protocols in place to address a problem.”

In context, that’s sufficiently absurd to cast a shadow over the man’s honor. It’s hard to believe it won’t come up when New York City is sued for negligence. At minimum it undermines Bratton’s credibility. “Every time this happens,” Hamilton Nolan observes, “there’s a lot of talk about ‘training’ and ‘changing the culture’ of the police.” Yet chokeholds persist. “What will change this situation,” he adds, “is putting police officers in jail for killing and abusing people. And it’s abundantly clear that our current laws are too lax to accomplish that. The laws need to change.”

Historical context suggests he is absolutely right.

Dudes On Diets

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Alice Robb argues that the new face of “it goes straight to my thighs” is increasingly male:

Calorie-counting has practically become shorthand for female vanity. It recalls Cher from Clueless whining about the “two bowls of Special K, 3 pieces of turkey bacon, a handful of popcorn, 5 peanut butter M&M’s and like 3 pieces of licorice,” that she’s pigged out on. Or Regina George, the villain of Mean Girls, studying nutrition labels in the school cafeteria in an effort to lose three pounds. (Down-to-earth Cady, on the other hand, nonchalantly loads her tray.) …

There is almost a cuteness element to the male diet. Perhaps it’s because—like wearing skinny jeans—it’s trendy, edgeing up to gender norms and then, ever so slightly, transgressing them. “Traditionally, men do not care about what they eat, and prefer a narrow meat-based diet,” says Brendan Gough, psychologist and co-author of Men, Masculinities and Health: Critical Perspectives. Men who do care, and who make a point of showing that they care, are advertising a sort of emotional and physical self-awareness. Weight-consciousness is also relatively new for men, and pop culture hasn’t yet given them a stock of unattractive Regina George–like figures to rebel against.

Or maybe it’s a reflection of the (stereotypically male) impulse to compete, and take things to an extreme. Some of the more all-consuming diets—like Paleo and Dukan—are marketed primarily to men. (According to Grub Street, the Paleo diet is “most often associated with city-dwelling males who go around pretending they’re cavemen.) “Men aren’t just going to be healthy, they are going to be ‘super healthy,’” says Christopher Faircloth, a sociologist and author of Medicalized Masculinities. 

Update from a reader:

It is BS that men don’t diet.  My dad, a WWII vet, career naval officer, etc dieted.  I’ve known men all my life who dieted, including me from age 25 to the present (I’m 60).  My weight, when I let it, tends to go about 10% higher than is good for me or attractive to my wife.   I associate male dieting with complaints/criticisms from their wives/girlfriends.  My wife has asked me several times over the years “when are you due?”  That is a non-subtle hint that it’s time to shed some pounds and hit the gym.

I restarted my diet last Sunday.  I regained 21 of 27 pounds I’d lost two years ago (largely due to a very heavy trial docket this year and way too much hotel food while on the road).  Just finished a delicious protein shake.  Salad for lunch, lean meat and veggies for dinner after a workout.  And red wine.  For the heart.

(Photo by Nellies Beemster-Klaucke)

Illiberal Feminism Strikes Again, Ctd

The in-tray has seen another big wave of reader responses since our most recent post, but we’re trying to balance the need for your input with the need to keep the debate productive and relatively concise. One reader who wants to keep it going:

I dissent from the dissenters. Keep talking about it. Keep questioning the excesses of the feminist hard line. I understand that they don’t want to confront their own worst elements because, like any political movement, talking about your internal messaging problems is guaranteed to annihilate your external message. So I know why they don’t want to talk about it, and I surely know that the mainstream brand of feminism is Emma Watson’s elegant, inclusive variety.

A refrain I hear often from the feminist side is that men have to learn to stop talking and listen. And when I point out that that sounds suspiciously like “shut up”, I then get a 30-minute explanation as to why it’s not hypocritical to tell men to remain silent when you’re angry that women have been kept silent for so long. You are listening, Andrew. Don’t let them tell you otherwise.

Many more readers sound off:

I do think that sometimes your maleness and gayness come together to make you a little tone deaf on feminist issues, but this pushback must just reinforce every bad stereotype you have.

Getting the Oxford debate cancelled is one giant case of ad hominem; your views have no merit because of who you are. The irony is so rich it’s cloying. But the last dissent finally clarified what’s wrong in this discussion. Your critic (male, of course) states, “every feminist contradiction you’ve covered in this thread has been debated within feminism since its beginning” (obviously, demonstrably false), and then whines: “It’s not feminism’s burden to educate.”

Seriously, dude, grow the fuck up. Of course it’s feminism’s job to educate; you just don’t want to do the work. The fact that you have suffered and/or do suffer injustice does not mean you’re not a massively over-entitled asshole. If the top level of the oppressor pyramid is a straight white wealthy intelligent educated first-world man, then almost everyone in this discussion on the first five levels of a fifty level pyramid, pointing furiously up at the top level and ignoring everyone below. They have all the entitled laziness of the top levels, but spend so much time looking up they actually feel (and act like) they’re at the bottom (like the guy who thought $450,000 a year made him poor).

This vocal minority of feminists are not wrong to name and fight the injustices. But they are childish to expect it to come easy, and only this entitled immaturity explains their gall in lecturing you, of all people, on the “burden to educate” – as though you did not spend decades educating and re-educating every new person who came to the table with a sudden insight on marriage equality.

Another continues along those lines:

The fact that this thread has revealed such a wide degree of opinions and experiences demonstrates the necessity of this education. There is a huge swath of people in this country, many of whom are intelligent and well educated, who have reservations towards or disagreements with positions in modern feminism. Even if you are certain that you are right, you don’t get to just snap your fingers and win the argument. Ignoring those who disagree with you isn’t going to help anything. Attempting to censor your detractors is only going to make things worse.

If there really are arguments that are strong enough to settle these debates within academic circles, then why is it treated as such a difficult task to show these arguments to those who haven’t seen them? Why are you “disheartened” when someone whose opinion and understanding you otherwise trust disagrees with you? Why don’t you just explain why this stuff is so damn clear to you?

On that note, a female reader wishes we hadn’t run this email from another woman:

I appreciate that you air comments from a variety of opinions and much prefer this format to a comments section, but that one could have stayed in the in-tray.  Actually, no, I think it’s illustrative in that it presents the hideous stereotypes and gross exaggerations often employed by equality foes.  This view that “feminists don’t care about equality for women … they want domination for women” hurts the cause of equality for all as much as the institutional patriarchy we defend ourselves against.

I’ve been kicked out of feminist forums for being reasonable and having the audacity to suggest that, perhaps, not all men are potential rapists and murders, so I know very well how they “eat their own.”  But that vast majority of people who call themselves feminists, publicly or privately, actually are on the side of equality, do not hate men, and are not seeking gender domination.  I’m sure you know this.  I’m not convinced that your reader does, but I think by posting it you give credence to the idea that probably had some of your readers nodding along.

Another wonders where to draw the line:

I generally agree with your overall take on this subject, but like everything else there needs to be room for nuance. Here is one example: At my law school, a first-year criminal law exam included a very detailed description of rape. A huge controversy arose. Now you might easily think this is more evidence of overly “delicate sensibilities,” but you should consider that at least some women, maybe a significant number, taking that exam would have to fight through their personal experiences with rape and somehow remain as analytically focussed and dispassionate as the men taking that exam. First-year law exams essentially determine your law school success, and one blown question will be difficult to overcome. So basically, by including that rape question, the professor handed a huge advantage to the male students in his class. Should we fault the female students who were enraged by this?

Update from a reader:

Why should we not do this for kidnapping, or traumatic car accidents, or … ? Are these women never going to deal with rape in their law practice? Is there a tipping point where a trauma that potentially affects {n}% of students should not be asked?  I am (perhaps overly) analytical. I’m not saying the precaution is unnecessary, but how are we making these decisions? What is the framework? That is the part that bothers me.

Another expands the debate to include race:

One reader argued that what is being given as an argument is: “I know you think what you’re doing is OK, but it’s not for some unspecified reason that you can’t understand because you are not the correct gender/race/religion. Because of this, you should refrain from expressing an opinion and solicit feedback from those who do possess the relevant identity.”

Sometimes that is the argument being made, and it is self-evidently a flawed argument. And I agree that “call-out culture” is a problem, with so much emphasis put on denouncing and writing people off as bigots. And obviously, as I’m a man commenting on feminist issues, I don’t think that men are incapable of understanding issues of sexism. But there is a more nuanced version of that argument that is much more persuasive, that your reader is ignoring.

Let’s take Ta-Nehisi Coates as an example where you to defer to someone else’s life experience because of your self-admitted ignorance. I don’t think this means, or that you intend to say, that you defer completely to TNC on all questions of racism or race relations. But a lot of questions relating to racism can’t be quantified. A lot of questions relating to racism have to do with subjective experiences. A lot of questions relating to racism are researched using surveys where canny respondents can and often will perceive the “correct” answer. We can’t just ask White people whether they’re racist and expect an honest answer. Sometimes there isn’t an objective answer in the data. And I think there’s enough evidence that White people have glaring holes in their perception of racism that we shouldn’t dismiss the experience of Black people because it doesn’t match with our own. And we can see from well-crafted studies that the perception of Black people is often validated by the results.

For example, I’ve often encountered White people who are skeptical that job discrimination is still a real factor affecting Black people. Often they think that because of affirmative action, the discrimination actually goes in the other direction. Yet studies have found that if you send identical resumes with White names and Black names, the White resumes will get substantially more responses. The statistics lead to the undeniable conclusion that despite what White people perceive, that discrimination is still there. But because this discrimination may be subconscious or is at least conducted in such a way that makes it hard to prove in any individual case, White people often just don’t see it and don’t think it’s there.

This perspective does not mean that White people have nothing to contribute, and they cannot debate racial issues. But it does mean that we have reasons to think that White people’s perception can be flawed.

You are willing to acknowledge these limitations and defer to writers like TNC rather than relying just on your perceptions. But you seem to be much less willing to do this with issues relating to women, despite much sexism operating in the same veiled manner as racism and involving situations with subjective interpretation.

And there’s also good reason to suspect that men often don’t perceive issues relating to sexism accurately. For example, I know from my studies in linguistics that the perception that women talk much more than men is not really true if you look at it quantitatively. The perception simply doesn’t match the data. There were even experiments where, when teachers were forced to actually give equal time to boys and girls, their impression was that the girls were talking more than the boys.

So, when issues of representation of women are derisively dismissed as calling for quotas in order to achieve gender justice, your impression that women are actually represented fairly as journalists and composers not only overrides whatever feminist activists are saying about the issue, but dismisses their analysis as illiberal, censorious fanaticism. That they looked at the numbers, to you, suggests quotas, and the issue of whether there’s actually any sexism causing those disparities wasn’t even considered. The way you think women should interpret objectification of women say, in video games, carries more weight than how women feel about it. But maybe you should be a little bit more circumspect about your ability to perceive these issues fairly.

Another reader questions how useful the word “feminist” is:

The main problem with the label of “feminist” is that it has come to mean something different from its literal definition.  Here’s another phrase to consider: “family values.”  Those words are quite noble if you look them up in the dictionary, but in reality many people suspect the term as a proxy for anti-gay Christianist sentiment.  For this reason, while I value my family and families in general,  I will never, ever say that I support “family values,” nor will any of my friends.

Sadly, the word “feminist” has been similarly corrupted by a very vocal minority who are defined by their damage and penchant for quick disapproval, and they are far more interested in punishing the world than changing it for the better.  It’s unfair, but the word cannot be rehabilitated. I would urge “dictionary feminists” to use the momentum of their hostile sisters against them, and simply pick a new label (“Equalists?”) and reject the old one.  Otherwise, they are going to bang their heads against a negative cultural image that is continually fueled by extremists who simply have no interest in reaching a consensus.

Another tells the story of how he came around to the idea of “privilege”:

I was raised in an ultraconservative, fundamentalist Christian household, where homophobia and sexism were the norm. It should surprise no one that I entered adulthood with some nasty, bigoted views.

Contact with the real world – meeting gay people that were “virtually normal” and realizing that women were obviously every bit as human as me – inevitably challenged my worldview, but also it put me in conflict with myself.  I started to soften my stance on issues such as gay marriage or women’s rights, adding qualifiers and exceptions to my language whenever the topics arose with friends, classmates or colleagues.  Yet, in the course of these discussions, I was still so often insulted, attacked or condemned for my beliefs that I had no reason to think that feminists and “liberals” considered me anything but brutish, stupid and evil.  So I never felt any impetus to consider their positions – you don’t stop in the middle of a fistfight to consider your enemy’s feelings and perspectives, and debate the relative merits of whether you should have your nose broken.

My change of heart came when I made friends with a bisexual woman who, at the time, sat on the board of the local feminist community center.  She and I had many conversations over many hours and evenings about feminism, sexuality, identity politics … you name it, and we jawed about it.  Rather than judging me, shaming me or telling me that my views were out of bounds or that debating certain topics was off-limits, she created a “safe space,” so to speak, and listened, attending to both my thoughts and feelings, and asking smart, vexing questions at opportune moments. It didn’t take long for me to start hearing the words coming out of my own mouth, and to realize how I had been so carelessly and unconsciously destructive with them in the past.

I’ll never forget the day she dropped this bomb: Knowing that Hemingway was my literary hero, she paraphrased him: “You have to pay some way for everything that’s good.” It became bleedingly obvious to me just then. There are so many human beings fighting for the basic privileges that I get for free, just for being white, straight and male.  With great power comes great responsibility: If I don’t accord everyone the same dignity, agency and freedom that I have, I cheapen myself.  You pay the price of privilege by recognizing that the privilege is good, it’s worth something, and that if you deserve it, everyone deserves it.

If she had blithely dismissed me as a bigot (which I was) and shut down the debate over some ignorant thing I said (there were many) I may have never come around.  Thank God that she realized you can’t teach someone empathy, understanding and mercy with hatred, hard-heartedness and vengeance.  You teach people how to be loving and understanding by being loving and understanding.  It makes me think of the recent post “Jesus Amidst the Ruins“; she didn’t attack me or attempt to silence me or give up on me because my beliefs were unacceptable in polite public discourse.  She just washed my feet.

The impulse to silence those that disagree with you may be all too human, but it has no place in a free society. It is the tool of the ideologue, the dictator and the assassin. Those of us that are able to participate in debates like #gamergate or illiberalism in the art world – or any public debate – need to check our privilege. You have to pay some way for everything that’s good, and the price of free speech is recognizing that it is good, that it is worth something, and that if we deserve it, everyone deserves it.

Platonic Procreation, Ctd

A reader remarks on a recent post:

Long before Michael Woodley theorized it, the link between asexuality and genius was covered on Seinfeld, when George Costanza’s girlfriend had mononucleosis and couldn’t have sex with him for six weeks. The result, as you may recall, was that George dedicated all of that time and energy once used to think about women and sex to thinking about other things and became … a genius!

Another goes on a bit of a rant:

I’m going to call BS on the evolutionary psychology idea that asexuals devote more of their brain away from sex. That is an incredibly self-serving idea; it simultaneously flatters the person who says they are too smart for sex and absolves them from having to engage with the cognitive complexities (and potential failures) of an intimate relationship or coupling.

I am certain there are asexuals, but I don’t think they are asexual because their brains are eugenically superior by dent of conscious intervention on the part of the asexual in question.  There are definitely a few geniuses who are asexual, but the idea that most geniuses are asexual is absurd. There are probably an equal number of dumb asexuals and smart asexuals.  Humans simply do not have that granular level of control over their own hormones – and if you think you do, that’s just a sad cognitive illusion and you are deluding yourself.

Geniuses are just the extreme end example of this.  Their brain is so great and everyone else’s brains are so puny their ineptness in relationships must be because their brain is so great, omg, in fact, their ineptness is actually EVIDENCE their brain is greater!  It’s a beautiful unbreakable feedback loop of self-serving delusion. Like Fox News.

I dated a very brilliant woman in college whom as best I can tell from Facebook now identifies as asexual.  She had her own set of background and baggage she prefers to believe she is above, and she would love the theory that she was just so smart her body wasn’t interested in sex.  Her body was interested in sex, but as she would often assert she would eventually mentally clamp down hard on any sexual response she felt when we were making out because she didn’t want to lose control (and she would get scared at her own non-conscious responses to physical intimacy, in my opinion).

I respected her boundaries, and while we explored each other moderately, we never went very far – which was fine, considering we were eighteen and it was a first relationship for both of us.  I think our relationship was a positive growing experience for both of us, but she never got comfortable with the idea that her body had a mind of its own.

Personally, I think this whole evo-psyche explanation is an extension of Smart Kid Syndrome.  Smart Kids have everything relating to school come so easily to them that they never learn how to struggle through something that is new and initially incomprehensible and requires a long time investment of repeatedly failing before its no longer impossible. On top of that, Smart Kids are subjected to an unending geyser of addictive exclamatory over-the-top praise about how SMART and brilliant they are.  Every time they make a minor achievement, they’re given a hit of that addictive praise for something that required a minimal input of effort; this has a huge downside, when something is not effortless their output is not amazing and they don’t get praised and they don’t get the endorphin rush they’re used to getting every time they complete something.  And when they try hard and put in tons of effort the praise they get is not commensurate to their immense effort, it’s the same praise they get for doing something that took minimal effort.

The natural response to this is anything that does not come as easily as schooling is derided and diminished as “stupid”.  This is exacerbated when the “stupid” thing is widespread or popular and the Smart Kid feels that they are missing out on something or being deliberately excluded.  But the fault cannot be the self, no, it must be the “other” exterior to the self that is at fault.

Do you see how seductive this line of thinking is?  “I’m smarter than everybody else therefore I’m better than everybody else, how come they can get dates or play sports when I am so much better and smarter?  It’s because X are so stupid or X are so shallow” etc.

No it is not.  It is because X made the effort, X tried to have a relationship, X invested years in learning sports skills.  It isn’t that asking a girl out is hard, or taking that long anxiety ridden path towards a first kiss is difficult, nope, according to the smart kid it is the entirety of society being stupid.  How dare they achieve success in something and win praise for something the smart kid is scared of confronting and failing at?  There’s nothing worse than failing, you don’t get your hit of endorphins from a geyser of praise when you fail, so the best strategy is to avoid at all costs situations where failure is likely to recur.

Previous Dish on asexuality here. Update from a reader:

Asexual here (I’ve written into the Dish about it before), and I’m calling bullshit on “asexual people are smarter because they don’t think about sex.” I actually had someone say this to me on OKCupid (I’m open about being asexual, as well as trans), and was totally caught off guard by it, it was a bizarre idea and not something I would have ever thought up on my own. I shared it with other asexual friends and they found it similarly laughable. No, I don’t think about sex, but just because I think about different things than different people doesn’t mean I’m thinking about smarter things. I’m sure I fill that brain space with plenty of frivolous things, as do my friends. Not to say that I don’t think about smart things, but I don’t even remotely feel like I do that more than other people, and I’m certainly not a genius.

Listening

I haven’t come across any new, dispositive facts to change my mind about the complicated specifics in the Michael Brown tragedy. But there is one dispositive fact that is hard to miss and that keeps impressing itself upon me every time I read about Ferguson and its meaning. There is a near-universal consensus among African-American men that there is a crisis about their role in American society, and particularly about their interaction with the police. You can cavil, or criticize or feign shock or refer back to the specifics of the Ferguson case. But it’s there and it’s real and any crisis between any segment of the population with respect to law enforcement is a crisis for the entire society.

Here’s what strikes me – the range of black voices telling us that this is a moment for despair. The rhetoric has gone to eleven. TNC:

Barack Obama is the president of a congenitally racist country, erected upon the plunder of life, liberty, labor, and land. This plunder has not been exclusive to black people. But black people, the community to which both Michael Brown and Barack Obama belong, have the distinct fortune of having survived in significant numbers. For a creedal country like America, this poses a problem—in nearly every major American city one can find a population of people whose very existence, whose very history, whose very traditions, are an assault upon this country’s nationalist instincts. Black people are the chastener of their own country. Their experience says to America, “You wear the mask.”

Here’s Colbert King, one of the sharpest columnists at the Washington Post, with long credentials in the civil rights movement:

We are in a bad place. My 20-year-old grandson, Will, the most gentle and respectful young man you would ever want to meet, posted this on his Facebook page:

“Regarding the recent events in Ferguson: I’ve always wanted to believe my country was free. But today’s grand jury decision tells me this cannot be the case. No country that refuses to hold the police, those so-called ‘defenders of the law,’ accountable for its unjust brutality — and yes, it is often very brutal — can be free. When the grand jury declined to charge Darren Wilson for his actions, what kind of a message does that send? . . . It doesn’t seem fair that police can commit brutal acts against innocent people and get away with it.”

It’s not, Will. Not today. Not in your great-grandmother’s day when that Mississippi grand jury let that white farmer get away with murder. Not ever.

John McWhorter shares my view of the murkiness of the actual incident, but is emphatic nonetheless about the broader problem:

The right-wing take on Brown, that he was simply a “thug,” is a know-nothing position. The question we must ask is: What is the situation that makes two young black men comfortable dismissing a police officer’s request to step aside?

These men were expressing a community-wide sense that the official keepers of order are morally bankrupt. What America owes communities like Ferguson — and black America in general — is a sincere grappling with that take on law enforcement that is so endemic in black communities nationwide. As Northwestern philosopher Charles Mills has put it, “Black citizens are still differentially vulnerable to police violence, thereby illustrating their second class citizenship.”

This is true. It is most of what makes so many black people of all classes sense racism as a key element of black life, and even identity.

What we’re talking about here is not prejudice exhibited by other members of civil society – the kind of prejudice you can argue should be ignored or proven wrong. It is prejudice exhibited by the representatives of the entire system – the police – and its expression is too often violence, even fatal violence. At first, I simply wondered how so many people I respect see no progress at all since the 1930s or earlier. But it is perfectly possible, it now seems clear, for there to be considerable social progress and integration even as police forces – especially in poor, urban areas – come to associate criminality with black men, and treat them as a different class of people – guilty until proven innocent, violent unless proven peaceful.

I can see why this happens, can’t you? Cops are not superhuman. High rates of violence and crime in neighborhoods with large numbers of young black men make a certain kind of prejudice almost impossible to avoid for a fallible human cop – but that makes training to counteract these impulses all the more important to enforce. A cop like Wilson, with clearly minimal finesse in these matters, come across as afraid, unprofessional, and reckless. Ditto this jumpy fool in a much clearer case:

I cannot imagine that happening to a white man. Period. The officer in that case has been fired and charged with assault. But what are the odds that would have happened without a dash-cam video?

The truth is: there are too many eerie parallels between today’s world and yesterday’s.

Although the formal structures are immeasurably better than in the darkest days of slavery and formal segregation, the informal patterns of mind created by history can stay the same. And I sense it is this unchanging attitude – and what it says about the core moral imagination of many non-blacks – that drives reasonable men to sputtering rage and frustration. We are not what we once were – but we remain deeply formed by what we once were. How hard is that nuance to understand?

Will we ever be different? I suspect so. Again from Chris Rock’s interview:

Grown people, people over 30, they’re not changing. But you’ve got kids growing up … I drop my kids off and watch them in the school with all these mostly white kids, and I got to tell you, I drill them every day: Did anything happen today? Did anybody say anything? They look at me like I am crazy … It’s partly generational, but it’s also my kids grew up not only with a black president but with a black secretary of State, a black joint chief of staff, a black attorney general. My children are going to be the first black children in the history of America to actually have the benefit of the doubt of just being moral, intelligent people.

But that may be too sunny a view – and for too many right now a distant prospect. Which is why I favor body cams for cops in these neighborhoods; aggressive attempts to improve schooling in poor black neighborhoods; the end of stop-and-frisk and of the revenue-creating abuses that Radley Balko highlighted. More to the point: I don’t think this should be viewed as some kind of attack on the police. Body cams can protect them from false charges as well as provide an incentive for more civil interactions with black men; and the dragnet criminalization of black men for possessing a joint is a bizarre waste of cops’ time. Their impulses are often understandable – if a huge proportion of criminals in your neighborhood are young black men, you can slide very easily into stereotypes that fatally undermine the rule of law. But that cannot excuse a set of different standards of justice for different types of people.

That’s not a minor bug in a democratic system. It’s a fatal illness. And we need to start treating it like one.

Update from a reader, who rightly keeps our attention on the outrageous killing of a 12-year-old black kid in Cleveland:

We learn more and more horrific details every day (I just saw a story about how the officers who killed him didn’t give CPR for nearly four minutes, essentially killing him once more). While the Ferguson incident was obviously complicated and demands at least some nuance in our response, the Tamir Rice killing, it seems to me, demands communal, shared outrage and pain and anger, the kind that can perhaps genuinely contribute to a meaningful response and to change.

At the very least, it seems to me to be as extreme and grotesque and worth extended attention as any story that has received multi-post, follow-up and conversation kinds of attention on the Dish. And since the Dish is the kind of space that can genuinely push the national conversation forward, I think doing so could help with those broader effects and impacts as well. So I wanted to see if it might not be able to get more of that kind of coverage. Tamir deserves it, and I’d say we all need it.

If you haven’t seen the disturbing footage already, showing the cops giving the kid who made a dumb decision no real time to surrender before shooting him dead, it pretty much says it all: