Right-Wing Media Whores

And, yes, that isn’t hyperbole. Having been busted a while back for writing positive articles about the Malaysian government, the hacks are back at the trough again:

Several conservative bloggers repeated talking points given to them by a proxy group for the Ukrainian government — and at least one writer was paid by a representative of the Ukrainian group, according to documents and emails obtained by BuzzFeed.

The Ukrainian campaign began in the run-up to high-stakes Ukrainian parliamentary elections last year, and sought to convince skeptical American conservatives that the pro-Russian Party of Regions, led by President Viktor Yanukovych, deserved American support. During that period, articles echoing Ukrainian government talking points appeared on leading conservative online outlets, including RedState, Breitbart, and Pajamas Media.

The stomach turns at this:

Warner Todd Huston was one of the more prolific of the writers tasked with writing pro-Yanukovych stories. He posted Ukraine content on Family Security Matters, the website run by the Center for Security Policy, anti-Muslim pundit Frank Gaffney’s think tank. Other posts appeared on small sites like Right Wing News, ChicagoNow’s Publius Forum, and Canada Free Press.

In a post titled “Russia’s Constant Interference in Ukraine,” Huston wrote that the imprisonment of Tymoshenko was justified.

“Too many in the west imagine that she was arrested by a Ukraine backsliding into a Soviet-styled police state where all opposition leaders are squelched,” Huston wrote. “This, however, just isn’t the case.” Huston called Tymoshenko “one of Putin’s best assets in the former Soviet-satellite nation.”

I can be snarky about Buzzfeed at times, but their reporting under Ben Smith is top-notch. I suspect the corruption of struggling young bloggers and writers by wealthy authoritarian regimes may be more widespread than many would believe.

Should Convictions Be Hard To Get?

Harlem Holds Vigil For Trayvon Martin

Wilkinson thinks so:

In Texas you can get away with shooting someone to death if they’re running away with your property. That’s insane, and it’s easy to see how a law like that rigs the system in favour of people with a lot of property—a class that remains disproportionately white and male. However, on the whole, our criminal-justice system is so frightfully racist because it’s too easy for prosecutors, not because it’s too hard. Of course, in a racist society, rules that help defendants are going to help the most privileged defendants the most, and that’s maddening. But that shouldn’t stop us from recognising that the least privileged, the most oppressed, the most discriminated against, are far and away most likely to stand accused. That’s why I suspect that a legal system making it harder for the likes of Mr Zimmerman to get away with it would be a system of even more outrageous racial inequity.

Cass Sunstein has a different view:

Reasonable doubt is far more difficult to meet than other legal standards, including “preponderance of the evidence” (used for most civil trials), “clear and convincing evidence” (used for deportation proceedings) and “substantial evidence” (used for administrative agency decisions). To be sure, any doubt must be “reasonable”; the law doesn’t require absolute certainty. But a good defense lawyer is often able to obtain an acquittal even if most jurors essentially agree with the prosecution’s account of the facts.

Among other things, the Zimmerman verdict shines a bright spotlight on the reasonable-doubt standard. Lord Blackstone famously said, “It is better that ten guilty persons escape than that one innocent suffer,” and most people think the reasonable-doubt standard reflects a judgment to that effect.

But that judgment isn’t self-evidently correct. If 10 guilty people escape punishment, then the deterrent effect of the criminal law will be significantly weakened, and wrongdoers will be set free to do more wrong, potentially putting innocent lives in jeopardy.

(Photo: Candida Feliz participates in a candle lit vigil for Trayvon Martin, the teenager who was shot and killed in Florida last year, on July 15, 2013 in New York City. By Andrew Burton/Getty Images.)

So “Stand Your Ground” Did Matter

Legally, it was irrelevant to the case, which hinged on basic self-defense. But listen to one of the jurors explain to Anderson Cooper how she came to her verdict:

COOPER: Because of the two options you had, second degree murder or manslaughter, you felt neither applied?

JUROR: Right. Because of the heat of the moment and the Stand Your Ground. He had a right to defend himself. If he felt threatened that his life was going to be taken away from him or he was going to have bodily harm, he had a right.

Geraldo got the jury dead to rights:

COOPER: It didn’t come up, the question of, did George Zimmerman profile Trayvon Martin because he was African-American?

JUROR: No, I think he just profiled him because he was the neighborhood watch, and he profiled anyone who came in acting strange. I think it was just circumstances happened that he saw Trayvon at the exact time that he thought he was suspicious.

The key to her was that Trayvon was allegedly just meandering around in the dark in the rain – but she concedes that that entire description was entirely from Zimmerman. It’s a glimpse into how the jurors balanced a black man’s corpse against a neighborhood watch’s testimony. And how racial profiling to some can seem like nothing of the sort to others.

The Tangible Tome

shackleton_web_1_med

“Books should always remain available in print,” Gracy Howard maintains:

When art enthusiasts enter an art gallery and survey freshly painted works, their first reaction is sensory. The canvases still bear the musty smell of pigments and glisten with wetness. In that moment, the spectator feels close to the painter. While an art aficionado can access Picasso’s paintings online, no one could argue such viewing is equivalent to firsthand observation. When Picasso devotees walk into a gallery, they are solely fixed on the artist and his reality.

Similarly, physical books limit readers and force them to ignore distractions. They enter the world of the author, and are obliged to forget or ignore the world outside. An e-reader allows easy shifts from reading to Facebook or a game app. But for the physical book reader, one must enter another universe.

Rachel Arons notes how lovers of physical books must increasingly reckon with craftspeople who re-purpose the printed page in the name of art:

Internet literary culture has also seen the flourishing of [a group] that celebrates books neither as precious physical objects nor as utilitarian vessels but uses them as the raw materials for works of art. The forms are varied—some are sculptures made from individual books, others use books as the building blocks for larger structures, while still others make books the canvas for paintings or drawings—but these projects have in common a way of playing off the near-spiritual aura that many of us associate with physical books, both augmenting books’ specialness by using them to make something beautiful, and undercutting it by ignoring their original purpose. …

The paper fetishists and text fetishists alike might view this kind of work as sacrilege—it does, after all, involve the destruction or deconstruction of books, and the disconnection of books from the act of reading. And yet, these works serve, perhaps more effectively than more straightforward forms of book worship, as moving expressions of our transforming relationship to books—and the potential for beauty, as well as loss, in that change.

Recent Dish on art crafted from books here and here.

(Image of “Shackleton’s Antarctic Adventure” by book sculptor Justin Rowe)

Being Sexual Without Sex

In an interview, the popular young adult novelist Judy Blume describes what the many letters she receives reveal about the emotional and sexual lives of teenagers today:

There are so many kinds of longing. The longing to fit in, the longing to figure it out, the emotional longing for friendship and being accepted—these are all as important as physical longing. Before all the hormones start raging, it’s the emotional longing that is most important, and boy, you have to learn to figure it out. In my day, the rules were there for us. Back then there was no abortion and no pill, and my friends and I knew that what we called “going all the way” could ruin our lives. It is not that we didn’t have physical sexual longing, but we went out with guys who understood that there were ways to satisfy—and it wasn’t oral sex. We kind of could be satisfied through touching; we could be physically satisfied with what we called petting. I went out with a lot of guys, and there was an understanding. I was never pushed to go all the way.

I think today’s kids miss out on being sexual without having intercourse.

There are a lot of sexual expectations today. Everyone is watching porn now. It turns you on, sure. I’m not saying don’t watch it. But what you see in porn is not what real love and sexuality within a long-term relationship are. Just like kids have to learn that the toy they see on TV is different from different from what it does in real life, I’d like to see the same thing taught about sex. I hate to see girls feeling like they have to emulate what they see in porn, with breast implants and pole dancing. I am actually glad that Amanda Bynes had her implants removed. This was a good development. What would I do if I was 16 now?

Avant-Garde Anime

Twenty-five years ago, Katsuhiro Otomo’s anime Akira broke the mold for animated storytelling. Phil Hoad pays tribute:

Anime (and its print sibling, manga) arrived in the west at the right time; its thrilling sense of spatial possibilities and destructive glee showed up Disney’s sentimental, character-focused approach and conservatism, as the American company slipped into its mid-90s slump. …

Led by Akira, anime expanded the idea of what animation could be: violent, abrasive, radically stylised, thoughtful and above all, adult. It arguably readjusted expectations ahead of the later revitalisation and maturation of the industry under Pixar – sweeping away the prejudice that anything with drawings was for kids. Along with a host of other cult and alternative influences percolating into the mainstream, its presence was widely felt by the late 1990s, from the west’s embrace of Pokémon fever, to tabloid moral panics, to the obvious visual transfusion received by The Matrix – which became the key touchstone for the next decade of Hollywood actioners. The Wachowskis put their debt on the record with their spin-off The Animatrix in 2003, just as Quentin Tarantino did with The Origin of O-Ren, the cartoon segment of Kill Bill Volume I.

The Trauma Of Gang Life

Members appear to be predisposed to mental illness:

The researchers aren’t certain why a third of these British gang members have tried to kill themselves, but believe suicidal behavior could be linked to other psychiatric illnesses or impulsive acts of violence directed inwards. Gang members are also quite young, [Professor Jeremy] Coid said. “The average age for gang membership is 15,” a demographic which wasn’t included in the study of 18 to 34 year olds. So do gang members become mentally ill as a result membership? Often extorted and pressured to express unfaltering loyalty, the study can’t say much about the psychiatric foundations of matriculating gang members.

Changing Climate, Changing Architecture

William Gething, coauthor of Design for Climate Change, warns that traditional construction materials will “behave differently” in a world wracked by global warming:

Brick, for example, is likely to become more saturated, particularly with increasing insulation standards, so it is likely to be less effective at keeping moisture out. Materials move more in higher temperatures, so joint design will need to take this into account. More intense rainfall events mean that gutters need to be sized differently.

Amid these challenges, Steve LeVine heralds the rise of the “extreme-weather architect”:

The emerging class of architecture suggests the onset of a global design-and-construction industry worth tens of billions of dollars in the coming years. Places such as the Netherlands have had to build around environmental- and weather-related challenges for years. But to the degree that extreme-weather architecture and construction moves to the mainstream, it would become one of the biggest infrastructure businesses on the planet, straddling US, Europe, Asia and Latin America. The cost of one recent set of recommendations alone, by New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg, responding to the ravages of Hurricane Sandy in October 2012, is estimated at $20 billion. Studies of the spending to come around the world range well into the hundreds of billions of dollars.

Recent Dish on Bloomberg and reforms to combat flooding here. As sea levels rise, architects continue to investigate the possibilities of buoyant buildings. One design firm recently finished work on a floating school in Lagos, with a floating neighborhood in the works.

In A Rush To Get Killed

Researchers studying evacuation strategies presented participants with a computer simulation depicting “a zombie-filled room with two available doorways on opposite sides”:

[T]heir task was to exit the room as fast as possible back to the corridor. During this evacuation phase, the zombies in the room were also attempting to get back out into the corridor. In a baseline condition, the participants showed no preference for either of the exits. However, when stress levels were ratcheted up with a prominent challenge to beat the current fastest time … participants were more likely than in the baseline condition to try to exit via the route they used to enter the room, even though this was the most crowded exit favoured by the majority of the zombies.

The result fits with anecdotal observations from real life emergencies. For instance when the Lowenbrauskeller building in Munich was evacuated in 1973, two people were killed in a crush at the main exit as fleeing occupants ignored eight other signposted exits on route.

“Our approach has revealed what can only be described as nonrational human decision making under the influence of the motivational, potentially stress-inducing, treatment,” said Bode and Codling. “We suggest that in evacuations with higher stress levels evacuees will be more likely to use known exit routes and less able or willing to adapt their route choices, even if this results in longer evacuation times.”