Who Will Take Snowden In? Ctd

Mark Adomanis predicts Russia will pay a serious price for refusing to hand over Snowden during his time in Moscow:

As should be clear, Russia doesn’t actually gain anything from helping Snowden, all it does is expose itself to the full wrath and fury of every part of Washington officialdom. Unless you’re defending a national interest of the first order, exposing yourself to the full wrath and fury of Washington officialdom is a really stupid thing to do.

There’s no obvious principle at stake in the Snowden case, no real “interest” that the Russians are trying to defend: they’re just acting like jerks because they think they can get away with it. This is a foolish decision. Russia has never been popular in Washington and the Obama administration was barely able to prevent the Magnitsky bill from becoming a full-fledged diplomatic disaster (it did so largely by soft-peddling enforcement). How willing do you think the Obama folks are going to be to “defend” Russia when Congress inevitably starts debating additional sanctions or punitive measures? Do you really think they’re going to expose themselves to an endless array of bad press on behalf of a country that engaged in such calculated and deliberate antagonism?

In contrast, Max Fisher suggests that China thought it was doing the US a favor by sneaking Snowden out of Hong Kong:

White House spokesman Jay Carney lambasted the Hong Kong government for apparently aiding in Snowden’s flight to Moscow, saying that the “decision unquestionably has a negative impact on the U.S.-China relationship.” … Take a moment, though, to consider how this might look from Beijing. Typically, when the United States and China argue about transferring a high-profile and politically sensitive individual between their custodies, it’s a Chinese dissident whom the U.S. wants to grant asylum. Those cases are often perceived as deeply embarrassing for China, although Beijing has increasingly learned to live with them. Perhaps Chinese authorities saw this as a rare reversal: an American political dissident looking for asylum in Hong Kong, which despite its special status is a part of China. In the Chinese government worldview, granting asylum would have been the real slap to the United States.

More Dish on Snowden’s search for asylum here.

Quote For The Day

“On its side, the Obama Administration has the courts, the intelligence services, Congress, the diplomatic service, much of the media, and most of the American public. Snowden’s got Greenwald, a woman from Wikileaks, and a dodgy travel document from Ecuador. Which side are you on?” – John Cassidy.

I guess my response is that I am on the side of whistle-blowers who take a stand and face the consequences as an act of civil disobedience if they find something awry. I am on the side of journalists, like Glenn Greenwald, who are simply doing their job – informing us more about our government’s surveillance of us, in our name.

But I am more conflicted by a man who took his job in order to expose what he already believed was wrong, then ran away to seek refuge in authoritarian regimes with open hostility to the US.

French Feminist Marxists Against Marriage Equality

On this issue, the left in France sounds … well a little like the American anti-marriage equality left of the 1990s. But with a new twist:

An important current of French thought, which has no real American equivalent, has maintained that while women deserve equal rights, these rights must not entail the supposed erasure of sexual difference. Historians and philosophers such as Mona Ozouf and Philippe Raynaud have seen a particular threat in American-style protections against sexual harassment, which they have labeled “sexual Stalinism.” The sociologist Irène Théry has called for a féminisme à la française that acknowledges the “asymmetrical pleasures of seduction.” The philosopher Sylviane Agacinski goes so far as to call sexual difference the true basis for sexual equality in law. …

This spring, precisely the same concerns have dominated the manifestos against “marriage for all” issued by groups of law professors and psychologists. And interviews with ordinary protesters have shown just how effectively the arguments of philosophers have filtered down to street level, with one figure after another explaining their opposition to the reform in the same way. To quote a popular protest banner: “Un père et une mère c’est élémentaire” (“A father and a mother is elementary”). And the 60 percent support for same-sex marriage has not changed the fact that a majority still favors banning child adoption by homosexual couples. In short, although religion and homophobia obviously fed into the recent protests, the rhetoric employed by the opposition has trickled down from the intellectuals (as one might, indeed, expect in France).

Will The GOP Kill Immigration Reform? Again?

Fawn Johnson expects so:

[T]he House is slogging along on a piece-by-piece approach that does nothing but stretch out the debate until all that’s left are wisps of ideas on work visas, local police enforcement, and electronic verification of workers. Indeed, the House might not kill the bill outright, but the GOP players are passing the ball around until the clock runs out.

Drum thinks the bill “depends entirely on the House leadership”:

If they decide they want to pass immigration reform and get it off the table for good, they can do it in four weeks. If they don’t want to, they can pretty easily fritter away the time. So we’re back to square one: do Republican leaders desperately want to put this whole thing behind them, regardless of the howling from the tea partiers, or do they care more about the backlash from their conservative white base than they do about picking up Hispanic votes in 2016?

Morrissey’s view:

There are two ways in which this gets bypassed. One is for John Boehner to simply put the Senate bill up for a floor vote, but his GOP colleagues would strongly resist that — regardless of whether it would pass or fail. Either way, it creates risk for Republicans, and they’d be better off developing their own version for Boehner to float. The other is to pass a more conservative comprehensive bill and throw it to a conference committee, but the House is so far away from that possibility (as Johnson points out) that it would have to be a shell bill.

Bouie thinks Republians are in serious trouble if the bill goes down in flames:

Latino voters don’t trust the Republican Party. Both because of their policies—hence President Obama’s three-to-one margin among Hispanics in last year’s election—and because of their rhetoric. According to a recent survey from Latino Decisions—a group that tracks and measures Latino public opinion—strongly worded statements against comprehensive immigration reform from Republican senators (in particular, Ted Cruz of Texas and Jeff Sessions of Alabama) harm the party’s standing with HIspanic voters. As Latino Decisions explains, “The results demonstrate that there is no ‘distancing from the party’ when it comes to the immigration reform bill and associated position-taking. It is perfectly reasonable that Latino voters view elected officials as spokespeople for their party, and either reward or blame them in similar proportion.”

Mataconis looks at a poll showing Rubio’s favorables dropping and a wider turning on him within the GOP:

it strikes me that the Republican/conservative (is there really a difference?) repudiation of a guy that they were all rallying behind just a few months ago is just another sign of the utter hopelessness of the GOP when it comes to immigration. One does not have to accept the Senate bill in full, indeed I’d argue that there are several provisions that I find problematic. However, the way legislating ought to work is that if you don’t like a bill then you propose alternatives and try to work out those differences through the legislative process. Instead, though, all I’ve seen from Senate GOP opponents of the bill are proposal after proposal designed more to appease their base with ineffective measures aimed at “border security” than to actually accomplish anything legislatively. In the House, meanwhile, it seems fairly clear that Republicans don’t want to act on immigration at all. In the end, it all points to reason to be pretty pessimistic about the future of immigration reform in the 113th Congress.

Dear Peggy, Your “Scandal” Just Evaporated

noonanBrendanSmialowski:Getty

It was the legitimate one: not the Benghazi bullshit or a surveillance program checked by Congress and the courts, whose secrecy was the scandal. This was the accusation that Barack Obama was Richard Nixon, ordering the IRS to target conservative – and only conservative – groups in their legitimate attempt to check on whether “social welfare” groups actually were just campaign machines. To give a sense of how far the Republican partisans went with this – completely unproven – allegation, let’s leave Darrell Issa behind, shall we? He’s such a creep he’d say anything anyhow to advance his own career.

Let’s go to one Peggy Noonan, once a relatively sane, if lugubrious, columnist for the WSJ. She’s been running around yelling Watergate for a while now, and just accused the president of an impeachable attempt to use the power of government to destroy his political foes:

One of the great questions about the 2012 campaign has been “Where was the tea party?” They were not the fierce force they’d been in the 2010 cycle, when Republicans took back the House. Some of us think the answer to the question is: “Targeted by the IRS, buried under paperwork and unable to raise money.” …

Think about the sheer political facts of the president’s 2012 victory. The first thing we learned, in the weeks after the voting, was that the Obama campaign was operating with a huge edge in its technological operation—its vast digital capability and sophistication. The second thing we learned, in the past month, is that while the campaign was on, the president’s fiercest foes, in the Tea Party, were being thwarted, diverted and stopped.

Technological savvy plus IRS corruption. The president’s victory now looks colder, more sordid, than it did.

And so she reaches back to her “Romney-Will-Win” pre-election mindset. He did. But it was stolen! Now check out how far the WSJ’s James Taranto has run with this Nixonian meme (yes, the right is now anti-Nixon, when it comes in handy):

Screen Shot 2013-06-25 at 10.22.18 AMNotice, en passant, that the WSJ is now indistinguishable both in party line and total hysteria from Fox News and talk radio (not that it’s ed-page was anything but extreme, but at least it was smart). Now check out the latest details from the IRS about 501 (c) 4 and 501 (c) 3 entities:

The instructions that Internal Revenue Service officials used to look for applicants seeking tax-exempt status with “Tea Party” and “Patriots” in their titles also included groups whose names included the words “Progressive” and “Occupy,” according to I.R.S. documents released Monday. … One such “be on the lookout” list included medical marijuana groups, organizations that were promoting President Obama’s health care law, and applications that dealt “with disputed territories in the Middle East.” … “Common thread is the word ‘progressive,’ ” a lookout list instructs. “Activities appear to lean toward a new political party. Activities are partisan and appear as anti-Republican.” Groups involved more generally in carrying out the Affordable Care Act were also sent to the I.R.S. for “secondary screening.” And “occupied territory advocacy” seemed subject to the most scrutiny of all.

So we begin to see the actual truth (and where it usually is, Page A14): the IRS was rightly scrutinizing a whole slew of new groups claiming to be all about “social welfare” and checking to see how politicized they were – on both sides. Most of those on the progressive side were seeking 501(c)3s – not 501(c)4s – so the parallel isn’t exact. But it sure suggests nothing of any malign nature here. Par exemple:

Ameinu, which on its website calls itself a “community of progressive Jews,” received its 501(c)(3) tax-exempt status on May 28 — five years after applying. IRS agents peppered the group with 18-page surveys and lingered for months without follow-up, Hiam Simon, national director of Ameinu, said in a telephone interview. He said he was looking at a 4-inch thick folder of Ameinu’s communications with the IRS. “I think they were painting with a broad brush, with worries about Middle East ties to terrorism,” he said of the IRS. “I don’t think it was caused by malice. Ignorance is too strong a word, too. They simply weren’t nuanced enough or careful enough.”

They’re not perfect, but this is the critical fact:

Werfel said his review of the agency’s actions hasn’t found evidence of intentional wrongdoing or involvement from outside the IRS. That’s consistent with the findings so far of congressional investigators.

So time’s up, Peggy. Put up or shut up – especially with the outrageous smear that the president was behind this. The IRS was trying to flush out bogus non-political groups on both sides. That’s what we pay them to do. Since the targeting used classic code words on right and left, it may have been unwise as an administrative policy, but it sure wasn’t illegal or scandalous. And you can see why, given the volume of applications, these might have been shortcuts to expedite the process.

I think this scandal just evaporated into thin air.

Please let me know if you find any right-wing outlets that have pushed this untrue story that are actually reporting on this new IRS data (this attempt by NRO is lame or needs further clarification); and whether – God help us – they are apologizing and correcting. Over to you, Mr O’Reilly. And Ms Noonan.

Where’s your Richard Nixon now? Breaking into Republican Party offices?

Blemishing The Beautiful Game

Diego von Vocano examines the protests in Brazil – covered extensively by Dish readers here – through the evolution of its national team over the past 40 years:

In the 1980s, Socrates was one of Brazil’s best futebol (soccer) players. With flowing hair, long limbs, and often wearing a bandanna and a jersey with the word “democracia” on it, he became a leading figure of the Brazilian national team. … This was Brazilian futebol in the 1970s and 1980s: full of creativity, eccentric characters, and politically engaged soccer stars. The zeitgeist was reflected in Brazil’s World Cup teams of 1982 and 1986, which were characterized by artfulness and attacking flair.  …

At least as far back as the 1994 World Cup in the United States, Brazilian teams have slowly abandoned the jogo bonito (“beautiful game”) style of play based on refined skills and aesthetic imagination in favor of pragmatic, results-driven tactics. What does this tell us about the mass, pro-democratic protests of the last few days in Brazil?

It tells us that futebol is both a reflection and a catalyst of social change in Brazil. To see Brazilians protest against the organization of the World Cup, in a country where the sport is nearly a religion, shows us that what used to be sacred is now nearly profane. The underlying cause of this erosion of a cultural pillar is the confluence of disaffection with democratic institutions and the transformation of the national soccer culture. As Brazil’s economic growth has produced economic and political elites, there is also a growing perception that those who benefit most from soccer are corrupt CBD (Brazilian soccer federation) officials, not the average fans.

As FIFA becomes a target for protesters, Travis Waldron considers the implications for the sport worldwide:

Protesters at the Brazilian national team’s match against Mexico held signs reading, “We want hospitals, FIFA standard,” a nod to the top-notch standards FIFA requires at its World Cup soccer stadiums — 12 of which Brazil has either renovated or constructed for next summer at a cost of more than $3 billion in taxpayer funds. The protesters have remained largely nonviolent (the police, unfortunately, cannot necessarily say the same), but last night they damaged two FIFA buses with rocks outside the hotel where FIFA officials are staying. …

It is important to remember that these protests, at their root, are about Brazilians and their efforts to make their country a more equal place to live, rather than simply a sporting event. But should they continue to escalate, they could also force change in other countries at at future World Cup and Olympic sites too. Other countries that have experienced the costly effects of such events have not reacted the same way — “Brazil is saying what we could not: We don’t want these costly extravaganzas,” The Guardian’s Simon Jenkins wrote in comparing the Brazilian events to the 2012 London Olympics. But thanks to Brazilians, other governments, FIFA, and the International Olympic Committee now have the chance to learn a lesson about what can happen when entire populations are excluded from the process of bidding on, hosting, and conducting these events.

What’s A Bisexual Anyway? Ctd

Readers have added several more questions to our survey:

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Cross-tabulated results will be posted soon. A reader writes:

I confess to being a fascinated outsider (a dude who doesn’t desire men), but if you’re wondering where all the out bisexual men are, look no further than these reader emails to see why they’re so scarce. You have a reader who “doesn’t believe” in bisexuality in guys, and then another “I know from personal experience” addendum. Well, fancy that! Do these guys have any idea how condescending that sounds? To tell someone else “I don’t believe you exist,” or to say “trust me, I know you better than you know yourself” Imagine if a straight guy like me told a gay guy that I “don’t believe” in homosexuality, or that “I know from person experience” that it’s only possible to desire females. I’d be called an absolute wingnut bigot, and rightly so.

I expect religious nutters to hate on anyone who isn’t straight, but I didn’t expect to find such ridiculous intolerance within the “LGBT community.” This is turning into a more fascinating read than I had first anticipated.

Another reader:

“You won’t find any truly bisexual men”?  Hi, I’m a 34-year-old truly bisexual man. I’m married – does it matter to which gender? – because I believe in monogamy. My partner knew my orientation 15 minutes after we met, as has every potential partner that came before. My friends know. My family knows. My co-workers do not, but I work in the government and talking about personal relationships (beyond socially accepted marriage and children) is frowned upon. Co-workers in former jobs knew, however, especially in my 20s when I was dating more frequently.

Unsurprisingly, I’m pretty tired of the sentiment from your reader whose personal experience is somehow a proxy for “data” on the subject. I’ve heard from many people over the years that my orientation is a denial, or a fetish on breaking social mores, or a phase, or a linguistic trick, or something that will settle down when I meet the right person. Partners who have suggested this to me are often surprised at how swiftly they become ex-partners.

I don’t care who came before, who hurt their feelings, how many people have just flat out lied to them. I fought to understand myself for a long time – struggled with religious upbringing, family acceptance, and the social stigma levied by straights and gays alike – and have come to the conclusion that I get to decide who I am. Sorry haters!

At the same time, I understand his frustration.

I think the root of the problem with talking about orientation is that it conflates two types of love – sexual and relational – that are rarely expressed in the same proportion to both genders, regardless of an individual’s orientation. In my 20s, I felt more attraction to dating one gender and sleeping with the other. Though those comfort levels converged sharply over the years, I suppose I’m still not “true” enough to say that I’d approach a relationship with a man the same way I would approach one with a woman.

But then again, why the hell do I need to? What is wrong with this picture that I’ve got to justify this definition of my identity? And believe me, as an out bisexual, when I let someone know, they always have more questions. ALWAYS. (Even before I was married.) Does that happen to straights and gays anymore? I honestly don’t know. But if I were any less secure of a person socially, I’d probably keep my orientation to myself and try to fit with something simpler. Which is why I think your reader’s inability to “believe” in a “true” male bisexual is one of the very reasons he can’t meet one.

Another:

Your reader writes, “While many may disagree with me and that’s fine, I don’t find bisexuals threatening because I don’t believe in them.” This is the problem.

When I was a teenager in the early 1990s, I was attracted to other young men. I was raised Southern Baptist, so this was obviously verboten, and years of prayer failed to make the gay go away. My entire sexual outlook was subsumed with the idea that being attracted to men was wrong. The strange part is that I was sexually attracted to women, but to my teenage logic being attracted to men meant that I couldn’t be attracted to both. (Emotional attraction has never been an issue.) I read enough on AOL – this was the 1990s – to know that “bisexuals don’t exist” and “bisexuals are just what gay men who aren’t comfortable being gay call themselves.” In college, I actively embraced that logic and chalked up my attraction to women as trying to fit in.

When I was 21, I had sex for the first time with a woman, and I thought, “This is great.” I wanted to date women, but my gay friends gave me such a hard time when I shared my “secret” that I felt ashamed: from “you’re lying to yourself” to “would any woman date you if she knew you had had sex with men?”

When I was 25, I moved to Washington, DC, where I decided to be straight. It was a failure because it was horrible lying. I felt that I was playing a straight man when I fact I knew I was sexually attracted to men. Sex aside, how could I talk about college without talking about my life? I thought that women would reject me for my background, but it was really lying to my friends that was the hardest.

For about six years I vacillated between trying to be simply gay to being simply straight. Neither option worked for me: I was unhappy lying to gay men and women about my actual sexual desires, and I was hurt by gay men mocking my sexuality and scared women would reject me out of hand. Eventually my frustration grew to the point of severe depression.

After a lot of counseling, I say that I am bisexual. I once joked to my counselor that “I must be the only man who’s been ashamed he is interested in women.” His solution has worked well for me: admit that my sexuality is fluid and be honest. Unsurprisingly, many of my gay friends have rejected my statement out of hand, but I have a number of gay and straight friends who have seen my evolution over the past 15 years to know that I am who I am. I’ve dated both men and women since admitting this, and I currently have a girlfriend who knows my entire history.

It may be true that there are few bisexual men, but we do exist. I’d much rather be not bi, but it’s the hand I’ve been dealt. But it’s a hell of a lot better being honest about my sexuality.

Another:

I have been following this discussion thread with much interest. It is not easy to discuss to the subject of bisexuality with others. I have identified as bisexual since college. When I first accepted this part of my identity, I came out to my friends and family as gay. The primary reason was because I wanted to explore my sexuality and did not want to have to deal with the pressure from family to suppress my same-sex desire and exclusively date women. After I broke up with my first boyfriend, I decided to tell my family the truth. Since that point, as expected, they have pressured me to get married to a woman and have children. While I am not opposed to that idea, I would like to be free from the pressure and have the ability to pursue romantic interests on my own terms.

My bisexuality also poses problems for me in dating women. The other night I was talking to a girl I have interest in who knows I am bisexual and she said that I need to figure out what I want and stop being confused. I told her what I want is a committed relationship with someone who I love, but it could be with a man or woman. Like some of your other readers, my sexuality varies, meaning sometimes I am more interested in women than men, and vice-versa. However, when I am with someone, I am with that person.

This is the main problem I think most people have with bisexuality. They think that if they are in a relationship with a bisexual, then that person will occasionally want (or need) to be with a person of the opposite sex as them. I cannot speak for other bisexuals, but like most people, I may get caught looking at other men and women, but I have no desire that I need to act on due my bisexuality, if I am already in a committed relationship.

In short, it is hard to navigate the world as a bisexual, which may be why people chose to identify in terms of gay or straight, and why many bisexuals never explore the other part of their sexuality. It is tricky to navigate family relations, as parents want grandchildren and are upset that you are not with a woman, despite the potential for such a relationship. On the other hand, my first boyfriend broke up with me largely because he was disgusted and insecure about the fact that I also liked women (a fact I did not tell him upfront, but in my defense I was wrestling with my identity at that time).

This is why discussions like this one are so important. I am not bisexual because I am a closeted gay or a postmodernist who believes in (but does not have a) fluid identity and want to explore a possibility. I am a man who is attracted to both men and women, who dates both and wants to settle down with a special someone. Hopefully, Mr/Mrs right comes my way, because like most people, all I really want is someone to share my life with who never feels the need to question my commitment to him/her.

How Predictable Is Popularity?

Ozgun Atasoy describes a research experiment that explored the question:

As one would expect, when people are better connected, they tend to unite around popular decisions. But research also suggests that social connection — fostered by Twitter, say — also makes crowds fundamentally less predictable. With social media connecting people to an unprecedented degree, it is possible that the sudden emergence of unexpected collective action will be a defining feature of this era.

Matthew Salganik, Peter Dodds, and Duncan Watts conducted large-scale experiments to investigate the effect of the strength of social influence on collective action. People were given a list of previously unknown songs from unknown bands. They listened to the songs and downloaded them if they wanted to. In the independent condition, people did not see other people’s choices. In the social influence condition, people saw how many times each song had been downloaded by others. The collective outcome in the social influence condition was more unequal. That is, popular choices were much more popular under social influence. When the researchers increased the strength of social influence by displaying the songs in a table ordered by popularity, the collective outcome became even more unequal.

After the events around Gezi Park unfolded, there were attempts at explaining why they happened. Events seem inevitable retrospectively. But the truth is most people did not know that the uprising was coming. But was it knowable? In other words, could a sophisticated observer accurately predict the events?

Salganik, Dodds, and Watts looked at the collective outcomes in eight different “worlds.” That is, eight separate groups of people downloaded songs under social influence. The collective outcomes in different “worlds” were different. Even though people in different “worlds” were indistinguishable and they did the same task under the same conditions, the collective outcomes were different. When the researchers increased the strength of social influence, the collective outcome became even more unpredictable. That is, the difference between the popularities of a given song in different “worlds” increased as the strength of social influence increased. Apparently, in collective decisions there is an inherent unpredictability that cannot be resolved by carefully examining the initial conditions and decision makers. Stronger social influence results in more unpredictability.

Picking A Pseudonym

Matt Soniak sums up the reasoning of eight classic authors:

George Orwell: When Eric Arthur Blair was getting ready to publish his first book, Down and Out in Paris and London, he decided to use a pen name so his family wouldn’t be embarrassed by his time in poverty. He chose the name George Orwell to reflect his love of English tradition and landscape. George is the patron saint of England and the River Orwell, a popular sailing spot, was a place he loved to visit.

Lewis Carroll: While Lewis Carroll might sound delightfully British to American ears, Charles Lutwidge Dodgson is even more so. Dodgson adopted his pen name in 1856 because, according to the Lewis Carroll Society of North America, he was modest and wanted to maintain the privacy of his personal life. When letters addressed to Carroll arrived at Dodgson’s offices at Oxford, he would refuse them to maintain deniability. Dodgson came up with the alias by Latinizing Charles Lutwidge into Carolus Ludovicus, loosely Anglicizing that into Carroll Lewis and then changing their order. It was chosen by his publisher from a list of several possible pen names.

Recent Dish on Orwell here, here, and here, and on Carroll here and here.