The Drug War Is A Civil Rights Issue, Ctd

Wilkinson is fine with the “shameless opportunism of privileged middle-class stoners … suddenly up in arms about the systemic racism of the American criminal-justice system”:

We should welcome it. We should cheer it, even if it begins in bad faith. Indignant exhortation only gets us so far. The best hope for justice is always an alliance with self-interest. It’s unlikely that my legalisation activist friends would have come to care much about the cruelty of denying marijuana to the sick, but they came to care, genuinely and deeply. Once they saw the strategic sense of focusing first on the legalisation of medical marijuana, the needless suffering caused by prohibition truly engaged their empathy and compassion. Suddenly, tens of thousands of people too weak to fight for themselves had legions fighting sincerely on their behalf.

Previous Dish on the racial bias of marijuana law enforcement here.

The Right To Be Left Alone?

Jacob Bacharach recently reflected on the way many authority figures construe privacy in the age of the Internet:

Educators and employers are constantly yelling that you young people have an affirmative responsibility not to post anything where a teacher or principal or, worst of all, boss or potential boss might find it, which gets the ethics of the situation precisely backwards. It isn’t your sister’s obligation to hide her diary; it’s yours not to read it. Your boyfriend shouldn’t have to close all his browser windows and hide his cell phone; you ought to refrain from checking his history and reading his texts. But, says the Director of Human Resources and the Career Counselor, social media is public; you’re putting it out there. Yes, well, then I’m sure you won’t mind if I join you guys at happy hour with this flip-cam and a stenographer. Privacy isn’t the responsibility of individuals to squirrel away secrets; it’s the decency of individuals to leave other’s lives alone.

Douthat responds with a more modest understanding of privacy:

A truly moral person, a truly moral corporation, and a truly moral government would not exploit the kind of information that people now share with one another on the internet. But it is not sufficient to simply say, with Bacharach and many others who have come of age with the internet, that privacy is “the decency … to leave other’s lives alone,” and demand that the world and all its powers live up to that ideal. Privacy is also the wisdom to recognize that not all peers and powers are actually decent, and that one’s exposure should perhaps be limited accordingly. And it’s precisely because the ease and convenience of internet communication inclines us all (myself included) to forget or compromise this wisdom — or else pretend to we’re abandoning it out of some higher commitment to honesty and openness — that I expect us to make our peace with the surveillance state, now and for many years to come.

On Idealism (And Israel)

Leon muses:

People who wish to change the world have a special responsibility to acquaint themselves with the world, in the manner of scouts or spies. The realist, by contrast, has no conscience about being complicit with the world. For the realist, the world is all there is to work with. He sees no virtue and no glamour in adopting a standpoint outside reality: it would only diminish his efficacy, which is his highest wish. He does not promote his goals into ideals. Aspiring to less, the realist may accomplish more. Aspiring to more, the idealist may accomplish less. And yet even the failed idealist adds to the store of the world’s sense of possibility. Idealism is futural: it is never completely defeated because it is never completely satisfied.

And elsewhere, he seems finally able to articulate what I and others have been saying for five years or so:

Unless there is a solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, there will not be a Jewish state for very long … Nobody lifted a finger to help Salam Fayyad, who was the Palestinian leader we were all waiting for. No Palestinians and no Israelis. He came and went. It’s a historical scandal of the first magnitude.

This essential argument he deemed worse than anti-Semitism when I made it. Still, it’s good to see him finally see the point – in a trip to Israel to get a million-dollar prize without bothering to visit the West Bank.

Shut Up And Write

Reviewing a collection of exchanges between Paul Auster and J.M. Coetzee, Terry Eagleton bashes novelists who try to be pundits and pols:

It is a Romantic delusion to suppose that writers are likely to have something of interest to say about race relations, nuclear weapons or economic crisis simply by virtue of being writers. There is no reason to assume that a pair of distinguished novelists such as Paul Auster and J. M. Coetzee should be any wiser about the state of the world than a physicist or a brain surgeon, as this exchange of letters between them depressingly confirms.

In fact, there is no reason why authors should have anything particularly striking to say about writing, let alone about Kashmir or the Continuity IRA. Their comments on their own work can be even more obtuse than those of their critics. If T. S. Eliot really did believe that The Waste Land was merely a piece of rhythmical grumbling, as he once claimed, he should never have been awarded the Order of Merit.

Coetzee’s comments on the current economic crisis are not only wrongheaded but fatuous. Nothing has really happened to the world economy, he writes airily to Auster, other than a change of statistics. It is unlikely that the Bank of England, not to speak of those who have had their homes or livelihoods snatched from them by financial gangsters, would be over-impressed by this argument. Neither, judging from his circumspect reply, is Paul Auster, though he is too respectful of his renowned colleague to say so outright. Mysteriously, Coetzee goes on to suggest that putting this right requires an entirely new economic system, a piece of logic that his correspondent wisely leaves untouched. The truth is that neither man knows anything about economics, and there is no reason why being skilled in handling a metaphor should grant you such insight.

The Neocon Pathology

Daniel Larison dismantles Max Boot’s unhinged argument that we should get involved in the Syrian civil war to “settle the score” with Hezbollah:

To seek to “settle” a score from 1983 by increasing U.S. involvement in a potentially even more dangerous civil war in Syria is nothing more than the foolish pursuit of revenge. It also demonstrates a complete failure to understand the original error of the Lebanon intervention, which [Max] Boot and [Lee] Smith think Reagan ended too quickly.

If intervention in Lebanon should have taught us anything, it is that the U.S. has no business meddling in another country’s civil war. To cite the costs of the disastrous Lebanon intervention as a “compelling” reason to intervene in Syria is perverse. If the U.S. made policy decisions today based on carrying out vendettas from thirty years before, there would be no end to the wars that we would feel “compelled” to join or start. The truth is that there are no compelling reasons for the U.S. to become more involved in Syria’s conflict. Many Syria hawks have been desperately trying to find some for two years, but to no avail.

“Open The Doors!” (And The Closets?)

VATICAN-POPE-AUDIENCE

If you want to understand just how vastly different this Pope is from his predecessor, read the full and best translation of his recent impromptu remarks to the Latin American and Caribbean Confederation of Religious Men and Women. They blew me away. Can you ever imagine the anal-retentive doctrine cop, Ratzinger, ever saying this about the body that dictates doctrine that he once headed, the Congregation For The Doctrine Of The Faith:

They will make mistakes, they will make a blunder [meter la pata], this will pass! Perhaps even a letter of the Congregation for the Doctrine (of the Faith) will arrive for you, telling you that you said such or such thing… But do not worry. Explain whatever you have to explain, but move forward… Open the doors, do something there where life calls for it. I would rather have a Church that makes mistakes for doing something than one that gets sick for being closed up…

The heart swells as the voice of Jesus replaces the voice of the Pharisee. Rocco tartly observes that Pope Francis’ “penchant for veering off-text in open company just reached a whole new planet”. You can say that again. I loved this aside in observing how we are often more obsessed with tiny shifts in stock prices than the human being dying of hypothermia down the street:

Computers are not made in the image and likeness of God; they are an instrument, yes, but nothing more. Money is not image and likeness of God. Only the person is image and likeness of God. It is necessary to flip it over. This is the gospel.

And I loved this dismissal both of the uptight traditionalists who cannot see the forest for the rosaries and of those seeking to substitute the core teaching of the incarnation in favor of a vague spirituality:

There are some restorationist groups. I know some, it fell upon me to receive them in Buenos Aires. And one feels as if one goes back 60 years! Before the Council… One feels in 1940… An anecdote, just to illustrate this, it is not to laugh at it, I took it with respect, but it concerns me; when I was elected, I received a letter from one of these groups, and they said: “Your Holiness, we offer you this spiritual treasure: 3,525 rosaries.” Why don’t they say, ‘we pray for you, we ask…’, but this thing of counting… The second [concern] is for a Gnostic current. Those Pantheisms… Both are elite currents, but this one is of a more educated elite… I heard of a superior general that prompted the sisters of her congregation to not pray in the morning, but to spiritually bathe in the cosmos, things like that …

And then a possible clue as to why Benedict XVI decided to break with centuries of tradition and run into hiding after he read a dossier on abuses in the church:

In the Curia, there are also holy people, really, there are holy people. But there also is a stream of corruption, there is that as well, it is true… The “gay lobby” is mentioned, and it is true, it is there… We need to see what we can do…

Was the former Pope subject to blackmail? Were other Cardinals?

If the Vatican’s screwed-up doctrines about gay people have led to genuine threats of blackmail from within the hierarchy, if a faction of benign or malign homosexuals has really been using that leverage for whatever purposes, then we do indeed have a problem, to which the answer must be more transparency – of the kind Francis seems to endorse. The Vatican is refusing to comment on the content of the “private meeting.” But Mary Elizabeth Williams recognizes an emerging pattern:

The pope’s cryptic statement about a “gay lobby” doesn’t do anything to explain what a “gay lobby” actually is, how it’s gay lobbying and what it’s gay lobbying for — or what the Vatican intends to do about what Francis calls the “difficult” work of reforming the genuinely corrupt aspects of the huge worldwide organization he recently became the leader of. But already his actions have revealed a Hillary-like determination to do it his way, protocol be damned. …

Like his institution itself, Francis still got a long, long, lonnnnnng way to go in terms of broadening the definition of love, humility and tolerance. But a guy who’s been tweeting about “the unemployed, often as a result of a self-centered mindset bent on profit at any cost,” is a guy who’s having a good time shaking things up and making splitting headaches for the big shots around him. A guy who remembers that Jesus was a loudmouth and a troublemaker. [Vatican spokesman] Father Lombardi, I hope you’ve got plenty of Advil. Because I have a feeling your boss is just getting warmed up.

Previous Dish on the rumors of a “gay lobby” in the Vatican here and here.

(Photo: Pope Francis smiles after his weekly general audience in St Peter’s square at the Vatican on June 12, 2013. By Alberto Pizzoli/AFP/Getty Images.)

Poseur Alert

“What kind of hand job leaves you cleaner than before? A manicure, of course. Why does this joke work? Because of the tension between the conventional idiomatic sense of ‘hand job’ (a certain type of sex act) and its semantic or compositional meaning (in which it is synonymous with ‘job done by or to the hand’). When you think about it, virtually all jobs are ‘hand jobs’ in the second semantic sense: for all human work is manual work—not just carpentry and brick laying but also cookery and calligraphy. Indeed, without the hand human culture and human economies would not exist. So really ‘hand jobs’ are very respectable and vital to human flourishing. We are a ‘hand job’ species. (Are you now becoming desensitized to the specifically sexual meaning of ‘hand job’? Remember that heart surgeons are giving you a ‘hand job’ when they operate on you; similarly for masseurs and even tax accountants.)

I have in fact written a whole book about the hand, Prehension, in which its ubiquity is noted and celebrated.

I even have a cult centering on the hand, described in this blog. I have given a semester-long seminar discussing the hand and locutions related to it. I now tend to use ‘hand job’ in the capacious sense just outlined, sometimes with humorous intent.

Suppose now a professor P, well conversant in the above points, slyly remarks to his graduate student, who is also thus conversant: ‘I had a hand job yesterday’. The astute student, suitably linguistically primed, responds after a moment by saying: ‘Ah, you had a manicure’. Professor P replies: ‘You are clearly a clever student—I can’t trick you. That is exactly the response I was looking for!’ They then chuckle together in a self-congratulatory academic manner. Academics like riddles and word games,” – Colin McGinn, a philosophy professor who resigned last week from the University of Miami following allegations that he sent sexually explicit emails to a female graduate student. McGinn is a Dish Poseur repeat offender.

Dissents Of The Day, Ctd

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Readers continue to vent their disapproval of the NSA program:

Add my voice to the throngs who find your shrugs over this week’s news distressing and unlike you.  I would argue that as a society we can’t possibly be protected 100% from persons who have decided to harm others, and that intrusive attempts to do so are neither fruitful nor worthwhile.  Stephen Walt is correct that this “making us safer” argument can and will be used indiscriminately and that the “insecurity industry” has far-reaching consequences. One of the reasons I take you seriously is your capacity to acknowledge when you’ve miscalculated.  I do hope to see such a change of heart on issues like these.  After all, it must be a little distressing to find yourself in agreement with Kristol.  Also, it would be illuminating to see a Dishhead poll, to see how many readers agree with you and how many don’t.

Poll available above. I understand the worries. They’re completely legit. But if they forbid the entire use of Big Data by government, let’s be clear what the consequences are. Those big drops in crime because of more targeted enforcement? Too invasive to allow:

The police say they are tamping down retaliatory shootings between gang factions by using a comprehensive analysis of the city’s tens of thousands of suspected gang members, the turf they claim and their rivalries. The police are also focusing on more than 400 people they have identified as having associations that make them the most likely to be involved in a murder, as a victim or an offender.

And what about the Obama campaign? They are a political organization that used vast amounts of Big Data to find specific likely voters and get them to the polls. Can you imagine the potential for abuse there? So ban it there too, I suppose. And if Big Data is inherently susceptible to abuse, then we also have to end the following:

Baseball teams like Billy Beane’s Oakland A’s (immortalized in Michael Lewis’s best-seller “Moneyball”) have embraced new number-crunching approaches to scouting players with remarkable success… And New York City has used data analytics to find new efficiencies in everything from disaster response, to identifying stores selling bootleg cigarettes, to steering overburdened housing inspectors directly to buildings most in need of their attention.

That’s from a fascinating review today of a new book, Big Data. Again, in every single case, private or public, someone could manage somewhere to abuse it – for a personal vendetta, or political smear campaign, and on and on. And this collapse of what we once called “privacy” is simply going to grow and grow while outraged defenses of the privacy we once enjoyed, while fully understandable, will become, if they are not already, effectively moot. That’s the conundrum, as Ross recently observed. It’s not a totalitarian police state; it’s a soft ubiquitous, private and public surveillance state that we either participate in or withdraw from society altogether. I don’t like this much, but I fail to see how it can be stopped. And it makes something like the Fourth Amendment in desperate need of re-interpretation. I guess what I’m saying is that the data is there and always will be. The question is simply who has access to it. If only private entities do, then we need to stop all the obviously productive and efficient innovations that Big Data has produced to make government better. Yes, we absolutely need to have firmer safeguards, and we need to end the secrecy about this. But the notion that we can somehow protect ourselves from all of this seems utopian to me. Another reader:

In this post you responded to a dissenter who expressed concern about the reach about the PRISM programBos: “As long as you’re clear about what you’re doing and will not complain about the government next time a Tsarnaev sets off a bomb, fine.” That might be a fine argument except you seem to have forgotten that the PRISM program was in effect before the Boston bombing – and the bombing still occurred. So, if we have to make those “hard choices” between security and privacy, what exactly have we gained?  It appears that Boston would have happened even if no one ever thought of PRISM.  The decision wasn’t between security and privacy; it was about privacy and no privacy. But, even if Boston didn’t invalidate the usefulness of PRISM, your argument points to its even greater danger.  Wait until a child is abducted, a drug lord is on the loose, a fraudster is preying upon the elderly.  The cries demanding we stop tying the hands behind the backs of authorities will begin and we’ll hear the same refrain:  If you’ve nothing to hide, what’s the problem?  “As long as you’re clear you won’t complain the next time a kid goes missing, fine.” And finally, I’m not comforted in the fact that Congress approved the program.  I have no doubt that the program fits within the bounds of legality given the collusion of the three branches of government, but given the lack of credibility and trust the American people have in Congress wouldn’t it be the right thing to do (even if not the legally mandated one) to be a bit more explicit in exactly what we as Americans were giving up?

Another:

Let’s think about what’s happened in the past few years. Bradley Manning managed to illegally copy and distribute massive amounts of classified data to a guy who doesn’t exactly seem like a fan of the US. We have the IRS picking out conservative groups for extra attention. We have a federal official leaking information about North Korea to James Rosen. We have the most recent massive leaks. This is not a bureaucracy that exactly has a comforting track record of late. This is who you trust to keep our information private?

Another:

Although I vehemently disagree with the massive-scale data mining being undertaken, that’s not what concerns me about your reaction. What I find especially disturbing is that after all we have now discovered, you still seem to be buying the government line. In March, DNI James Clapper emphatically told Congress that the intelligence community wasn’t data mining domestically. Now we know that was a bald-faced lie (if only he had been under oath…).  Now, however, when President Obama says that the content of our emails is not being read, you believe him … um, why? No matter how many times President Obama or his aides lie, you seem ready to believe their mitigating explanation.

Ending the absurd secrecy around this would avoid those legally mandatory lies. And I favor ending the secrecy.

Ask Fareed Zakaria Anything: Convincing China To Play Nice

Fareed offers some thoughts on the best and worst things the US could do in its relationship with China:

Recent Dish on the US/China summit here and here. Last week, Fareed also shared his thoughts on the situations in Turkey and Syria. His show, Fareed Zakaria GPS, airs Sundays on CNN, as well as via podcast.  Zakaria is also an Editor-at-Large of TIME Magazine, a Washington Post columnist, and the author of The Post-American World, The Future of Freedom, and From Wealth to Power: The Unusual Origins of America’s World Role. Our Ask Anything archive is here.