Fark Self-Censorship

by Dish Staff

Amanda Hess has limited expectations for a new misogyny ban at Fark:

Policing misogyny is fabulous in theory. In practice, it’s a bitch. [Drew] Curtis notes that Fark’s commenters often appear to be engaging in an extreme “parody” of sexism, using a pastiche of satirical cultural references. (Fark contributors favor the SNL line “Jane, you ignorant slut” and callbacks to Blazing Saddles’ rape jokes.) Where is the line between pointed social commentary and vile misogyny? “On SNL and in a comedy movie … the context is clear,” Curtis continues. “On the Internet, it’s impossible to know the difference between a person with hateful views and a person lampooning hateful views to make a point. The [moderators] try to be reasonable, and context often matters. We will try and determine what you meant, but that’s not always a pass.” He added: “I recommend that when encountering grey areas, instead of trying to figure out where the actual line is, the best strategy would be to stay out of the grey area entirely.”

Telling members of an anonymous Internet message board to stop hating women is, unfortunately, a monumental ask. But instructing posters to refrain from pushing the boundaries of acceptable human discourse—to avoid a “grey area” just in case—is an irresistible provocation. The gray area between vile offensiveness and dark humor is where Fark’s commenter community thrives.

Jason Koebler is more optimistic:

“oderating speech online is tricky, and there’s the whole “slippery slope” argument to be made about censorship. Let’s be clear here: privately owned websites are obviously not required to respect the First Amendment, but there’s a mandate on the internet that anything and everything goes that there’s this de facto assumption that you should be able to say whatever you want, anywhere on the internet.

But Fark’s move is more likely to actually facilitate truly free speech, rather than restrict it. And it’s a sign that women’s rights are thankfully and finally being taken a bit more seriously of late (take a look at what Gawker finally did over at Jezebel last week for another example).

Jessica Roy, meanwhile, responds to some of the backlash the ban has received:

It’s hard to imagine Fark’s community will suffer from the banning of easy rape jokes — if anything, it will make the community a safer space for women and might even elevate the quality of humor. And don’t worry, if you’re desperate to discuss how women who dress slutty deserve to be raped, there’s always r/mensrights.

The Slums Of The Future

by Dish Staff

Prachi Vidwans explains why we should worry about them:

If it seems like conflict over slums is mounting, that’s because it is: The urbanization of the world is accelerating. In 1950, just 29 percent of the world’s population lived in cities; back then, that was roughly 742 million people. Today, more than half of the world’s people — more than 3.5 billion — are citydwellers. That may sound like a dramatic shift, but you ain’t seen nothing yet. Roughly 70 million people move into cities every year, and the vast majority of them usually end up in illegal or informal urban settlements. According to U.N. estimates, by 2050, a third of the world’s population will live not just in cities, but in slums.

The growth of slums is a bit like climate change: We know it’s happening. We know it’s important. But no one, so far, seems to have much of a response. Policymakers tend to view slums as a necessary evil, a problem best contained through coercion or ad hoc responses. Experts point out, however, that there is a rational way to deal with the coming surge of urbanization: Plan for it. If cities are prepared to anticipate and acknowledge the inevitable influx of urban migrants, slums might not be slums.

What’s The Matter With St. Louis?

by Dish Staff

St Louis

Yglesias digs up an illuminating set of maps:

In May of 2014, researchers from Washington University in St Louis and St Louis University put together a long report on racial health disparities in the St Louis area. It’s largely a deep dive into the socioeconomic roots of these disparities, and includes this map highlighting the pattern of segregation by race and income levels in both the City and County of St Louis. On the left is the distribution of the African American population in the city and county, and on the right is the distribution of poverty

Philip Bump examines the racial disparities in St. Louis:

The unemployment and poverty rates for blacks in St. Louis County are consistently higher than those rates for white residents. Only one time between 2007 and 2012 has the poverty rate for blacks been less than three times that of whites, according to Census data (which is only available through the latter year). The unemployment rate is two-to-three times higher, and, as of 2012, had grown worse while it grew better for whites.

What’s more, those figures disproportionately affect younger residents. [St. Louis Post-Dispatch columnist David] Nicklaus pulls out a subset of Census data: “47 percent of the metro area’s African-American men between ages 16 and 24 are unemployed. The comparable figure for young white men is 16 percent.”

Jamelle Bouie expects tensions in the St. Louis area to continue for some time:

A 2012 report from University of Missouri–St. Louis criminologist David Klinger found that, from 2008 to 2011, St. Louis police officers fired their weapons 98 times. “Any comparison across cities right now is still missing the lion’s share of circumstances in which people are shot by the police,” Klinger said to the St. Louis Post-Dispatch. “There are only a smattering of cities that report their officer-involved shootings, and when compared against them, St. Louis is on the high end.” The data on police violence is incomplete, as there is no federal effort to pull together information on unjustified homicides. But the anecdotes of brutality and excessive force out of St. Louis  and St. Louis County are rampant and often startling. In 2009, for example, a man was wrongly arrested, beaten by police, and subsequently charged for bleeding on their uniforms.

This abuse is so ubiquitous that the shooting of Michael Brown might seem like static against a backdrop of awfulness. But even for the area, Brown’s death was brutal. Which is why—in an otherwise quiet town in an otherwise quiet area—we’re dealing with an explosive fire that shows no signs of ending.

Perfectionist Parenting

by Dish Staff

Jesse Singal flags new sociological findings about the pressure on mothers and fathers to be “super-parent[s]”:

It’s almost as though when you tell parents that they need to be able to perfectly juggle work and child-rearing, but don’t give them the assistance basically every other rich developed country does, this leads to mental-health issues. Almost.

Jessica Grose concurs:

Of course, this is a very small study, and we can’t draw any sweeping conclusions from it. It doesn’t mean that these women would not be depressed if they breast-fed easily or if they had ample maternity leaves or if they had better family support. But certainly these things are not helping them feel like their best selves. I am a broken record these days in my exhortations to lay off judging new moms and to give them some goddamn maternity leave. So I’m glad that [Carrie] Wendel-Hummell did this study, and that we hear more and more voices of new moms who are struggling. The louder we are, the likelier we are to see some actual cultural and political change.

Public Assistance Isn’t “Free Money”

by Jonah Shepp

Darlena Cunha, a mother of twins who spent 18 months on the WIC program (while working full time and paying taxes), brings some personal perspective to bear on why drug testing welfare recipients amounts to utter overkill in a welfare system that already assumes all applicants are lying:

It’s also not just a phone call and done. Women applying must be pregnant or up to six months post-partum. Children can receive services Drug Screenup to their fifth birthday, according to the United States Department of Agriculture’s Food and Nutrition Services. Once you’ve called, you have to provide proof of income for everyone in the household, proof of identity, proof of residence, proof of participation in any other program—including Medicaid, Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, Temporary Assistance for Needy Families, or General Assistance—immunization records for your children, pregnancy confirmation (official note from your doctor), recent height and weight measurements and a blood test for hemoglobin levels, and a WIC Referral Form from your doctor. You also have to provide documentation of any child support payments, unemployment benefits, or short-term disability money received. These requirements vary slightly from state to state, but for the most part they are consistent. …

Applying and being accepted for aid is a mentally grueling process that can stretch on for months. Add to that the humiliation of having to pee in a cup just because you can’t afford to eat.

I’ve touched on this before (and garnered some angry e-mails from readers for suggesting that Paul Ryan was on to something about how demoralizing it can be to live on welfare), but I’m always glad to see someone speak on this from a personal perspective, given how few such stories make their way into the public consciousness. I grew up on welfare in New York City in the 80s and 90s with an alcoholic single mother, so my experience in the system is very different from Cunha’s, yet I agree abundantly with the main thrust of her argument, which cannot be stressed enough: welfare is not exactly designed to make recipients feel good about themselves.

Conservative critics of the welfare state tend to denigrate it as easy money for doing nothing, and often imply or claim outright that poor people feel no shame in taking it because they (I should say, “we”) have no conception of the moral value of labor or feel that we are “entitled” to our food stamps and Obama Phones. That may be true of some poor Americans (Indeed, I have at least one or two family members who fit that description), but it’s not at all representative of those who receive public assistance. The welfare system is badly in need of fixing, not primarily because it’s too expensive but rather because it doesn’t do enough to help ameliorate entrenched poverty. Reform conservatives have some decent ideas about how to do that, but as long as this caricature of the poor is the starting point for their critique of the welfare state, they shouldn’t be surprised if they have a hard time finding an audience.

People tend to take it personally when you call them freeloaders and layabouts. Who knew?

(Photo by Francis Storr)

Excessive Financial Force

by Dish Staff

Sarah Stillman spotlights the economics of police militarization:

[T]he economic arm of police militarization is often far less visible, and offender-funded justice is part of this sub-arsenal. The fears that [Jelani] Cobb and [Malik] Ahmed describe—court debts that lead to warrants and people who are afraid to leave their homes as a result—compound the force that can be wielded during raids or protests like those on the streets of Missouri. Debtors’ fears change their daily lives—can they go to the grocery story or drive a child to school without being detained? “It deters people who have legitimate problems from calling the police, and removes the police’s ability to do what they’re supposed to be doing—helping people in the community respond to emergencies,” [Equal Justice Under Law cofounder Alec] Karakatsanis said. It erodes the community’s trust in and coöperation with law enforcement.

Court fees are Ferguson’s second biggest source of municipal revenue. Thomas Harvey, whose “group represents low-income residents of St. Louis County in municipal court proceedings,” illustrates what this means for individuals:

We had one woman who was pulled over and charged with driving with a suspended license, failure to register and no proof of insurance. She was ticketed and assessed fines of $1,700. She couldn’t pay that; she’s a mother of three living in Section 8 housing. She didn’t go to court, a warrant was issued for her failure to appear and a few months later she got into a car accident that wasn’t her fault.

They saw that she had a warrant, and held her for two weeks and then took her in front of a judge. She told them I can’t pay this money, so they reduced it to $700. For her, that might as well have been $700,000. What ended up happening was her mom borrowed against her life insurance policy and her sister gave her half her bi-weekly paycheck. That was two weeks in jail for unpaid traffic tickets. And what the court learned from that, is that, if they send people to jail, they’ll probably make money.

The Adaptable ISIS

by Dish Staff

While US airstrikes and advances by Kurdish forces have begun to reverse the gains ISIS has made in recent weeks, Joshua Keating doubts the group will be easily defeated:

Over the past few months, the group has shown remarkable flexibility in both its tactics and its targets, one of its key advantages over the national governments trying to stamp it out. If its progress against Baghdad stalls, it can turn against Erbil. If it suffers a setback in Iraq, it can simply focus its efforts on Syria (or Lebanon), where the dynamics of the ground as well as the international alliances work completely differently. If U.S. airstrikes turn the tide against it on the battlefield, it can turn back to urban warfare or suicide bombings.

In other words, a group like ISIS is perfectly positioned to exploit the hazy national boundaries, sectarian divisions, and mistrust among governments in the region where it operates. Given that those factors don’t seem to be going away anytime soon, my guess is that the Islamic State will find a way to regroup. British Prime Minister David Cameron is probably right to be warning the public of a long fight to come.

Yochi Dreazen warns that ISIS is also getting better at governing the territory it controls:

U.S. intelligence officials say the leaders of the Islamic State are adopting methods first pioneered by Hezbollah, the Lebanon-based Shiite militia, and are devoting considerable human and financial resources toward keeping essential services like electricity, water, and sewage functioning in their territory. In some areas, they even operate post offices. …

Taken together, the moves highlight the fact that the Islamic State, already the best-armed and best-funded terror group in the world, is quickly adapting to the challenges of ruling and governing. That, in turn, dramatically reduces the chances that the extremists will face homegrown opposition in what amounts to the world’s newest territory.

Accordingly, Faysal Itani argues that the key to defeating ISIS is to treat it like the state it claims to be:

Above all, ISIS wants to control territory and borders. Otherwise it is just one militia among many others in Syria and Iraq. This requires fighting on multiple fronts against multiple enemies, within both Syria and Iraq. That means openly moving fighters, arms and equipment across vast desert areas. Therefore, like any conventional army, ISIS is prone to overstretch. These increasingly lengthy lines of communication are prime targets for ground and air attacks that would destroy ISIS’ territorial integrity and fighting capability. …

But ISIS is adaptive, creative and ambitious. By contrast, the international community’s response has been rigid, predictable and unimaginative. If it continues to see and treat ISIS as simply a terrorist group, the international community will forever be playing defense, which ISIS can happily live with, until it no longer has to and can go on the offensive abroad. Unless its rivals understand and treat ISIS as a state, and exploit the vulnerabilities statehood presents, ISIS will continue to outclass them in ambition and sophistication, and it will have its state.

Every Sex Worker Is Somebody’s Daughter, Ctd

by Dish Staff

Elizabeth’s post about sex workers as the theoretical “daughters” of those opining on the topic continues to cause a stir. Adam Ozimek argues against thinking of adults in this way, no matter the issue at hand:

Whether you’d want your kid to do something is a terrible, selfish, and self-centered way to think about policy. You hear this kind of argument when it comes to drug use too. “Do you really want your kid to be able to smoke pot?” But the laws of this country aren’t the rules of your household. Stopping your kid from smoking pot or becoming a prostitute isn’t our job, it’s yours. Quite frankly if you need the law’s help in that regard then I’m guessing you’re going to have other problems on your hands anyway.

Ozimek, perhaps spoiling for a Dish guest-blogger show-down, goes on to quote Freddie making such an argument:

On the left you hear things like this when it comes to labor standards, especially around the globe. For example, I recall Freddie deBoer once wrote of an NPR piece on labor conditions in China:

Would Ira Glass ever allow his children, when grown, to work 60 hours a week? In those factories? In those conditions? Of course not.

Here we have not only have every U.S. citizen being treated like your child, but every worker in China, a country of 1.3 billion people that is thousands of miles away. That’s quite a paternalistic reach.

Many readers also responded to Elizabeth’s provocative argument. And it turns out that no, not everyone is losing sleep over the possibility that their children are or might become sex workers. Some speak from personal experience:

My friend recently went to LA to shoot porn. Her parents were fully aware; and she went with her husband (she only shot solo stuff and “girl girl” scenes. Her parents gave their blessing; I’m not sure “approve” is the right word, but they definitely were not upset by her decision and they were happy she seemed so excited.

I suspect a lot of parents would be like this: your primary desire is your child to be happy and safe; and after a certain point you get convinced that both will be true within that industry.

That said, it WAS a very odd experience. This is a girl who had had sex with only one guy in her life, and one girl; yet her second day there she is taken to a shoot in a hotel room, meets another young nervous girl, and in 15 minutes is having sex with her on film. The fact that she loved it was beside the point; there is something very weird about having a third party arrange your sex partner for you, and you having sex with them within 15 minutes of meeting them.

My friend is also a cam model on one of “those” sites; and she could easily make $75k this year. This is working from home, maybe 15-20 hours a week, setting her own hours, doing something that she loves to do. What parent WOULDN’T want their child to be in a situation like that?

Another reader astutely notes that even non-controversial romantic situations have the potential to freak out one’s immediate family:

“I submit that virtually every honest person — those with children of their own, as well as those who merely possess a functional moral imagination — will admit to being appalled at the thought.”

Sure, and every one of us is appalled at the thought of our parents having sex, too.  That doesn’t mean sex for old people is wrong.  It just means we don’t want to think of it. We don’t like to contemplate the sexuality of the people we have a close non-sexual relationship with.  When we men don’t are appalled at the thought of our daughters having sex for money, it’s just a more advanced version of not wanting to think of them having sex at all.

And another makes a feminist libertarian argument:

I think the key thing to understanding this is the framing – Father, Daughter.  It’s an entirely paternalistic approach, treating these adults as if they were children. “I know better than you.” The gender aspect matters to a degree, since it touches on the tendency towards protectiveness/possessiveness towards the sexuality of daughters, but even if we were talking about a mother or a son, the key point is the same.  This sort of logic and thinking should not be what drives us.  Your children are not yours to make decisions for once they become adults, nor should it remain in that frame. Just because someone wouldn’t want their daughter (or son) to sleep with half the people at their college, doesn’t mean that we should outlaw sex.

We need a society where everyone’s choices are respected, not treated as perpetual children. Laws should be about reducing risk associated with those choices (focused on making sure no one else screws us over, literally or figuratively) not about making our choices for us.

A different reader – one with daughters! – argues that there are options worse than sex work:

What a lede – it just made me shout out, in the presence of both my kids “THAT’S NOT TRUE!”  Having a daughter as a sex worker is not my worst nightmare – there are many fates worse than being a sex worker, and being a sex worker can actually prevent some of them (dying homeless, being “forced” by finances into a bad marriage, starving while working “legit” fast food, etc.).  My daughters both agreed.  And then they added that most of the true hazards of the sex business come from its illegality.

Another reader dissents:

One does not have to be an uptight sexual prude to expect more from one’s daughter beyond having sex for money. Does this mean I do not respect sex workers? I respect them if they made their own choice to be in the sex business; but I often wonder if they truly did.

Why? Because I shared a rehab group therapy with a number of young women who worked the sex trade as teenagers and then young women. The experience showed me that none of them did sex work as an ambition; none said they sold their bodies as a deliberate choice to work in the sex trade. Most told how they started peddling their bodies for sex as strippers, or because a man offered to pimp them (one was 14 when her volleyball coach raped her, then turned her out). Sex work was a way to pay for drugs, and to feel loved for a bit. None spoke highly of the sex work they did. All were trying to end doing it, and those with daughters were very concerned their children might end up in sex work, because of how they got there.

Add to it none saw sex work as a viable way to make a living.

My stance on this front is: I do not want my daughter to aim so low in her life, that sex work becomes her only option, or an option at all.