Criminally Bad Parenting, Ctd

Douthat takes a deeper look at “the obligations of conservatives, who tend to support measures that encourage single parents to take jobs, to fiercely oppose policies and practices that then punish such parents when they leave their kids unsupervised.” He suggests building on “direct, paycheck-based success rather than trying to build out the existing K-through-12 system,” and warns against looking to Europe for answers:

[T]he more regimented and mandate-thick a society’s child care system, the more likely it is to have unexpected and perverse consequences for parents and families whose lives don’t quite fit the system’s implicit norms — which could mean anyone from high-achieving professional women (who often fare better in the laissez-faire U.S. than under family-friendly socialism) to would-be stay-at-home parents (who get nothing from a government-run child care system, and who can be effectively prodded into the workforce by the taxes required to pay for it).

Which is why it’s a little unfortunate that American liberalism is pressing so hard right now on ideas (universal daycare, mandated family leave) that could just import some of the European system’s problems to our shores.

Ross returns to the practical childcare issues for struggling families within the US:

Whatever policy outcomes we’re seeking for working families, I still want to resist one possible implication here, because by allowing that it’s reasonable to debate whether policy can do more for parents in Debra Harrell’s position I’m in no way conceding that she actually did anything wrong or problematic, or for that matter that letting one’s children roam or play unsupervised is ever necessarily a sign that government assistance is needed, stat.

My Sunday column began with a childhood anecdote, but I think the far better anecdata comes from today’s piece by Michael Brendan Dougherty, who unlike myself actually grew up with a single mother, somewhat outside the upper middle class cocoon. Part of his argument, and it’s an important one, is that whatever we do to help working parents cope, we should also want to live in a society where parents — regardless of their material situation — feel entirely comfortable leaving their kids to play in park while they work, or letting them wander the woods and streets near their house, or leaving them home alone for a few hours under an older sibling’s supervision.

Michael Kress at Parents, responding to Ross’ column, is more sympathetic to Europe’s approach:

Affordable, reliable, and safe childcare is a necessary component of a functioning society, especially one that expects—requires, even—parents to work. And so we need to figure out a way to guarantee it to all working parents. In Europe, “all European countries offer government subsidies and regulation support to early childhood care,” according to the European Union’s website. “These measures include tax breaks, vouchers, subsidies paid to parents or to the care provider; and in several European countries, capping of childcare costs relative to household income, or by obliging employers to support childcare costs (for instance in the Netherlands).”

I don’t know what form this sort of policy should take here in the United States, but whether it’s tax breaks or subsidies or publicly funded day-care centers or something else entirely, without addressing this problem, we will see many more Debra Harrells. …

Our public policy must recognize the realities of today’s families, especially the huge number of single parents (and the correlation between single parenthood and poverty). In addition, many families today lack the extensive familial and social networks that may have, in the past, provided (free) childcare so mom and/or dad could work. This is not just a problem for the very poor. There is nothing optional about working for most people trying to support their kids, and childcare could easily be beyond a single parent’s means.

As parents, most of us have said things to our kids like, “I don’t have eyes in the back of my head,” or, “I can’t be in two places at once.” For the single moms who must be at work in order to feed their families but have no one else to supervise their children, these are not flippant throw-away lines; they are realities that we as a society must help fix.

More blogging on bad parenting here and here, and some reader responses here.

Mental Health Break

Breaking the fourth wall:

Looking at you – Movie Montage from Brutzelpretzel on Vimeo.

Update from a reader:

A quick note: The vast majority of these clips are not really “Breaking the Fourth Wall.” They are simply POV shots, showing what one of the characters in the film is seeing. It’s an effective technique for helping the audience put themselves into the mind of one of the characters. But true breaking of the fourth wall is the direct acknowledgment of the audience. You are not being put in the position of a character; you are being asked to conspiratorially join in the movie.

My favorite versions are malevolent in nature; many remember several shots like this in the Austrian and American versions of Michael Haneke’s Funny Games, as one of the young killers turns to the camera and asks the audience their opinion. But my favorite comes in Atom Egoyan’s Felicia’s Journey as repressed serial killer Bob Hoskins slowly walks through his home, I believe up some stairs, presumably on his way to kill a young victim. And then he pauses, and looks directly at the camera for an uncomfortable moment, before continuing on. Essentially he was indicting us in his crimes, there are no passive observers.

Lonely Planet

Ethan Chiel recounts the strange story behind the decade-old Internet phenomenon I am lonely will anyone speak to me:

[Ten years ago] an unregistered guest poster using the name “lonely” started a thread on the forums at moviecodec.com, a site usually dedicated to discussing digital video files. The thread was titled “i am lonely will anyone speak to me,” and the first post read:

please will anyone speak to about anything to me …

Ten days after the thread was created, another guest, wetfeet2000, made the first of what of what would be many similar posts:

dude, i typed in “I am lonely” in google, and your post was the very first reposnse. does that make you the most popular lonliest person on the planet ?

Noting that the thread is now nearly 2,200 pages long, Chiel considers its significance:

I’ve never posted in the thread, but I think about some of the posts in it often. Having spent time as the top search result for lonely people seeking help through Google means that it doubles as a public archive of mostly anonymous human loneliness. …  There are definitely bad elements in “i am lonely will anyone speak to me,” but I think of it fondly anyway because for a long time it’s struck me as an enduring example of something the Internet is well suited for: an impromptu place where people can say something out loud, and where doing so might help them a little.

Which makes us all a little less lonely.

Some Clarity On Russia And Ukraine

Anne Applebaum has a really sober and accurate description of what has been going on:

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A reader adds:

For too long, news reports have spoken of the “Ukrainian rebels” as if the warfare underway in the Donetsk to Luhansk corridor were some sort of bona fide local uprising. It is true that the populace in this zone have pro-Russian sympathies. But the suggestion that they rose up against Kiev is nonsense. Everyone who has looked closely at these operations–starting with a study of the personnel who sprouted up out of nowhere as local “mayors” or “leaders” has come to the same conclusion–this is a very sophisticated covert operation of Russian intelligence, using Russian personnel with clear links to the Russian intelligence services (but covert nevertheless) in all the starring roles, drawing on support from regular Russian military as well as the elite Spetsnaz units, with money, weapons, munitions and logistical support all supplied with a go-ahead from the Kremlin. In other words, Putin really is calling all the shots–including telling the “Ukrainian rebels” to make a show of being independent.

Now, that being established, let us not lose sight of the fact that the United States decided back in the Bush years to rely principally on covert operations for its counterterrorism operations, and Obama fully embraced this.

This is the reason for the full militarization of the CIA, its outfitting with its own air force, and the revving up of JSOC as the covert military unit of the Pentagon. The Kremlin has tracked all of this very carefully, and it’s firmly of the view that if the Americans can wage covert war around the globe using the CIA/JSOC, so can they, using their Spetsnaz and their covert military operations. This in no way excuses MH17, of course, but it provides some important context.

The U.S. decision to turn steadily in the direction of covert warfare has consequences, and we see some of them in the tools used by the Kremlin to fight in Ukraine. It’s a darker, nastier world, and Obama’s decisions have made a significant contribution to that.

Notwithstanding that observation, I’d say his handling of the MH17 incident, and the rest of the Russian adventure in Ukraine, has been pitch perfect. I can hardly imagine where we’d be with someone like John McCain or Butters at the helm. Probably inching our way towards global thermonuclear war… over whether Donetsk and Luhansk are part of Ukraine or part of Russia (talk about issues which matter not an iota in terms of U.S. national interest).

Treating Prostitutes Like Children

Elizabeth Nolan Brown sees the Swedes doing so:

Many areas have adopted or are considering what’s known as the “Swedish” or “Nordic Model,” which criminalizes the buying, rather than the selling, of sexual services (because, as the logic goes, purchasing sex is a form of male violence against women, thus only customers should be held accountable). In this nouveau-Victorian view, “sexual slavery” has become “sex trafficking,” and it’s common to see media referring to brothel owners, pimps, and madams as “sex traffickers” even when those working for them do so willingly.

The Swedish model (also adopted by Iceland and Norway and under consideration in France, Canada and the UK) may seem like a step in the right direction—a progressive step, a feminist step. But it’s not.

Conceptually, the system strips women of agency and autonomy. Under the Swedish model, men “are defined as morally superior to the woman,” notes author and former sex worker Maggie McNeill in an essay for the Cato Institute. “He is criminally culpable for his decisions, but she is not.” Adult women are legally unable to give consent, “just as an adolescent girl is in the crime of statutory rape.”

From a practical standpoint, criminalizing clients is just the flip side of the same old coin. It still focuses law enforcement efforts and siphons tax dollars toward fighting the sex trade. It still means arresting, fining and jailing people over consensual sex. If we really want to try something new—and something that has a real chance at decreasing violence against women—we should decriminalize prostitution altogether.

Previous Dish on the Swedish model here. More Dish on prostitution in Europe here and here. Update from a reader:

I completely agree with the excerpts you posted from Elizabeth Nolan Brown. It is indeed a problem in many areas of feminism currently. Fighting for equality in all the “good” ways – like undoing all the ways they have been held back by being treated like children or less important or less intelligent – yet many feminists refuse to accept any of the “bad/negative” aspects of not being treated like children.

Can Kerry Fix The Gaza Mess?

John Kerry rushed off to Cairo last night to try and broker a ceasefire between Israel and Hamas, but it’s not at all clear that he can get the deal he wants:

Kerry reiterated Sunday what Obama told Netanyahu on Friday: that the US supports a return to the 2012 cease-fire that halted rocket fire into Israel from Gaza. Hamas says Israel did not hold up its side of that agreement. And the militant group that governs Gaza is also deeply suspicious of the Egyptian government, which – since the 2012 cease-fire – has banned the Muslim Brotherhood. Hamas is affiliated with the Muslim Brotherhood. But just returning to the 2012 agreement is unlikely to happen, says WINEP’s [Eric] Trager. “Egypt today is not going to accede to anything that would allow Hamas to come out of this strengthened,” he says. Egypt is also not likely to accept opening the Gaza-Egypt border at Rafah, another Hamas demand.

As of this writing, the Cairo visit has produced no breakthroughs. Steven Cook argues that Egypt is a terrible interlocutor, given that Sisi’s regime actually benefits from the conflict:

The Egyptians seem to believe that a continuation of the fighting — for now — best serves their interests.

Given the intense anti-Muslim Brotherhood and anti-Hamas propaganda to which Egyptians have been subjected and upon which Sisi’s legitimacy in part rests, the violence in Gaza serves both his political interests and his overall goals. In an entirely cynical way, what could be better from where Sisi sits? The Israelis are battering Hamas at little or no cost to Egypt. In the midst of the maelstrom, the new president, statesman-like, proposed a cease-fire. If the combatants accept it, he wins. If they reject it, as Hamas did — it offered them very little — Sisi also wins.

Pointing to signs that Israel is reluctant to escalate the conflict further, John Cassidy raises hopes for a ceasefire soon:

Reports from Israel suggest the I.D.F. has been surprised (and even impressed) by the ferocity and effectiveness of the Hamas fighters, and that there is a mounting feeling that, with seven more Israeli soldiers having been killed in the past twenty-four hours, Benjamin Netanyahu’s government will soon be faced with the choice of escalating the military campaign or declaring victory and withdrawing. “In view of the stiff resistance put up by Hamas, the level of destruction, if fighting continues, may reach that of Beirut in 2006,” Amos Harel wrote in Haaretz.

Is Netanyahu prepared for that? Is Israel? Since the Prime Minister of Israel has insisted all along that the aims of Operation Protective Edge are limited—degrading Hamas’s infrastructure and reducing its ability to launch rocket attacks—he seems to have some wiggle room. On Tuesday, the I.D.F. announced that it had already uncovered fourteen tunnels in the Gaza Strip, some of which were twenty-five metres deep and reinforced with concrete. Having destroyed these tunnels and foiled, or so he claims, several terrorist attacks on Israeli communities close to the border, Netanyahu may be able to claim that the military escapade has accomplished its aims, and he may be able to bring it to an end. That, at least, is what Kerry and the embattled residents of Gaza will be hoping for.

Michael Totten suspects that Hamas is also ready to declare “victory” and agree to a truce, but is pessimistic that this war will bring the parties any closer to a permanent peace than the last war, or the one before that:

By the time the Israelis finish their work, Hamas may have killed enough Israelis and fired enough of its rockets that it can save face with an empty “victory” boast despite losing so many people, despite emptying its vast arsenal with little to show for it, and despite having [its] tunnels collapsed. Then its leaders will agree to a cease-fire. It doesn’t matter that no one will believe Hamas won. Hamas just needs to be able to say it. The Israelis and Palestinians won’t be an inch closer to peace after that happens, but at least the conflict will go back into the refrigerator. It will start up again at some point, though, and we’ll take another ride on the deadly and stupid merry-go-round, so savor the calm while it lasts.

The Challenge Of Reform Conservatism, Ctd

Last week, in response to me, Douthat kicked off a conversation about reform conservatives’ foreign policy views. Ross, for his part, advocates for a “kind of unifying center for conservatives weary of current binaries (Tea Party versus RINOs in the domestic sphere, ‘isolationists’ versus ‘neocons’ in foreign policy), which would internalize lessons from the Bush and Obama eras (especially lessons about the limits of military interventions and nation-building efforts) without abandoning broad Pax Americana goals“:

I liked Ben Domenech’s way of framing this point, when he wrote [last week] in the Transom that the Republican Party “has always burke.jpgincluded realists and idealists, and there was in the past a degree of trust that elected leaders could sound more like idealists but govern more like realists.” It’s that trust that was forfeited by some of the Bush administration’s follies, and that needs to be recovered if the G.O.P. is to deserve anybody’s vote. But because it’s a trust, ultimately, in competence and caution, it’s a bit hard to say exactly what this kind of “new realism” or “realist internationalism” or “chastened idealism” (or whatever phrase you prefer) would look like case by case … beyond, I suppose, saying “let Robert Gates drink from the fountain of youth, and put him in charge of Republican foreign policy forever,” which is certainly an idea, but probably not a sufficient foundation for an actual agenda.

Justin Logan argues that a “big part of the problem here is the conservative donor class”:

To put it bluntly, the portion of the GOP donor class that cares about foreign policy is wedded to a militaristic foreign policy, particularly in but not limited to the Middle East. Tens of millions of dollars every year are pumped into an alphabet soup of magazines, think tanks, fellowships, lobby groups and other outfits in Washington to ensure that conservative foreign policy stays unreformed.

If we conceive of the Right broadly, comparatively dovish voices on the Right consist of Rand Paul, those writing at the American Conservative, and the foreign and defense policy staff at the Cato Institute, the latter of which Wall Street Journal editorial page editor Paul Gigot once derisively but not entirely inaccurately referred to as “four or five people in a phone booth.” (We have actual offices, for the record.) But until there is some larger countervailing force in the conservative movement, the well-financed and well-entrenched status quo will persist.

Suderman engages in the conversation:

Too much of our foreign policy conversation, on both sides of the aisle, is conducted with a kind of chest-thumping certainty about what we can know, what we should do, and what the results will be if we follow through. That attitude is perhaps understandable, given the context of war and international power, but it’s also frequently frustrating and unhelpful, especially given how difficult it can be to establish even the most basic facts on the ground when it comes to the particulars of many foreign policy conflicts and disputes.

A foreign policy of caution and humility, of uncertainty and wariness, might help help turn down the heat on foreign policy debates, by focusing on the limitations of America’s power and—even more—its ability to determine foreign policy outcomes, and by talking as much about what we don’t know as what we do.

Larison sees foreign policy as the GOP’s greatest weakness:

Bush-era foreign policy has been politically toxic for Republicans in three of the last four national elections. There is good reason to assume that it will continue to be an important liability in future presidential elections unless the party makes a clear break with at least some of its Bush-era assumptions and positions, and for the most part that isn’t happening at all. Until that happens, everyone outside the party will reasonably assume that the GOP hasn’t changed, that it has learned nothing, and that it still shouldn’t be trusted with the responsibility to conduct foreign policy. It seems unlikely that a domestic reform agenda will even get off the ground as long as the public doesn’t trust a Republican president to carry out some of his most important primary responsibilities.

But Drum remains skeptical that the GOP’s foreign policy split is real:

I’ve seen no evidence of change within the mainstream of the party. Aside from Paul, who are the non-interventionists? Where exactly is the fight? I don’t mean to suggest that everyone in the Republican Party is a full-blown unreconstructed neocon. There’s a continuum of opinion, just as there’s always been. But as near as I can tell they’re nearly all about as generally hawkish as they’ve ever been—and just as eager as ever to tar Democrats as a gang of feckless appeasers and UN lovers.

Kilgore is less dismissive of the GOP “civil war”:

I’m less interested in Paul’s own views than in the possibility that he will make it possible for other 2016 presidential candidates to break away from the old neocon and realist schools that share a commitment to higher defense spending and U.S. global hegemony. Already Ted Cruz has declared himself “half-way” between Paul and John McCain on foreign policy. And such potential candidates as Scott Walker, Bobby Jindal and even Mike Huckabee have the flexibility to position themselves at any number of points on the spectrum.

My concern is that their rubric for understanding Obama’s foreign policy is that he is weak, doesn’t call enough foreign leaders thugs and is too deliberative. It’s hard to see a response to that that doesn’t privilege the unreconstructed neocons and Cheneyites. Or, worse, the idiotic ramblings of Rubio.

The View From Your Window

Tromsø-Norway-1223AM

Tromsø, Norway, 12.23 am. The reader writes:

Tromsø is 70 degrees north in the Arctic circle, and it never goes dark during June and July. I’ve been in Norway just a few weeks now and predictably haven’t had a decent night’s sleep since I got here. Still, Norway is such a happy wonderful country and I feel lucky to be here during such weird and sad times. Wishing you the best; I remain a subscriber, admirer, & c.,

100 Percent Efficacy

That’s the effectiveness of Truvada in preventing HIV infection in the latest large study just unveiled at the AIDS conference in Melbourne:

PrEP had no significant efficacy in people who took fewer than two doses a week. However, the efficacy of PrEP was 84% in people who took 2-3 doses a week – there was only one infection in this group – and no infections at all were seen in people taking at least four doses a week. This 100% efficacy translates into a minimum efficacy of 86% if the statistical uncertainty of the result is taken into account.

Did they all throw condoms away?

The study found absolutely no “sexual risk compensation” among participants—that is, those taking PrEP did not abandon other forms of protection, namely condoms. That data was self-reported. But researchers also tested participants for syphilis, another marker of sexually risky behavior, and found that those on PrEP were no more likely to carry the sexually transmitted infection than those not taking the drug.

The debate in the gay community is not really a debate at this point; it’s a function of the deep difficulty of psychologically navigating from a way of life dominated by plague to a normal way of life. It will take time. But the potential of this drug, combined with condoms and cocktail therapy for the infected, is nothing less than the eradication of HIV among gay men in our lifetimes.

The Last Great English Romantic

Reviewing Oakeshott’s recently published Notebooks, John Gray sketches a charming portrait of the idiosyncratic philosopher:

When I knew him towards the end of his life, the impression he made was of a Twenties oakeshottoutsidecaius.jpgfigure, whose values and attitudes – notably an uncompromising commitment to personal authenticity – echoed those of D H Lawrence, so I was interested to find a number of references to Lawrence in the notebooks. O’Sullivan comments that Oakeshott ‘was really the last great representative not only of British Idealism but also of English Romanticism’. It is a shrewd observation. Where he differed from Lawrence was in not expecting, or wanting, any wide acceptance of his view of things. Here Oakeshott’s aestheticism may have been important: if he praised and defended conventional morality, one reason could have been that he enjoyed contemplating a world composed of people unlike himself.

It is difficult, if not impossible, to imagine a figure like Oakeshott in academic life at the present time. For one thing, he had a wider experience of the world than most academics nowadays.

Joining the army on the fall of France and being rejected for SOE because he looked too unmistakably English to be parachuted into Germany, he ended up serving in Phantom, a reconnaissance unit that, among other tasks, supplied information to the SAS. For a time his work involved using pigeons, whose behaviour he studied assiduously: when the birds were released, he once told me with a smile, many of them ‘just flew off and got lost’. Finding comedy, even an element of absurdity, in the most earnest business, it was a remark characteristic of the man.

He would have found the industrial-style intellectual labour that has entrenched itself in much of academic life over the past twenty-odd years impossible to take seriously. He wrote for himself and anyone else who might be interested; it is unlikely that anyone working in a university today could find the freedom or leisure that are needed to produce a volume such as this. Writing in 1967, Oakeshott laments, ‘I have wasted a lot of time living.’ Perhaps so, but as this absorbing selection demonstrates, he still managed to fit in a great deal of thinking.

Previous Dish on Oakeshott’s notebooks here and here.