The Dish

A reader sends the above video:

On reading your post re: Palin and torture, I couldn’t help but think of this “New Rules” on Maher’s show. I played it for my Sunday school class.

Another:

Don’t you think you and others are giving Palin a bit too much credit when you say things like “she is drawing on a brutal theology from the past” or it’s an “allusion to converting Muslim prisoners by coercion”? Do you really think she has any grasp on history? I agree her statements are barbaric, but I do not believe she is capable of thinking at the level you and others ascribe to her.  She’s incapable of allusion.  I think the thought process, such as it was, was more like “Baptism = water; waterboarding = water; that will get a laugh.”

Yes, it’s frightening that John McCain wanted to foist this creature upon the world, but I am angrier at John McCain than I am at her – that would be like being angry at a cat for thinking like a cat (no disrespect to cats intended.)

My view is that Palin is a delusional, paranoid fantasist. My point is perhaps better expressed thus: her conflation of torture of Muslims with a Christian sacrament could objectively be seen as a terribly dangerous provocation in the context of Islamist terror. Whether she meant it that way is something I cannot know. Another reader also quotes me:

“It reveals that vast swathes of American Christianity are objectively anti-Christian, even pagan, in their support for this barbarism.” Andrew, as a practicing and proud Pagan, I must strongly dissent. Pagans do not endorse torture. Please do not malign us this way.

Ouch. Another reader:

I’m not sure that you calling them “Christianist” really has any authority. Who gave you the power to determine who is Christian and who is not?

Palin and her ilk believe themselves to be Christians. Who am I or anyone else to argue with them? This is what Christianity is, revealed in its reality. And it has always been thus. It is the same Christianity that Nietzsche wrote about – a cult of revenge. A cult of revenge for those who feel themselves on the bottom. Whether it is revenge wrought in this world or the next, casting the “evil” to hell is revenge, pure an simple.

Andrew, sometimes you are smart, but you use your mind to see what you want to see, not to see more fully how the world actually is. You have come to see Republicanism for what it is, you have yet to see Christianity for what it really is.

And who are you to say what Christianity really is? My use of the term Christianist is simply to distinguish the political abuse of Jesus teachings from the teachings themselves. It’s an act of linguistic hygiene. And someone who sees the urge to torture others as intrinsic to Jesus’ teachings has simply never read the Gospels. Another dissent along those lines:

By any reasonable standard, Palin and her supporters are Christians. They believe in God. They believe that the Bible is the word of God. They believe that Jesus is both the son of God and his earthly incarnation, and that he sacrificed himself for the salvation of all mankind. They’re biblical people, alright. Since this book, which Palin and her followers believe – despite all evidence to the contrary – is the True Word of the Creator of the Universe, says that followers of other gods must be stoned to death (Deuteronomy 13:6 etc), it follows quite naturally that Palin and company need shed no tears over their sufferings. God has cursed the unbelievers (the “terrorists”), and they will suffer for eternity for their transgression, at least, according to other parts of the Bible.

One might hope that the love of Jesus will help to transcend these base mentalities, but since Jesus intends to bring the law of Moses to the world, we can expect that many will remain anchored firmly to the bedrock. According to you, this is just “fundamentalism”. To my mind, this is the natural result of faith – belief without evidence.

Jesus transcended the laws of the Old Testament, and transformed their rules into the single rule of caritas. Another adds:

You forget one thing in your well written rebuttal: the Inquisition was a Christian enterprise. Christians, or more accurately, Christianists, are highly capable of this.

Of course they are and have always been. That doesn’t make it an expression of Jesus’ teachings. A “committed evangelical Christian” chimes in:

I’m sorry, but these views on waterboarding are not and never will be anything that I agree with. But the more important question is this: What’s it going to take for this Christianist madness in America to dissipate? I can’t see any option other than a serious decline in adherence to Evangelical Christianity in America, at least among whites. That would disrupt and eventually destroy Evangelicalism’s accommodation with, and takeover of, the Republican Party. Given how the Millennial generation seems to feel about Christianity at the moment? Highly likely, I’d say. Politically, that would be a good thing. Spiritually, I’m not going to enjoy it.

Another wants to forget the whole thing:

At some point it might be worth asking whether more good would come from ignoring Palin entirely rather than addressing her most egregious slights, which merely lets her know how offensive she needs to be to elicit a reaction from the press.  Maybe post a poll on “No More Palin News?” I don’t click on any stories on Yahoo or Google news, or Politico or other sites, that feature her in the headline.  I figure page clicks only give them more incentive to run such stories, which in turn fuels her to say more asinine things.

One more reader:

Thanks much for shining more light on Sarah Palin’s embrace of torture, and the favorable reception her speech received. To be honest, the increasing popularity of torture in the United States, and the role of faith in that process, has been woefully understudied as its own “puzzling” development, one that is actually worthy of social scientific study on its own. I have a published study (pdf) engaging this “curious” case of torture’s increasing popularity, a trend that seems to befuddle even the most notable experts on torture like Darius Rejali (whose work I admire in so many ways).

In short, some of the process can be chalked up to the “hidden” nature of American torture. Because we can’t see the torture (with the exception of the Abu Ghraib photos), those who have a strong “faith” in what they cannot see but are told (by authoritative figures like Sarah Palin, or Dick Cheney, or George W. Bush) can imagine that the tortured are all “terrorists” and that water boarding isn’t “that bad” anyway, and that those who do the torturing are, like Jack Bauer, good and right and just. This is also one of the reasons why Jose Rodriguez’s illegal act to destroy the tapes of water boarding sessions was so effective – it removed a possibility that their heroic narratives of what torture is doing, and who it is doing it (and to whom), could be easily shattered by the screams and images and cruelty that is the reality of the torture chamber.

I know you’re swamped with emails, but if you get a chance to read the study, you’ll also notice that you and the Dish are quoted in my study. Your blogging and work on torture has inspired my own in so many ways over the years, so thanks for what you’re doing on it and I hope you continue to shed light on this incredibly troubling trend and politicization of this barbaric “tactic” that should be left in the dustbin of history.

Unfiltered thoughts from readers on our Facebook page.

Julia Ioffe reviews the reasoning behind the new sanctions we imposed on Vladimir Putin’s cronies yesterday:

The psychological factor of naming these [Russian “crony banks”] is not to be underestimated. First of all, it removes the curtain cloaking this shadowy “crony economy,” full of small, strange banks whose business is far from obvious. It shows the Russians that we know how and by whose hands the economy runs. Furthermore, says prominent Russian economist Sergei Guriev, “the continuation of adding companies and banks indicates that future sanctions may include certain truly systemic financial institutions.” …

“I don’t think the Russians quite understand the extent to which the world financial system is integrated with the dollar and the U.S. financial system,” says one administration official involved in the sanctions deliberations. “I don’t know if these people have assets in the U.S. I always suspected most of their assets are in Europe. But once the U.S. banking system has redlined you, it’s hard to do business. You’re radioactive.”

Which is why it’s starting to work. Western financing in Russia has seized up.

But Bershidsky thinks the sanctions are too weak:

The banks are too small to matter: At worst, the holders of almost $2 billion in private deposits at SMP Bank will have to find a new bank if they plan to use their debit and credit cards overseas. Some significant omissions suggest that the list’s drafters intentionally avoided Putin’s friends’ major possessions. Volga Group, for example, holds a 23 percent stake in Novatek, Russia’s biggest independent natural gas producer, and a 32.3 percent stake in Sibur, a major petrochemical producer. Kovalchuk’s Abros holds stakes in a large pro-Putin media holding as well as one of Russia’s biggest insurance companies, Sogaz. Sechin runs state-owned Rosneft, Russia’s biggest oil company. And though Washington officials earlier suggested Gazprom chief Alexei Miller would be mentioned, he is conspicuously absent. So is his company, long used to make Ukraine toe Russia’s line.

Keith Johnson complains that the sanctions don’t hit Russia’s energy sector:

Seriously targeting the energy sector would be crucial, though, because energy exports make up more than half the Russian government’s revenue. Gas sales to Europe, in particular, are a point of vulnerability for Gazprom, since about three-quarters of its sales go to Europe. But Russia’s oil firms, especially Rosneft, are also huge producers and long-time partners of big Western firms, with ambitious expansion plans. …

Big Oil firms continue to talk up their investments in Russia, and some, such as Royal Dutch Shell, plan to ramp up investments in major energy projects in Russia. European countries continue to plan major deals with Russian nuclear power firms. Big European companies that have long-standing trading ties with Russia, meanwhile, are arguing against a ramping-up of sanctions.

So why bother with sanctions at all? Keating’s take:

Fred Kaplan makes a moral case, even as he acknowledges that sanctions don’t often work:

Sometimes, as with South Africa’s apartheid system, sanctions are worth imposing on moral grounds. And, in that case, because the sanctions were so deep, widespread, and long lasting, they finally paid off.

In this sense, sanctions against Russia are worthwhile, too. First, the West has to do something about Putin’s incursions and threats in Ukraine, and the fact is, there’s not a lot it can do. Second, if Putin isn’t determined to invade Ukraine outright, the pain of the sanctions to date—and the threat of more pain to come if he escalates—might affect his calculations on the costs of going ahead and the benefits of keeping still.

However, it’s illusory to think that these or any other sanctions will have more than a marginal impact on Putin’s behavior, especially when it comes to Ukraine, which has been integral to Russia—as a market, a supplier, and a security buffer—for centuries. If Putin decided that it was in his vital interest to chop off eastern Ukraine and call it a part of “New Russia,” then no economic sanctions—none that the United States and Western Europe can plausibly impose—would dissuade him from doing so.

John Cassidy wonders whether Putin will respond rationally:

[I]f the previous round of sanctions—which extended travel bans and asset freezes to a number of people and institutions close to Putin—did not change Putin’s behavior, it’s questionable whether these new measures, which are basically more of the same, will have much impact. Indeed, Putin’s failure to rein in the pro-Russian forces that have seized buildings in Donetsk and other cities raises three disturbing possibilities: first, that he is not fully in control of the local militants; second, that his cost-benefit analysis doesn’t weigh the economic costs imposed by the sanctions very highly; and third, that he’s not the wily rational actor everybody has assumed him to be. He might be something else.

Kliff contemplates the disconnect between Obamacare’s success and the perception of that success. One big reason for it: Heathcare.gov:

“News about the problems with the exchanges was on a lot longer than any discussion of beating the enrollment goal,” [Kaiser’s Liz] Hamel says. “It’s possible that all the reports were still in the forefront of people’s minds.”

And its likely that most Americans are gauging their understanding of how well — or poorly — Obamacare is going from the news coverage. Most Americans already have health insurance, and aren’t shopping on the exchanges for new policies. So even if the Obamacare experience improves, most people won’t necessarily notice.

“So many people are not impacted by the law that they’re more likely to respond to messages in the media than they are to evaluate their own experience,” Hamel says. “That makes me think it will be a while before there’s any shift in how people think the law is going.”

Relatedly, Ezra listens to Scott Brown’s anti-Obamacare rhetoric:

Scott Brown, who’s now running for Senate in New Hampshire, has found the perfect position on Obamacare. He’s for it. He’s just not for calling it Obamacare.

In an interview with WBUR, he called Obamacare a “disaster.” Then he was asked what he’s for  — and he went on to describe Obamacare. … [T]he polls are clear. The American people don’t want Obamacare. However, they like what’s in Obamacare. And they don’t like it when Republicans try to get rid of Obamacare. Brown’s position shows Republicans a way out: a rebranding of Obamacare, accompanied, perhaps, by some vague tweaks and changes to be named later. Fauxbamacare, in other words.

Egyptian judge Saed Youssef, who infamously sentenced 529 people to death last month for their alleged roles in the death of one police officer, outdid himself yesterday when he condemned another 682 defendants, including Muslim Brotherhood Supreme Guide Mohamed Badie, to hang for the same crime:

Those found guilty have been charged with contributing to the death of a police officer during a raid on a police station in August. But their individual crimes were all relatively minor, like committing acts of violence or inciting violence, and none of the 683 was charged with participating in the officer’s murder. Badie, in fact, was advocating for nonviolence during the tumultuous aftermath of former Egyptian President Mohamed Morsi’s ouster.

Badie also happened to be in a different city during the incident. … The trial itself lasted a matter of minutes, and most of the accused were tried in absentia.

Bel Trew looks at Youssef’s record:

Judge Youssef first rose to prominence in 2012 when he took over the second district of the criminal court in his hometown of Beni Suef, some 100 kilometers north of Minya. It was there he earned the nickname “The Butcher” for bending the law with his notoriously harsh verdicts:

He once sentenced a man to 40 years in jail for possessing a gun. “He gave him 15 years for the weapon, 15 years for the bullets, then 10 years for getting into the gunfight,” said lawyer Mohamed El-Zanaty, based in Beni Suef, who has worked extensively in Youssef’s courtrooms.

But Youssef only gained international notoriety last year, when he acquitted the area’s security chief and 10 of his policemen accused of killing protesters on January 28, 2011, dubbed the “Friday of Rage,” one of the bloodiest moments of the 18-day uprising that overthrew President Hosni Mubarak.

Karl Vick notes that this level of judicial complicity in oppression is unprecedented in the country:

During the rule of President Hosni Mubarak and his predecessors, Anwar Sadat and Gamal Abdel Nasser, “the judiciary sometimes acted as a brake on the government’s most authoritarian impulses,” Nathan J. Brown and Michelle Dunne of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace recently wrote, “Now, all the instruments of the Egyptian state seem fully on board. Whereas Nasser had to go to the trouble of setting up kangaroo courts, today there is no need.” Judges have outlawed the Muslim Brotherhood, the Palestinian militant group Hamas, and now the liberal April 6 Movement, named for the date of a planned 2008 public strike in an industrial town that grew into a nationwide protest movement.

The editors at Bloomberg decry the direction Egypt is headed in and say it’s time to cut off the aid:

Egypt’s government says about 500 people have been killed in terrorist attacks since the coup, mainly security personnel. That violence flared in response to draconian policies that offered Islamists no peaceful avenue. Previous attempts to crush the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt, notably under President Gamal Abdel Nasser, failed miserably. [Yesterday’s] death sentence against the leader of the Muslim Brotherhood, which claims membership of up to a quarter of Egypt’s population, will further aid recruitment for radical Islamist groups that preach violence. …

Al-Seesi’s Egypt is measurably more bloody and repressive than either the Muslim Brotherhood government it replaced or any of Egypt’s previous dictatorships. It’s not enough for the U.S. to merely condemn the mass trials. If the U.S. truly supports the spread of democracy and individual rights in the Middle East, as it claims, then it cannot provide the means to suppress them.

Last Thursday, the Supreme Court issued a 5-4 ruling in Paroline v. United States. The court decided that, while a victim of child pornography is owed restitution from any and every person who has viewed it, a single individual cannot be held liable for the entire sum of that restitution. Lyle Denniston explains:

The decision clearly will spare a Tyler, Texas, man, Doyle Randall Paroline, from paying all of the nearly $3.4 million that lawyers for a young woman identified only as “Amy” had demanded from him.  Paroline had two images of her being photographed as her uncle sexually abused her when she was eight years old.  Now a young woman, she had testified that “My life and my feelings are worse now because the crime has never really stopped and will never really stop.”

The Court ruled that a federal district court judge must calculate how much to assess against Paroline personally.  There is no doubt, Justice Kennedy wrote, that Paroline “was part of the overall phenomenon” of distributing and keeping images of the abuse of Amy.  He should have to pay his share and, Kennedy said, it must be enough to send the message that his part in the crime was not victimless. Lawyers for “Amy” had insisted that Paroline, like everyone who has her images and looks at them, contributes to her continuing injury, so each of them should be required to pay the full amount for her losses, in whatever multiples of individuals are found and prosecuted for having the pictures.

In a dissent joined by Scalia and Thomas, Roberts argued that as the statute in question provided no formula for how to calculate such restitution, “Amy” should get nothing from Paroline. Sotomayor dissented in the other direction, arguing that Paroline should pay the full sum or collect it from other offenders himself. Rick Pildes notes that this is all Congress’s fault:

As eight Justices saw it, the text of the law suggested Congress had created a messy situation:  (1) Congress intended to ensure that victims like Amy receive some restitution; (2) Congress did not intend that they receive as much as $3.4 million in restitution from someone who possessed two images of the victim, which is what the victim sought; (3) and Congress had not provided any direct guidance in the statute itself for how courts ought to determine the point between $0 and $3.4 million at which restitution ought to be set.  Congress must have meant something between $0 and $ 3.4 million, but provided no road-map for even generally figuring out how much.  All eight Justices presumably agree it would be better for Congress to address and resolve the general policy issues.  The question is what to do when Congress hasn’t — and, perhaps, what decision from the Court makes it most likely that Congress will do so.

But Paul Cassell, one of “Amy’s” lawyers, argues that the law’s intent was already clear:

[T]he text of the statute makes clear that Congress wanted child pornography victims like Amy to recover “the full amount of their losses” — not some partial, fractional amount.  Moreover, the Court entirely ignored an amicus brief filed seven Senators who were in Congress in 1994, when the provision was enacted.  As Senators Hatch, Feinsten , Grassley, Markey, McCain, Murray, and Schumer explained in their brief, “Congress really did mean what it said.”  They provided drafting history showing that Congress had specifically decided not to include a “proximate result” limitation in the other parts of the statute — only subsection (F).  In other words, Congress meant for victims like Amy to recovery the full amount of their losses from each defendant.

Either way, it seems the matter won’t be settled until Congress amends the statute. Marci Hamilton urges them to make the perps collect the restitution money, in line with Sotomayor’s position:

There is a simple two-part fix, if you parse Justice Kennedy’s and Justice Sotomayor’s views closely enough: (1) Congress should enact a federal rule of contribution among child pornography defendants and (2) replace “proximate cause” with “aggregate causation.”  That would make it possible for the many Amys of our world to obtain restitution from even one perpetrator in the marketplace and obtain full restitution.  The best part of this solution is that it would then incentivize the one defendant forced to pay it all to identify others as contributors.  Let the defendants go after their many contacts in the market for contribution.  That reduces the restitution, even if levied against a single person, from an excessive personal fine, and puts the burden of parsing out blame on the bad guys, not the victims who never asked to be on the Internet in the first place.

Posner proposes an alternative that he considers more just:

The problems with Kennedy’s and Sotomayor’s approaches stem from the same source: When Congress drafted the provision about restitution in the Violence Against Women Act, it thought about traditional types of harms—when one person directly injures another—and not the unusual collective injury in this case. That’s why the justices’ efforts to twist the statutory language lead to unfair and bizarre outcomes.

Congress created this mess, and only Congress can fix it. Every person who is convicted of child pornography should pay a large fine into a government trust. The fine would be tailored to the wealth of the defendant and the magnitude of his wrongdoing. Then this fund would be used to compensate all the identified victims of child pornography, who would share it in proportion to the severity of their injuries. That way, not Kennedy’s or Sotomayor’s, lies fairness.

(Video: Clip from the Law and Order: Special Victims Unit episode “Downloaded Child”, based on the case of “Amy”. It envisioned a much different result than the ruling in Paroline.)

Game Of Thrones author George R.R. Martin compares the violence in the series to that of drone warfare:

Taking human life should always be a very serious thing. There’s something very close up about the Middle Ages. You’re taking a sharp piece of steel and hacking at someone’s head, and you’re getting spattered with his blood, and you’re hearing his screams. In some ways maybe it’s more brutal that we’ve insulated ourselves from that. We’re setting up mechanisms where we can kill human beings with drones and missiles where you’re sitting at a console and pressing the button. We never have to hear their whimpering, or hear them begging for their mother, or dying in horrible realities around us. I don’t know if that’s necessarily such a good thing.

Zack Beauchamp thinks this is mistaken:

Martin is certainly not alone in questioning the implications of drones, and exploring the human impact of war is a major part of his work. As he’s said repeatedly, his work is designed to be a criticism of war as a human institution, the base cruelty of characters like Joffrey Baratheon and Ramsay Snow exposing what happens during episodes of organized violence. Still, Martin’s own books allow for a lot more nuance around the morality of medieval warfare than he seems to see in its more modern incarnation. The idea that killing in war is somehow better when done with a sword rather than a missile seems to cut against his critique of war itself.

What’s really troubling about both the drone program and slaughter on Game of Thrones isn’t the technology people are using to kill each other. It’s the reasons that they decide to deploy it. On the show, it’s mostly a pointless struggle over which royal family gets to wield power. In real life, it’s the willingness to kill civilians to achieve arguably dubious gains against al-Qaeda. The problem in both cases is the policy of people in power, not the weapons they use to pursue it.