The Dish

What’s The Best Way To Combat Military Rape? Ctd

by Chris Bodenner

A reader writes (with an updated reader retort below):

I’m a reserve naval officer with a young daughter that I love very much. I mention this information just to let you know where I’m coming from when I say that the media (including The Dish) is getting this story wrong and missing the larger problem.

One rape is too many – period – and does it happen in the military? Obviously. That said, I can tell you from personal experience that the military is more proactive on this problem than any other public or private institution. I’m not an apologist – just telling you the facts. Every year, every single member of the military goes through several hours of sexual assault prevention training. As long as I can remember – at least 10 years – this training has included outside-the-chain-of-command hotline numbers and other reporting techniques. You should also know that sexual assault stats in the military can include incidents that wouldn’t even be reported within civilian institutions – things like “brushing by” and “staring for too long.”

The reason that I mentioned that I have a young daughter is that, after studying the data, I can say with confidence that she would be safer in the military than at most American colleges. I’m not even talking about the frat colleges like USC or Duke. I’m talking about places like Harvard. Check out the Class of 2013 survey that was published in The Crimson, especially this tidbit:

In the survey, 45 people—41 of whom were women or transgender students—said that they had been sexually assaulted at Harvard. Just eight of those victims said they reported the assault to Harvard administrators. And just one, a male victim, went to the police.

I believe only about half of the graduates responded to this survey and so it doesn’t include those who were so traumatized that they had to leave Harvard. But even so, those numbers are roughly the same as the numbers for the military – and remember that the threshold of what is defined as “sexual assault” at Harvard is probably much higher than the military. Finally, and most damning, only one – one! – victim out of 45 went to the police. And only 8 notified anyone at all. That is absolutely egregious.

Clearly this is just the tip of the iceberg. So who has the problem? We all do. Like I said, one rape is too many.

Lastly, Harvard and every other college gets a shitload of federal money for research and student loans and grants, so their sexual assault problem is not theirs alone. If the tax-payer is funding those institutions, the tax-payer has a right and duty to demand higher standards.

Update from a reader:

Responding to the Naval Reserve Officer who excuses the military’s demonstrably unsuccessful response to sexual assault while pretending not to: I’m a retired Naval Officer, and now a civilian working on a military base, and I call bullshit on his assessment that the military is more proactive on this than anyone else. A few points:

1. Mentioning he has a daughter he loves is irrelevant, manipulative hand waiving.

2. The annual sexual harassment training we receive is a check-in-the-box lecture conducted by ill-trained and apathetic instructors. The last one I attended devolved into a lengthy discussion that was little more than victim-blaming accusations of inappropriate dress, which the instructor allowed without interruption or contradiction. This was not much different than the post-DADT training lecture, during which the instructor opened with “You don’t have to like it and I’m not gonna try to justify it,” signaling his clear dislike of the new policy.

3. Your correspondent’s dismissal of military assault statistics because the include “brushing by” and “staring too long” is insulting to all those that have been assaulted. It is a repulsive and inaccurate minimization of a very real problem. The writer is conflating sexual harassment issues – which, just as in the civilian world, can include ogling, leering, and staring inappropriately – with assault, while pretending that such concerns are unheard of in the civilian workplace.

4. Comparing “the military” to “colleges” is a nonsensical logical fallacy. It is much more appropriate to compare the military to other industries and workplaces. The fact that our daughters are not particularly safe at colleges is a problem, but to hand-wave away the military issues with little more than “but other places that are worse” is childish.

We have a major sexual assault problem that has confounded the uniformed leadership despite having vastly greater authority over their employees than nearly any other industry or professional leadership cadre. It is this contradiction that suggests a significant structural and cultural problem not to be dismissed by lazy comparisons and minimizations.

“He’s A Much Greater President Than The Polls Suggest”

by Chris Bodenner

Andrew’s Overtime appearance on Real Time is up:

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Earlier in the show, Rand Paul came up:

Maher says Paul’s success could be based on his aversion to “American Empire”. “Like his father, he is for not for having an American empire,” Maher said, referring to former GOP presidential candidate and his dad, Rep. Ron Paul (R-Texas). “That’s the thing I love about the Pauls.”

Blogger Andrew Sullivan concurred with Maher saying, “I think Rand Paul’s attempt to say what most people in this country really understand, which is we don’t need to run the world. We don’t want to run the world. America would be in a better place if we were less interested in our own power, and more interested in freedom.”

Most of the show isn’t available online, but featured on YouTube below is Maher’s blistering take on the upcoming movie Noah and the 60% of Americans who believe the Biblical flood story is true (money quote: “Hey god, you know you’re kind of a dick when you’re in a movie with Russell Crowe and you’re the one with anger issues”):

Update from a reader:

You can get a podcast of Real Time (full audio, no video) for free at iTunes or HBO.com. Usually comes out midweek after the show.

The iTunes version is out – here.

Don’t Bite The Hand That Buys Your Gas

by Jonah Shepp

James Surowiecki contends that when ” it comes to natural gas [Putin] isn’t thinking enough moves ahead”:

You might take Putin’s brandishing of the gas weapon as a shrewd geopolitical move. But it’s a classic case of putting short-term interests ahead of long-term gain. Although the region’s need for Gazprom supplies may strengthen his hand in the present, the strategy is forcing Europe to end its reliance on Russia.

After the crises of 2006 and 2009, Europe increased imports from Norway and Qatar. It built new facilities for receiving liquefied natural gas, and upgraded storage capacity, so that supplies could be stockpiled in case of a cutoff. It imported more coal. Pipeline connections within the E.U. were improved, making shortages easier to alleviate. The Crimea crisis will give new impetus to these efforts. The U.K.’s foreign secretary has said that the crisis is likely to make Europe “recast” its approach to energy. A draft document prepared for a forthcoming E.U. summit deplored the Continent’s “high energy dependency” and called on E.U. members to diversify their supplies. These moves are reminiscent of what happened after the oil crises of the nineteen-seventies made it clear to the West and Japan that relying on opecsuppliers was foolish. Europe installed energy-saving technologies and invested heavily in nuclear energy and natural gas. France built fifty-six nuclear reactors in the fifteen years after the oil embargo of 1973.

Turning Himself In To The Internet

by Katie Zavadski

Matthew Cordle hit and killed Vincent Canzani while driving drunk. Joel Oliphint has the inside story of his viral video confession, which got him a sentence of six-and-a-half years:

The video’s shock factor (“I killed a man”), professional production (good lighting and editing, emotional music), and storytelling (building drama by obfuscating then revealing Cordle’s identity) all contributed to its appeal. But another aspect is Cordle’s averageness. He doesn’t come across like an actor. He’s focused, though not particularly poised. He seems like a regular, middle-class kid with whom millions of YouTube viewers could identify. Before the crash, Cordle’s sister Grace says she thought of him as “just a normal teenage kid. The problem is, he’s not a teenager anymore.” Chances are you know more than a few people like that — the man-child who never quite left his teenage years behind, going from job to job and partying hard on the weekends. The driven types could relate to him too; self-medicating a quarter-life crisis with massive amounts of alcohol is what a lot of middle-class kids call “college.” …

It’s true the video was not solely for the message and Canzani. It was for Cordle’s benefit, too, at least mentally and emotionally. The video didn’t alleviate the guilt of taking another man’s life, but admitting his guilt in a public way enabled Cordle to grapple with and accept it. This was something active when everything since the crash had been suffocatingly passive.

Do Extroverts Find Life More Rewarding?

by Jessie Roberts

A new study suggests yes:

A key finding is that extraverts reported more happiness than introverts during what the researchers defined as effortful “rewarding” activities, such as sports and exercise, and financially rewarding work tasks. In contrast, there was no difference in extraverts’ and introverts’ happiness during merely low effort, low importance “pleasurable, hedonic” activities, such as watching TV, listening to music, relaxing, and shopping. … Based on the broad pattern that extraverts experience more happiness during rewarding activities, but not during pleasurable activities, the researchers suggested that existing theories should be refined. It’s not that extraverts have a more responsive pleasure system, but rather that they have a more active and responsive “desire system”. …

Even after controlling statistically for the fact that extraverts spend more time with other people and on rewarding activities, there remained a strong relationship between extraversion and happiness.

Chart Of The Day

by Patrick Appel

The Prison Policy Initiative (PPI) sizes up the prison population:

Jon Fasman adds important context:

PPI reckons the United States has roughly 2.4m people locked up, with most of those (1.36m) in state prisons. That is more than the International Centre for Prison Studies estimates, but it’s in the same ballpark.

Remember, though, that number is static: it does not capture the churn of people in and out of incarceration during a given year. For the population in local jails, PPI used the information in Table 1 of this report, which shows how many people were locked up in jails on June 30th 2012 (the last weekday in June), and came up with 721,654 in local jails, as well as another 22,870 immigration detainees housed in local jails under contract with Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE). Around 60.6% of jail inmates have been convicted; 39.4%, which includes the immigration detainees, have not been convicted, either because they had only recently been arrested or because they are awaiting trial and don’t have the money to make bail. Look one page earlier in the report, however, and you’ll see that local jails admitted a total of 11.6m people between July 1st 2011 and June 30th 2012.

A Prejudicial Policy Toward The Poor

by Jonah Shepp

In an interview with Nora Caplan-Bricker, Harold Pollack explains why drug testing welfare applicants, as Mississippi is set to start doing, is “among the worst ideas in American social policy today”:

NCB: What’s the greatest harm you see programs like this cause?

HP: These programs build upon, and perpetuate, harmful myths about parents who seek cash assistance. Illicit drug disorders can certainly be found among TANF recipients. Yet these disorders are not particularly widespread among participants in this program. Young men of college age are more likely to have substance use disorders than welfare recipients are.

Drug testing does have an appropriate role when individuals face particular problems in the criminal justice system, sometimes in the workplace, or in particular family situations. Such testing should be provided as part of an evidence-based set of interventions to improve parents’ well-being and their ability to successfully navigate their work and family roles. A diffuse, poorly-targeted political effort like this will not accomplish these goals. Instead it dissipates scarce resources.

by Jonah Shepp

Like Mississippi, most of the nine other states that have adopted drug testing regimes are deep red, and all have Republican governors. That the so-called party of limited government and individual freedom sanctions such heavy-handed state interference in the bodies and personal choices of “those people” says something about that party’s real priorities: specifically, that its abiding contempt for the poor overrides its supposed principles every time.

Though his supposed solutions are deeply misguided, Paul Ryan is right to suggest that public assistance is degrading and demoralizing. Perhaps, then, he should take a look at his fellow partisans’ ongoing efforts to make it even more so.

How To Treat A Werewolf

by Jessie Roberts

Ryan Jacobs explores the history of cultural responses to clinical lycanthropy, an extremely rare disorder characterized by a patient’s conviction that he or she is a werewolf:

France identified a high of 30,000 werewolf cases during the Inquisition “between 1520 and 1630, many of which ended under extremely cruel circumstances at the hands of the Inquisitor’s executioner.” Of course, these strong beliefs increase the chances of conflating actual clinical cases (“a strict clinical diagnosis of clinical lycanthropy hinges on the patient’s verbal report of having turned [or being able to turn] into a wolf”) with misrepresentations due to religious pressures.

But even in the Early and Middle Ages, however, there’s some evidence that doctors were treating it as a natural disease with a cure, rather than a damning demonic spell. Primitive health care recommended “dietary measures, complex galenical drugs, hot baths, purgation, vomiting, and bloodletting to the point of fainting” and many doctors labeled it “as a type of melancholia (i.e. a disease due to an excess of black bile), whereas Paul of Nicaea classified it as a type of mania.” Surprisingly, the 7th century Greek Byzantine physician Paul of Aegina linked it to brain disorders, “notably epilepsy, humoral pathology and the use of hallucinogenic drugs.” By the 1800s, physicians had finally more broadly and formally defined it “as a delusional belief.”

(Image of a German woodcut of a werewolf, 1722, via Wikimedia Commons)

Let The Teens Sleep In

by Patrick Appel

It’s better for them (NYT):

New evidence suggests that later high school starts have widespread benefits. Researchers at the University of Minnesota, funded by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, studied eight high schools in three states before and after they moved to later start times in recent years. In results released Wednesday they found that the later a school’s start time, the better off the students were on many measures, including mental health, car crash rates, attendance and, in some schools, grades and standardized test scores.

Suderman uses this research to lobby for school choice:

Sure, it’s nice to see that some school districts are taking note of the evidence in favor of later start times for high schools. But it would be even nicer to imagine a world in which the evidence didn’t take 20 years to filter into school systems’ decision-making processes, in which small bands of school-board bureaucrats weren’t making one-size-fits-all decisions for thousands of students, and in which teenagers and their families had a variety of meaningful options available—options that might include, among other things, variable start times, and perhaps even school days that weren’t constructed on the traditional seven-hours-starting-in-the-morning schedule at all. In other words, it would be nice if there were choice and competition in public education, and if innovations and adjustments like later start times weren’t news.

America’s Religious Exceptionalism

by Patrick Appel

Waldman notes the America’s unusual religiosity for a wealthy country:

The relationship is pretty clear: countries with higher levels of development are less religious and more accepting of those who don’t believe in a deity, with two outliers. China is obviously where it is because of communism, and the United States? Well, we’ve always been the most religious of the wealthy countries, which is the product of multiple factors but can largely be explained by the fact that unlike in European countries, where a sclerotic state church lost more and more adherents over time, we’ve always had a dynamic, competitive religious marketplace. Like just about everything when it comes to religion, on this question we’re the exception among similar countries.

Ross Douthat argues that, “relative to many other countries and cultures, we’ve managed to reap the benefits of religious idealism – through our many religiously-motivated reform movements, from the abolitionists to the populists to the civil rights movement to (or so I would say) the pro-life movement, and then also through the social, civic benefits of a thriving religious marketplace– without enabling the worst forms of religious intolerance.” He fears that America’s political relationship to religion is changing:

My general anxiety, underlying the specific religious-liberty issues that we’re debating these days, is that this achievement may be slipping away from us – that as the country has become somewhat less religious overall, and as the two parties have become not only ideologically but religiously polarized, a sort of Europeanization of American church-state issues has become visible in our politics. You can see this on the religious right, in the appeal of an ahistorical nostalgia for a Christian America that never really was, and then you can see it on the irreligious left, in the appeal of an ahistorical view that the Constitution somehow bars religious people from bringing their theological convictions into politics. And I think the latter impulse is pushing liberalism in an increasingly anti-clerical direction, toward a narrowed view of religious freedom in which that freedom stops when the Sunday (or Saturday) service ends, and a narrow view of religious pluralism that sees religious schools and charities and hospitals mostly as potential threats to individual liberty, rather than important non-state servants of the common good. How far this impulse will take liberalism I don’t know – you should ask a liberal! But I don’t think current trends are good news for what Robert Putnam calls the “grace” that religious freedom has offered our society these last few hundred years.

But Katherine Franke believes that the new religious liberty cases are pushing the envelope:

In many respects, the people or companies who claim these religious exemptions are asking that they be entitled to travel through life—both their private life and their public life—surrounded by a bubble that defines their faith. What does it mean to be a citizen if you can say, “My bubble basically inoculates me from having to answer to your law”? But in the United States, we say everyone is governed by the same law. To say “my religious law trumps your secular law” is a radical idea.

Emily Bazelon makes related points:

[R]ooting against Hobby Lobby or anti-gay bills doesn’t have to mean rooting against religious liberty. When Congress passed [Religious Freedom Restoration Act in 1993], liberals helped take the lead. The law was a disapproving response to a 1990 Supreme Court ruling in the case Employment Division v. Smith, a suit brought by two drug counselors who were fired after taking peyote in a Native American religious ceremony and couldn’t get unemployment benefits because their use of the drug violated state law. Could the state do this, or did their constitutional right to religious freedom mean they should be allowed to use peyote in a religious ceremony without penalty?

The Supreme Court said the answer to that question was no: The employees didn’t have the rights here. Justice Antonin Scalia wrote that since peyote is illegal, and since that law is “neutral” in applying to everyone, the state could impose it. At the time, the ruling read as insensitive to the lack of power religious minorities have relative to the majority. “In law school, I saw Smith as a conservative decision,” Brooklyn law professor Nelson Tebbe remembered when I called him this week. “And when Congress passed RFRA in response, it was about protecting potentially persecuted minorities. But now, in an amazing shift, it’s the most powerful religious organizations in the country that are invoking this law—the Catholic Church and Protestant evangelicals.”