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“Libidinal Pathology”

Any writer who wants to tackle touchy subjects in this day and age will be subjected to constant and often colorful insults, attacks, smears, ad hominems and general abuse. I’m used to it and don’t whine. And so I am resigned to the fact that any post or essay I might write will be condemned at some point (whatever its subject) because of my support for the Iraq War (despite countless mea culpas, including a whole e-book), or for the sentence in 2001 about a potential “fifth column” (for which I have also apologized), or for asking for some minimal documentation of the story of Sarah Palin’s astonishing fifth pregnancy (for which I see no reason to apologize), or for doubting that gender, sexual orientation or ethnicity can be entirely explained by social constructionism. And look, this is fair enough. I had my say; people also get to have theirs’ about what I wrote. Just because you’ve apologized for something doesn’t mean others have to accept it.

But one meme that crops up eternally whenever the left side of the spectrum wants to take a whack is my alleged sexual hypocrisy from as far back as 2001. A recent Gawker piece – after ticking off the usual accusations that I’m a racist, a misogynist, etc. – prompted the following reader comment:

Anyone remember when he was criticizing gay men for their “libidinal pathology” while posting ads for himself on a bareback sex site?

I do!

Except I wasn’t. That phrase – which appeared in countless articles asserting my hypocrisy – comes from Love Undetectable. It’s used in a section on circuit “rave” parties in the gay male world, and the debate they provoked in the 1990s. Here’s the full context of that phrase, and you can judge for yourself whether I was “criticizing gay men for their ‘libidinal pathology'”:

Slowly the proliferation of these events became impossible to ignore, and the secrecy that once shrouded them turned into an increasingly raucous debate on the front pages of newspapers across the country. Despite representing a tiny sub-subculture, and dwarfed, for example, by the explosion of gay religion and spirituality in the same period, the parties seemed to symbolize something larger: the question of whether, as AIDS receded, gay men were prepared to choose further integration, or were poised to leap into another spasm of libidinal pathology.

I am not criticizing gay men for “libidinal pathology” at a circuit party. I am describing a “raucous debate” about the possibility of them signifying the revival of such a thing. My own actual answer to that question was the following:

What these events really were about, whatever their critics have claimed, was not sex … what replaced sex was the idea of sex; and what replaced promiscuity was the idea of promiscuity, masked by the ecstatic high of drug-enhanced drug-music.

It also makes little sense for me to be slamming circuit parties for “libidinal pathology,” when I am describing my attendance at one – and not as a reporter but as a participant. In fact, the section is a celebration in part of unabashed gay sexuality:

What would the guardians of reality think, I remember asking myself, if they could see this now, see this display of unapologetic masculinity and understand that it was homosexual … [I]t was hard not to be struck, as I was the first time I saw it, by a genuine, brazen act of cultural defiance, a spectacle designed not only to exclude but to reclaim a gender, the ultimate response to a heterosexual order that denies gay men the masculinity that is also their own.

As to circuit parties as a whole, I have long gone to them, and, as you can see if you actually read what I wrote, celebrated them as one way I found liberation in a dark time. I met my husband at that very same party a decade later. I went to one last year. Yes, in that essay, I was trying to understand them in the AIDS era and to explain them to an outside world – and I was prepared to address some of the issues around them, including the very issue of promiscuity itself that hovered around the AIDS question. But the notion that this proves I was a sexual Puritan is ridiculous. A reviewer even lamented that in the book, “Sullivan drones on and on about his sexual encounters.” Well which is it: am I boring you with an account of my own promiscuity or condemning others for it?

Another sentence was routinely hauled out to condemn me for hypocrisy and pops up from time to time. Here is Richard Goldstein’s phrase of accusation:

[Sullivan] considers gay marriage the only healthy alternative to “a life of meaningless promiscuity followed by eternal damnation.”

Again, go check the original context. It’s from the same book. It comes from a section where I am impugning the idea of “hate the sin, love the sinner” and the failure of the churches to offer moral direction of any kind to gay men, leaving us for millennia vulnerable to, yes, sexual pathologies born out of desperation or the need for relief from the contradictions of our lives. Here’s the full passage:

If you teach people that something as deep inside them as their very personality is either a source of unimaginable shame or unmentionable sin, and if you tell them that their only ethical direction is either the suppression of that self in a life of suffering, or a life of meaningless promiscuity followed by eternal damnation, then it is perhaps not surprising that their moral and sexual behavior becomes wildly dichotic; that it veers from compulsive activity to shame and withdrawal; or that it becomes anesthetized by drugs or alcohol or fatally distorted by the false, crude ideology of easy prophets.

It’s clear from this passage that I am actually criticizing those who hold the belief that Goldstein and countless others ascribed … to me! You can watch the debate at the New School in 2002 where I directly confronted Goldstein about this … and he had nothing to say in his own defense, as the very lefty crowd discovered to their shock and mounting anger. I could go on. In the same book, I wrote explicitly about my own first experience of sex without rubbers with another survivor of HIV and a good friend. So in a book published in 1998, I recount details about my many sexual encounters and also unprotected sex with another man with HIV … and yet three years later I am a hypocrite for doing exactly the same things.

To be sure, the essay was about finding a way between no sexual boundaries and more humane ones for gay men. It does contain an implicit critique of compulsive sex – but in the context of my own experience of it. It revealed things about the gay subculture that are not usually told to heterosexuals or a general reader. It’s a raw book, written in a much more fraught time for the gay community. But it was also a memoir that placed myself in the middle of that struggle – and not above or outside it. And yes, I used terms like “hairy-backed homos” which critics took to be condemnatory – when it was anything but (as any Dishhead surely knows by now)! And, yes, arguing for marriage equality was also about ending the psychic wounds that led so many gay men into such painful places for so long. My only criticism of promiscuity per se was Randy Shilts’: when the AIDS epidemic first showed up and there was resistance to shutting down bathhouses. And Randy got slut-shamed as I was for taking what now seems like an honorable, brave and prescient stand.

Then the alleged irresponsibility. We know for certain that one of the most effective ways of curtailing HIV transmission is what we now call sero-sorting – i.e. HIV-positive men having sex only with other HIV-positive men. I was an early proponent and practitioner of it – as an informed act of responsibility. For this act of responsibility, I was hauled out to be condemned and humiliated and accused of rank hypocrisy.

This is a very old story but also a very old lie. It rests on misrepresentations of what I wrote and what I believe. Every now and again, since it is a lie that won’t die, it is perhaps necessary to remind people of this.

(Sidebar image by Marc Love)

Republicans Refuse To Save The Planet

Beutler passes along the above video, a “supercut of Republicans citing China as an excuse to ignore climate change.” His takeaway after watching it:

[T]he problems that climate pollution causes are real, and even the least accountable governments in the world understand that they need to be addressed—even if not for the purest, most idealistic reasons. Once you accept the alarming implications of climate science, then trying to avert them becomes ineluctable. And the only way to explain away how wrong conservatives were here is to conclude that they had actually internalized the view that climate change isn’t a big deal, and might just be a big hoax.

Kate Galbraith looks at how Republicans might derail Obama’s climate agenda:

If a Republican takes the White House in 2016, he or she could reverse or revise the executive orders that form the core of Obama’s climate push. And it’s going to be a hard fight even before the election: Republicans in Congress, newly empowered after recapturing the Senate this month, are already vowing to undercut the Environmental Protection Agency’s (EPA’s) regulations to reduce greenhouse gas emissions from coal-fired power plants. Sen. James Inhofe (R-Okla.), the incoming chairman of the Senate Committee on Environment and Public Works, is already plotting a way out of the U.S.-China deal. He immediately described it as a “non-binding charade.” He also vowed to do “everything in my power to rein in and shed light on the EPA’s unchecked regulations.” Inhofe has limited direct leverage over the EPA, but the Senate could withhold appropriations to the agency.

Rebecca Leber marvels at Inhofe’s grandstanding:

“Why would China ever agree unilaterally to reduce its emissions when that’s the only way that they can produce electricity?” he later asked. “Right now—and I have talked to them before, I’ve talked to people from China who kind of smile. They laugh at us and say, ‘Wait a minute, you say that you’re going to believe us that we’re going to reduce our emissions? We applaud the United States. We want the United States to reduce its emissions, because if they do that, as the manufacturing base has to leave the United States looking for energy, they come to China.’ So it’s to their advantage to continue with their increases in emissions.”

In his speech, Inhofe called himself a “one-man truth squad”—twice.

Chait is disheartened by the GOP response:

The Republican Party and its intellectual allies regard close analysis of Chinese internal motivations as a useless exercise. Conservatives oppose taxes or regulations limiting greenhouse gas emissions, therefore they dismiss scientific conclusions that would justify such regulations, and therefore they also dismiss geopolitical analyses that would have the same effect. On the right, it is simply an a priori truth that nothing could persuade China to limit its emission. Obviously, the feasibility of a deal with China is far less certain than the scientific consensus undergirding anthropogenic global warming. What is parallel between the two is the certainty of conservative skepticism and imperviousness to contrary evidence. …

It would be nice to think that evidence like today’s pact would at least soften the GOP’s unyielding certainty about the absolute impossibility of a global climate accord. The near-total refusal of the right to reconsider its denial of the theory of anthropogenic global warming sadly suggests otherwise.

But Drum doesn’t think Republicans can stand in Obama’s way:

Unlike Obama’s threatened immigration rules, these are all things that have been in the pipeline for years. Obama doesn’t have to take any active steps to make them happen, and Republicans can’t pretend that any of them are a “poke in the eye,” or whatever the latest bit of post-election kvetching is. This stuff is as good as done, and second only to Obamacare, it’s right up there as one of the biggest legacies of Obama’s presidency.

Earlier Dish on the agreement here and here.

Chart Of The Day

crime_scatterplot.0

Dara Lind shares an important one:

An analysis by the Pew Public Safety Performance Project found that the states that shrunk their incarceration rates the most over the last five years experienced a slightly bigger drop in crime as the states where incarceration rates grew: 12 percent versus 10 percent. What about all fifty states? We made a scatterplot based on Pew’s data, mapping how a state’s imprisonment rate changed from 2008-2013 on the horizontal x axis, and how its crime rate changed on the vertical y axis. The result is, well, a scatter – there’s no clear relationship at all between prison and crime. That makes it a lot harder to justify the US’ current level of incarceration.

Meanwhile, Stephen Lurie urges Obama to cut off the money for mass incarceration:

The most pressing task is to address the enabler of incarceration: money. Policy experts from leading liberal and conservative justice-reform think tanks told me that spending is the single most important avenue for reform. Money determines outcomes; change that and you can change the whole system. In fact, as Inimai Chettiar, director of Justice Program at NYU Law School’s Brennan Center, explained to me, the current system arose out of expanded federal spending. “The federal government enacted several laws that basically gave states more money if they would increase their prison population,” she said. Truth-in-sentencing guidelines, for example, disbursed billions of dollars to “ensure that people would spend 85 percent of their sentences in prison even though those sentences were already … overly harsh.” That flow of cash, a product of the War on Drugs, also came with a series of designated metrics – like arrests or drug seizures – that incentivized states to gear performance towards what they saw to be lucrative outcomes. If the Justice Department revised its interpretation of many of these laws, it could reshape the system.

Our Climate Pact With China, Ctd

Jack Goldsmith calls the emissions reductions “aspirational”:

US China Emissions[T]he two sides do not promise to, or state that they will, reduce emissions by a certain amount. Rather, they state only that they intend to achieve emissions reductions and to make best efforts in so doing.  Whether and how the goals expressed in these intentions will be reached is left unaddressed, and one nation’s intention is not in any way tied to the other’s.  Nor would it be a violation of the “announcement” if either side’s best efforts fail to achieve the intended targets.  As we have seen with a lot with climate change aspirations, intentions are easy to state, and they change over time.  The key point is that this document in no way locks in the current intentions.  In fact it creates no obligations whatsoever, not even soft ones (except that, in a different place, both sides “commit” to “reaching an ambitious … agreement” next year, an empty commitment).  It is no accident that the document is called an “announcement” and not a treaty or pledge or even an agreement.

Tyler Cowen also provides a reality check:

First, China is notorious for making announcements about air pollution and then not implementing them.

This is only partially a matter of lying, in part the government literally does not have the ability to keep its word.  They have a great deal of coal capacity coming on-line and they can’t just turn that switch off.  They’re also driving more cars, too.

Second, China falsifies estimates of the current level of air pollution, so as to make it look like the problem is improving when it is not.  Worse yet, during the APEC summit the Chinese government blocked the more or less correct estimates coming from U.S. Embassy data, which are usually transmitted through an app.  A nice first step to the “deal” with the United States would have been to allow publication (through the app) of the correct numbers.  But they didn’t.  What does that say about what one might call…”the monitoring end”…of this new deal?

Chris Mooney is more upbeat:

[T]he experts underscore that this deal has a symbolic value that goes far beyond the literal emissions cuts (or caps) that have now been pledged, precisely because the world’s top two greenhouse gas emitters have now both come to the table. If the agreement lays the groundwork for a broader global agreement — one that encompasses other major emitters like India, Japan, and Russia — then that is the real payoff. That agreement could happen in Paris in late 2015, when the nations of the world gather to try to achieve a global agreement to cut greenhouse gas emissions.

What Michael Levi will be keeping an eye on:

I wouldn’t expect much more negotiation over either U.S. or Chinese targets, even though European leaders may want to have a discussion. Over the next year, rather than focus on any haggling over emissions numbers, it will be worth watching three things. What will the remaining details of the Chinese plan look like? How will the U.S. goals be received politically – and could they spook a Congress currently considering how much to try to interfere with pending EPA regulations? And, perhaps most important, could this display of pragmatic U.S.-China diplomatic cooperation be a sign of more to come in international climate change diplomacy – which will need to go well beyond target-setting – over the coming year?

Scott Moore reads the fine print:

Other areas covered by the agreement include new partnerships linking water scarcity and sustainable energy, a demonstration project for carbon capture and storage (CCS), and a sustainable cities initiative. Integrating energy and water issues promises to expand U.S. – China climate cooperation from an almost exclusive focus on emissions mitigation to one that also helps both countries adapt to climate change. Greater cooperation on CCS, meanwhile, will help develop a technology that is needed to help wean the world off fossil fuels by storing carbon dioxide deep underground instead of releasing it into the atmosphere.  The sustainable cities initiative, finally, builds on dynamic sub-national action on climate change in both the United States and China, with the leaders of places as diverse as New York and Jiangsu Province pledging to work together to reduce emissions.  Washington must devote serious resources to ensure that these initiatives fulfill their promise.

Max Fisher puts the announcement in context:

[I]t’s a very promising precedent of the two countries working together as global leaders on difficult issues. Over the next century, the US and China are going to face many, many more global issues on which they disagree, but on which they will both be better off if they cooperate. Indeed, the world as a whole is better served by Chinese and American cooperation and joint leadership. That’s why even Chinese state-run media is trumpeting the climate deal as “highlight[ing] a new type of major-country relations.”

But Alexa Olesen finds that China is downplaying the news at home:

Deborah Seligsohn, an expert on the Chinese environment at the University of California San Diego, told FP that Chinese leaders “tend not to enthuse,” so that may in part explain Xi’s reserve. But she also said that Beijing is under fire domestically for its unsuccessful efforts to curb local air pollution, noting that people were furious that authorities managed to clear the air for the visiting APEC dignitaries but can’t do it on a daily basis for their own citizens. ” There may be worries that focusing on climate change rather than air pollution doesn’t meet the public’s main concerns,” Seligsohn said via email.

And Michael Grunwald keeps focused on the role technology must play:

You don’t see the U.S. or China ditching oil yet, because when it comes to transportation, there’s nothing cost-competitive with oil yet. Electric vehicles are getting cheaper, and their sales are doubling every year, but internal combustion engines still rule. No international agreement will change that—and until there are viable alternatives to oil, international agreements that try to change that by fiat will end up being ignored. Ultimately, it’s unrealistic to expect developing countries or developed countries to ignore the short-term economic interests of their people, even when medium-term environmental disaster looms.

After all, the end of the Stone Age had nothing to do with stones at all. It ended when the world found stuff it liked better. It ended when better technology could do the same things more efficiently. Governments can do a lot to promote cheaper alternatives to fossil fuels, but the Fossil Fuel Age won’t end until they’re here.

Everything else is just words.

Earlier Dish on the agreement here.

(Chart from Philip Bump)

The State Of Global Gay Rights

Rights And GDP

Jay Michaelson offers an overview:

Two reports released Tuesday contain some surprising new conclusions about why some countries are more accepting of sexual minorities than others. It’s not quite religion, and not quite homophobia. It’s the economy, stupid.

The first report, “Public Attitudes about Homosexuality and Gay Rights Across Time and Countries,” was produced by the Williams Institute at UCLA School of Law and NORC at the University Chicago, and is essentially a survey of surveys, ultimately comprising 2,000 individual survey questions. … Economic development seems to matter most. According to Andrew Park and Andrew Flores of the Williams Institute, “Residents of countries whose economies that are in the top quartile are on average twelve times more likely to be supportive of homosexuality than residents of countries who economies are in the bottom quartile.”

The second report, “The Relationship between LGBT Inclusion and Economic Development: An Analysis of Emerging Economies,” was produced by the Williams Institute at the UCLA School of Law, this time in partnership with the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID), and studied 39 emerging economies. It, too, shows an overall increase in pro-LGBT policies. Using the Global Index on Legal Recognition of Homosexual Orientation (GILRHO), a new metric of eight categories of legal protection created by Dutch law professor Kees Waaldijk, it finds that the average number of SOGI rights went from one in 1990 to more than three by 2011. And again, money matters. In a neat statistic, the report shows that each additional right in the GILRHO is associated with approximately $320 in GDP per capita.

Michaelson mulls over the relationship:

Which is the chicken and which is the egg? Intuition would suggest that economic development is the cause, and pro-gay policies are the effect. The more affluent a society, the more educated, the more democratic, the more networked, and so on. But the report also suggests that anti-gay policies may harm economic development. The discrimination against, marginalization of, and criminalization of LGBT people removes them from the job market, among other things. “This research delineates the macro- and micro-level costs of not having an LGBT-inclusive workforce,” said Stephen O’Connell, USAID’s chief economist.

“Call It The Stupidity Of The American Voter”

This video of Obamacare architect Jon Gruber is going viral:

Money quote:

The bill was written in a tortured way to make sure CBO did not score the mandate as taxes. If [CBO] scored the mandate as taxes, the bill dies. Okay, so it’s written to do that. In terms of risk-rated subsidies, if you had a law which said that healthy people are going to pay in — you made explicit that healthy people pay in and sick people get money — it would not have passed … Lack of transparency is a huge political advantage. And basically, call it the stupidity of the American voter, or whatever, but basically that was really, really critical for the thing to pass.

Gruber has apologized for the remarks. The White House is distancing itself while Republicans are talking about making Gruber testify. Suderman feels the video “validates much of what critics have said about the health care law, and the tactics used to pass it, for years”:

For one thing, it is an explicit admission that the law was designed in such a way to avoid a CBO score that would have tanked the bill. Basically, the Democrats who wrote the bill knowingly gamed the CBO process.

It’s also an admission that the law’s authors understood that one of the effects of the bill would be to make healthy people pay for the sick, but declined to say this for fear that it would kill the bill’s chances. In other words, the law’s supporters believed the public would not like some of the bill’s consequences, and knowingly attempted to hide those consequences from the public.

Most importantly, however, it is an admission that Gruber thinks it’s acceptable to deceive people if he believes that’s the only way to achieve his policy preference.

Philip Klein goes further:

Gruber, in a moment of candor, acknowledged what has always been true about Obamacare and liberalism — that the masses have to be tricked into ceding control to those who know what’s best for them.

But Tyler Cowen is uninterested “in pushing through the mud on this one”:

It’s a healthy world where academics can speak their minds at conferences and the like without their words becoming political weapons in a bigger fight.  Or how about blogs?: do we want a world where no former advisor can write honestly about the policies of an administration?  I’ve disagreed with Gruber from the beginning on health care policy and I thought his ObamaCare comic book did the economics profession — and himself — a disservice.  But I’m simply not very interested in his proclamations on tape, which as far as I can tell are mostly correct albeit overly cynical.  (If anything he is overrating the American voter — most people weren’t even paying close enough attention to be tricked.)

Neil Irwin is likewise underwhelmed by the comments:

Mr. Gruber was exposing something sordid yet completely commonplace about how Congress makes policy of all types: Legislators frequently game policy to fit the sometimes arbitrary conventions by which the Congressional Budget Office evaluates laws and the public debates them. … This kind of gamesmanship is very much a bipartisan affair. President George W. Bush’s expansion of Medicare in 2003 was carefully designed so that its costs were backloaded, rising sharply just after its 10-year mark. Estimating costs in the 10-year window is an (arbitrary) convention for C.B.O. scoring of pending legislation. The design of the law made it seem less costly than it was expected to be over a longer time period.

Drum weighs in:

First, he noted that it was important to make sure the mandate wasn’t scored as a tax by the CBO. Indeed it was, and this was a topic of frequent discussion while the bill was being debated. We can all argue about whether this was an example of the CBO scoring process being gamed, but it has nothing to do with the American voter. Rather, it has everything to do with the American congressman, who’s afraid to vote for anything unless it comes packaged with a nice, neat bow bearing an arbitrary, predetermined price tag.

As for risk-rated subsidies, I don’t even know what Gruber is talking about here. Of course healthy people pay in and sick people get money. It’s health insurance. That’s how it works. Once again, this was a common topic of discussion while the bill was being debated—in fact, one that opponents of the bill talked about constantly. They complained endlessly that healthy young people would pay relatively higher rates than they deserved, while older, sicker people would get a relative break on their premiums. This was no big secret, but the bill passed anyway.

Beutler notes that “nearly everyone who’s attacking Gruber as if he were a White House political employee or a Democratic senator is simultaneously trying to require the Congressional Budget Office to say that tax cuts pay for themselves”:

The people who brought you the phony arithmetic of the Bush tax cuts and Medicare Part D and the self-financing Iraq war are upset about the ACA, which is genuinely fiscally sound. By any reasonable standard, ACA respected budgetary constraints much better than most other laws. That the authors took pains to meet concrete budgetary goals actually underscores the point that they took CBO, and budgetary questions in general, very seriously. If they didn’t take CBO seriously, they could’ve just ignored it, or fired the messenger. That’s what the George W. Bush administration threatened to do when the chief Medicare actuary prepared to say the Part D drug benefit would cost more than the White House was letting on.

And Chait’s take:

“Stupidity” is unfair. Ignorance is a more accurate term. Very few people understand economics and public policy. This is especially true of Obamacare — most Americans are unaware of the law’s basic functions or even whether their state is participating.

Since people know so little about public policy in general and health-care policy in particular, they tend to have incoherent views. In health care and other areas, they want to enjoy generous benefits while paying low taxes and don’t know enough details to reconcile those irreconcilable preferences. Gruber’s error here is that, by describing this as “stupidity” rather than a “lack of knowledge,” he moves from lamenting an unfortunate problem both parties must work around to condescending to the public in an unattractive way.

Huckabee 2016?

The former governor and current Fox News pundit may be gearing up for another presidential run. Luke Brinker takes him seriously:

While it’s early yet, public polling places Huckabee near the top of the GOP’s field; according to RealClearPolitics’ polling average, he’s in a statistical tie for first place with Rand Paul, Bush, Christie and Paul Ryan. Huckabee certainly stands an excellent chance of once again winning the Iowa caucuses, where RCP gives him a 6.2 point lead over Ryan, his nearest competitor. What’s more, his net favorability rating is the highest among the Republican pack, although a surprising number of voters remain unfamiliar with him.

Douthat deduces that a Huckabee campaign “is probably good news for Team Rand, since Huck is more likely to take votes (at least initially) from potential Paul rivals like Cruz than he is from Paul himself”:

As for Huckabee’s own odds of winning the nomination … well, they’re probably slightly better than the press and the political class assumes, because he’s a gifted politician who appeals the most important G.O.P. constituency, has a Fox News fan base and substantial gubernatorial experience, and polls as well as anyone at the moment.

But speaking as a longtime Huckenfreude afficianado, I think it’s fair to say that his moment (if there was one) came and went in 2012, a year when the party’s populists cycled through every possible anti-Romney candidate before finally settling on Rick Santorum and then losing (but surprisingly narrowly) with him. In those circumstances, what you might call Huckabee’s “Teavangelical” appeal and genuine populist background probably would have given him a better shot than Santorum or Gingrich (or Cain or Bachmann or help me I’m having flashbacks) at defeating Romney, who was, let’s face it, pretty much his ideal foil. But in 2016, with a much stronger field that might actually feature a little more populist substance and fewer corporate raider gazillionaire candidates, it’s much harder to see how Huckabee would expand beyond his big-in-Iowa base. At best, he’d be an important spoiler; at worst, his voters would ultimately jump to Cruz or Carson or even Rubio before the first ballot was even cast.

Larison dreads a Huckabee run:

On foreign policy, Huckabee has always been a hawk, but he went from occasionally saying somewhat sensible things during the 2008 campaign to being a predictable, awful hard-liner since then. In fact, he always was a hard-liner on some issues. His views on Israel and Palestine are so unreasonable that his presence in the 2016 field could only make the Republican debate on foreign policy much worse than it already will be. Especially if Santorum also chooses to run again, a Huckabee campaign would appear to add nothing to the debate that won’t already be there.

Waldman sizes up the growing GOP field:

Huck will certainly stand out as the friendliest, happiest candidate in a phalanx of grim and angry contenders. And there sure will be a lot of them. The RNC recently sent out a straw poll to its supporters and included a remarkable 32 candidates. Many of them won’t actually be running (I’m doubtful that “Ready For Pawlenty” is gaining steam), but I count no fewer than 15 Republicans whom I’d say were more likely than not to run. They’ll all be playing “Who’s the most conservative?” while bludgeoning each other desperately, and with Huckabee in the race, there’ll be no shortage of folksy aphorisms. It’s going to be a lot of fun.

Getting To The Head Of The Class

Carl Chancellor and Richard D. Kahlenberg argue that when it comes to education, economic segregation is worse than racial segregation:

African American children benefited from desegregation, researchers found, not because there was a benefit associated with being in classrooms with white students per se, but because white students, on average, came from more economically and educationally advantaged backgrounds. All-black schools that included the sons and daughters of doctors and lawyers and teachers alongside the offspring of less-advantaged parents often provided excellent educational environments because the economic, not racial, mix drives academic strength.

The solution, they say, is school choice:

School officials today emphasize public school choice – magnet schools and charter schools – to accomplish integration, having long rejected the idea of compulsory busing that gave families no say in the matter. In Hartford, Connecticut, for example, magnet schools with special themes or pedagogical approaches often have long waiting lists of white middle-class suburban families who are seeking a strong, integrated environment.

While many charter schools further segregate students, some are consciously seeking to bring students of different economic and racial groups together. The Denver School of Science and Technology, for example, uses a lottery weighted by income or geography to ensure a healthy economic mix in its seven middle schools and high schools. …

Today, more than eighty school districts, from Cambridge, Massachusetts, to Raleigh, North Carolina, to Champaign, Illinois, promote socioeconomic integration, almost always relying on choice. These districts educate more than four million students nationally.

But as Sara Neufeld notes, charter schools around the country are struggling with a separate problem – teacher turnover:

Since the “no excuses” movement began in the mid-1990s, its schools developed a reputation for attracting teachers who are young, idealistic and often white, available to families around the clock until they leave after a few years. Sometimes they’re ready to have children of their own or move on to more lucrative career prospects; other times they’re just tired. The phenomenon has been blasted for depriving students of stable adult relationships and creating mistrust in minority neighborhoods when white teachers serving black and Hispanic students come and go. So now the focus is sustainability.

What Washington Refuses To Admit

[Re-posted from earlier today]

Let me put this as baldly as I can. The US fought two long, brutal wars in its response to the atrocity of September 11, 2001. We lost both of them – revealing the biggest military machine in the history of the planet as essentially useless in advancing American objectives through war and occupation. Attempts to quash Islamist extremism through democracy were complete failures. The Taliban still has enormous sway in Afghanistan and the only way to prevent the entire Potemkin democracy from imploding is a permanent US troop presence. In Iraq, we are now confronting the very same Sunni insurgency the invasion created in 2003 – just even more murderous. The Jihadism there has only become more extreme under a democratic veneer. And in all this, the U.S. didn’t just lose the wars; it lost the moral high-ground as well. The president himself unleashed brutal torture across all theaters of war – effectively ending any moral authority the US has in international human rights.

These are difficult truths to handle. They reveal that so many brave men and women died for nothing. And so we have to construct myths or bury facts to ensure that we maintain face. But these myths and amnesia have a consequence: they only serve to encourage Washington to make exactly the same mistakes again. To protect its own self-regard, Washington’s elite is prepared to send young Americans to fight in a war they cannot win and indeed have already lost. You see the blinding myopia elsewhere: Washington’s refusal to release the Senate Intelligence Committee’s report on torture merely proves that it cannot face the fact that some of the elite are war criminals tout simple, and that these horrific war crimes have changed America’s role in the world.

What infuriated me about the decision to re-start the Iraq War last August – by a president explicitly elected not to do any such thing – was its arrogance, its smugness, and its contempt for what this country, and especially its armed forces, went through for so many long years of quagmire and failure. Obama and his aides revealed that their commitment to realism and not to intervene in Syria could be up-ended on a dime – and a war initiated without any debate in Congress, let alone a war authorization. They actually believed they had the right to re-start the Iraq War – glibly tell us it’s no big deal – tell us about it afterwards, and then ramp up the numbers of combat forces on the ground to early Vietnam levels.

This is not just a Republican fixation. It’s a function of the hegemony reflexively sought by liberal internationalists as well. Just listen to Jon Stewart calling Samantha Power’s smug bluff last night:

 

It was one of Stewart’s best interviews in a long while. One telling moment comes when Stewart asks Power why, if the threat from ISIS is “existential”, the regional powers most threatened by it cannot take it on themselves. She had no answer – because there is none. The US is intervening – despite clear evidence that it can do no real good – simply to make sure that ISIS doesn’t actually take over the country and thereby make president Obama look bad. But the IS was never likely to take over Kurdistan or the Shiite areas of Iraq, without an almighty struggle. And our elevating ISIS into a global brand has only intensified its recruitment and appeal. We responded, in other words, in the worst way possible and for the worst reasons possible: without the force to alter the underlying dynamic, without a breakthrough in multi-sectarian governance in Baghdad, without the regional powers taking the lead, without any exit plan, and all to protect the president from being blamed for “losing Iraq” – even though “Iraq” was lost almost as soon as it was occupied in 2003.

My point is this: how can you behave this way after what so many service-members endured for so long? How can you simply re-start a war you were elected to end and for which you have no feasible means to achieve victory?

The reason, I fear, is that the leadership in both parties cannot help themselves when they have a big shiny military and see something they don’t like happening in the world. If they can actually decide to intervene in a civil war to suppress an insurgency they couldn’t fully defeat even with 100,000 troops in the country, without any direct threat to national security, they can do anything. Worse, our political culture asks no more of them. The Congress doesn’t want to take a stand, the public just wants beheadings-induced panic satiated by a pliant president (who is then blamed anyway), and the voices that need to be heard – the voices of those who fought and lost so much in Iraq – are largely absent.

That’s why I found this op-ed in yesterday’s NYT so refreshing. A former lieutenant general in Iraq reminds us of the facts McCain and Obama both want to deny:

The surge in Iraq did not “win” anything. It bought time. It allowed us to kill some more bad guys and feel better about ourselves. But in the end, shackled to a corrupt, sectarian government in Baghdad and hobbled by our fellow Americans’ unwillingness to commit to a fight lasting decades, the surge just forestalled today’s stalemate. Like a handful of aspirin gobbled by a fevered patient, the surge cooled the symptoms. But the underlying disease didn’t go away. The remnants of Al Qaeda in Iraq and the Sunni insurgents we battled for more than eight years simply re-emerged this year as the Islamic State, also known as ISIS.

To go back in and try to do again with no combat troops what we could not do with 100,000 is a definition of madness brought on by pride. It is to restart the entire war all over again. It makes no sense – except as political cover. I was chatting recently with an officer who served two tours of duty in Iraq, based in Mosul. I asked him how he felt about ISIS taking over a city he had risked his life to save. And I can’t forget his response (I paraphrase): “Anyone who was over there knew right then that as soon as we left, all this shit would happen again. I’m not surprised. The grunts on the ground knew this, and saw this, but the military leadership can’t admit their own failure and the troops cannot speak out because it’s seen as an insult to those who died. And so we keep making the same fucking mistakes over and over again.”

At what point will we listen to those men and women willing to tell the ugly, painful truth about our recent past – and follow the logical conclusion? When will Washington actually admit its catastrophic errors and crimes of the last decade – and try to reform its own compulsive-interventionist habits to reflect reality rather than myth? Not yet, it appears, not yet. Washington cannot bear very much reality.

(Photo: U.S. Army soldiers of the D-CO 2/325 AIR 82nd Airborne Division during a dismounted movement to conduct early morning raids on homes in Baghdad, Iraq on April 26, 2007. The soldiers are part of the United States military surge as they try to help control the violence plagued city. By Joe Raedle/Getty Images.)

Senseless Style, Ctd

A reader shakes his head at Nathan Heller’s harsh appraisal of Steven Pinker’s The Sense of Style :

Heller seems entrapped in conventional but uninformed assumptions about language that don’t really endure being questioned well. Language is not a fixed, absolute thing.  In a way, language is the ultimate free-market commodity.  It changes in accordance with the whims and interests of its speakers, heeding no regulation. (Just observe the futile efforts of L’Académie française to tell the French how to speak French.) School-taught standard languages and rules such as those that Professor Pinker takes issue with try to freeze a language at an arbitrary point in time, or even a mishmash of several arbitrary points, that has no practical reason to be taken as authority. English went from “Oþlice on þam dagum wæs geworden gebod fram þam casere Augusto,” to “And it came to passe in those dayes, that there went out a decree from Cesar Augustus,” in about 500 years. Even that later translation looks a little funny to a modern reader, and it the gulf would seem greater if we heard if spoken using early-17th-century pronunciation.

Another takes issue with Robert Lane Greene’s criticism of Heller:

It doesn’t follow from simply saying “logic” and “consistency” mean different things to different to people that therefore there is no correct meaning of “logic” or “consistency” independent of anyone’s feelings about it.  To admit a pluralist logic is to forfeit the ability to make any arguments for or against anything that rise above sheer expression of will.

Another reader snarks on a related post about writing style:

Ben Myers may be “laboring to achieve good short sentences,” but with sentences like this, he’s got plenty left to do:

At any rate, whatever the source of this malaise, the symptoms are evident in the tendency of students to obfuscate simple ideas through a complexification of syntax, a multiplication of imprecise verbs instead of the selection of the one strong verb, and a deliberate substitution of polysyllabic words whose meanings are often vague and slippery for smaller ones whose meanings are plain and solid.

A more cynical reader:

Mr. Myers advocates simplicity and clarity in writing without demonstrating any of these qualities in his own prose, which he duly acknowledges in his self-effacing close. That said, may I suggest that simplicity, clarity, and explanation in writing mean very little without simplicity, clarity, and understanding in thought?

Most education today is driven by a market mentality. Why wouldn’t teachers want to help students learn to “obfuscate simple ideas through a complexication of syntax,” when that’s exactly what will gain one access to any of the white-collar professions? The entrance to the door of the legal, medical, political, financial, and scholastic professions could easily read: “Enter those who have mastered the implementation of  a multiplication of imprecise verbs instead of the selection of the one strong verb, and a deliberate substitution of polysyllabic words whose meanings are often vague and slippery for smaller ones whose meanings are plain and solid.”  It seems Mr. Meyers is unaware of his own egalitarian impulses, as he speaks of students class-based shame, but has not reached the clarity in his on mind before putting pen to paper.