Tag: Premium

“Yes Means Yes” Becomes Law

On Sunday, Jerry Brown signed California’s controversial affirmative-consent bill. Amanda Marcotte welcomes the news:

This means that during an investigation of an alleged sexual assault, university disciplinary committees will have to ask if the sexual encounter met a standard where both parties were consenting, with consent defined as “an affirmative, conscious and voluntary agreement to engage in sexual activity.” Notice that the words “verbal” or “stone sober” are not included in that definition. The drafters understand, as most of us do when we’re actually having sex, that sometimes sexual consent is nonverbal and that there’s a difference between drunk, consensual sex and someone pushing himself on a woman who is too drunk to resist.

She calls out what she views as “misrepresentations of the bill,” explaining:

The law has no bearing on the vast majority of sexual encounters.

It only applies when a student files a sexual assault complaint. And all it does is help the disciplinary board craft its line of questioning to get to the important facts. Now, instead of starting the investigation by asking if the victim said no—and how she said no and whether her no was good enough to get her out of unwanted sex—the investigation focuses on the actions of the accused. Example questions could include, “Did she want to have sex with you?” or “Did she want to do everything you two did?”

Maya Dusenbery is really encouraged by the new law:

This paradigm shift has been a long time coming and is desperately needed. The idea that mutual desire, not the mere absence of “no,” should perhaps be the standard for an activity that’s generally agreed to be pretty fun hardly seems radical. And there’s nothing that makes me sadder about the state of our sexual culture than the fact that this bill was met by such resistance.

Others, including some on the left, are more skeptical. Michelle Goldberg is among them:

The law might force couples into dialogue about their desires—obviously a good thing—but it’s hard to see how that alone will address rape. It is, after all, a right-wing canard that acquaintance rape cases tend to stem from misunderstanding rather than predation. Research at one campus by the scholars David Lisak and Paul M. Miller shows that most rapists are serial offenders who have committed other acts of violence as well. “This portrait is more consistent with the data on recidivism among sex offenders than with the still-prevalent image of a male college student who, under the influence of alcohol, mistakenly crosses the line between sexual pressure and rape,” they write. Yet California’s law treats the campus rape crisis as a communication problem, even as it blurs the parameters of what sexual assault is.

Laurie Essig also objects to the law:

Like the antiporn laws, “yes means yes” is a bad romance between feminism and the state for two reasons: pleasure and danger. The statute equates good sex with a legalistic definition of consent rather than with the pleasures had by the parties involved. It also expands notions of criminality at a time when the criminal-justice system is regularly committing horrific acts of race- and class-biased violence.

Freddie piles on:

Even the people who show up in my comments to advocate for these policies seem to have little confidence that they will actually make it easier to prosecute sexual assault, rather than make it more confusing, more messy, more ambiguous, and more likely to produce abuse or evasion. Many who support these policies seem to do so out of a desire to be deeply committed to opposing sexual assault in an abstract sense, rather than out of the sincere conviction that these policies will reduce sexual assault in fact.  It’s not enough to want to prevent rape; you’ve got to articulate why a reduction in rape is the most likely outcome of the adoption of these policies.

The controversy seems perfectly indicative of the enduring question for today’s left: are we in the business of being good or the business of doing good?

Meanwhile, Amanda Hess illustrates how the culture of “yes means yes” is spreading – to an absurd extent, in this case:

Here’s how [the new app] works: After deciding that you would like to have sex with someone, launch the Good2Go app (free on iTunes and Google Play), hand the phone off to your potential partner, and allow him or her to navigate the process to determine if he or she is ready and willing. “Are We Good2Go?” the first screen asks, prompting the partner to answer “No, Thanks,” “Yes, but … we need to talk,” or “I’m Good2Go.” If the partner chooses door No. 1, a black screen pops up that reads “Remember! No means No! Only Yes means Yes, BUT can be changed to NO at anytime!” If he or she opts instead to have a conversation before deciding—imagine, verbally communicating with someone with whom you may imminently engage in sexual intercourse—the app pauses to allow both parties to discuss. …

When I tried this process out with a partner, it took us four minutes to navigate through all the screens, mostly because he kept asking, “Why are we using an app for this?” and “Why do I have to give them my phone number?” (More on that later.) I was confused, too: As the instigator, I wasn’t asked to confirm that I wanted to have sex or to state my own intoxication level for my partner’s consideration. (A promotional video modeling the process begins by announcing how “simple” it is, then snaps out instructions for three minutes, but questions remain.)

Perhaps the process is deliberately time-consuming: The app provides the “opportunity for two people to pause and reflect on what they really want to do, rather than entering an encounter that might lead to something one or both will later regret,” the app’s FAQ reads. Or maybe I’m just old: At 29, I find it much easier to just talk about sex than to use an app for that.

A Warm Welcome For Narendra Modi, Ctd

A reader writes:

The United States should feel some pressure to enhance relations with India and Prime Minister Modi. Chinese President Xi Jinping visited India this month andUS-INDIA-DIPLOMACY-MODIsigned signed three pacts meant to boost trade and investment between the two nations. Setting aside the economic impact, the visit indicated a significant trend in two ways: It was the first time India has welcomed a Chinese head of state with a public reception since the Sino-Indian War in 1962. The leaders were said to have had an easy chemistry and seem to be looking to ease border tensions through the pragmatism of economic trade. The other aspect worth noting is that the trade pacts weren’t signed in Delhi, setting aside the tradition of making international agreements in the capital. Prime Minister Modi’s tenure as Chief Minister of the western state of Gujarat saw rapid industrial growth. He clearly was aiming to highlight the impressive development the region has made since 2001.

The Obama Administration’s outreach toward the new Prime Minister has been circumspect. There was an understandable caution given Modi’s unabashed Hindu nationalism and the Gujarat religious riots in 2002. However, a détente between India and China would certainly complicate Obama’s “Asian Pivot”. The diplomatic dance over waivers on the Iranian sanctions certainly hasn’t helped matters. The “champagne and roses” probably aren’t a bad idea.

On a shamelessly self-promoting note, I recently covered these matters in their relation to the burgeoning Asian space race. There has been a good deal of discussion about India’s recent success with the Mars Orbiter, Mangalyaan. India is the only country to have delivered on its first Mars mission. There is undeniable prestige that comes with besting China and Japan in the race to Mars. However, this has overshadowed another important development from President Xi Jinping’s trip to India: There was an agreement to forge a closer bond regarding space activities. If this does indeed come to fruition, there would be tremendous consequences for the commercial space industry and for the geopolitical balance in Asia.

But Shikha Dalmia is worried about the fate of Indians under Modi:

The Obama administration has been working to normalize relations with Modi – as it must and should – now that he is the duly elected leader of the world’s most populous democracy. As such, the White House singled him out for a dinner with the president (although Modi declared that he won’t eat anything because he’s observing a nine-day religious fast, a flamboyant display of his fabled austerity).

But such quiet gestures were not enough for Modi who has the autocrat’s instinct to be the star attraction. His gaudy displays – literally unprecedented for visiting leaders – are not merely unbecoming. They are also deeply disturbing, because they highlight Modi’s need for self-aggrandizement. That does not bode well for the massive economic decentralization – the hands-off approach – that he himself touted as essential for offering a decent standard of living to all Indians. Maybe he’ll learn to keep a lid on this tendency as he grows in office. Right now, however, it seems to pervade his economic decisions, making even many of his cheerleaders nervous about his ability to lead India’s socialist, centrally planned economy to a free-market one.

Pankaj Mishra also views the prime minister with concern:

One of Modi’s political feats is to have tapped into the complex insecurities of rising Indians with his potpourri of fantasies tinged with defiant, if under-educated, Hindu nationalism. Thus, climate change, on which India rejects all compromise, can be tackled with the help of yoga, as he put it in his speech at the United Nations, and India, which was a “golden bird” before being enslaved for a thousand years by foreigners (read Muslims and the British), will regain its glory with “make in India” manufacturing. …

It’s not too early to worry about the pernicious fallout from the ambition to turn India into a golden bird in double-quick time. For Modi’s plan to redeem India’s thousand years of slavery through labor-intensive manufacturing may be about as realizable in these days of increasing automation as Mao Zedong’s project of overtaking America’s industrial production by making steel in backyard furnaces. Scapegoats are already being sought in India just three months after Modi’s ascent. A member of Modi’s own coalition protested last week that while “discrimination and the distrust of the Muslim were covert” in the past, “now the gloves are off and the hatred is in-your-face.”

But Reihan Salam isn’t counting Modi out. He focuses on how Modi “attracted 19,000 cheering fans to a rally in Madison Square Garden on Sunday”:

There are no guarantees that Modi’s strategy will work. To become a manufacturing powerhouse, India will have to reform its ridiculously stringent labor laws, which are very much the third rail of Indian politics, and spend vast sums of money on roads and power plants and all of the other basics of industrialization. This will be an issue, as the Indian bureaucracy is famously terrible at spending money wisely.

If Modi succeeds, however, India will do more than alleviate poverty, important though that is. It will become the “big, powerful country” of Naipaul’s dreams—the kind of place that can afford to ignore Pakistan, its hostile, dysfunctional neighbor, and that won’t get pushed around by China. So you can see why Modi attracted support not just from India’s urban middle class, but also from hundreds of thousands of people of Indian descent in countries around the world, including the United States: He is promising that all of these people will be able to walk a little taller in a world that has long dismissed India as a land of “hunger and snakes.”

(Photo: A crowd of US-based supporters await the arrival of Prime Minister Narendra Modi of India for a community reception September 28, 2014 at Madison Square Garden in New York. By Don Emmert/AFP/Getty Images)

A Sunny Energy Future

Rebecca Leber spotlights two reports suggesting that “the world could be largely powered by the sun, instead of coal, within decades”:

The reports come from the International Energy Agency (IEA). It focuses on two kinds of solar—the kind that’s commonly seen installed on homes and businesses in the U.S. (solar photovoltaic) and the kind that generates heat to power (solar thermal). Within 35 years, according to the reports, they could account (respectively) for 16 and 11 percent of the world’s electricity generation.

It wouldn’t be easy to get to this level. Today, solar accounts for less than 1 percent of global energy consumption and 0.2 percent in the United States. To hit the levels IEA projects, there would have to be substantial investment upfront. But advances in technology, in addition to taxpayer subsidies, have helped solar panel costs come down some 80 percent in the last five years. If the IEA is right, costs may shrink another 65 percent by 2050.

Dave Roberts highlights the fact “that solar costs are plunging so fast that even the stodgy IEA is scrambling to keep up”:

At virtually every point in time over the last several decades, IEA has been behind the curve, underestimating the growth of renewables. Raise your hand if you think this is the last time it will reassess and upgrade solar’s potential contribution.

Relatedly, Brad Plumer analyzes the fight between solar and electric utilities. The core issue:

Rooftop solar generation has roughly tripled since 2010. By some estimates, a new solar system is installed every four minutes in the United States.

To electric utilities, this poses a dilemma. As rooftop solar becomes more popular, people will buy less and less electricity from their local power company. But utilities still have plenty of fixed costs for things like maintaining the grid. So, in response, those utilities will eventually have to raise rates on everyone else. Trouble is, those higher electricity rates could spur even more people to install their own solar rooftop panels to save money. Cue the death spiral.

Sound far-fetched? This was the doomsday scenario laid out by the Edison Electric Institute, an industry trade group, back in January 2013. Even a relatively modest increase in rooftop solar power could cause havoc. David Crane, CEO of NRG Energy, has called these trends “a mortal threat to the existing utility system.”

China vs #OccupyCentral

censorship-of-hong-kong-pro-democracy-protests-permission-denied-per-10-000-weibo-posts_chartbuilder

Beijing’s censors have been working overtime to scrub coverage of the Hong Kong protests from social media:

Weibo censorship hit its highest point this year at 152 censored posts per 10,000, according to Weiboscope, an analytics project run by the University of Hong Kong. (“Hong Kong” and “police” were the day’s top censored terms.) To put that in perspective, the Sept. 28 censorship rate was more than double that on June 4, the 25th anniversary of the crackdown on the Tiananmen student movement — an event so meticulously censored in both traditional and social media that many of China’s younger generation are largely ignorant of the event. …

Despite 2014’s many politically sensitive and potentially destabilizing events — including a March 1 terrorist attack at a busy train station, the July 29 announcement of an investigation into former security watchdog Zhou Yongkang, and the Sept. 23 sentencing of prominent Uighur scholar Ilham Tohti on charges of separatism — the three most censored days on Weibo nevertheless all related to Hong Kong. Beijing’s official rejection on August 31 of open nomination of candidates in Hong Kong came in second, while the annual July 1 pro-democracy march in Hong Kong took third.

Alexa Olesen monitored the reaction after China blocked Instagram on Sunday:

A handful of Chinese Weibo users blamed the Hong Kong protestors for getting their Instagram service axed. But many Chinese appeared oblivious to the situation in Hong Kong, unsurprising given the current mainland news blackout on the escalating situation and the scrubbing of Weibo messages that mentioned Hong Kong. Weibo also was blocking searches for the keyword “Instagram,” forcing users to resort to calling the service “Ins” in order to grouse about the shutdown.

Most mainland Chinese still likely know nothing of the Hong Kong protests, now continuing into the early hours of the morning. But online chatter about the Instagram blackout could backfire on Beijing, leading otherwise indifferent Chinese web users to feel the personal impact from events transpiring far away — and to begin asking why yet another popular online tool has, at least for now, been taken away.

And Lily Kuo looks at how Chinese netizens are getting around the censors:

Bloggers are findings ways to get around the censors by searching for the English transliteration of blocked Chinese phrases—substituting “xianggang” for Hong Kong or “zhanzhong” for “Occupy Central,” for example. Entering a space in between the two Chinese characters for Hong Kong is another way around the restrictions, [Chengdu resident] Li said. Censors are adapting swiftly. Searching for the phrase “zhanzhong” already prompts a notice on Weibo that results cannot be displayed. Even posts critical of the protesters are being removed, including a comment that read, “So violent like this, and you tell me you want democracy. I don’t want this kind of democracy!” was deleted.

(Chart via Lily Kuo)

Going Viral

Kalev Leetaru considers the role that online data – even blogs – could have in halting diseases like Ebola:

It turns out that monitoring the spread of Ebola can teach us a lot about what we missed — and how data mining, translation, and the non-Western world can help to provide better early warning tools.

Earlier this month, Harvard’s HealthMap service made world headlines for monitoring early mentions of the current Ebola outbreak on March 14, 2014, “nine days before the World Health Organization formally announced the epidemic,” and issuing its first alert on March 19.  Much of the coverage of HealthMap’s success has emphasized that its early warning came from using massive computing power to sift out early indicators from millions of social media posts and other informal media.

As one blog put it: “So how did a computer algorithm pick up on the start of the outbreak before the WHO? As it turns out, some of the first health care workers to see Ebola in Guinea regularly blog about their work. As they began to write about treating patients with Ebola-like symptoms, a few people on social media mentioned the blog posts. And it didn’t take long for HealthMap to detect these mentions.”

The unfortunate flip side:

But there was some great news today:

Update: Some not-so-great breaking news:

Meanwhile, Maryam Zarnegar Deloffre assesses the latest US role in combatting the Ebola epidemic – boots on the ground:

Last week, President Obama announced the deployment of the U.S. Africa Command (AFRICOM), which will set up a joint force command in Liberia to coordinate the activity of 3,000 U.S. forces; expedite the transportation of equipment and supplies; and train an estimated 500 health-care workers per week. …

The AFRICOM and UNMEER missions are not your typical militarized humanitarian intervention. Defining the Ebola crisis as a human security issue is a game changer. There is no conflict in the West African countries most heavily affected by Ebola (at least not yet), thus the security threat highlighted by the UNSC is a threat to people and their humanity — the right to life with dignity. Humanity is a universal principle, one that transcends and orders all the other humanitarian principles, one that NGOs, states and international organizations can all get behind. Viewed through this lens, it is no wonder that NGOs, such as Doctors Without Borders, that typically refuse to work with national militaries are calling on militaries to provide logistical support to address the Ebola epidemic.

Ezra, in an interview with the director of the CDC, underscores the connection between West Africa and the US:

Ezra Klein: One thing that has been striking here is the degree to which weak health-care systems in poor countries can be a real threat to rich countries. How should we think about that?

Thomas Frieden: Yes. We are all at risk. But it’s not health systems so much as public-health systems. Do you have a system in place to find when there’s a cluster of unexpected illness, whether it’s Ebola or MERS or SARS or the next HIV? Do you have a system in place to get the lab tests done? Do you have trained disease investigators?

This is not going to come by creating some great global entity to do all this for us. We need to build the capacity of countries to find, stop, and prevent global health crises. We are all vulnerable to the weakest link in the chain. And it is not that expensive to strengthen those links. But it does mean you need to train public-health workers. It does mean you need a lab-reporting network. It means you have more than a public-health system you pull out in case of emergencies. It means you have one you’re using every day to fight disease, and so you can scale it up in the event of an emergency.

Follow all our Ebola coverage here.

Parody For Profit

David Hajdu charts the rise of the satirical music video:

Song parodies now generate more revenue than official videos, according to YouTube data provided in the 2014 Annual Report of the International Federation of Phonographic Industries (IFPI), a music-recording trade group. While YouTube once discouraged parody videos on the dubious grounds of copyright infringement – its attorneys must have skipped the readings on Berlin v. E. C. Publications in law school – YouTube now welcomes music parodies, because it has figured out how to make money from them. YouTube is helping record companies and rights administrators to hit up parodists (and others who employ copyrighted music in their content) for licensing fees.

He finds himself ambivalent about the genre. On the one hand, parody amounts to “critique in creative form, and as such it provides a service essential to society”:

These benefits are real and important, particularly at a time when mainstream popular music is subjected to so little serious criticism, and when serious criticism has so little traction in mainstream culture.

On the other:

There is something disconcerting about the dominance of parody in the YouTube musical sphere today. The true purpose of parody is the making of jokes rather than the making of critique. The final test of a parody is its ability to get laughs; it is not the depth, nor even the accuracy, of its insights.

Is John Oliver A Journalist? Ctd

Several readers comment on our praise of Last Week Tonight:

My brother and I have fallen into something of a Monday-morning ritual where we rave about how great John Oliver’s expose-of-the-week had been the night before. Not because the extra 8 minutes have afforded him the equivalent of brutally delivered “long-form comedy-news journalism”, but because Oliver routinely taps into the collective influence of his audience’s Internet fluency toward a sort of “social media civic engagement” we haven’t seen before.

Seemingly without exception, he always gives the audience an opportunity to participate in his issue-of-the-week in surprisingly meaningful ways: send comments to the FCC about net neutrality, donate to other scholarship funds made available to women to supplant Miss America’s status at the top, copy a satirical letter to APSCU lampooning the abuse of student loan subsidies by for-profit colleges.

Where Jon Stewart tends to end his rants with pithy statements that leave us feeling angry but hopeless, John Oliver seems to be going out of his way to channeling that outrage into non-trivial calls for action. Even if his goal is only to dominate the next day’s cable news cycle in replays, it makes the endeavor seem much more traditionally journalistic than The Daily Show or The Colbert Report.

Another sends the above video:

I know how you feel about Michael Moore, but he did much the same thing with his show TV Nation.

The most telling was how he hired a lobbyist to get Congress to declare a “TV Nation Day,” with clips of actual congressmen giving speeches about a show they had clearly never seen based on what the lobbyist told them, or rather, the money they got from them.

Another dissents:

Unlike you, Andrew, I am very disappointed with John Oliver’s HBO program. While I think it serves a useful public service when it gets the word out on under-reported issues like Net Neutrality, I find it lazy and often insulting. The piece he did on for-profit colleges simply took its talking points and best clips from a superb Frontline documentary, “College, Inc.,” which aired four years ago. The show’s segment on Payday loans included a fake PSA from Sarah Silverman in which she encouraged the poor who use their services to make money by debasing themselves (“People will pay you to pee on them”). I spent many Saturday mornings driving my severely disabled mother to Payday loan stores (people were “so nice there.”). I stood by the door to keep her from getting mugged and paid back her interest for her. To even jokingly suggest that people like her should get the money they need through shitting on strangers (which Silverman also does) reveals how callow and insincere the show toward some of the issues it covers. (Don’t even get me started on the cute gerbil eating a burrito as a reward for hearing about death penalty abuses).

When you single out Jon Stewart’s failings for comparison, you miss the point. For me, the Daily Show’s genius is its investigative pieces, at which John Oliver once excelled. For an understanding of Russian political culture and how it might be capable of state-sponsored homophobia and invasions of its neighbors, look no further than Jason Jones’ Winter Olympics interviews in Moscow with a leadership delighted to spew their hate and aggression on camera to an American audience. Nothing else in the media comes close to getting at their “epistemic closure.” John Oliver needs to use his long-form platform to get back on the road and do what he does best.

The State Of The Secret Service, Ctd

whitehosue.0

It turns out White House fence-jumper Omar Gonzalez made it far past the mansion’s front door. Adam Baumgartner created the above animated GIF of Gonzalez’s route based on the following description from Carol Leonnig:

After barreling past the guard immediately inside the door, Gonzalez, who was carrying a knife, dashed past the stairway leading a half-flight up to the first family’s living quarters. He then ran into the 80-foot-long East Room, an ornate space often used for receptions or presidential addresses. Gonzalez was tackled by a counter-assault agent at the far southern end of the East Room. The intruder reached the doorway to the Green Room, a parlor overlooking the South Lawn with artwork and antique furniture, according to three people familiar with the incident.

According to Leonnig, an alarm box meant to alert the Secret Service to intruders had been “muted” at the request of the White House usher staff.  Joe Coscarelli adds:

That wasn’t the only failure. Gonzalez seems to have made it past the following lines of defense, according to the Post:

1. “a plainclothes surveillance team … on duty that night outside the fence, meant to spot jumpers and give early warning”
2. “an officer in a guard booth on the North Lawn”
3. attack dogs, which were never released
4. a “specialized” SWAT team
5. the front-door guard

Amy Davidson notes, “The head of the Secret Service, Julia Pierson, will testify before Congress on Tuesday, and will be asked to account for this failure; she should be thankful that she’s not explaining a far worse one”:

She and others in the White House should also be asked why there wasn’t a straightforward account of the intrusion. The story was that, although Gonzalez wasn’t stopped when he climbed over the fence, or by the officers who were supposed to tackle him on the lawn, or by the dogs that were supposed to be released, or by the door that was supposed to be locked, he “was physically apprehended after entering the White House North Portico doors,” as the Secret Service said, in a statement at the time. This was taken to mean that he was pounced on the moment his toes touched the White House floor, and, as the Times noted on Monday, “Secret Service officials said nothing in their public comments after the incident to suggest otherwise.”

House Oversight Committee members Jason Chaffetz and Elijah Cummings are already murmuring about changes in leadership. It will be interesting to see how the Pierson’s testimony, which is in progress, will play out. Ed Krayewski listened in:

[W]hile the Secret Service’s recent history of mishaps was brought up throughout the hearing, several members of Congress, both Democrat and Republican, appeared more interested in demanding the Secret Service use more force in situations like last week’s fence jumper. This even though the president and his family weren’t at the White House that day, something the Secret Service knew when responding but Gonzales probably didn’t.

Josh Marshall thinks excessive force would be a mistake:

The White House lawn is pretty big. And the place is crawling with Secret Service. It should be possible to apprehend someone on the lawn. It should definitely be possible to incapacitate and stop them at the building perimeter or just inside it. If the intruder is armed, obviously the entire calculus changes. But until you know that or can reasonably assume they shouldn’t be just shooting to kill every time someone hops the fence.

Doubling Down On Afghanistan

Today, Afghanistan and the US signed an agreement allowing nearly 10,000 American soldiers to remain there past the end of this year, fulfilling a campaign pledge from the new president, Ashraf Ghani:

Under the agreement, 12,000 foreign military personnel are expected to stay after 2014, when the combat mission of Afghanistan’s U.S.-led NATO force ends. The force is expected to be made up of 9,800 U.S. troops with the rest from other NATO members. They will train and assist Afghan security forces in the war against the Taliban and its radical Islamist allies. The U.S. has the right to keep bases in Afghanistan as long as the security pact is in force, and in return it promises to raise funds to train and equip the Afghan security forces, which now number 350,000.

Ghani was inaugurated on Monday and called on the Taliban to join peace talks. He formed a unity government with election rival Abdullah Abdullah after a prolonged standoff over vote results that ended in a deal to make Ghani president and Abdullah a chief executive in the government with broad powers.

“Like it or not,” Ioannis Koskinas argues, “Afghanistan remains a key battlefront in the fight against extremists, terrorists, and fanatics hiding behind the veil of religious fundamentalism”:

The uncertainty that surrounded the prolonged election process, in many ways, emboldened the insurgents and strengthened their narrative. Additionally, while the U.S. combat mission in Afghanistan is due to end at the end of this year, al Qaeda fighters, while diminished in number, remain strong in Afghanistan and Pakistan.

Although unsavory in Washington political circles, al Qaeda’s presence and the introduction of groups who pledge allegiance to the Islamic State make an enduring U.S. counter-terrorism task force in Afghanistan long past 2015 necessary. Complicated by the Taliban’s significant gains in parts of Afghanistan in past months, at times aided by foreign fighters, Obama would be smart to reconsider his earlier arbitrary timeline to withdraw all troops from Afghanistan in 2015. It is imperative that Ghani and Abdullah have the necessary time to combat the insurgency physically, but also counter their narrative through reform initiatives.

The Obama administration since May had been pushing for the troop extension, and the main obstacle to the BSA was former Afghan president Hamid Karzai’s implacable opposition. But Morrissey spins the agreement as a policy shift by Obama, inspired by the disaster that befell Iraq after the US withdrawal:

Of course, the war isn’t coming to an end in Afghanistan any more than it came to an end in Iraq. The Taliban have picked up their efforts as the US prepared to leave, and will no doubt continue to pressure Kabul politically as well as militarily for years to come. The best that the US can do in Afghanistan is attempt to keep the Afghan security forces from collapsing while all sides tire of the fight and find a way to settle the tribal wars that have been ongoing since the Soviet withdrawal. … The residual-force arrangement may not prove successful in keeping Afghanistan from collapse, but at least they show that someone’s learned a lesson from the American withdrawal from Iraq.

Drawing on an interview with Ghani from last month, Sune Engel Rasmussen underscores the challenges faced by the new Afghan president, especially given the roundabout (and possibly fraudulent) way he came into office:

Corruption is only one of the ills plaguing the Afghan economy.Dependent on foreign imports and with little domestic industry to speak of, the economy was left close to comatose as financial activity stopped during the recent election impasse. According to the country’s finance minister, the stuck ballot cost Afghanistan $5 billion in lost revenue and investment, and threatened to leave the government unable to pay salaries for civil servants.

Making Afghanistan self-sufficient is at the top of Ghani’s agenda. “We want to generate one of the biggest construction industries in the region,” he said. “We have enough marble to last the region for 100 years, but we are importing marble from neighboring countries.” Many of Afghanistan’s problems come down to poor infrastructure. “Urban and rural Afghanistan are totally disconnected. Go to the market. 70 percent of the food is foreign imported, while 40-60 percent of our food rots between the field and the market because we don’t have the system,” Ghani noted.

The American Realm vs The British Republic

My old friend, Jesse Norman, is an MP in the British parliament and noted something odd in the recent war debate in the Commons:

During the past decade or two, a convention has started to develop that, except in an emergency, major foreign policy interventions must be pre-approved by a vote in Parliament. The idea springs from honourable motives and it is understandable given the present climate of distrust in politics, but in my judgment it is nevertheless a serious mistake … It is a basic purpose of Parliament —above all, of this Chamber—to hold the Government to account for their actions. It is for the Government, with all their advantages of preparation, information, advice and timeliness, to act, and it is then for this Chamber to scrutinise that action.

If Parliament itself authorises such action in advance, what then? It gives up part of its power of scrutiny; it binds Members in their own minds, rather than allowing them the opportunity to assess each Government decision on its own merits and circumstances; and instead of being forced to explain and justify their actions, Ministers can always take final refuge in saying, “Well, you authorised it.” Thus, far from strengthening Parliament, it weakens it and the Government: it weakens the dynamic tension between the two sides from which proper accountability and effective policy must derive.

In the British constitutional system, Jesse is surely right. He reminds us that when Margaret Thatcher PresidencyKingrecalled Parliament for an emergency session before the launch of the Falklands war, the motion before the House was simply: “That this House do now adjourn.” But what makes this so striking is how the American republic, meanwhile, has turned into the British one. It was long understood as a vital part of the American constitution that declarations of war had to come from the Congress and not the president – precisely to avoid the dangers of a pseudo-monarch using war to bolster his own standing, to project strength or to act as some kind of protector of the realm. None of that really applies any more, the president launches war after war (while calling them counter-terror operations), and the Congress’s only remaining role is to provide the funds. This is precisely what the Founders feared; and it is precisely what is now routine. In a stark review of a new book on presidentialism by F H Buckley, The Once And Future King: The Rise Of Crown Government In America, Gene Healy sees how far the rot has gone:

We’re hardly “the freest country in the world.” As Buckley points out, his native Canada beats the United States handily on most cross-country comparisons of political and economic liberty. In the latest edition of the Cato Institute’s Economic Freedom of the World rankings, for example, we’re an unexceptional 17th. Meanwhile, as Buckley points out, the Economist Intelligence Unit’s “Democracy Index” ranks us as the 19th healthiest democracy in the world, “behind a group of mostly parliamentary countries, and not very far ahead of the ‘flawed democracies.’”

There’s a lesson there. While “an American is apt to think that his Constitution uniquely protects liberty,” the truth “is almost exactly the reverse.” In a series of regressions using Freedom House’s international rankings, Buckley finds that “presidentialism is significantly and strongly correlated with less political freedom.”

In this, Buckley builds on the work of the late political scientist Juan Linz, who in a pioneering 1990 article, “The Perils of Presidentialism,” argued that presidential systems encourage cults of personality, foster instability, and are especially bad for developing countries.

Subsequent studies have bolstered Linz’s insights, showing that presidential systems are more prone to corruption than parliamentary systems, more likely to suffer catastrophic breakdowns, and more likely to degenerate into autocracies. The Once and Future King puts it succinctly: “there are a good many more presidents-for-life than prime-ministers-for-life.” Maybe what’s exceptional about the United States is that for more than 200 years we’ve “remained free while yet presidential.”

Relatively free, that is. The American presidency, with its vast regulatory and national security powers, is, Buckley argues, rapidly degenerating into the “elective monarchy” that George Mason warned about at the Philadelphia Convention. Despite their parliamentary systems, our cousins in the Anglosphere also suffer from creeping “Crown Government”-“political power has been centralized in the executive branch of government in America, Britain, and Canada, like a virus that attacks different people, with different constitutions, in different countries at the same time,” he writes.

But we’ve got it worse, thanks in large part to a system that makes us particularly susceptible to one-man rule. As Buckley sees it, “presidentialism fosters the rise of Crown government” in several distinct ways. Among them: It encourages executive messianism by making the head of government the head of state; it insulates the head of government from legislative accountability; and it makes him far harder to remove. On each of these points, The Once and Future King makes a compelling-and compellingly readable-case.