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Celebrities: They Sext Like Us, Ctd

by Dish Staff

A reader responds to a previous one:

It amazes me how casually people presume to dictate to others what they can and can’t do with their own bodies, in the privacy of their own homes (or in the privacy of their own phones, as the case may be). “Is your life going to suck if you can’t take nude pics on your telephone?” What the hell kind of question is that? Why exactly “can’t” a person take nude selfies? Because of the inevitability that someone else will break into their phone/laptop/cloud storage account, steal this personal information or images and disseminate them without consent? Do the people asking these questions not hear themselves and recognize they might as well ask women, “Is your life going to suck if you can’t wear a short skirt?”

I was the victim of identify theft last week; somebody got my debit card info and made some fraudulent purchases at Macy’s. My bank, to their credit, immediately alerted me, canceled the card, reversed the charges, etc. At no point in the process did anyone think to ask, “Would your life really suck if you just paid cash for your purchases?” At no point did anyone suggest that if I didn’t want to have money stolen from me, that I shouldn’t purchase anything over the Internet.

Of course, our right to our own money is considered sacrosanct. Women’s right to their own privacy? Their right to control the images they take of their own bodies and they keep private, by any reasonable measure? Not so much …

Another asks:

Why is it so important for everyone to argue about who’s ultimately at fault here? There’s plenty of blame to go around. The person who released these pictures is a terrible human being. If Apple has flaws in iCloud, then shame on them. And anyone taking naked pictures of themselves and sending them across the Internet is creating risk. There are a bunch of parties at fault here. Some are certainly more morally wrong than others, but that doesn’t mean that there are valid lessons to be learned for the rest of them.

If I don’t bother to lock my front door when I leave the house, is there any question that I made a mistake? That doesn’t mean I deserved to be robbed, but I should’ve known better. It doesn’t absolve the guy that wandered in and stole my stuff from his guilt at all, but it’s fair to criticize me as well. I wish we lived in a world where I could leave my doors unlocked, but that’s not the world that exists, and that should be obvious.

These celebrities did not deserve to have their pictures distributed, but they made decisions that made this event possible. If they’ve been paying any attention to the world around them, they’d have understood that there is a huge market for naked celebrity photos, and that being the case, maybe allowing them into “the cloud” wasn’t the best idea.

Is it fair that celebrities have to be extra wary of this sort of thing? Maybe not, but very little of the world is fair, and we have to live our lives accordingly.

Another makes a very similar argument and concludes:

This does circle back to the rape conversation on the Dish. And it pains me to go here, but it neither bad nor victim-blaming for people of either sex to be educated on some steps to take to lower the probability of being assaulted (mainly having to do with very heavy alcohol consumption). It does not mean anyone deserves to be assaulted in any way. And when rape and other terrible assaults occur, our legal system should investigate and prosecute. But even when a rapist is convicted, it doesn’t undo the trauma. It would have been much better not to happen, and every reasonable* effort to reduce the chance of this is smart. (*maybe this is where people differ – what is reasonable and what is overly cautious.)

But can we stop equating some thoughtful prudent advice with victim-blaming? I figured if there is a place where this can be posted and intelligent conversation can ensue, it’s the Dish.

Interventionist Insanity

by Jonah Shepp

Shadi Hamid characterizes Obama’s foreign policy as reflecting a lack of faith in American power:

Obama, far from the prudent technocrat some assume him to be, is a believer in the limits not just of American power (which would be understandable) but American agency, colored by a lack of faith in America’s ability to play a constructive role where religious and ethnic divides are paramount. The president has been surprisingly dismissive of the growing number of former U.S. officials and Middle East and Syria experts who have criticized him for not intervening in Syria more than two and half years ago when less than ten thousand Syrians had died. That Obama appears unwilling to question his original assumptions, despite rapidly changing events on the ground, suggests an insularity and ideological rigidity that surpasses even the Bush administration.

The fact that Syria has gone to shit without American help doesn’t disprove the argument that US intervention wouldn’t solve Syria’s problems. Hamid’s logic here is telling: Obama thought it was a bad idea to intervene in Syria in 2012, and today he thinks it’s still a bad idea (and no evidence has emerged to demonstrate otherwise), therefore Obama is insular and ideologically rigid. After a series of disastrous exercises (Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya) brought about by an overabundance of faith in American power, where do interventionists like Hamid get off criticizing Obama’s lack of faith in this power as though it were some kind of nebbishy tic? Is that lack of faith not a rational response to repeated demonstrations that there are problems in the world that American power can’t solve? Having “faith” in a course of action that has been repeatedly been demonstrated not to work demonstrates not strength, resolve, or leadership, but rather a failure to see what is in front of one’s face. And lacking faith in it seems pretty smart to me.

Hamid, of course, is on the long list of Libyan war cheerleaders whom Freddie deBoer calls out, wondering when their mea culpas will emerge. I’m not on the public record regarding that intervention, but for what it’s worth, I had serious misgivings about it and wasn’t terribly surprised when it went awry, though I admit I was not sorry to see Qaddafi go and did argue with friends on the far left who believed (still do) that he was a great humanitarian rather than an eccentric narcissist who killed a lot of people and bought off a lot of other people with oil money.

But now, the American Power Caucus has turned its attention to Ukraine, where Walter Russell Mead claims (literally) that the only thing separating us from a “Mad Max world” is a good, old-fashioned US intervention:

America’s choices here (as in the Middle East) are few and they are ugly. We can back Ukraine with enough weapons, money, political will and if necessary air power and boots on the ground to tip the balance on the ground, or we can watch Russia conquer as much of the country as it wants. A Russian victory here won’t be the end; Putin is an empire builder and his goal is to restore the Kremlin power in all the former lands of the USSR, for starters. A Russian win in Ukraine will change the world. Putin’s flagrant violation of every standard of decency and restraint leaves the United States with the choice of confronting him or living in a Mad Max world ruled—if at all—by the law of the jungle.

But as Daniel Larison points out, arming Ukraine wouldn’t actually accomplish very much other than raising the death toll:

It’s telling that no one in favor of arming Ukraine believes that it would do anything more than drag out the conflict. That’s the best-case scenario. It is just as likely that Russia would respond to the arming of Ukraine by Western governments with a much larger attack that inflicts even greater damage on the country. Russia has consistently been willing to go much farther than the U.S. and its allies in terms of what it will risk over Ukraine, and we should assume that will also apply to its response to attempts by Western powers to arm Ukraine. At each stage of the Ukraine crisis, Western governments have pursued their policies there without considering how Russia would respond to them. This has repeatedly put Western governments in the absurd position of provoking reactions from Moscow that they should have expected but failed to anticipate.

Another Land Grab, Or Much Ado About Nothing?

by Dish Staff

https://twitter.com/arabiaenquirer/statuses/507058535021445121

On Sunday, Israel declared nearly 1,000 acres of land near Bethlehem in the West Bank to be “state land”, allowing it to be developed into a new settlement, in what Haaretz describes as a partly punitive measure:

The announcement follows the cabinet’s decision last week to take over the land in response to the June kidnapping and killing of three teenage Jewish boys by Hamas militants in the area. Peace Now, which monitors settlement construction, said it was the largest Israeli appropriation of West Bank land in 30 years. … The appropriated land belongs to five Palestinian villages in the Bethlehem area: Jaba, Surif, Wadi Fukin, Husan and Nahalin. The move is the latest of a series of plans designed to attach the Etzion settlement bloc to Jerusalem and its environs. Construction of a major settlement, known as Gvaot, at the location has been mooted by Israel since the year 2000. Last year, the government invited bids for the building of 1,000 housing units at the site, and 523 are currently under construction. Ten families now live on the site, which is adjacent to a yeshiva.

Jonathan Tobin defends the decision by pointing out that this particular area would end up going to Israel in any conceivable two-state deal anyway:

Let’s be clear about this. Neither the ownership nor the future of Gush Etzion is up for debate in any peace talks. In every peace plan, whether put forward by Israel’s government or its left-wing opponents, the bloc remains part of Israel, a reality that most sensible Palestinians accept. The legal dispute about whether empty land can be converted to state use for development or settlement or if it is actually the property of neighboring Arab villages is one that will play itself out in Israel’s courts. Given the scrupulous manner with which Israel’s independent judiciary has handled such cases in the past, if the local Arabs can prove their dubious assertions of ownership, the land will be theirs.

But Damon Linker gets why the continual expansion of the settlements rankles:

Israel’s defenders say the country will repatriate hundreds of thousands of settlers and dismantle and remove or turn over to the Palestinians many thousands of homes, apartments, and buildings used by businesses, as well as roads, electricity, plumbing, and other infrastructure. That sounds like a stunningly foolish and wasteful policy. And yet, against all apparent good sense, Israel apparently intends to continue and expand it. No wonder so many Palestinians have despaired of ever reaching a two-state solution with Israel. Regardless of what Israel’s leaders and apologists say — and these days they often sound ambivalent at best — its actions are those of a country that has no intention of ever leaving the West Bank.

To Will Saletan, the move looks creepily Putinesque:

What’s more disturbing, from the standpoint of international norms, is the close resemblance between Israel’s and Russia’s rationalizations. Israelis point out that hundreds of thousands of Jews live in the West Bank and East Jerusalem. Russians make the same case for protecting ethnic Russians in Ukraine. Israelis say they need the new patch of land to connect their West Bank outposts to Israel proper. Russians use the same logic to justify carving a land bridge to Crimea. Israelis say they captured the West Bank fairly in a long-ago war started by the other side. Russia could say the same about its World War II reclamation of Ukraine. Israel says it’s still willing to negotiate peace; the ongoing settlements just add to its leverage. That’s exactly how Russian officials view their bullying in Ukraine.

Meanwhile, Hamas has grown more popular since the Gaza war:

A new poll appears to show that support for Hamas has surged among Palestinians – in spite of (or perhaps due to) a huge Israeli military operation that battered Gaza and left many of the militant group’s fighters dead. It’s a stark shift. If presidential elections were held today with just the two top candidates, the Palestinian Center for Policy and Survey Research (PCPSR) found that 61 percent of Palestinians would vote for the militant’s leader Ismail Haniyeh over current Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas. That’s a big increase over a poll conducted in June, which found that 53 percent supported Abbas and 41 percent supported Haniyeh. PCPSR note that it’s the first time that Haniyeh has received a majority in the eight years they have asked the question.

Manipulated By Metaphors

by Dish Staff

Figurative language may warp your perception of reality. Britt Peterson explains:

Lera Boroditsky, an associate professor of cognitive science at the University of California at San Diego, has written a series of papers on the effect of figurative language, particularly metaphors of space and time, on reasoning. One paper, written with Paul Thibodeau, an assistant professor of psychology at Oberlin College, showed that substituting just one word in a text about a crime wave ravaging an imaginary town – comparing crime to a “beast” instead of a “virus” – completely changed how readers responded to the problem. People who read that crime was a beast were far more likely to advocate putting more police on the streets or locking up criminals; people who read “virus” were far more likely to push for education and social reforms. And yet, when people cited the factors behind their decisions, no one mentioned the metaphor. “People love to think that they’re being rational, and all of us love to think that we’re basing our opinion entirely on facts,” Boroditsky told me. “But in fact it was the metaphor that people overlooked.”

Meanwhile, Michael Chorost looks at what happens in our brains when we interpret metaphors:

Neuroscientists agree on what happens with literal sentences like “The player kicked the ball.” The brain reacts as if it were carrying out the described actions. This is called “simulation.” Take the sentence “Harry picked up the glass.” “If you can’t imagine picking up a glass or seeing someone picking up a glass,” [linguist George] Lakoff wrote in a paper with Vittorio Gallese, a professor of human physiology at the University of Parma, in Italy, “then you can’t understand that sentence.” Lakoff argues that the brain understands sentences not just by analyzing syntax and looking up neural dictionaries, but also by igniting its memories of kicking and picking up.

But what about metaphorical sentences like “The patient kicked the habit”? An addiction can’t literally be struck with a foot. Does the brain simulate the action of kicking anyway? Or does it somehow automatically substitute a more literal verb, such as “stopped”? This is where functional MRI can help, because it can watch to see if the brain’s motor cortex lights up in areas related to the leg and foot.

The evidence says it does. “When you read action-related metaphors,” says Valentina Cuccio, a philosophy postdoc at the University of Palermo, in Italy, “you have activation of the motor area of the brain.” In a 2011 paper in the Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience, Rutvik Desai, an associate professor of psychology at the University of South Carolina, and his colleagues presented fMRI evidence that brains do in fact simulate metaphorical sentences that use action verbs. When reading both literal and metaphorical sentences, their subjects’ brains activated areas associated with control of action. “The understanding of sensory-motor metaphors is not abstracted away from their sensory-motor origins,” the researchers concluded.

“White Supremacy Ate My French Homework”

by Phoebe Maltz Bovy

Like Bill McKibben, I read Ta-Nehisi Coates’ essay on learning French with interest. I did so both because French, and because of how powerful and prescient I’d found his reparations article. I read this latest essay as a reflection on the ways that studying a highbrow, so-called universal subject can bring about deeper insights on more particular struggles. While I came to the piece with as good a sense as anyone of how studying French can impact Jewish identity (that being, in a roundabout way, the subject of my doctoral dissertation), I had very little idea of what effect it might have on black identity. But it seemed natural enough to me that it might have one. It didn’t, then, seem out-there to me that Coates would take the opportunity of describing his adult-ed French classes to segue into musings on the state of education for African-American children.

Rod Dreher has a somewhat different take. A part of Dreher’s critique of Coates makes sense. Another part of it, however, does not, and then there’s Dreher’s witticism in the comments to his own post: “The more I think about it, the more it seems to me that TNC’s essay amounts to ‘white supremacy ate my French homework.'”

The more I think about that sentence, the more I think that it expresses exactly the sort of breezily-expressed viewpoint – not quite racist (although I’ll leave that for readers of the race in question to decide), but definitively insensitive – that gives conservatism a not entirely fair reputation as… less than ideal, let’s say, when it comes to issues regarding race.

But first, the bit that made perfect sense:

Dreher takes Coates to task for conflating “white” childhoods with ones steeped in cultural capital. This is a common problem with “privilege” critiques – people often round up how easy those who have it relatively easy actually have it. I’ve heard variants of this that are about class, not race – where those who didn’t grow up with college-educated parents assume that those who did spent their dinners discussing Ideas, not squabbling over nonsense, or watching bad television. This gets at a problem I’ve long had with the word “privilege” – while the concept it refers to is sound, the word itself has a tendency to give the impression that anyone with one form of privilege is privileged in the colloquial sense, i.e. all-around advantaged.

On the one hand, it’s part and parcel of lack-of-privilege that you don’t know how it goes for the more privileged in whichever area. On the other, if the end goal is highlighting actual injustices, then it should be pointed out where advantages actually lie. It’s completely fair to point out that some aspects of Coates’ struggle with French are related less to racism than to his class background, or to the fact that he was older than his classmates. Next, the not-so-fair:

Then TNC goes on to draw some sort of black nationalist lesson from his summer at French camp, culminating in this line: “Sometimes you do need the master’s tools to dismantle his house.” OK. Whatever. Reparations scholarships to Middlebury for all!

I snark, but honestly, the idea that the enormous privilege of spending a summer studying a foreign language at a verdant Vermont college should conclude with a resolution to become even more of a militant race man is depressing. Exactly whose house will TNC be burning down as a result of the tools he acquired this summer at Middlebury? François Hollande’s? I don’t get it. I seriously don’t. Seems to me that learning French as a middle-aged American can only do one worthwhile thing: make you more of a humanist.

Agreed that Coates doesn’t end on a particularly upbeat note, but why exactly shouldn’t studying French lead Coates to reflect on racial injustice? Because anyone who gets to go to a language summer school somewhere “verdant” should be so busy expressing gratitude that they wouldn’t even find the time?

Dreher proceeds to dig himself into a deeper hole in a follow-up post. “Ignore the author’s tendentious race politics,” writes Dreher, “and there’s a deeply human lesson in that essay.” Dreher, in other words, instructs readers to ignore the point of the essay. More frustratingly, he constructs a dichotomy between the black and “human” aspects of it: “What he discovered at Middlebury was not the effects of white supremacy, but the limits inherent within himself — limits all of us will eventually discover about ourselves, one way or another.”

Dreher seems oddly attached to the idea that Coates could only possibly have been talking about a universal experience – as if anything particular to Coates’ experience as an African-American was something that a better editor would have thought to take out. There’s a certain irony in this, given that Coates’ essay inspired Dreher, in turn, to discuss the particularities of his own upbringing.

Dreher remains committed to calling out Coates’ “privilege”… when what he’s actually calling out are achievements Coates has earned.

From his initial response:

He is part of the Establishment now. He writes for a well-respected national magazine, about things he enjoys. He takes summers to go to language camp to learn French. That’s great! Why is he such a sore winner? Feeling guilty about one’s privilege doesn’t mitigate it.

And the second:

He’s a senior editor at one of the most respected magazines in the richest and most powerful nation on the planet, he writes for top publications … and he has the luxury of spending his summer studying French at Middlebury. And is embittered because of circumstances in his youth, circumstances he attributes to white supremacy, he’s probably not going to ever master French, at least not to his satisfaction.

We should all be fortunate enough to have such problems.

I suppose Coates is privileged in the it’s-been-a-privilege sense. Unearned advantage, though, is a tough case to make.

Official Mascot Of Financial Crisis Still Unsure Why Everyone Is So Mad At Him

by Alex Pareene

Angelo Mozilo, the co-founder and former CEO of notorious subprime lending machine Countrywide, was was one of the first top industry figures to be publicly blamed for the financial crisis, and he remains among the very few individuals to be actually punished for his role. He didn’t go to jail or anything, but the SEC made him pay a few million dollars in fines for fraud and insider trading. In exchange, the government dropped its criminal investigation. That seemed, to many people who aren’t Angelo Mozilo, like a decent deal, but now the U.S. Attorney’s in Los Angeles bringing a civil case against him, and Mozilo has emerged from wherever we keep disgraced former financial executives (it’s somewhere really, really nice, btw) to complain to Bloomberg’s Max Ableson that everyone is picking on him for no reason.

Mozilo is being mocked (and rightly) for his insistence that Countywide didn’t do anything wrong, when, in fact, it did a lot wrong, but at times in the interview, Mozilo approaches accidental insight:

“You’ll have to ask those people, ‘What do you have against Mozilo, what did he do?’” he said in a 30-minute call with Bloomberg News before Labor Day, one of his few interviews since the firm’s downfall. “Countrywide didn’t change. I didn’t change. The world changed.”

That’s sort of true! Mozilo’s confusion stems from the bubble in which he spent much of his adult life. He likely never read one remotely negative thing about himself, or his company, before 2007. He was much-admired and frequently adulated in business press, which could not stop giving him honors and awards:

In 2005, Fortune placed Countrywide on its list of “Most Admired Companies,” and Barron’s named Mozilo one of the thirty best C.E.O.s in the world. The following year, American Banker presented him with a lifetime-achievement award.

Mozilo was beloved because his company performed quite well for its shareholders, and made a lot of money. Much of that money came to be made through predatory lending and the production and sale of known toxic garbage; still, the money was still being made, and that’s all that mattered, to everyone who mattered, until the housing bubble revealed that the entire enterprise was based on equal parts malicious fraud and deluded wishful thinking. Basically, though, Mozilo was praised and feted for doing what he did, until he wasn’t, and he is confused. Wouldn’t you be?

On the plus side, he is giving back, by teaching tomorrow’s titans of industry how to repeat the mistakes of the very recent past:

Mozilo decided to teach undergraduates what he knows about finance last year. The former trustee of Gonzaga University in Spokane, Washington, said he spent about two weeks in Italy at Gonzaga-in-Florence, housed in the Mozilo Center overlooking a 16th-century Medici garden.

“I taught them the basics of finance based on my own experiences,” he said. “I really enjoyed being among them. It was very refreshing for me.”

(About the Program: “To the Gonzaga-in-Florence student, Italy is much more than a boot-shaped peninsula in the Mediterranean; it is an opportunity of a lifetime.”) We can take solace in the fact that he is only “teaching” at an American college’s Western European study abroad program. The kids will be too busy recovering from hangovers and trying to figure out where to score ecstasy to actually pay attention to what the disgraced embodiment of a fraud-based financial house of cards is telling them.

(Photo: Angelo Mozilo, founder and former CEO, Countrywide Financial Corporation, stands at the witness table before the start of a House Oversight and Government Reform hearing on Capitol Hill March 7, 2008 in Washington, DC. By Mark Wilson/Getty Images)

Dissents Of The Day

by Jonah Shepp

My assertion yesterday that Russia’s invasion of Ukraine might have had something to do with the eastward expansion of NATO is drawing some fire from the inbox. One reader writes:

I think that you and John Mearsheimer may think yourselves very clever for understanding that the US and NATO’s hubristic expansion is at fault in the Ukrainian crisis. You claim, that without this expansion there would be no Ukraine crisis, a totally ludicrous statement, for which you give no justification. What you fail to appreciate is that the countries in Eastern Europe who clamored to join NATO are also rational independent actors totally capable of acting independently the US or other Western Powers. Poland, the Baltics, Czech Republic, etc.. all know what it is like to be dominated by an imperial power from the east and they certainly wanted protection again such a thing happening again. They chose NATO, not the other way around. In the 90s, most people in the west didn’t think that NATO was even necessary anymore. I think it is completely preposterous to claim that NATO expansion was borne out of some desire for conquest.

Another reader argues that the eternal Cold War mentality belongs to Putin, not the West:

I kept expecting [you] to acknowledge that this only ‘bears out’ anything if one already views NATO’s expansion from a Cold War perspective. I’ll certainly admit that there’s significant tension between the West’s interests and the Russian government’s and that this is not all Russia’s doing, but until this year I’d never though Ukraine joining NATO was even plausible, and even then until this week I’d never thought it was *likely* that Ukraine would join NATO. Now Putin has made it clear to everyone that regardless of anyone else *he* is waging a cold war, so he will keep creating more Cold War responses in those he’s made his foes. I think it’s a real stretch to say that the failure of the world to dance around this world-view counts as confirmation of it.

And a third points out that the link between Russian aggression and NATO expansion can also go the other way:

I think you have causality the wrong way around when you say that Russia has attacked Ukraine (and, earlier, Georgia) in response to the threat of NATO expanding to include those countries. But there had been no NATO expansion in Russia’s immediate neighborhood in a decade. And neither Ukraine nor Georgia were going to join NATO . . . until Russia attacked them. Then they acquired an enormous motivation to try to join an alliance which could defend them against further Russian attacks. Georgia wasn’t getting anywhere with its request to join either — until the attack on Ukraine, which has caused NATO to reconsider whether “trying not to provoke Putin” was an impossible quest. I can see why Russia would be upset at the prospect of Georgia or Ukraine in NATO. But if it happens, the overwhelming reason will be Russia’s actions towards those two countries. In short, Russia will have nobody to blame but themselves. (Not that this will prevent them from blaming everybody else in sight, of course.)

Well, the causality is a little more complicated. The effort to bring Georgia into NATO started in 2005 and was a major item on Mikheil Saakashvili’s to-do list long before the Russo-Georgian War of 2008. One can easily argue, as Saakashvili himself did, that this effort was in response to fears of Russian bellicosity, but one can also see it the other way around, as Putin and his cohort clearly do, and argue that Russian assertiveness (they probably wouldn’t say “aggression”) was necessary to check NATO’s nefarious plan to weaken Russian influence in its former imperial holdings. It’s not hard to see how they arrived at that conclusion; that is different, however, from saying that the conclusion is correct.

I don’t actually share Mearsheimer’s conclusion that this mess is all the West’s fault. I think it’s useful to remember, though, how the West has condescended to Russia since the end of the Cold War, and to consider how that treatment might have influenced the mentality that drives Putin to adopt such an aggressive posture. Remember how Germany was demonized, humiliated, and driven hopelessly into debt by the victors of World War I? Well, how did that turn out? When Alexander Motyl compares Putin to Hitler, he focuses primarily on their dictatorial ways, but their countries also have some salient similarities:

Both Germany and Russia lost empires and desired to rebuild them. Both Germany and Russia suffered economic collapse. Both Germany and Russia experienced national humiliation and retained imperial political cultures. Both Germany and Russia blamed their ills on the democrats. Both Germany and Russia elected strong men who promised to make them grand and glorious again.

In other words, Hitler had others to thank for the conditions that enabled his rise to power, and one can say the same of Putin. I don’t mean to engage in some wishy-washy, “it’s all society’s fault” leftish apologetics. Putin clearly believes in restoring the Russian Empire by any means necessary, including force, and has committed many misdeeds in pursuit of that belief. But if the question at had is what the West ought to do about it, it’s worth thinking about our past policy choices and how they might have contributed to the problem. If instead we attribute the crisis solely to Putin’s grandiosity, that implies that there’s not much we can do to change his behavior, and that’s scarier to me than admitting we made some missteps.

Making Cops Wear Cameras

by Dish Staff

It’s happening:

The St. Louis Post-Dispatch reports that two companies, Safety Visions and Digital Ally, donated about 50 cameras to the Ferguson Police Department a week ago. Ferguson Police Chief Tom Jackson said they are “still playing with them,” but officers started using the cameras at a protest march on Saturday. Jackson said the officers captured video of protesters taunting them.

More than 153,000 people have signed a“We the People” petition to create a “Mike Brown Law” that would require all police to wear cameras, and several police departments across the country have moved toward implementing them in the wake of Brown’s shooting. Police in Columbia, South Carolina just started testing the cameras, and last week the police chief in Houston, Texas requested $8 million to equip 3,500 officers over the next three years.

But Justin T. Ready and Jacob T.N. Young, who have done research on cop cameras and support their use, caution that “many assumptions people make about body-worn cameras simply aren’t true.” A big one:

The first myth is that video evidence is completely objective and free of interpretation. If a picture is worth a thousand words, then a video must be worth at least a million. Or is it? For example, we’ve been working on a study surveying residents in a large West Coast city about their experiences with police officers during traffic stops. One finding was surprising: When asked whether they observed the officer touch his gun when approaching the car, 50.9 percent of black motorists said yes. In contrast, only 11.5 percent of white motorists observed the officer touch his gun. What’s surprising is not the disparity but that police training and policy in this city required all officers to approach vehicles during traffic stops with their hand on their service weapon. Essentially, white motorists may not have been paying as much attention to where the officer was placing his or her hands when approaching the vehicle. What was a subtlety of behavior for whites was not a minor detail for blacks. The police in this city did not wear on-officer video cameras. It is possible that police were more likely to disregard their training with white motorists, but a 2007 study by the Rand Corp.found that when researchers matched stops involving black drivers with similarly situated white drivers (those stopped at the same time, place, etc.), officers were no more likely to disregard their training for white motorists. What do you think—was our finding due to a difference in police behavior or selective awareness of the officer touching his firearm?

The point is that two people observing the same police activity may see different things because each person will focus her attention on details that are most important to her own self-interest. A video clip from body cams is part of a larger story, some of which is not caught on camera.

Previous Dish on cop cameras here.

(Photo: New York City Public Advocate Letitia James displays a video camera that police officers could wear on patrol during a press conference on August 21, 2014 in New York City. By Andrew Burton/Getty Images)

Celebrities: They Sext Like Us, Ctd

by Dish Staff

David Auerbach blames Apple for the photo hacking:

Apple is currently delighted that people are talking about how you shouldn’t take naked photos of yourself in the first place, but make no mistake: Apple has been provably irresponsible with users’ security. It is currently unclear how the naked photos were gathered—most likely through a number of different methods and different servers over a period of months if not years. What is clear is that Apple has had a known security vulnerability in its iCloud service for months and has been careless about protecting its users. Apple patched this vulnerability shortly after the leak, so even if we’re not sure of exactly how the photos got hacked, evidently Apple thinks it might have had something to do with it. Whether or not this particular vulnerability was used to gather some of the photos—Apple is not commenting, as usual, but the ubiquity and popularity of Apple’s products certainly points to the iCloud of being a likely source—its existence is reason enough for users to be deeply upset at their beloved company for not taking security seriously enough.

Yishai Schwartz points a finger at the private sector more generally:

[A]s this week’s photos scandal demonstrates, the threat to privacy comes from the private sector as much as from the government. Is another Nixon, and particularly one powerful enough to overcome layers of post-Watergate oversight and compliance mechanisms, really more likely than an iCloud or Gmail hacker? When corporations cannot even be relied upon to secure our content, it seems naïve to automatically entrust our privacy to the private sector rather than the government. And it seems odd to allow Verizon commercial access to the same information that we deny the NSA for the purpose of counterterrorism.

In the modern era, it is the large corporations that pose the greatest threat to privacy. Google, Amazon, and Facebook may know things about us that we have never written in an email or stored in a file. We may never even know what is included in the mosaics of our lives that corporations are already weaving. With the government, we can take comfort that layers of bureaucracy, minimization procedures, and oversight prevent tyranny and mitigates the damage from leaks. But with private corporations, we have no such assurances.

On the subject of Apple, a reader responds to Sue Halpern’s post last week on the upcoming release of the iPhone 6:

There are a lot of these anti-Apple articles written by people who claim to understand Apple products. But they don’t ever seem to discuss the real reasons that exist for owning one. Here are mine:

1. Top notch hardware – if you’ve compared the responsiveness between and Apple touch screen and another brand, there is a difference that matters to some people. Another example, the always amazing and always improving iPhone camera.

2. No malware – the threat of malware grows every year on Android-installed gadgets. Thanks to Apple‘s careful administration of their app store, there is virtually no threat on iOS.

3. Product support – Apple makes it easy for their owners to ALL have the latest version operating system. Many, many phone makers ignore new versions, or make their own versions. Their refusal to support the standards set forth by Google make it difficult sometimes to be sure the phone you’re buying now can run an app now, and even more unlikely, to be sure it will be able to run new apps a year from now. Which leads to #4:

4. Developer support – Developers have to test on dozens of different devices and operating systems if they want their app to work in the Android ecosystem. This is costly and often their app is made long after the iOS version, if they decide ever to make it at all.

5. Forward thinking – Apple introduces innovative features every year. This year they’re rumored to be implementing NFC payments. With their reputation and the strength of the usage of their products in the real world, things like NFC which failed before, are more likely to succeed. Meaning iPhone owners are prepared for the future already, while other brands follow suit. Same with 64 bit processing: most of us don’t know what that is, but perhaps our experience of the device will be improved thanks to this technology.

6. User experience – this is the top reason I use Apple devices. While nothing is perfect, Apple places an importance on how users interact with their products. Something like a 64 bit processor is a small part of the carefully-crafted ecosystem which makes the whole entirety a pleasure to use. Other manufacturers get this, but just as often as not, other aspects such as price or deadline take priority.

I’m an Apple fanboy for these reasons, and not because of some mystique that anti-Apple articles like the quoted one prefer to present. If I someday feel these are no longer Apple‘s priorities, I will certainly look elsewhere. Till then, it’s nice to buy a device and not have to worry about if I did enough research or made the right choice.

Putin’s “Peace” Plan

by Jonah Shepp

https://twitter.com/b_judah/statuses/505302225909190657

The Russian president has unveiled a seven-point plan to end the fighting in Eastern Ukraine, which he claims to have arrived at after consultations with his Ukrainian counterpart Petro Poroshenko (NYT):

Mr. Putin said he and the president of Ukraine, Petro O. Poroshenko, had a similar understanding about what was needed, and he urged Ukraine and the pro-Russian separatists in the east to reach a settlement at talks scheduled for Friday in Belarus. The primary conditions on Mr. Putin’s list are that the separatists halt all offensive operations and that Ukrainian troops move their artillery back out of range of cities and large towns in the rebel-held area. Mr. Putin also called for Ukraine to cease airstrikes; the establishment of an international monitoring mission and humanitarian aid corridors; an “all for all” prisoner exchange; and “rebuilding brigades” to repair damaged roads, bridges, power lines and other infrastructure.

Or in other words, according to Armin Rosen’s interpretation, the plan is for Ukraine to retreat and Russia to invade:

The proposal would formalize the presence of Russian troops in eastern Ukraine while requiring the withdrawal of Ukrainian forces from their internationally recognized territory in the Donbas region, where pro-Russian separatists have been fighting Kiev’s forces since February. This proposal, which both Ukraine and the international community are unlikely to accept, amounts to Russian annexation of eastern Ukraine — Putin would be able to secure and develop the region, and Ukraine would be forced to accept a new reality on the ground. This follows Moscow’s longstanding game plan from other conflicts on the Russian periphery. For instance, the Georgian separatists regions of South Ossetia and Abhkazia are secured with the help of “peacekeepers” from the Russian army, even though both areas are internationally recognized as part of Georgia.

Also, the plan notably omits any mention of the status of the territories in dispute. But Leonid Bershidsky argues that there is “nothing here to which Poroshenko might reasonably object”. He believes the plan should be implemented simply because the fighting needs to end before any other progress can be made. The tricky part, in Bershidsky’s view, is what comes after the peace:

Putin will not want to give up a measure of control over eastern Ukraine. Although it might be tempting for Poroshenko to declare it a Russian-occupied territory and wash his hands of it, he won the presidential election in May on a promise to keep Ukraine together. Hence, there will have to be further negotiations on issues that are much harder for both sides to agree on than Putin’s lenient cease-fire terms. There is every chance that the cease-fire will break down as the political talks fail, and that Poroshenko’s plan to hold a parliamentary election in October will fall through. For now, however, the steps Putin proposes must be taken.

Must they? Those particular steps, in that order? Yes, the fighting must end first and foremost, but ending it on Putin’s terms could mean walking into a trap. Either way, Ukraine appears not to be taking the bait:

“This latest plan is another attempt to pull the wool over the eyes of the international community ahead of the NATO summit and an attempt to avert the EU’s inevitable decision to unleash a new wave of sanctions against Russia,” [Ukraine’s Prime Minister Arseniy Yatsenyuk] said in a statement. “The best plan for ending Russia’s war against Ukraine has only one single element — for Russia to withdraw its troops, its mercenaries and its terrorists from Ukrainian territory.” His comments come despite Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko saying he and Putin had agreed on the peace plan aimed at ending the near five-month conflict in eastern Ukraine.

That makes it sound like the Ukrainian leadership is divided over how to respond. That wouldn’t be surprising: after all, Poroshenko is known to be a bit friendlier to Russia than Yatsenyuk, and indeed that’s why some people think he’s the best man to make peace. But then there’s the question of whether Putin can actually get the rebels to stop fighting in the first place:

The insurgency clearly does not represent a unified organization with a central command, and furthermore Moscow’s interaction with its leaders is varied, according to Alexander Khramchikhin, deputy head of the Institute of Political and Military analysis, a Moscow-based think tank. “Following rebel advances, the Ukrainian government is ready to make certain concessions. Moscow sees this as a window of opportunity to exploit and come to terms, with the captured territories becoming autonomous within Ukraine. Hence, Purgin came up with the plan,” he told The Moscow Times in a phone interview. “The problem is that many insurgents do not want to settle anything now that they have got the upper hand in the military conflict. It is naive to believe that the Kremlin controls everything there,” he said.

Meanwhile, the West has finally shamed France into suspending a delivery of warships to Russia, and aggressive military posturing continues on all sides. The US and NATO allies are going ahead with a joint military exercise in western Ukraine later in September, while Russia’s defense ministry has announced a 4,000-soldier drill, also this month, by the forces in charge of the country’s nuclear arsenal:

RIA news agency quoted the ministry as saying the exercises would take place in Altai in south-central Russia and would also include around 400 technical units and extensive use of air power. The agency quoted Dmitry Andreyev, a major in the strategic rocket forces, as saying troops would practice countering irregular units and high-precision weapons, and “conducting combat missions in conditions of active radio-electronic jamming and intensive enemy actions in areas of troop deployment.” He said enemy forces would be represented in the exercises by spetsnaz (special forces) units.

Surely this is just in case the “peace plan” doesn’t work out.