Tag: Premium

Elf On The Shelf Is How Kids Learn To Love the NSA

by Will Wilkinson

Elf on a Shelf

I didn’t know what Elf on a Shelf was until maybe last week, and when I found out, I didn’t like it one bit. The little guy’s a spy! A spy! A gentle playtime introduction to the idea of a pervasive but ultimately benevolent surveillance state. No good! Bad for the children!

It is a comfort to discover, from Peter Holley’s charming Washington Post piece, that I am not alone in this response:

For some, the Elf on the Shelf doll, with its doe-eyed gaze and cherubic face, has become a whimsical holiday tradition — one that helpfully reminds children to stay out of trouble in the lead-up to Christmas.

For others — like, say, digital technology professor Laura Pinto — the Elf on the Shelf is “a capillary form of power that normalizes the voluntary surrender of privacy, teaching young people to blindly accept panoptic surveillance and” [deep breath] “reify hegemonic power.”

I mean, obvs, right?

The latter perspective is detailed in “Who’s the Boss,” a paper published by the Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives, in which Pinto and co-author Selena Nemorin argue that the popular seasonal doll is preparing a generation of children to uncritically accept “increasingly intrusive (albeit whimsically packaged) modes of surveillance.”

Exactly. You might not cotton to Pinto’s academic argot, but she’s got the right idea. If you didn’t know, the way the Elf on the Shelf works, according to the massively popular accompanying story book, is that this creepy elf is Santa’s intelligence agent lurking in your house, keeping tabs on whether the kids are naughty or nice and reporting back to the jolly old goat. The kids aren’t supposed to touch the elf, a misdeed that might disqualify them from getting presents from Santa. And parents jerk the kids around by moving the elf from room to room so that the kids can’t ever be sure where it is.

In Pinto’s paper with Selena Nemorin, they write:

What is troubling is what The Elf on the Shelf represents and normalizes: anecdotal evidence reveals that children perform an identity that is not only for caretakers, but for an external authority (The Elf on the Shelf), similar to the dynamic between citizen and authority in the context of the surveillance state.

I suppose most people will think this sounds nutty. Well, you know what I think is nutty? I’ve got an infant son, and it’s damned hard to find clothes that don’t have sports balls or modes of transportation on them, and impossible to find anything intended for a boy in pink. People (and the market that caters to their preferences) seem weirdly dogged about making damn sure that their babies’ outward appearance strictly conforms to our most debased and simplified gender stereotypes. I mean, people need to know what sex your baby is so they know how to treat it, right? To know whether to buy it a tiara or a truck? To know say whether to say the tot is “pretty” or a “li’l scamp.” Who knows what confusion might ensue if the my wee tiny baby boy appears in public wearing a pink hat, or is not exposed very early to objects and clothing emblazoned with pro-sports propaganda! If it’s just normal to worry about that sort of thing, then I would submit that, logically speaking, it ought not to seem so nutty to worry that Elf on a Shelf might be preparing your child to complacently accept surveillance from an unaccountable authoritarian state.

When Felix is old enough, we’ll get ourselves an Elf on the Shelf, and I’ll tell him no presents will come until he finds the little rat and burns him alive. (This plan might need some work.)

Anyway, this video is great:

(Photo by Lisa Werner/Getty Images)

Executive Amnesty: The Court Battle Begins

by Dish Staff

ICE Detains And Deports Undocumented Immigrants From Arizona

Ruling in what otherwise would have been a fairly straightforward deportation hearing, District Judge Arthur J. Schwab issued an opinion (pdf) yesterday declaring President Obama’s executive action on immigration unconstitutional. Lyle Denniston explains Schwab’s ruling, which could send the matter to the Supreme Court sooner than expected:

“The President may only ‘take care that the laws be faithfully executed’; he may not take any Executive action that creates laws.” The new policy, the judge went on, is not an exercise of presidential discretion on when to prosecute individuals for a violation of the nation’s laws, but was in fact a legislative action beyond the president’s constitutional authority.

Instead of being a form of case-by-case judgment about which individuals are to be deported, Judge Schwab found, the policy “provides a systematic and rigid process by which a broad group of individuals will be treated differently than others based upon arbitrary classifications.” Rejecting the government’s claim that the policy only delays deportation and does not create any new legal rights for those who benefit from it, the judge declared that the policy provides those who qualify with “substantive rights.” He ultimately concluded: “President Obama’s unilateral legislative action violates the separation of powers provided for in the United States Constitution as well as the Take Care Clause, and, therefore, is unconstitutional.”

As Sahil Kapur points out, Schwab is no stranger to controversy. Ian Millhiser picks apart the judge’s argument:

One case that Schwab does not cite is Arizona v. United States, where the Supreme Court said that the executive branch has “broad discretion” in matters of deportation and removal. As Arizona explains, a “principal feature of the removal system is the broad discretion exercised by immigration officials.” Executive branch officials, moreover, “must decide whether it makes sense to pursue removal at all.”

Notably, Arizona also indicates that this broad discretion flows from federal immigration law — i.e. laws that were enacted by Congress. This matters because Schwab’s opinion concludes that Obama’s “unilateral” policy “violates the separation of powers provided for in the United States Constitution as well as the Take Care Clause.” In essence, Schwab concludes that the president lacks the authority to act in the absence of authorization by Congress. Schwab does not even discuss the possibility that Obama’s actions may actually be authorized by Congress. Thus, even if Schwab’s reading of the Constitution is correct — itself a questionable proposition — the judge does not even discuss another major source of law that can justify the president’s actions.

Ilya Somin is not persuaded by Schwab:

Schwab complains that generalized “threshold criteria” will “almost wholly determine eligibility” for deferred deportation under the president’s order. But any exercise of prosecutorial discretion – no matter how “case by case” it may be, must include consideration of criteria that that end up wholly determining the outcome. That’s the whole point of using criteria in the first place. Unfortunately, Judge Schwab fails to even consider the possibility that the key distinction he relies on might be unsound.

If the Supreme Court were to adopt Judge Schwab’s reasoning, federal law enforcement agencies would be barred from issuing general systematic guidelines about how their officials should exercise prosecutorial discretion. The exercise of discretion would then become arbitrary and capricious. Alternatively, perhaps they could still follow systematic policies, so long as those policies were not formally declared and announced to the public, as the president’s order was. Neither possibility is particularly attractive, and neither is required by the Constitution.

Neither is Jonathan Adler:

It is true, as Judge Schwab notes, that the President’s announced policy identifies broad criteria for deferring removal of individuals unlawfully in the country.  This would appear to make the action somewhat legislative, but I don’t think it’s enough to make the action unlawful.  The new policy does not preclude the executive branch from revoking deferred action in individual cases and does not create any enforceable rights against future executive action.  It’s no more unconstitutional than a US attorney telling the prosecutors in his office not to prosecute low-level marijuana possession absent other factors that justify federal prosecution.

Overall, Orin Kerr finds the opinion bizarre:

I was astonished by the legal contortions that Judge Schwab undergoes to get to the point that he can rule on Obama’s policy — and then the way he backs off the implications of his own ruling. Unless I’m just missing something unique to immigration law, it’s an exceedingly strange opinion.

As it happens, the ruling dropped on the same day as this piece by Somin, arguing that Obama’s actions are entirely constitutional:

Because of the enormous scope of federal criminal law, presidents routinely exercise extraordinarily broad discretion in deciding which violations to prosecute. Far more violators are ignored than punished—or even investigated. … Article II of the Constitution states that the president must “take Care that the Laws be faithfully executed.” But that requirement does not mean that the president has an absolute duty to prosecute all violations of federal law, or that he cannot choose which ones to pursue based on policy considerations. If it did, virtually every president in the last century or more would be in violation.

Allahpundit, for one, doesn’t buy it:

The question is this: Whom would you rather see punish O for that, the courts or the voters? In theory, there’s already a check on the president in all this — voters can simply express their disgust by refusing to vote for him or his party’s successor next time around. But that means, without a judicial or legislative counter, we’ll have to endure this power grab for two more years with no remedy. Is that tolerable?

But it’s hard to see this ruling standing when even Bushies like John Yoo oppose it:

To be clear, Yoo’s objection to Schwab’s decision is entirely procedural. Yoo, who once argued that the executive can use many forms of torture despite the fact that federal law explicitly forbids such activities, believes that President Obama’s decision to allow immigrants to remain united with their families is executive overreach. Yet Yoo also criticizes Schwab for opining on the immigration policy’s constitutionality when the issue was not properly before his court. As Yoo notes, “[t]his is not a case where the executive order applies, because the Obama administration is not allowing an illegal alien to remain in the country.” Thus, the case presents “no real dispute over the law, because regardless of whether the executive order is constitutional or not, it would make no difference in [this defendant’s] case.”

(Photo:: A Honduran immigration detainee, his feet shackled and shoes laceless as a security precaution, boards a deportation flight to San Pedro Sula, Honduras on February 28, 2013 in Mesa, Arizona. By John Moore/Getty Images)

Ruble Trouble, Ctd

The beleaguered currency bounced back a bit today from its epic freefall, as the Russian government took further steps to try and stabilize it:

The Finance Ministry said it was selling foreign exchange currency from its leftover stocks, of which it has around $7 billion, according to Reuters. The ministry did add in a statement that it considered the ruble “extremely undervalued,” however. … The announcement of the intervention immediately sent the ruble higher against the dollar, and after a volatile trading day was up 10 percent versus the greenback. Head of emerging markets research at Standard Bank, Timothy Ash, called the move “totally weird.“

Cassidy doubts that any of Moscow’s recent hail-Mary passes will do the trick:

Once the markets lose confidence in a currency, interest rates are no longer an effective policy tool, and foreign-exchange reserves can be depleted at an alarming rate. The reason is found in simple arithmetic. Even if the Russian Central Bank were to raise rates to a hundred per cent, which is obviously out of the question, the weekly return on ruble-denominated assets would be less than two per cent.

In the midst of a panic like the one we are seeing now, a currency can plummet by five or ten per cent in a single day, thus erasing even ultra-high interest-rate yields and leaving holders of the currency with a big loss. Foreign-exchange traders know this all too well, and that’s why they still refuse to buy ruble-denominated assets.

Matt O’Brien calls Russia’s current situation a catch-22:

Russia has gone from not having an economy and 10.5 percent interest rates to not having an economy and 17 percent interest rates. That should be enough to turn its recession into a full-on depression — and make all of this self-defeating. Think about it this way: Russia’s central banks already says its economy will shrink 4.5 to 4.7 percent next year — about as much as the U.S. did in 2008 — if oil stays at $60-a-barrel. But now that interest rates are sky-high, nobody’s going to want to borrow, either. The economy, in other words, is going to crater as households hunker down and just try to survive the double-digit inflation that the crashing ruble will bring.

Anna Nemtsova solicits the opinion of a Russian expert, who predicts an awful year to come for consumers:

[O]n Tuesday afternoon, after the ruble had fallen again to a stunning 80 to the dollar, the head of the central bank, Elvira Nabiullina, made a statement: “We have to learn to live in a new zone and count more on our own sources of finance,” she said. What? Ordinary Russians should read Nabiullina’s statement as, “Get used to being at least twice as poor next year as you were before the annexation of Crimea,” says Vladimir Ryzhkov, a prominent Russian politician and professor at the National Research University Higher School of Economy. “Now Russia does not have enough dollars to pay back billions of corporate bank debts; the payment is due before the new year. In the coming year, prices will continue to grow: Most medicine, which is mostly imported, will grow twice as expensive, as well as all electronic equipment—fridges, iPhones, computers and so on,” Ryzhkov told The Daily Beast.

And so it seems that Putin has finally met an enemy he can’t bully or buy off, Daniel Gross observes:

Putin’s successful statecraft has alternately consisted of bullying and defiance (Western Europe, the U.S.), invading neighbors (Ukraine, Georgia), depriving others of energy resources (Ukraine again, Eastern Europe), winning prestigious events through the promise of large investments (the 2014 Winter Olympics, the 2018 World Cup), forging relationships by offering sweetheart resource deals (China), or currying favor by allowing oligarchs to funnel huge quantities of money into real estate and banks (England, Turkey, Greece.) The currency markets can’t be bought off though. They are faceless, merciless, and swift. Every day, they are in effect passing judgment on regimes around the world.

Still, Max Fisher expects him to try:

As the economy sinks, Putin will only become more reliant on these sorts of shenanigans he’s used previously to stay in power. He’s not just worried about his popularity, after all, but his very legitimacy as the head of state; the 2012 election showed him that Russians could turn against him. Putin has little choice, then, but to seek legitimacy by stirring up more crises abroad, positioning himself as a nationalist hero leading the brave Russian state in a hostile world. But the only way he can maintain that image at home is if his soft conflict with the West continues. Putin can’t deescalate tensions in Ukraine and more broadly in Europe because those tensions are just about all he has left.

More broadly, the obvious move here is for Putin is to blame his country’s falling economy on American and European imperialism. By playing up the role of outside hostility in Russia’s economic crisis, Putin would shift the blame and, just as important, promote the idea that Russians have to come together and endure the downturn as a matter of national mission against a foreign enemy.

Walter Russell Mead imagines some of the crazy foreign policy decisions Putin might try:

There is one other alternative that the Dark Genius of the Kremlin may be turning over in his mind: Is there some way Russian foreign policy could create a Middle East crisis that would drive oil prices back up into the stratosphere? The most obvious way would be to bring about some kind of situation involving the Iranian nuclear talks—perhaps by offering quiet support to Iranian hardliners, increasing the chances that the talks fail. Any kind of serious war scare in the Persian Gulf would be good for Russia’s financial situation; Russian foreign policy experts are presumably thinking through their options.

So how should the West respond? Well, Bershidsky recommends that we make hay while the sun shines and rob Putin of the talking point that Western economic warfare is to blame for the crisis:

[T]he best thing the West could do now would be to lift the sanctions unconditionally. A Western leader, perhaps German Chancellor Angela Merkel or even U.S. President Barack Obama, could go on TV to say, “We stand with the Russian people in its hour of need. We support Russia, we want it to be strong and prosperous, and we have no intention to push it around.” That would leave Putin naked, faced with a weakening economy that rejects his management methods and a population increasingly wondering why it needs Putin and what he stands for anymore.

That, however, is another fairy tale. Obama will soon sign legislation calling for tougher sanctions, giving Putin more ammunition in his intensifying fight for power, and also feeding more radical nationalist elements that consider even Putin too weak in defending Russian interests. Western leaders lack the imagination to deal with the Putin problem creatively, and they are loath to admit mistakes. They will keep adding stones to the soup.

Larison likewise scolds Obama for agreeing to sign the new sanctions legislation, which Congress passed last Friday:

Obama is making a mistake by signing this bill. In addition to creating a pretext for more aggressive moves by Russia, signing this legislation will exacerbate Russia’s growing economic problems, and that will adversely affect the economies of Europe even more to the detriment of the U.S. and our allies. This could hardly come at a worse time when it appears that there is a good chance of having a genuine cease-fire in the Ukraine conflict. Piling on additional punitive and hostile measures now risks jeopardizing that fragile truce. It certainly isn’t going to make Moscow more accommodating or inclined to compromise. On the contrary, this is sure to make Russia more combative.

“So,” the Bloomberg View editors suggest, “why not cut a deal on Ukraine?”

The sanctions that the U.S. and European Union imposed earlier this year to dissuade Putin from further aggression made it hard for Russian companies to borrow on international capital markets; triggered large-scale capital flight (an estimated $130 billion this year); and shriveled inflows of foreign investment. Since then, they have acted as a multiplier on falling oil prices. The mere promise of lifting sanctions would begin to change sentiment in the currency markets.

Once that happens, Russia’s central bank would be in a better position to intervene by buying up rubles — going with the tide instead of against it. Putin would, without question, come under attack from nationalists for betraying the rebel cause in Ukraine. Yet the authorities in Kiev are under even more economic duress. The U.S. and EU should use their leverage to get Ukraine to a deal that secures the country’s independence while meeting some of Russia’s demands.

Obama Scraps Our Failed Cuba Policy

by Dish Staff

https://twitter.com/jonfavs/status/545276674846519297

How the deal came together:

The initiative comes after more than a year of secret talks, with a major impetus provided by Pope Francis, who hosted the final discussions between Cuban and U.S. officials at the Vatican in the fall. U.S. President Barack Obama and Cuban President Raul Castro spoke on the telephone yesterday for the better part of an hour, going down the checklist of measures that had been agreed in secret talks over the course of more than a year.

The agreement includes a “decision to reopen embassies, closed since 1961, and a dramatic expansion of the kinds of licenses that will allow Americans to travel legally to Cuba”:

Even if “tourism” is still barred by law, it is difficult to imagine that anyone wanting to visit the island will not be able to find some category that allows that to happen.

More on the accepted reasons for travel here. And yes, you can bring back cigars. Massie approves of Obama’s actions:

This is not – repeat not – going soft on Cuba. It’s getting tough with Cuba.

The old approach has had half a century to work and yet, golly, the Castros are still there, still running their sunshine-soaked island gulag. By any reasonable measure the old approach has failed. Every sensible person knows this. Every reasonable person knows just about any alternative policy could hardly do worse. So why not try something different? If the embargo was going to topple the Castros’ nasty little regime it would have done so by now. Perhaps capitalism should be given a chance instead.

There are other benefits to this startling eruption of sanity. American relations with the rest of Latin America have long been complicated by the stupidity of its Cuban policy. A reset here allows – in theory at least – an improvement in this area too. It is hard to see how this opening can hurt the United States anywhere in the western hemisphere.

Rubio, of course, is pissed:

“The President’s decision to reward the Castro regime and begin the path toward the normalization of relations with Cuba is inexplicable,” said Rubio in a statement. “Cuba, like Syria, Iran, and Sudan, remains a state sponsor of terrorism…Appeasing the Castro brothers will only cause other tyrants from Caracas to Tehran to Pyongyang to see that they can take advantage of President Obama’s naiveté during his final two years in office. As a result, America will be less safe as a result of the President’s change in policy.”

Goldblog dismisses such criticisms:

Critics of Obama’s Cuba initiative have a point: There is no way to guarantee the success, in human-rights terms, of this dramatic new opening. But time has discredited the alternative vision. The seemingly never-ending embargo did nothing to bring about the conclusion of the seemingly never-ending rule of the Castro brothers. After 50 years of trying one thing, and seeing that thing fail, and fail again, it was about time that the United States try something else.

Yglesias adds that “US policy towards Cuba isn’t really about human rights”:

While the Cuban government has a genuinely awful human rights record, it’s hard to argue that that explains US policy towards Cuba. While Cuba is the only country in the Western Hemisphere rated “not free” by Freedom House, it’s hardly the only such country in the world. The United States conducts normal diplomatic relations with China and Vietnam, who run similarly repressive regimes. And the United States considers not-free states such as Saudi Arabia, Bahrain, and Jordan to be close allies worthy not only of normal diplomatic relations but deep military and security assistance.

Cuba policy, in other words, has been driven by Cold War strategy and domestic politics much more than by human rights. That’s why with the Cold War issues now obsolete and the domestic politics changing, US policy is set to change too — even without significant change in Cuba’s human rights situation.

Keating provides some more important context:

[W]hile we certainly can’t say that Cuba is on the path toward democracy, Raul Castro’s government has carried out some meaningful reforms, including loosening rules on travel and private property. Even the country’s best-known anti-Castro dissident, Yoani Sanchez, thinks the embargo is now counterproductive.

Larison’s take:

The administration deserves credit for trying to make such a significant change to Cuba policy. When relations are restored with Havana, it will be a genuinely praiseworthy achievement of Obama’s second term. Normalization with Cuba is broadly popular in the U.S. and has been becoming more so over the years, but there is a dedicated core of supporters of the status quo that will presumably put up strong resistance to these changes. Let’s hope that they’re unsuccessful in any attempt to delay or derail this rapprochement.

And Noah Feldman supports Obama fighting the Cuba Lobby:

The risk that Obama carries in taking on a concentrated lobby isn’t totally unfamiliar to him. After all, he tried to take on the NRA by pushing gun control after the Newtown shootings. When he lost, the political cost to him was much less than the cost of doing nothing. With regard to Israel, Obama has tread much more carefully, limiting himself to the unmistakable message that he thinks West Bank settlements are an obstacle to peace and that Benjamin Netanyahu is, too. Many pro-Israel lobbying groups detest him for it, but they haven’t yet had the occasion to go to war against him.

With the end of his presidency in view, Obama has to take risks if he wants to score some legacy points. His gamble on Cuba may not be fully realized. But the results will have implications for the structure of American interest group politics more broadly.

Earlier Dish on the deal here.

“A Chick Who Can Hang”

by Phoebe Maltz Bovy

Flagging research supporting what women already knew – wearing heels to a bar gets male attention – Ally Fogg notes that his preferences differ from those of the men in that study:

For what it is worth (ie nothing), personally I’m more attracted to a woman who looks like she can drink me under the table then carry me home, making a sturdy pair of DMs just the ticket. I live in hope that one day the human race will view high heels with the same horror with which we view foot-binding. Women would be spared innumerable podiatric agonies and men would, I think, just about cope. Until then I shall content myself with the knowledge that I’m right and the rest of the human race is a bit daft.

I don’t want to be too hard on Fogg here, because he’s basically right about heels, and he at least has the decency to precede his explanation of his tastes with a disclaimer acknowledging their irrelevance. But reading this, I couldn’t help but think of the Amy Schumer sketch, “A Chick Who Can Hang”:


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The man who will have you know that prefers a woman without makeup, who’s casual and laid-back, who’s one of the guys is, at least in conversations among women, a well-established cliché.

As Schumer suggests, there’s the effortlessness many men rhapsodize about, and then there’s actual effortlessness, which consists of looking like a disheveled version of one’s usual self. The ideal woman is well-groomed, but has a shower-and-go beauty routine. She’s well-dressed, but never goes shopping. As Lauren Bans recently pointed out, that Schumer sketch works because “a supermodel going to town on a cheeseburger” is basically the straight male fantasy. (Well, the PG one, at any rate.) The perfect woman, then, is thin without dieting. Perhaps, too, she’s simultaneously in combat boots and heels.

The Delights Of Penelope Fitzgerald

by Michelle Dean

Today is Penelope Fitzgerald’s birthday. Let’s celebrate it, because Americans don’t celebrate Penelope Fitzgerald nearly enough.

Penelope_FitzgeraldI mentioned yesterday that one of the books that has really stuck with me this year is Hermione Lee’s biography of Penelope Fitzgerald. I was drawn to the biography in the first place because I like Fitzgerald’s books – The Bookshop is tops with me, but I like The Blue Flower too, obviously – of course. Though as someone raised on Alice Munro with general doses of Mavis Gallant, I’m probably genetically programmed to love the writings of shrewd, intelligent, but ultimately despairing British Commonwealth writers. Also, I’d been having a weird fall working on my own book. And I could justify reading the Lee as a sort of research. “I’m skimming for structure,” I told a friend. “I want to know how Lee puts these things together.” And she is, yes, a wonderful biographer and I always learn new tricks from her.

But these were excuses. I was doing the thing people write whole essays decrying: I was reading the biography out of an impulse not far from a reader of self-help. I wanted to know how Fitzgerald did it. And I loved what I found out.

Some things I already knew, of course. For example, that Fitzgerald didn’t publish her first book until the age of 58. Her first proper novel didn’t appear until she was 60. If you’re not the sort of writer who ascended to the stratosphere right away, these are cheering numbers. They represent hope. Even if you spend your whole life struggling, Fitzgerald’s trajectory suggests that late in life there might be a breakthrough. You might become a great.

There’s more hope to be found, as it turns out. Though I’d read Offshore before, I hadn’t quite cottoned on to the fact that Fitzgerald’s struggles included her houseboat actually sinking into the Thames. That put my first writing apartment, a basement affair in which the ceiling fell in twice from bad plumbing in the two years I lived there into real perspective, let me tell you.

Fitzgerald’s example also casts hopeful new light on the problem of awful people who don’t like your work. Fitzgerald won the Booker for Offshore in 1980, went on television in celebration with the other finalists and proceeded to be insulted by everyone present. She’d upset V.S. Naipaul for the prize and evidently others felt she didn’t deserve it. Quoth Fay Weldon on the announcement of Fitzgerald’s win, with Fitzgerald sitting right there: “I felt as though something had hit me very hard on the head.” It was like Twitter, except in real life. And yet Fitzgerald was the one who made the best British novelists lists. I’d say she won out.

America’s Tortured Conscience

by Will Wilkinson

WaPo Torture

The Washington Post reports:

A majority of Americans believe that the harsh interrogation techniques used on terrorism suspects after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks were justified, even as about half the public says the treatment amounted to torture, according to a new Washington Post-ABC News poll. By an almost 2-1 margin, or 59-to-31  percent, those interviewed support the CIA’s brutal methods, with the vast majority of supporters saying they produced valuable intelligence. In general, 58  percent say the torture of suspected terrorists can be justified “often” or “sometimes.”

What to make of this? My guess is that a fair number of those who think torture can be justified are thinking of ticking nuclear time bomb scenarios, and that a lot of those same people believe the CIA when it says that that is precisely the sort of situation they were dealing with. As Rosa Brooks says in a terrific FP column, bullshit:

The ticking bomb scenario is a powerful hypothetical, and it’s one that several former CIA directors really, really hope you’ll keep in mind this week to counterbalance all those not-so-nice revelations contained in the just-released Senate Select Committee on Intelligence (SSCI) report on CIA interrogations. […] But there’s one major problem with the ticking bomb scenario: It’s entirely irrelevant — morally and legally.

First, in real life you don’t get actual ticking bomb scenarios, with their certainty, simplicity, and urgency. In real life, you get ambiguity and uncertainty. You get conflicting information about the nature, magnitude, and timing of threats, and conflicting information about the identity of planners and perpetrators. Sometimes, you get information that’s just plain wrong: As the SSCI report notes, more than two dozen people tortured by the CIA were detained in error. In some cases, they were victims of simple cases of mistaken identity.

This creates an obvious slippery slope risk: If we think torture is justifiable in the hypothetical I used above, would torture be justifiable if the bomb wasn’t a nuclear bomb? What if it was only powerful enough to kill 100 people, not millions? Ten people? One person? Would torture be justifiable if we thought the person we captured might be about to set off a bomb that might kill 10 people? What if we weren’t sure we had captured the right guy? Would it be okay to torture someone who might be innocent because torture might produce information that might save 100 people? Ten? One?

I think this helps explain what is going on in the American mind. Many of us have already gone down the slope psychologically. It’s sort of like someone asks you whether you’d sleep with a stranger for $1 billion – you know the joke – and you say, “Duh! Of course!” and then you find yourself a couple hours later in a seedy hotel room feeling a bit dehydrated after getting bargained down to $12.50. What’s your attitude toward trading sex for money now? You shrug. You think, What’s the big freaking deal? It’s sort of like that, but mostly not like that at all, because there’s not actually anything wrong with trading sex for money, but you’ve got the idea. In for a pound in for a penny.

The aversion to cognitive dissonance – the need for a sense of internal consistency – is strong. We Americans like to think that we are good people. (“We are awesome!“) Now it seems clear enough that torture is the sort of thing we Americans do. So torture must be not inconsistent with goodness, with exceptional American awesomeness. It must be okay. Is there a moral analogue to cognitive dissonance? Moral dissonance? The shocking percentage of Americans willing to endorse the CIA’s vile interrogation techniques is an index of the portion of the population who suspect but are unable to admit to themselves, who cannot stand the moral dissonance of admitting, that they are complicit in something monstrous.

Our Two Party Family System

by Dish Staff

Former US President George H.W. Bush(2nd

Karen Tumulty tweeted yesterday that, “with exception of 2012, you’d have to be 38 or older to have lived thru an election with no Bush or Clinton running for prez.” Aaron Blake discovers that it’s even worse than that:

[G]oing back a full half-century – i.e. to 1964 – there have been only three elections (midterm or presidential) in which a Bush or a Clinton hasn’t been on the ballot somewhere for something.

Stretching back to George H.W. Bush’s first bid for U.S. Senate in 1964 (he lost), that’s 23 out of 26 elections. The only exceptions are 1972, 2010 and 2012. That most recent two-election drought was broken when George P. Bush – Jeb Bush’s son – ran for Texas land commissioner this year (he won).

Greenwald believes that a Clinton-Bush match-up would illustrate “the virtually complete merger between political and economic power, of the fundamentally oligarchical framework that drives American political life”:

If this happens, the 2016 election would vividly underscore how the American political class functions: by dynasty, plutocracy, fundamental alignment of interests masquerading as deep ideological divisions, and political power translating into vast private wealth and back again. The educative value would be undeniable: somewhat like how the torture report did, it would rub everyone’s noses in exactly those truths they are most eager to avoid acknowledging.

Even Douthat, who isn’t against political dynasties in principle, has misgivings about a Clinton-Bush race:

[T]here really would be something historically unusual about having the same two families alternate in the American presidency for, potentially, twenty-eight out of thirty-six years. The closest analogue would be the Roosevelts, Teddy and Franklin, who served for about twenty out of the 20th century’s first forty-five years, and they were related in a much looser way, rather than being part of the same marriage or nuclear family. In the main, the American presidency has resisted dynastic control, and the dynasts have tended to be among the less-enduring of chief executives: The Adamses were both one-termers, likewise the Harrisons (a one-monther, in William Henry’s case!), and for all their fame the Kennedys only occupied the Oval Office for the three short years of J.F.K.’s not-entirely-brilliant presidency. And they have also tended to be well-spaced: Twenty-five years from Adams to Adams, more than fifty years between the Harrisons, twenty-four between T.R. and F.D.R.

So it’s hard not to look at Bush-Clinton dominance, however shaped by randomness, as distinctive to our era, and therefore probably somehow connected to stratification and elite consolidation and other non-ideal patterns in American life generally. At the very least, it’s striking how many non-pedigreed men — Truman, Ike, Nixon, Carter, Reagan — won the White House during the golden years of the American middle class, compared to the mix of family ties and Ivy League resumes (dynasty woven into meritocracy, as it inevitably is) that has defined the office’s leading aspirants in recent decades.

Update from a reader:

Oh, please. Conflating the Clintons and the Bushes is ignorant and offensive. The Bushes are on their fourth generation of power and their third presidency. The Clintons are a married couple. Hilary did not inherit anything, nor did Bill. A Washington power couple is not a dynasty. Put these two families in the same sentence when Chelsea’s granddaughter is running.

(Photo: Former US President George H.W. Bush greets his former Vice President Dan Quayle as former First Lady Barbara Bush stands by after inaugural ceremonies at the US Capitol on January 20, 2005. Also pictured are Florida Governor Jeb Bush his wife Columba and former President Bill Clinton and his wife Sen. Hillary Clinton, D-NY. By Don Emmert/AFP/Getty Images)

Talking About The Law Of Rape

by Michelle Dean

At the New Yorker, Harvard law professor Jeannie Suk writes that it’s getting harder to teach the law of rape on campus. She describes a collision course between her desire to teach the hard cases – ones where the parameters of consent may be tested – and the sensitivities of students. Her list of the particulars is sobering:

Student organizations representing women’s interests now routinely advise students that they should not feel pressured to attend or participate in class sessions that focus on the law of sexual violence, and which might therefore be traumatic. These organizations also ask criminal-law teachers to warn their classes that the rape-law unit might “trigger” traumatic memories. Individual students often ask teachers not to include the law of rape on exams for fear that the material would cause them to perform less well. One teacher I know was recently asked by a student not to use the word “violate” in class—as in “Does this conduct violate the law?”—because the word was triggering.

It’s worth saying that I bet some of these organizations and students would quibble with Suk’s description of events. The last sounds particularly apocryphal, I have to say, like it’s gotten misdescribed in the re-telling to better fit a stereotype of campus politics. It’s not just sexual assault stories that tend to get molded to fit an agenda.

It’s harder to object, though, to what Suk describes as a growing fear and apprehensiveness about even broaching the subject of rape:

About a dozen new teachers of criminal law at multiple institutions have told me that they are not including rape law in their courses, arguing that it’s not worth the risk of complaints of discomfort by students. Even seasoned teachers of criminal law, at law schools across the country, have confided that they are seriously considering dropping rape law and other topics related to sex and gender violence. Both men and women teachers seem frightened of discussion, because they are afraid of injuring others or being injured themselves.

While obviously I haven’t faintest idea of what’s specifically been going on at Harvard or other American law schools, I believe that this fear is real because I’ve felt it too.

For most of this past year I took a break from writing about sexual violence. I have what I’d call both strong and considered beliefs on the subject. I’ve spent time talking to and working with victims as a law student and an attorney. I’ve also done my time as a writer in the varied and raucous (and often misrepresented) trenches of the “feminist blogosphere.” My knowledge of the subject is neither that of an amateur, nor even the surface investment of a pundit.

It’s long been apparent to me that no side of this debate is right.

Unqualifiedly believing victims without trying to substantiate their claims doesn’t serve them well, but unqualifiedly doubting doesn’t work either. Calling the current state of the prosecution of rape as “truth-seeking” is misdescribing the process, no matter what evidentiary reform is out there. If you want to teach the hard cases in rape law, I think you have to grapple with those questions carefully. I don’t think it can be enough to simply dismiss that entire part of the discussion as the product of oversensitivity.

Even long experience could not rescue me in the public discussion about Woody Allen earlier this year, though. It was some kind of rape rubicon for me. I hated having to address it. It felt like no matter what I wrote, it was “wrong.” I actually switched jobs to get away from the subject.

But what had caused me to despair of the state of conversation is largely, though not entirely, the opposite of what Suk describes. Whenever I wrote about sexual violence I ended up accused of advocating dogma, of being a bad journalist, of creating an atmosphere where “truth-telling” was impossible. I was also, frankly, tired of being stereotyped as a “feminist blogger” merely for addressing it. If I wrote that there was even some small modicum of value in people believing victims of trauma, I was accused of foreclosing all further discussion.

In other words, knees can jerk on every side of aisle.

That isn’t to say that I felt no pressure from the opposite side. I have also become uneasy with the fact that these rape stories were traffic bonanzas for the various places I write for. And I cringed watching people try to react to the dismantling of the Rolling Stone story in real time according to the well-worn treads of this debate.

But then I come back again to nuance. It’s not a simple matter of dishonest clickbaiting, from my vantage. Over the years I have watched lots of friends turn themselves inside-out emotionally to recount their own sexual assaults over and over in op-eds. They do so out of an honest hope to be heard in the yelling that happens whenever these stories come up. But they also do so at the encouragement of editors who, though well-intentioned, also know full well that the traffic returns could be enormous. And I have my own theories about how all of that intersects with what happened at Rolling Stone.

But like most things in life, it’s complicated. The resistance to nuance is general. Literally no one seems to want to have a careful conversation about any of this. We’re just reiterating the same old positions. Believe them. Don’t. The courts are just. The courts are unfair. Ironically everyone is too busy talking to ask: how can we really have a conversation about this?

Ending The Embargo?

by Dish Staff

Cuba’s release of US citizen Alan Gross is being coupled with a thaw in US/Cuba relations. Both Obama and Cuban President Raúl Castro are set to make public statements today:

Gross’ “humanitarian” release by Cuba was accompanied by a separate spy swap, the [senior administration officials] said. Cuba also freed a U.S. intelligence source who has been jailed in Cuba for more than 20 years, although authorities did not identify that person for security reasons. The U.S. released three Cuban intelligence agents convicted of espionage in 2001.

President Obama is also set to announce a major loosening of travel and economic restrictions in what officials called the most sweeping change in U.S. policy toward Cuba since the 1961 embargo was imposed.

Amanda Taub runs through the basics of the US-Cuba deal. Juan Cristobal Nagel is live-blogging the news. Elliott Abrams prefers the status quo:

On human rights, liberty, individual freedom there have been no changes: Cuba remains a communist dictatorship run by the Castros.

The new Republican-led Congress has a job to do here: to ask whether the President simply forgot about the Cuban people’s rights in his urge to show he isn’t just a lame duck and can still do important things. To make sure that the United States isn’t giving this vile regime a lifeline just when the old age of the Castro brothers is bringing it closer and closer to an end. To limit the benefits to Castro unless and until there are human rights improvements in Cuba.

But Phillip Peters notes that the US political climate has been changing:

As recently as 2000, Cuban Americans broke three-to-one for Republicans in Presidential elections, but no more. In 2012, exit polls showed them splitting 50-50 between President Obama and Gov. Mitt Romney. Considering that the president had mildly liberalized Cuba policies in his first term and Governor Romney was calling for a return to President Bush’s hardline policies, this was a shocking result.

But it was not a fluke: it reflects changing policy preferences in a Cuban-American community increasingly populated by younger generations and more recent immigrants. A 2014 Florida International University (FIU) poll showed that for the first time since its surveys began in 1991, a majority of Cuban Americans, 52 percent, wants to end the embargo. (During the 1990s, five FIU polls showed average 85 percent support for the embargo.) Among those under age 30, 62 percent want to end the embargo and 88 percent want to re-establish full diplomatic relations with Havana.

Larison believes a shift is long overdue:

Normalizing relations with Cuba shouldn’t be seen as a “reward” for the regime. It is the removal of a barrier that has been senselessly maintained for more than five decades. If anyone is being punished by the embargo, it is the people in America and Cuba that would otherwise have productive commercial and cultural exchanges. The U.S. gains nothing by persisting in the embargo. On the contrary, it needlessly alienates Latin American governments and puts the U.S. in the absurd position of defending a Cold War relic. Normalization is twenty years overdue, and nothing will be gained by delaying it any longer.

David Graham notes Republican opposition to normalizing relations:

Republican Senator Marco Rubio of Florida, whose parents were born in Cuba and moved to the United States, has opposed looser travel restrictions. Senator Ted Cruz, another Republican whose father was born in Cuba, also opposes lifting the embargo.

Earlier this month, Jeb Bush, the Republican former Florida governor who on Tuesday announced that he’s “actively exploring” a presidential bid, said, “I would argue that, instead of lifting the embargo, we should consider strengthening it.” As proof that the embargo’s backers aren’t ready to surrender, the Miami Herald reported that “the crowd of donors, the backbone of Cuba’s exiled elite, applauded loudly” when Bush made that proposal. But their view looks more beleaguered than ever today.

And Morrissey wonders how this will play out politically:

This abrupt change will make Florida a very interesting place for Hillary Clinton in 2016. The Cuban exile community has been firm about playing tough against the Castros, but the younger generation may be moving away from that policy. We’ll see.