In a speech at the Ronald Reagan Presidential Library last week, the Louisiana governor claimed that there was a “silent war on people of faith” being waged in this country. Waldman examines how Jindal’s rhetoric played to the conservative id:
Jindal is rather shrewdly attempting to tap into something that’s universal, but particularly strong among contemporary conservatives: the urge to rise above the mundane and join a transformative crusade. It’s one thing to debate the limits of religious prerogatives when it comes to the actions of private corporations, or to try to find ways to celebrate religious holidays that the entire community will find reasonable. That stuff gets into disheartening nuance, and requires considering the experiences and feelings of people who don’t share your beliefs, which is a total drag. But a war? War is exciting, war is dramatic, war is consequential, war is life or death. War is where heroes rise to smite the unrighteous. So who do you want to get behind, the guy who says “We can do better,” or the guy who thunders, “Follow me to battle, to history, to glory!”
Saletan compares Jindal’s argument to the one Bob Jones University made for its ban on interracial dating 14 years ago:
The resemblance between Bob Jones’ argument and Jindal’s argument raises a simple question: Does the right to practice a religious belief against gay marriage differ fundamentally from the right to practice a religious belief against interracial marriage? There are several ways to claim that it does. But these rebuttals don’t stand up. … If religious freedom protects your right to discriminate privately between same-sex and opposite-sex relationships, does it also protect your right to discriminate privately between same-race and opposite-race relationships? If not, why not? As Bob Jones put it: “Does a Christian consensus have to exist to make a belief right? Who decides?”
Kilgore notes that “Jindal’s job approval ratio now comes in at a terrible 35/53”:
Worse yet, asked if Jindal should run for president, Louisianans say “no” by an insulting 63/25 margin (even Republicans oppose his candidacy by 50/36), and that’s not because they want him to stay home and do his job since he’ll be leaving office at the end of 2015. Listed among possible 2016 candidates, Bobby can win only 13% among Louisiana Republicans, seven points behind Mike Huckabee and just one point ahead of Ted Cruz.
As I wrote in late January, the last time that protests reignited, Ukraine’s politics have long been divided into two major factions by the country’s demographics. What’s happening right now is in many ways a product of that division, which has never really been reconciled. Just about every Ukrainian government since independence has been seen as representing one “side” of this divide, with the other hating him or her as a perceived foreign pawn. That’s exacerbated by political corruption and by the fact that Ukraine’s troubled economy does indeed make it reliant on outside countries. Today, Ukraine is still demographically divided, its government is still troubled by corruption, and its economy is still in bad shape. As long as those things are all true, public unrest is likely to continue.
Policy makers should not rule out the possibility that the country could split, enter a period of prolonged violence, or even face something approaching a civil war. This does not mean that any of these outcomes are foreordained, but for anyone looking forward it is no longer unreasonable to speculate about the causes or the consequences of such outcomes.
This is a potentially revolutionary situation – we are watching violent street protests that could force out a government that was, whether we like it or not, reasonably democratically elected. It is also an emergency in which an ill-informed EU policy played a role. In demanding an all or nothing, now or never, decision from a Ukraine that needed emergency financing more than it needed European promises, it badly misplayed its hand.
Ioffe calls the protests “Putin’s worst nightmare”:
The last time that this many people came out to the Independence Square (the Maidan) in Kiev, nine years ago, protesters undid the election of Victor Yanukovich and brought to power a Western-friendly government. In the process, they scared the living daylights out of Putin. … Ukraine is Slavic. Ukraine speaks Russian, even though the Western part insists on having its own tongue. Kiev is the cradle of Russian civilization. Ukraine, in Putin’s mind, is almost just another province of Russia, one that, by some accident of history and politics, has a different government and a different name. He is said to have said as much to George W. Bush in 2008. “Don’t you see, George, that Ukraine is not even its own state?” he is reported to have smirked.
Update from a reader:
And what must really be causing Putin to tear his chest hair out is the fact that, so long as he is the very public face of the ongoing Winter Olympics in Sochi, he pretty much has to sit on his hands at precisely the time when his allies in the Ukraine most require his support. Hell, it’s entirely possible that before the Games end, things in will be too far gone in “just another province of Russia” for him to rescue the pro-Putin government. How schadenfreude-tastic would it be if, on account of an Olympics whose staging is designed to prop up his image at home and abroad, Putin gets a bloody nose and a black eye?
Meanwhile, Bob Dreyfuss thinks there is little the West can do about the violence in Kiev:
Likely, there will be American and European sanctions against Ukraine now, at least directed at some of its leaders, but sanctions will simply push the country’s leaders even farther from the West, and from any accord with the European Union. In the Cold War-like struggle between the United States and Russia over Ukraine, which many Russians (including Vladimir Putin, Russia’s autocratic, czar-like leader) see as part of Russia’s sphere of influence, Moscow—which urged the Ukrainian government to crack down on protesters—may have won a round. But a bloody, shaky peace, filled with simmering hatreds, is not likely to be the final result of the ongoing crackdown in Kiev.
Gideon Rachman also considers the role of the US and EU:
The West’s instinct in these situations is to call for fresh elections and that is certainly a demand that can be expected to be promoted now. In theory, this should lead to the establishment of a legitimate government, ending the need for violence. But what if elections in Ukraine actually confirm that this is a deeply-divided country with an increasingly incompatible west and east? That is certainly one possible outcome of a poll. At that point, a durable political solution might need something rather more drastic, and difficult, than holding fresh elections.
In Focus has photos from the protests. A startling contrast via Twitter:
Starvation thrives on the confusion and social disruption of war; famines and food shortages tend to have multiple factors. This makes it easy to portray them as unfortunate but inevitable, the outcome of tragic circumstance (potato blight in Ireland) rather than deliberate manipulation (British exports of Irish grain). The hunger in Syria is creating a new class of warlords among rebel commanders—a perfect excuse for the regime to employ its usual passive-aggressive politics of shifting the blame, by promoting the fiction that “both sides” are using siege tactics (a claim that sources inside Syria call ridiculous).
Michael Totten declares that we’re “not doing anything real about Syria, we were never going to do anything real about Syria, nor will we do anything real in the future”:
I thought we should get involved in a limited capacity by backing moderate regime opponents when they still had a chance, but the White House didn’t want to, nor did the American public—not after Iraq and Afghanistan—so here we are. Perhaps it was inevitable considering everyone’s interests and mood.
And now that we’re here, staying out of it is the right call. We can’t back Assad, and we can’t back Al Qaeda. Whatever moderate forces still exist have been marginalized. The odds that a stable and non-hostile Syria can emerge after an Assad or a jihadist victory are zero.
Previous Dish on Assad’s starvation strategy here. More recent coverage of Syria here. The above screenshot of Assad’s wife is from his propagandist Instagram account, covered here and here.
As the makers of Candy Crush prepare to go public, Derek Thompson marvels at how much money the addictive game has made them:
King Digital Entertainment, the company behind the mega-hit game Candy Crush, has filed its IPO papers with the SEC, offering investors a look inside its massive popularity. And, well, dear God. Last year the company took in $1.88 billion with $568 million in profits—half $1 billion in profits! To put this in perspective, a mobile gaming company specializing in colored sugar baubles made more than a quarter of Amazon’s lifetime earnings in a year.
Yglesias advises against investing, saying the sugar high isn’t likely to last:
These things become monster hits because they’re basically fads (or “memes” that “go viral” as we say in 2014) that benefit from attention spirals that eventually burn out. The very fact that King Digital wants to do this IPO right now should actually tell you something.
It’s not like the company desperately needs to go public to raise capital. And it’s not like the company has become so big that it’s in the Facebook situation of being basically unable to incrementally expand without going public. What you have is a case of founders and early investors trying to cash out while Candy Crush is still popular.
But, with few precedents, it’s hard to predict how the company might fare:
Wary investors could (and should) look to Zynga as an example. The gaming company behind uber-popular Facebook-based games like Farmville went public in 2011, but has been in freefall ever since, due to the company’s inability to launch another game as popular. But the jury’s still out on Zynga, which some say could be just as profitable as initially thought. Yahoo Finance writer Kevin Chupka thinks Zynga is due for a comeback, arguing that the company’s stock dip was due to their lack of mobile offerings. King, on the other hand, operates primarily in the mobile sphere, relying on mobile apps for seventy percent of its revenue.
David Dayen runs through what it means for residents, farmers, and the rest of the country:
The conditions have created impossible, Sophie’s Choice-type dilemmas. The State Water Project, which supplies water to agencies serving 25 million residents, announced they would make no deliveries this month for the first time in history. Seventeen California communities and water districts, primarily in the Central Valley, may not have drinking water in the next 60-90 days. Residents in these cities are being asked to cut their water usage by as much as 30 percent.
Farmers may have to leave half a million acres fallow this planting season, a record loss that could cost more than $2 billion. They must choose between watering perennially thirsty almond and cherry trees and planting annual crops like tomatoes and lettuce. Any choice will result in lower yields and increased food prices across the country. Migrant workers won’t get hired to cultivate crops, leading to unemployment that could top 50 percent in some Central Valley towns. The state has banned fishing in several rivers to protect thinning populations. The dry conditions create breeding grounds for wildfires, which started this year as early as January. Ranchers have been forced to sell off their calves at half their usual sale weight because of a lack of grass, a predicament that has even faced rancher and Congressman John Garamendi, who has sold one-third of his herd. “It’s going to affect everything that goes on in the state,” Garamendi said.
Even though some rain has finally come, it would be nearly impossible for California to make up the water it needs. According to the Department of Water Resources, the state would need to experience heavy rain or snowfall every other day from now until May in order to achieve average annual precipitation levels. Dr. Peter Gleick, codirector of the water-focused research nonprofit the Pacific Institute, explained that because California’s reservoirs are already depleted from a dry past two years, “We need a really, really wet rest of the season. And that’s statistically unlikely.”
Late last week, Belgian lawmakers overwhelmingly passed a measure that would allow euthanasia for terminally ill children. Ben White and Lindy Willmott explain:
Belgium has removed the age limits to access its assisted dying regime and this has been reported as a world first. This is true, but it is also important to note that the scheme in the Netherlands permits access for children as young as 12, provided various conditions are met. So, the key difference in Belgium is that access to euthanasia is not limited by age. A child will only be eligible to access the legislation if all of the following conditions are satisfied:
The child must be “conscious” and display “a capacity of discernment”. This refers to a child who is competent to decide for themselves. …
The child must “be in a hopeless medical situation of constant and unbearable suffering that cannot be eased and which will cause death in the short-term”.
The child must be counselled by doctors and a psychiatrist or psychologist, and the child’s decision must be approved by his or her parents.
What is apparent is that the cohort of children who may access euthanasia in Belgium is narrow: terminally ill children who cannot otherwise be helped and who are capable of making a considered decision about seeking assistance to die. The capacity aspect serves as an indirect limit related to age, as only older, mature children would be able to satisfy that criterion.
Allowing minors to take their lives, or have them been taken, necessarily makes assumptions about their capacity that is at odds with many liberal features of international law.
International treaties, including the Rome Statute of the ICC, make the recruitment of child soldiers a crime, and European countries have been active in promoting the expansion of these norms. Being a child soldier (under 15) is not a crime, only enlisting them. Crucially, the consent of the child, her parents or any psychologists is not a defense. Indeed, consent is presumed, as the crime covers accepting voluntary enlistees. As the Special Court for Sierra Leone put it:
The act of enlisting presupposes that the individual in question voluntarily consented to be part of the armed force or group. However, where a child under the age of 15 years is allowed to voluntarily join an armed force or group, his or her consent is not a valid defense.
But is this still a far cry from euthanasia? Not if the underlying issue is one of capacity to make life-imperiling decisions.
The Belgians, who overwhelmingly approve of euthanasia for adults, seem to have been caught off guard by the international outcry. As Clare Wilson reports, even Belgian kids seem to support euthanasia, at least in certain cases:
There is some research on how children themselves view euthanasia. Take Femke, a fictional 14-year-old girl who has terminal bone cancer, cannot tolerate the pain and wants to die. Her hypothetical case was presented to 1,769 Belgian teenagers aged around 14 at 20 secondary schools. Of these, 61 per cent said Femke should be offered euthanasia, compared with only 18 per cent for Nathalie, a girl with severe but not life-threatening burns. In another study, 90 per cent of adolescent cancer survivors interviewed said terminally ill children should be free to make end-of-life decisions. ”Most children say they would want to make the decision on their own,” says Johan Bilsen of the end-of-life care research group at the Free University of Brussels and Ghent University, who co-authored both studies, “but would want their parents involved.”
Researchers recently discovered that crazy ants have a natural defense against the venom of fire ants:
When a crazy ant is sprayed with venom from the abdomen of a fire ant, the crazy ant secretes formic acid from its own abdomen, takes the secretion in its mouth, and smears it over its body. According to Furturity, exposed crazy ants that were allowed to detoxify themselves had a 98 percent survival rate in lab experiments. When [researcher Edward] LeBrun and his team sealed up the crazy ants’ abdominal glands with nail polish, the number of survivors dropped to below half. On the battlefield, this makes the crazy ants impervious to the weapons of the fire ant.
Kate Shaw Yoshida has more on the evolutionary arms race between the species:
While this rare ability confers a huge advantage for crazy ant survival, its biggest implications are ecological.
Ever since fire ants were imported into the southern US in the 1930s, they have been the dominant ant species in most grassland ecosystems. But crazy ants—introduced only about 12 years ago—are now taking over, thanks in part to their ability to detoxify fire ant venom. When the two species fight over food or space, crazy ants come out on top 93 percent of the time.
Digging into these two species’ past sheds light on this asymmetry. Tawny crazy ants and red imported fire ants share an evolutionary history since their native ranges overlap in parts of South America. Their arms race began there, with fire ants evolving venom to defend themselves and crazy ants evolving a detoxification mechanism as a counter-defense. Now the chemical warfare has been re-engaged here on a second continent, playing out across the Gulf Coast. And for a second time in the past century, a new invasive ant species is dominating and drastically transforming ecological communities.
As they make their way north at a rate of 600 feet a year, they’re wreaking havoc on populations of insects, spiders, centipedes and crustaceans. This is likely to cause deleterious effects on various ecosystems. They can’t be stopped with conventional pesticide, they’ve been known to disable a huge industrial plant, and they frequently short out electrical equipment.
Last week, the Ninth Circuit issued what Lyle Denniston calls “the most sweeping decision yet on the right to carry a gun in public places.” David Kopel points out that “shall issue” is becoming the rule rather than the exception:
In its ruling, the court wrote that “to forbid nearly all forms of public arms bearing would be to destroy the right to bear arms entirely.” California issues concealed carry permits on a “may issue” basis, meaning that in many counties, citizens must apply to the county’s sheriff department and show “good cause” to have a [concealed carry weapon (CCW) permit]. A majority of states have a “shall issue” rule, which forces local governments to justify the denial of a permit by citing a criminal record, mental health issue, or some other potential public safety risk. Approximately 0.1% of California citizens have CCWs, which is almost 20 times lower than in the average shall-issue state, a statistic that supports the court’s opinion that the “good cause” rule is destroying, or at least severely hindering, the right to bear arms.
Once the Supreme Court ruled that the Second Amendment protected the keep a gun in one’s home for self-defense in Heller, and then ruled that, like the rest of the Bill of Rights, the Second Amendment applied to the states in McDonald v. Chicago, it was inevitable that the day would come when the Federal Courts in general, and the Supreme Court specifically, would be required to rule on the issue of whether or not the right recognized in Heller extended beyond the confines of the home. Logically, of course, there’s no reason why it shouldn’t, and while there is arguably a good case to be made that states should be permitted to create some reasonable regulations when it comes to the right to carry, whether it be open or concealed, it seems unlikely that a Supreme Court that still treats Heller as good law will decide that individuals only have Second Amendment rights inside their home. How far the right extends beyond that is something we’ll have to wait to find out.
After four days of deliberation, the jury in the racially tinged trial of Michael Dunn, a Florida man who set off another firestorm over the state’s self-defense laws when he shot a teenager to death in a parking lot during a dispute over loud music, said it could not agree on whether Mr. Dunn had acted to protect himself or was guilty of murder. The jurors did find Mr. Dunn guilty of three counts of second-degree attempted murder for getting out of his car and firing several times at the Dodge Durango sport utility vehicle in which Jordan Davis, 17, was killed. Three other teenagers, the subjects of the attempted murder charges, were in the car but were not struck. Mr. Dunn continued to fire at the vehicle even as it pulled away. On the attempted murder convictions, he could be sentenced to 60 years in prison.
In other words, a white man was found guilty of firing shots at a car filled with unarmed black teenagers, yet somehow he is not responsible for the young man who died inside. TNC is livid:
I wish I had something more to say about the fact that Michael Dunn was not convicted for killing a black boy. Except I said it after George Zimmerman was not convicted of killing a black boy. Except the parents of black boys already know this. Except the parents of black boys have long said this, and they have been answered with mockery. …[T]he inability of black parents to protect their children is an ancient tradition.
What is bracing about these regular deaths is how easily I can slot myself into the same circumstance. Follow me in a Jeep, then follow me on foot and we might come to blows. Demand that I turn down my music, at 17, and you might well not like my response. And I do not think this is a fact of black magic, of pathologies, of my culture. I think it is product of 17. I ride the trains in New York and I see boys of all colors who are very loud, because they finally can be, and no one can stop them. I see them and smile, and remember my own days back in Baltimore, my first freedoms, talking shit and being out in the world.
Bouie describes the cases of Zimmerman and Dunn as “our Dirty Harry epidemic”:
[Both] stories rely on particular tropes. Martin and Davis aren’t just rude or rowdy teenagers, they are dangerous intruders — aggressive thugs who can turn violent at any moment. And it’s up to the keepers of the peace – Zimmerman and Dunn – to play Dirty Harry and put them in their place. To wit, in one of his letters from prison, Dunn said as much: “This may sound a bit radical, but if more people would arm themselves and kill these (expletive) idiots when they’re threatening you, eventually they may take the hint and change their behavior.” …
Put simply, the narratives of Dunn and Zimmerman reflect a cultural near-consensus on the idea of the threatening black criminal. And, when trying to explain the verdicts in both cases – Zimmerman’s acquittal and Dunn’s hung jury on the count of first degree murder – it’s worth considering the extent to which they found receptive audiences; jury members who believed their stories, or at least, could empathize with their fear of “thugs.”
Meanwhile, David Kopel argues that Stand Your Ground laws had nothing to do with the verdict:
Because the jury convicted Dunn of three counts of attempted murder, it is certain that the jury determined that Dunn was not acting in lawful self-defense. Stand Your Ground is a rule about one detail of when self-defense is lawful. Accordingly, the assertion that Stand Your Ground may have been a reason why the jury hung on the first degree murder charge is totally implausible. The three convictions for second-degree murder show that the jury had determined there was no self-defense; ergo, jury confusion about self-defense was not the reason why the jury deadlocked on first-degree murder.
The right to “stand your ground” when attacked in a public place did not figure prominently in the trial, but Dunn’s lawyer, Cory Strolla, did mention it during his closing argument, saying, “His honor will further tell you that if Michael Dunn was in a public place where he had a legal right to be, he had no duty to retreat and had the right to stand his ground and meet force with force, including deadly force.” As in the Zimmerman case, the jury instruction concerning justifiable homicide mentioned that right, and it is more plausible in this case that it made a difference, since Dunn arguably could have driven away even if, as he claimed, Davis menaced him with a shotgun.
If Davis had a shotgun and threatened to kill Dunn, as Dunn claims, the shooting was justified. If Davis had no weapon and made no threats, the shooting was not justified. If Davis threatened Dunn (or merely shouted curses at him) and was holding something that Dunn mistook for a shotgun, the question is fuzzier: In the circumstances, was it reasonable for Dunn to believe Davis had a gun and intended to use it? But the question of what Dunn reasonably believed has nothing to do with the presence or absence of a duty to retreat. … Jurors across the country face this same challenge of deciding whether a homicide was justified based on the reasonable-belief standard, regardless of whether their state imposes a duty to retreat.
And Corrine McConnaughy considers the research on racial bias in the courtroom:
A courtroom environment where race is present but not consciously checked is precisely the kind that research has shown is conducive to a number of cognitive biases entering the legal process. Studies have shown that jurors in these circumstances are more likely to selectively remember and misremember the facts of the case in ways that are more consistent with racial stereotypes – being more likely to recall, for example, facts related to aggression by African Americans. They also demonstrate that white jurors are more likely (pdf) to find black defendants guilty in the absence of conscious processing of the racial meaning of the case. While this case did not involve a black defendant, it did involve a need for jurors to judge the culpability of Jordan Davis for his own death in order to decide upon Dunn’s self-defense claims. Whether and how the absence of individuating details about Davis in the trial mattered in the jury’s decisions thus stands an open but legitimate question.
Ellen Page came out at an HRC event on Friday. Harriet Williamson argues for why we should care:
The normalization of homosexuality by famous names even makes it harder for young people to bully their LGBTQ peers. I wish Ellen Page had been out when I was a scared twelve-year-old who knew she had to get a boyfriend to fit in and stop the taunts of ‘ugly lesbian bitch’.
Alyssa applauds another part of Page’s coming-out speech, in which she criticized Hollywood’s “crushing standards” of beauty and success – for women and men, gays and straights alike:
When Page said that these standards “serve no one. Anyone who defies these so-called norms becomes worthy of comment and scrutiny,” she’s making an important jump. LGBT actors and actresses, and LGBT people who have to live in the world shaped by Hollywood products, may have a great deal to gain by tearing down these standards. But their heterosexual peers will benefit, too. Maybe their gains will be smaller: maybe they’ll be able to go out of the house without makeup, or they won’t have to make themselves sick preparing their bodies for a part. But whatever the potential benefits, we all have a common interest in a world where there are more than one way to be beautiful, more than one kind of good life, more than one barometer for success. This isn’t Page’s cause, this is all of ours.
The Dish 