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Theodore Johnson asks if enrolling in Harvard’s distance-learning program counts as attending Harvard:

I often felt [as if] I’d snuck into one of the world’s premier institutions for higher learning. There is little chance that my slightly-above-average undergraduate GPA and an extra-curricular résumé that only consisted of a part-time job at a music store would’ve secured a spot for me in one of Harvard’s ultra-competitive graduate schools. Yet, with no admission letter in hand and exactly zero hours spent preparing for graduate admissions tests, I became a Harvard student. And I was not alone. The Extension School – Harvard’s degree-granting continuing education school – has a student population of more than 13,000.

Johnson, who was one of the .2 percent of Harvard Extension School students to graduate with a degree, asks, “Did I really go to Harvard?” Daniel Luzer says no – but it doesn’t matter anyway:

The truth is that Harvard, like other colleges, runs a lot of programs that aren’t really Harvard.

Harvard Business School runs the Executive Education Program, in which “those enrolled attend one three-week session, which … cost $33,000 a pop, per year for three years.” Enrollees don’t earn an MBA but they “still receive alumnus status.” High school students can attend Harvard Summer School and spend $7,000 to live in Harvard dorms and take a class on the Harvard campus. In the unlikely event that one is subsequently admitted to Harvard College, however, such classes cannot be applied to a Harvard degree.

Harvard Extension is not quite the same thing, of course. While it’s arguably not really Harvard, it’s not “fake Harvard,” either. It’s not a scam. It’s not an attempt to earn extra cash by selling the Harvard brand. Indeed, at $1,020 to $2,000 per four-credit course, it’s actually donating the Harvard brand.

Eric Posner considers the growing irrelevance of the International Criminal Court (ICC), especially in light of how it hasn’t gone after Assad:

The countries that signed on were mostly peaceful democracies and poor countries embroiled in endless conflicts that could not be addressed with regular law enforcement. Because the ICC treaty specifically limits ICC involvement to cases where national legal institutions fall short, the ICC focused its attention on the latter group, which unfortunately were mostly African.

In some cases, the African countries invited ICC participation, but in others it was thrust upon them. For example, the Security Council authorized the ICC to investigate Sudan, whose president Omar al-Bashir was indicted for his role in ethnic killings in Darfur. (He has refused to appear for trial.) Even a country like Uganda, which invited ICC participation, later found that as a result it could not offer an amnesty to insurgents in order to establish peace. As the ICC increasingly interfered in their affairs, African countries took the view that the court, in the words of Ugandan President Yoweri Museveni, is now being used by Western powers “to install leaders of their choice in Africa and eliminate the ones they do not like.” Meanwhile, the ICC—with an annual budget of more than $140 million and staff of about 700—has been able to convict only one person (the Congolese warlord Thomas Lubanga) in more than a decade.

The map seen above, from Wikipedia, shows countries belonging to the ICC (green), countries that have signed but not ratified (yellow), and countries that have not signed (red).

Robert Lane Greene suggests so. He feels all schoolchildren in the European Union should learn two foreign languages:

Why not let the [English] spread to every corner of Europe – and, indeed, the rest of the world? This would certainly seem more practical than teaching every European child two more languages. But mandating English might also serve to undermine loyalty to the EU. There are too many Europeans who would rather not have English dominate political affairs. The continent has more native German-speakers, including four countries where German is an official language. French has as many native-speakers in Europe, too, and is official in three countries (not to mention Europe’s de facto capital, Brussels). Native English-speakers make up less than a fifth of the EU’s population. And, awkwardly, English is the official language of the one country that will soon hold a referendum on whether to quit the EU entirely.

But the real reason not to adopt a “mainly English” language policy involves the EU’s promise to its members, under the official motto “united in diversity.” No country joined the union in order to be crushed under a homogenizing wheel.

Leon Wieseltier – news alert – thinks I’m a callous bastard:

In the name of “nation-building at home,” we are learning to be unmoved by evil. I will give an example. On Anderson Cooper’s show last week, there appeared a man named Zaidoun Al Zoabi, an academic in Damascus and a prominent anti-Assad activist, who was kidnapped by the Syrian secret police and held in one of Assad’s most notorious prisons. He was pleading for American action to stop Assad’s savagery. “Is the diplomatic path now only about chemical weapons?” Al Zoabi asked, with a look on his face composed in equal measure of dignity and desperation. “What about [Assad’s] massacring us for the past two years?”

At which point Andrew Sullivan, who was a panelist on the show, folded his arms, turned away, and sneered: “Chemical weapons is all you’re going to get right now!” Go back to your disgusting little country and die. The blogger giveth and the blogger taketh away. Is this “war-weariness”? It is certainly a disrespect for suffering.

A couple of points. Zoabi has opposed military intervention by the West for the last two years. Anne-Marie Slaughter noted this on the show:

SLAUGHTER: Last week when we talked you did not support military strikes. You did not think…

ZOABI: I do not support until now.

So how heartless was Zoabi for the last two years? More to the point, a clear majority of Syrians still oppose military intervention by the US. From a recent YouGov poll:

More opponents of the regime strongly disapprove of a U.S. military strike than favor it. 81 percent of government supporters, as well as 56 percent of those who prefer not to say. There’s little evidence that ordinary Syrians favor an attack.

In fact, distrust of America is nearly unanimous among Syrian poll-takers. Only 7 percent of those interviewed thought that the U.S. government was “a friend of the Syrian people.” There wasn’t much disagreement on this point among supporters and opponents of Assad. 79 percent of supporters, 61 percent of opponents and 57 percent of non-aligned said the U.S. was “an enemy of the Syrian people.”

If the Syrian people themselves remain at best ambivalent, is it really solely a mark of “heartlessness” to be skeptical that military intervention would do any good either for the future of Syria or for the current cessation of chemical attacks.  Leon describes what I said with respect to chemical weapons thus:

“Chemical weapons is all you’re going to get right now!”

The transcript reads:

ZOABI: Let me just say one thing. Is the diplomatic path now only about chemical weapons? What about massacring us for the past two years?

SULLIVAN: Chemical weapons right now.

As for my moral callousness – expressed by Wieseltier, putting words into my mouth, as “Go back to your disgusting little country and die!” – here’s a part of the transcript when I was asked directly about the horror of August 21 – and countless other occasions Assad used these vile weapons. I said:

It is absolutely fair and important for us to observe this horrifying thing.

We should. I’m not saying we shouldn’t. I think we should feel it, see it, absorb it, think about it, and face up to it. But statecraft is not about emotional, visceral responses. Statecraft requires someone to see the world as it is but then to make serious judgments about our interests, the future, unintended consequences.

You cannot run foreign policy by emotional spasms. And my fear is that that emotional spasm threw Obama off his essential trajectory of keeping out of this.

These are difficult, tough choices to make in a fallen world. I do not envy the job of the president. Nor do I doubt the sincerity of Wieseltier’s anguish in the face of such horror. If I have at times seemed too indifferent to the suffering in that country in making realist points, I apologize. But I differ in judgment about the right course of action. It seems to me we should be able to acknowledge that, without imputing inhuman callousness.

Garance is uncomfortable with creating a registry of the mentally ill:

More than half of Americans experience one or more mental illnesses over the course of their lives, and around 26 percent of Americans over age 18 each year experience at least one, primarily anxiety disorders and mood disorders like depression. The overwhelming majority of them are no danger to anyone at all. But with so substantial a portion of the country going through bouts of one thing or another over the course of their lives, the idea that any federal database could capture enough information to encompass every one who might one day be a threat anywhere is akin to hoping for a government staff of precogs.

And that’s not even getting into the highly problematic question of whether the government should mark millions of people who will never hurt anyone for a carve-out from the Second Amendment, and the privacy and stigmatization issues involved in cataloging harmless people who suffer from common mental illnesses in order to label them as potential threats in a federal government database. The idea of creating a mental health database instead of pursuing policies that involve direct regulation of guns is one put forward, not surprisingly, by the gun lobby, which knows that it’s easier to blame gun violence on out-of-control crazies than on abundant access to deadly weapons by disturbed individuals with evil intent bent on mayhem and murder.

Ambinder has similar worries:

I am pretty certain that there is no reliable matrix to predict, with anything close to reasonable certainty, that a person with “X” traits and “Y” life experiences will perpetrate a mass shooting, or otherwise brutalize people. So I believe that a mental health surveillance system, hastily constructed, would be a significant and worrisome expansion of the state, and an ineffective one, at that.

In today’s video from Jimenez, he addresses the criticism he faced after working on the 20/20 piece that first introduced the thesis of The Book Of Matt to the world in 2004:

Sure enough, Media Matters has already published a take-down of Jimenez’s book before it’s even released. And this is how the Matthew Shepard Foundation has responded thus far:

Attempts now to rewrite the story of this hate crime appear to be based on untrustworthy sources, factual errors, rumors and innuendo rather than the actual evidence gathered by law enforcement and presented in a court of law. We do not respond to innuendo, rumor or conspiracy theories. Instead we recommit ourselves to honoring Matthew’s memory, and refuse to be intimidated by those who seek to tarnish it. We owe that to the tens of thousands of donors, activists, volunteers, and allies to the cause of equality who have made our work possible.

The Book Of Matt: Hidden Truths About the Murder of Matthew Shepard comes out next week. Steve’s previous videos in the series are here. A reader reflects on it:

What made Matthew’s story a story is not the facts of his death, but the reaction after his death. Whatever happened, Jimenez adds new information to the context, but the actual events are trapped on a hillside 15 years ago.

When the first reports of what happened in Laramie became publicized, I was a closeted guy living in a mostly rural, conservative Midwestern town.  I felt Matthew’s death because of the coverage and the story. It provided a realization of my fears leftover from being assaulted in my early teens by two classmates suspicious that I was a faggot.

They rammed me up against a locker in a late morning break between classes and punched and kicked me a few times. They then pinned me into a corner and poured an entire bottle of cheap perfume over my head – an event that had helped keep me in the closet for the next 25 years.

Nearly five years after Matthew’s death, I was returning home after a one-year leave.  Just as I finished the overseas leave, I was part of an incident wherein another man and I intervened in the hate-based assault of a 19-year-old man by four men shouting homophobic slurs. The assailants had been alternating holding him and hitting him and throwing his possessions into the busy street.  The other guy who intervened also got injuries, including an apparent concussion, but I was mostly okay. We slowed it down enough until some bouncers at a nearby gay bar came over and ended it.  When we tried to report it, the police did not want to file a report and told us that they thought it was just a fight and should not be reported for its context.

The reality is that the extra fear caused by hate crimes deserves more thought than you give it.  I have been robbed and assaulted in another context that had not to do with being gay.  It was a more serious incident in terms of potential risk to my life, but the incident that I remember, that I can smell, hear and see to this very day is the assault of a young man named David on Oxford Street in Sydney, Australia.  The incident wherein the next day the police said, “Mate, they’re kids, so nothing will happen if we file the crime report.”  They said it happens all the time and there is nothing they can do about it.  It took two hours of me being an asshole in the police station before they agreed to write a crime report.  Matthew Shepard was with me that entire time.

A week later, after arriving back in the states, I was driving cross-country from San Francisco with a friend back to the Midwest.  We stayed one of the nights in Laramie, as it made the most sense for the trip.  That evening, I took a solo walk through town and looked up at the hillside where I know from the reports he spent his last hours.  Whatever the reason and true circumstances from the night he died, I knew that one of me, another imperfect gay soul, died alone on that hillside.  The reaction and story, however factual, is, like many American stories, a defining moment.

The next morning, when we drove out of Laramie (I didn’t sleep much that night), I knew that I was not going back in the closet.  I knew that I was moving into a new phase of my life.  Not four years later I was testifying in the Indiana legislature against a marriage amendment.  I don’t need the story of Matt to be perfect, but we cannot change the impact of his story still has on many of us.

Joseph Stern rants against the anti-circumcision movement, going so far as to compare it to vaccine denialism. It’s an enjoyable piece of hysteria and affront but he fails to address the core point of those, like me, who oppose circumcision. The basic question is a very simple one: Why not leave infant boys alone? The foreskin is the result of aeons of human evolution, and only desert religions, like Judaism and Islam, have embraced it as a way to mark their own particular relationship with their deities. The question, really, is why all infant boys should be subjected to this mutilation at all? The vast majority of the world’s male population is not genitally mutilated – and they have not, over history, shown any serious defect.

What Stern has to address – and, despite fulminations and aspersions and disparagement of those seeking to leave infants alone, he never does – is why on earth are we even talking about this? What could possibly justify a horrible, traumatic procedure removing part of an infant boy’s body? Those who favor doing something seem to me to be the ones who need to make the case. The default doesn’t need to be defended. What has to be defended is such an intervention – which is irreversible and which is done without the consent of the infant. If you are concerned about future health hazards, why not remove the tonsils or the appendix after birth? The only reason this barbaric practice endures is religious fundamentalism.

As it is, more and more American parents are joining those around the rest of the world in choosing not to subject infants to the excruciating pain of mutilation. The following data are from Wikipedia.

Brazil, for example, has a circumcision rate of only 7 percent; Canada 32 percent; China less than 1 percent; Germany 11 percent; Spain 2 percent; in Britain, medical authorities are trying to reduce circumcision rates to below 2 percent.

To read Stern’s rant would require one to believe that somehow, all these countries, representing a huge majority of the world population, are somehow leaving boys open to all sorts of risks that Americans are free from. It’s a preposterous argument – and Americans increasingly see it as such. The genital mutilation rate for American-born boys has been slowly declining for a while, and Medicaid increasingly doesn’t cover it in many states. In the 1970s, 90 percent of infant boys were mutilated. That rate is now, mercifully, 54.7 percent. In the West, the rate is now mercifully down to 25 percent. Let’s hope it keeps declining and more and more boys can grow up with their bodies intact.

(Photo: A boy shouts as he under goes circumcision in Kajang outside Kuala Lumpur on November 20, 2011. By Mohd Rasfan/AFP/Getty Images)