A 2007 paper by Douglas Massey argued that undocumented immigrants have responded to increased border security “by hunkering down and staying once they had run the gauntlet at the border and made it to their final destination.” Ezra finds that the “data support Massey’s thesis”:
In 1980, 46 percent of undocumented Mexican migrants returned to Mexico within 12 months. By 2007, that was down to 7 percent. As a result, the permanent undocumented population exploded.
The militarization also had another unintended consequence: It dispersed the undocumented population. Prior to 1986, about 85 percent of Mexicans who entered the U.S. settled in California, Texas or Illinois, and more than two-thirds entered through either the San Diego-Tijuana entry point or the El Paso-Juarez entry point. As the U.S. blockaded those areas, undocumented migrants found new ways in — and new places to settle. By 2002, two-thirds of undocumented migrants were entering at a non-San Diego/El Paso entry point and settling in a “nontraditional” state.
I will say that I think that dispersal of migrants is also attributable to increasing demands for labor in agriculture across the country (such as working in poultry in Alabama or in labor-intensive crop-picking jobs across the southeast). However, the hypothesis makes sense: if one cannot return home without risking trouble with la migra, then it is best to look stay put (not to mention to get away from places where border enforcement is being intensely focused).
Balko believes that, if “we really value whistleblowers, we need to provide them with a bit more incentive” to come forward:
A series of prizes for government employees who risk their livelihoods to shed light on government abuse might be one way to provide an incentive for more whistleblowing. It needn’t just be one big prize. Think about a foundation that might give out multiple prizes, at all levels of government.
Yes, it would need to be pretty well funded. The idea here would be to give out prizes significant enough to compensate for the losses of income, the foregoing of careers, and potential legal expenses. But it seems to me that there are enough people — and enough affluent people — concerned about NSA spying, police abuse, and government waste to make something like this happen. In fact, there needn’t even be just one foundation, or one series of prizes. Perhaps conservatives aren’t eager to reward someone like Edward Snowden, or have no interest in compensating a cop who exposes racial profiling or spying on protest groups. Fair enough. A conservative-oriented whistleblower prize, then, could reward government employees who expose waste, fraud, and politically-motivated regulation or application of the tax laws. Perhaps the foundations themselves could eventually be staffed and run by whistleblowers — a way to provide them with continued meaningful employment in public service.
At last! If cell phone use and texting were such great risks to safety, there would be carnage in the streets. But there’s not. No statistical correlation that I’ve seen.
Am I a shill for the cell phone companies? No. The reason for the lack of carnage is that the specific distraction of communicating (by whatever means) is offset by an overall increase in attentiveness. Think of doing a long-distance drive. It’s easy to be sleepy or inattentive. Your senses are at a low. But if you have a task – practically any task – you are more generally aware. Your mind is functioning at a higher level. So that’s why the streets aren’t littered with bodies. For every bus driver who plows into the back of someone’s car while texting, I’d suggest that there are several who understand the risks of what they’re doing and are concentrating hard to counteract the distraction.
Which raises the question: How could we raise everyone’s overall attentiveness without the negatives inherent to cell phones? That’s what we should be asking.
Another points out:
The study you link to only studied voice calls while driving, not texting. Further down in the link it reads:
Our study focused solely on talking on one’s cellphone. We did not, for example, analyze the effects of texting or Internet browsing, which has become much more popular in recent years. It is certainly possible that these activities pose a real hazard.
And, to answer your question, texting while driving is dangerous.
Another elaborates:
What the LSE study totally misses is how consumers are using their phones today. From 2002 – 2005, I bet the primary usage of mobile phones was still to talk to somebody, so the only time somebody should look away from the road is while dialing or answering their phone. Today people are texting, tweeting, and reading emails etc.; smartphone technology has provided a huge increase in the visual experience of using a phone, which means more reasons and more time looking away from the road.
I used to ride a motorcycle to work. Cyclists and motorcyclists are extremely aware of driver behavior because we’re so much more vulnerable than drivers if we crash. I can tell you from personal experience that the amount of distracted driving going on now has just become too much; its gotten much worse in the past five years as mobile technology has become more advanced and more engaging. If I saw a distracted driver, 95% of the time if I would also see that little bright phone screen being held and read. I had one too many close calls even as a very defensive rider, so I just stopped and today I take the bus.
There was a real debate about how to interpret the Pope’s recent conciliatory tone toward gay people. Many, like me, saw the tone as substance, seeing no massive overhaul in doctrine, but a revolution in emphasis that necessitates an eventual change in doctrine. By choosing to emphasize the humanity and dignity of gay people seeking God in good faith – “Who am I to judge?” – this Pope was shifting gears away from the counter-revolution of John Paul II and Benedict XVI against the liberation of modernity. Others insisted there had been no change at all – and that the idea of one was a deliberate or misinformed misreading of the Pope’s comments by the secular press.
Well, we could go back and analyze every sentence of the impromptu press conference – as some have done with surprising results:
He did not say that “homosexuals should not be marginalized.” He said “these persons should not be discriminated against, but welcomed (accolte).” He is citing the words of the Catechism here.
And he did not regurgitate other language from the Catechism about gays’ “objective disorder” or “just” and “unjust” discrimination against them. He ignores the former language and expunges the latter. In fact, the more you examine the presser, the more radical its implications seem.
But now we have more confirmation that this was not a gaffe but a strategy. Well, confirmation might be a bit strong – but one of the American cardinals tapped for Francis’ new, reformist group of eight cardinals is Boston Cardinal Sean O’Malley. He has clearly been in touch with the new pontiff and just gave a speech which confirms the theocons’ worst nightmare. It was at the annual Knights of Columbus convention in San Antonio. K-Lo was there and didn’t see anything but the attendants’ desire to evangelize in the developing world and roll back Obamacare, marriage equality, alleged religious repression, and abortion rights. In fact, her opening paragraph is about the Catholic importance of denying gay couples civil equality. Funny that, isn’t it?
But O’Malley’s speech was an eye-opener to anyone who hasn’t decided to be blind for a while.
The context is worth revisiting. It comes after the American hierarchy has insisted that the issues of contraception, marriage equality and abortion are central to religious freedom and to the Catholic faith. American nuns have also been subjected to an inquisition because they were insufficiently vocal about these issues and preferred service to the poor and needy. The inquisition is not over, but its guiding philosophy appears to have been up-ended:
“Some people think that the Holy Father should talk more about abortion,” O’Malley told approximately 2,000 attendees, according to a copy of the remarks posted online. “I think he speaks of love and mercy to give people the context for the Church’s teaching on abortion,” he continued. “We oppose abortion, not because we are mean or old fashioned, but because we love people. And that is what we must show the world.”
In this picture, it is hard not to see Francis’ challenge to the theocons as a version of Jesus’ rebuke of the Pharisees of his day. It’s a return toward humility and service, and away from the authoritarian control and doctrinal obedience mandated by Ratzinger and Wojtila. It’s a recognition that if Christianity’s global reputation is framed as hostile to gays, women and the marginalized, its doctrinal arguments will never succeed, because the only basis for any Christian argument is love. If Christians are seen as haters or discriminators or wielders of government power to enforce their doctrines, they will not only betray their core, but also fail at reaching the people of modernity.
Yes, the arrival of this new Pope increasingly appears as a watershed in the life of the Church. And not a moment too soon.
Chait asks why the GOP would “nominate a candidate who looks and sounds like a right-wing ogre but actually isn’t?”
Voters in a general election judge candidates by a combination of personal and ideological characteristics. George W. Bush deflected on his unpopular, regressive tax cut by acting like a gentle, normal guy. The nicer and gentler you seem, the more room you have for an election platform that’s neither nice nor gentle. That’s Paul Ryan’s formula — match a radical program with a soft-spoken persona. Eventually, the contradiction between Ryan’s persona and his agenda became too great to sustain, but Ryan is trying to patch up the problem using the same method. He’s talking about poverty all the time. What he’s not doing is changing his proposals to eviscerate funding for programs for the poor.
Ryan’s method makes sense. As a party, you want to spend your “frighten swing voters” budget on real policies. Spending it on personality is a total waste. Ryan himself may go so far on policy that no amount of aw-shucks Midwestern wholesome I’ve-never-heard-of-foreign-beer-I-drink-Miller-Lite charm can make up for it. But he has the general idea. Christie is the anti–Paul Ryan.
Chait is confusing his reaction to Christie’s combative style with the way that Christie is perceived outside his home state.Any discussion of polling on whether most Americans like Christie is notably absent from Chait’s post. If he were viewed as “unbearably obnoxious,” his favorability ratings wouldn’t be so good. 52% favorability nationwide for a politician who has only been in state office for one term is quite high. Other national Republican figures would love to be so “unbearably obnoxious” that a majority of Americans across party lines likes them.
Massie recently argued that, above all, voters “need to be able to imagine the candidate sitting behind that big desk in the Oval Office”
Being likeable is one thing but it’s more important for a candidate to be respected. That means they need to project some brand of presidentialism which is not quite the same thing as being able to talk Average Joe even if that quality may also be extremely useful. We don’t know if Christie can do that yet.
Scott Wilson and Zachary Goldfarb lay out the proposals from the president’s speech on Friday:
Obama said he intends to work with Congress on proposals that would add an adversarial voice – effectively one advocating privacy rights – to the secret proceedings before the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court. Several Democratic senators have proposed such a measure. In addition, Obama said that he intends to work on ways to tighten one provision of the Patriot Act – known as Section 215 – that gives the government broader authority to obtain business phone data records. He announced the creation of a panel of outsiders – former intelligence officials, civil liberty and privacy advocates, and others – to assess the programs and suggest changes by the end of the year.
Tomasky thinks the administration is going in the right direction:
[Obama] took a couple steps away from the imperial presidency. I think that’s the first time since the presidency became imperial – after World War II, more or less – such a thing has happened. And Obama was, as he claimed Friday, headed down this course before the Snowden leaks. Those began on June 5. But on May 23, he gave a speech at the National Defense University in which he foreshadowed the moves he just announced. Combine all this with John Kerry’s recent announcement that we have a plan for ending drone strikes in Pakistan, and you might have thought liberals would be cheering. I suppose some liberals are. I am. But not civil libertarians. With them, it’s all or nothing. If you’re not signed on to the whole program, you might as well be Joe McCarthy.
Obama is still lying, obfuscating and misleading the American people. In doing so, he is preventing representative democracy from functioning as well as it might. With the stakes so high, and his performance so dubious in so many places, Friday’s speech has got to be one of the low points of his presidency.
Greg Sargent is cautiously optimistic, and David Ignatius believes some of the proposals could have a “real impact”:
[T]he murkiest of Obama’s surveillance proposals, for a commission that would examine new technologies dealing with surveillance, might actually have the most impact. That’s because some leading technologists believe that there may actually be systems that could enhance privacy rights while also allowing aggressive surveillance in cases where there was a genuine threat to national security.
Obama deserves some credit for recognizing that the grounds for debate on surveillance are shifting. … Really, though, only one of these steps is “specific”: the release of the legal rationale in a white paper, which happened today. The rest, as welcome as they may be, are vague promises, predicated on “work with Congress” – something that he hasn’t had a lot of success with in recent months, or even years.
The president’s mission, as set out on Friday, is to take credit for all the reforms that sound the best, and to re-establish the government as a trusted actor without doing much that’s new. In that May speech at the National Defense University, Obama committed to “a strong Privacy and Civil Liberties Board to review those issues where our counterterrorism efforts and our values may come into tension.” On Friday, he said that he’d “asked the Privacy and Civil Liberties Oversight Board to review where our counterterrorism efforts and our values come into tension.” Created in 2004, on the recommendations of the 9/11 Commission, the board was effectively powerless until three months ago, when it finally got a chairman, and the president’s still bland when it comes to its goals.
Obama also caught heat for saying, “I don’t think Mr. Snowden was a patriot.” As I’ve noted, the pledge to reform precisely those programs Snowden opposed belies that assertion. As Trevor Timm points out:
More than a dozen bills have already been introduced to put a stop to the NSA’s mass phone record collection program and to overhaul the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court, which has reinterpreted the Fourth Amendment in secret, creating a body of privacy law that the public has never read. A half-dozen new privacy lawsuits have been filed against the NSA. The Pentagon is undergoing an unprecedented secrecy audit. U.S. officials have been caught deceiving or lying to Congress. The list goes on. … If Congress passes meaningful NSA reform, Snowden may go down in history as the most influential whistleblower in American history. What could be more patriotic than that?
Snowden could be both a hero and a villain, Max Fisher argues:
Snowden has made other leaks that were not discussed at Friday’s press conference, including revealing U.S. espionage programs against China, where he was seeking shelter at the time. Espionage between nations is both legal and an accepted norm of the international system; it’s also a two-way street that China treads quite heavily. Some have argued that the cyberespionage programs that Snowden revealed may have been targeting Chinese arms control, although this is circumstantial and the exact target remains unknown. So does Snowden’s internal motivations in making these leaks, just like his others. But it’s extremely difficult to imagine a way in which these particular leaks were driven by patriotism. That’s not an argument on behalf of considering him a traitor, as some do, but just a reminder that these cases are not always as simple as binary divisions between good or bad, hero or villain.
Meanwhile, Matt Berman and Brian Resnick warn Americans not to hold their breath for any policy change:
Task forces like the one laid out [Friday] don’t have a huge history of recent success. Just look at Vice President Joe Biden’s gun task force, announced by Obama following the shooting in Newtown, Conn., last year. “This won’t be some Washington commission” that goes nowhere, Obama said in December. The task force issued recommendations in January. And aside from a failed Senate amendment, it has not resulted in any tangible change.
“What I’m trying to do is document these buildings carefully and with craft,” Jarmain says. “The buildings are part of a history filled with ingenuity, innovation and entrepreneurship. They’re part of a record that is about brilliant minds coming together to create the capitalist frontier and the middle class of America.” … Many famous architects, such as Albert Kahn, helped the city become an architectural hub, and Jarmain’s title, American Beauty, is named after Kahn’s American Beauty Iron Building. Even though Detroit is shrinking and structures are being destroyed almost daily, it still has one of the country’s best collections of late 19th- and early 20th century buildings.
Jarmain says he tries not to judge the city for demolishing structures in an effort to shrink its enormous urban footprint. He also understands people are stripping the buildings because they desperately need money or supplies. He just wants to make sure he can get as many buildings recorded as he can before they disappear.
Two recent examples spring to mind, because they are representative of the complexity of this kind of issue in a world of such staggering social and cultural change. Here’s a quote from the UKIP member of the European parliament, Godfrey Bloom, on the perils of foreign aid:
How we can possibly be giving a billion pounds a month when we’re in this sort of debt to bongo bongo land is completely beyond me.
That’s a weird formulation – aid is not debt. But the context reveals that the man’s main ire is directed at the European Union, and not just at developing countries:
Mr Bloom, who pointed out he has a Polish wife and Kashmiri staff, said that his comments were not racist. Asked by the BBC where “bongo bongo” land is, Mr Bloom referred to “Ruritania” – a fictional country in Europe that formed the setting for three novels by Anthony Hope.
Does that make him a racist or just a xenophobe? This hilarious interview – dissecting the origins of the term “bongo-bongo-land” – suggests both to me:
But I’m not sure I’d be able to prove that point beyond a reasonable doubt. Sometimes, a racist expression is so foul and unrelated to any broader context that it merits no debate – like this tirade from Eagles player Riley Cooper. The trouble is: racism is often also interwoven with all sorts of other factors. It collides with legitimate resistance to fast cultural change, xenophobia, generational attitudes, and legitimate questions, such as immigration policy, in which one side should not be deemed irrational because of an implied racist motivation. Take this explanation of Smith’s broader point:
When a country has a trillion pounds of debt and we’re cutting our hospitals, our police force and we’re destroying our defense services, that the money should stay at home and people who want to give money to worthwhile charities…what I would argue is that is for the individual citizens. It’s not for the likes of David Cameron to pick our pockets and send money to charities of his choice.
That may in some way be a reflection of racism, but it is also a legitimate political argument. And it’s hard to tackle the latter if you are constantly wrapped up in debates about the former. Then there’s the complex interaction of tradition, culture and social change. So this sure looks like racism on the surface:
T.J. Hawkins rolled out the big inner tube, and the bull lowered his head, shot forward and launched into the tube, sending it bounding down the center of the arena. The crowd cheered. Then the bull saw the George Bush dummy. He tore into it, sending the rubber mask flying halfway across the sand as he turned toward the fence, sending cowboys scrambling up the fence rails, hooking one with his horn and tossing him off the fence.
What might be seen as racist in one context – because the president is black – may not be in another. What some may see as a legitimate reclaiming of sovereignty from European bureaucrats can also be motivated by bald “bongo-bongo-land” racism. This is not either-or. And if it’s not either-or, we have to make a decision as to whether to hunt for these manifestations of racism or ignore them and get on with the actual arguments at hand, regardless of their psychological motivation. I favor as a purely pragmatic measure not jumping on every incident like this to yell racism – not because it is never racist, but because that charge cannot truly be proven without peering into opaque human souls, because it diverts potentially constructive debate into moral posturing, and because it is crowding out our discourse with gotchas that don’t really advance substantive debate.
And now I’ve written an entire post about whether certain people are racists. See how the cycle continues?
The upcoming book To Be or Not to Be is an illustrated “chooseable-path adventure” version of Hamlet. Cartoonist Ryan North explains his inspiration:
“It occurred to me that [Hamlet’s] favorite speech, ‘To Be Or Not To Be’, is structured like a choice, almost like those old Choose Your Own Adventure books, and I thought, ‘Oh my God, I have to write this.'” North says. So he wrote his version of Hamlet in the style of the classic children’s book series, in which the reader would be prompted to make the main character’s decisions — turn to page 3 for this, turn to page 5 for that — and take the story in many different directions.
Alison Hallett credits the Kickstarter project’s record-breaking $580,905 to North’s business savvy:
[T]hanks to North’s voluble backer updates and creative reward tiers, being a part of his campaign didn’t feel like simply preordering something, as Kickstarter so often does these days; nor did it have the faint whiff of desperation that often comes with artists asking their friends and family for money. This felt like being a part of the creative process, and having a front-row seat to an artist giddily realizing that his biggest dreams are now possible.
And she deems the result is a success:
In Hamlet, the Prince of Denmark has one of the most famous existential crises in literary history, as he ponders aloud whether suicide is worth the risk that whatever happens after death might be even worse than life itself. North’s version puts the being vs. not-being decision square in the reader’s hands, though it turns out choosing “Not to Be: turn to page 17” isn’t much of an adventure at all: It leads to artist Mike Holmes’ illustration of Hamlet chugging from a vial of poison, one pinky lifted genteelly, while Ophelia peeks from behind a curtain. There’s no sign of the terrifying death-nightmares Hamlet’s so worried about; just the words “The End.” But even asking the reader to make the decision highlights how much of the original play—and how much of life itself—revolves around possibly crazy people bumbling through situations they barely understand, possessing a fraction of the information they need to get from one scene to the next.
Keith Lowe explores how historians are increasingly reevaluating idealistic beliefs about World War II. Aaron William Moore, for instance, examines the wartime diaries of Japanese, Chinese, and American soldiers in his book Writing War:
Perhaps most disturbing of all is the way that Moore analyses the actual process of diary writing by these men. In all three countries, he reveals, the thoughts and feelings of soldiers were closely monitored by their superior officers. As a consequence the sentiments they expressed were self-policed: soldiers effectively used their diaries as a way of convincing themselves to act in the way that was required of them by the state.
The implications of this are huge, and draw a question mark over one of our strongest taboos about the war. When Chinese, Japanese or American soldiers spurred themselves on to commit acts of bravery, or atrocity, how much were they expressing their own desires and how much were they resigning themselves to things that were expected of them? Does this – can this ever – at least partially absolve them of the things they did during wartime?
The fact that we can ask such questions says as much about our own time as it does about the second world war. Perhaps we are more comfortable expressing doubt now than we were a generation ago, or even 10 years ago, when we were deeply embroiled in the black-and-white certainties of the cold war or the war on terror. Perhaps the behaviour of our armed forces today – such as the Abu Ghraib scandal – has allowed us also to ask questions about how our soldiers behaved in the past.
The Dish 