Tag: Premium

Suicide And Gun Control, Ctd

A new study finds that “residents of states with the highest rates of gun ownership and political conservatism are at greater risk of suicide than those in states with less gun ownership and less politically conservative leanings”:

[University of California, Riverside sociology professor Augustine J. Kposowa] said that although policies aimed at seriously regulating firearm ownership would reduce individual suicides, such policies are likely to fail not because they do not work, but because many Americans remain opposed to meaningful gun control, arguing that they have a constitutional right to bear arms. “Even modest efforts to reform gun laws are typically met with vehement opposition. There are also millions of Americans who continue to believe that keeping a gun at home protects them against intruders, even though research shows that when a gun is used in the home, it is often against household members in the commission of homicides or suicides,” Kposowa said.

Previous Dish on suicide and gun control here.

Republicans vs Rubio

The immigration bill and its most prominent Republican supporter are under attack:

Conservative bloggers immediately seized on portions of the bill funding expanded cell phone access along the border as evidence Rubio was supplying free phones to undocumented immigrants. Some commentators connected it to the “Obama phone,” a popular meme on the right last year about a program that provides discounts on phone service to the poor. Despite the moniker, it predated the current administration by decades and rose to prominence last year mostly due to a viral video of a female black Obama supporter talking about the program.

Rubio himself was confronted with the claim on Wednesday in an interview with conservative talk show host Laura Ingraham, who quoted from a blog post that read “Move over Obama phone, this is the amnesty phone.”

In response, Rubio pointed out that the phones are not for illegal immigrants but for US citizens “so they can report illegal crossings because many of them either don’t have phone service or don’t have cell phone service and they have no way of calling.” Waldman bets that the truth won’t matter much:

What folks like Ingraham understand is that when you’re trying to gin up outrage about a big, complex piece of legislation, the way to do it is to find some component of the bill that is weighted with symbolic value and will hit directly on your target audience’s resentments and fears. It doesn’t matter how minor the provision is, or how much you need to distort its actual function and intent. All that matters is that it’ll get people pissed off.

Seth Mandel sees Rubio’s outreach to the talk-radio right as essential:

[E]ven if the bill comes together and passes the Senate, Rubio and the others will have far less influence on what happens to it in the GOP-controlled House. And that is why Rubio is working so hard to dull conservative commentators’ unease with anything that resembles “amnesty” for illegal immigrants. Rubio is scheduled to appear on Rush Limbaugh’s show today, and it will be Rubio’s second interview with Limbaugh since the push for immigration reform picked up steam after the November election.

Labeling Terror

Fertilizer Plant Explosion In West, Texas

President Obama announced this week that the FBI is treating the Boston bombing as a case of terrorism, since explosives were used to target civilians. Yesterday, I likewise wrote that “happened in Boston was an act of terror.” Lisa Beyer demurs:

Actually, that’s not right. The U.S. federal code and the Federal Bureau of Investigation both include in their definitions of terrorism an element of political motivation. Having spent nearly a decade based in Israel, I understand the common impulse to fit any grave disturbance into an obvious narrative. While politicians, commentators and bystanders can afford such assumptions, the responsible authorities cannot. I remember a particular car bombing in Israel, which the media, as a matter of course, treated as a terrorist act. Evidence later emerged proving the bombing was an internal mob hit.

That’s a helpful perspective. My own definition was based on a simple idea: violence designed to terrorize a broader community – violence random and dangerous enough to affect far more people than those directly hurt. There’s no question that many Bostonians were terrorized by the bombings. But that definition would definitely fit Newtown as well – arguably more broadly. Maybe I was painting with too broad a brush. It’s also true that unintentional violence can terrorize. I cannot imagine how the citizens of West, Texas, feel this morning. They just witnessed an explosion far larger than Oklahoma City. (Despite the location near Waco and the mid-April date, I am assuming no one was behind the explosion.) Ackerman agrees with Beyer:

For some, “terrorism” will equate to an act committed by Muslims, no matter how many pre- and post-9/11 acts of terrorism were committed by non-Muslims.

It’s not fair. But it is real. That association can have dire consequences for innocent Muslims and non-Muslims, both from ignorant fanatics and from law enforcement. One of the biggest sources of speculation in journalism and on social media concerned a Saudi national questioned in the bombing. Yet Boston police commissioner Ed Davis said flatly [yesterday], “There is no one in custody.” The investigation is just beginning to interview Bostonians.

That’s to be expected: law enforcement has to run down what one investigator called the “voluminous” leads emerging in the hours after the explosions. After reports came through social media about police questioning Arabs who among the thousands running away from the Copley disaster area, people grimly joked that “Running While Arab” is the new “Driving While Black.”

The Saudi national, a student, turned out to be simply a victim himself. Brian Beutler blames Benghazi for the focus on the T-word: 

The media was listening for that word yesterday because they identified it as a potential source of a future, contrived political controversy; reporters were acting as opposition researchers for the people they cover, and identified a sin of omission. Like the inverse of when Obama said the private sector was “doing fine” and the press corps zeroed out everything else he said in the same press conference.

Waldman’s contribution to the debate:

Words certainly matter, but the idea that if we use the word “terrorism” to refer to a particular attack then we’re being strong, brave, and resolute, while if we call it, say, an “attack” then we’re being weak and cowardly, is just insane.

Yes, that’s a fetish now common on the let’s-panic right. It’s not about what happens. It’s a form of partisan self-expression. Which may be reason alone to be more circumspect before using it.

(Photo: Shattered glass covers items in the front of a thrift show after the West Fertilizer Company exploded April 18, 2013 in West, Texas. A massive explosion at the fertilizer company injured more than 100 people and left damaged buildings for blocks in every direction. The death toll from the blast, which occured as firefighters were tackling a blaze, is as yet unknown. By Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images.)

Being Master Of Your Own Domain

Quitting masturbation is a trend on Reddit now, in the “NoFap” forum:

The goals for all these men, regardless of their personal lives or relationship statuses, seemed to be similar: to return to a more charged, natural self. It’s a throwback notion—virility as integral to manhood—but many of these anti-masturbators regard it as truth. “I feel like a man again” is a common refrain. One NoFapper referred to his 90 days without masturbation as “a passage into manhood.” They see masturbation as a failure of masculinity—not because it’s shameful or forever associated with adolescence, but because, on a fundamental, even chemical level, it’s draining their true potential.

The medical profession isn’t convinced. Every doctor and psychologist I spoke with informed me that “there’s no evidence” to link masturbation to sexual performance, and that it’s an over­simplification to think that frequent masturbation is the cause of delayed ejaculation.

Adam Weinstein isn’t on board:

The thing about jacking off is, it’s so personal it’s mystical: There is only you, and the feeling that arises in you. No one can judge that relationship better than you—as opposed to abstainers, who like ardent ex-smokers can judge and browbeat you, Mr. (or Ms.) Self-Abuser, as only the zealous convert can. For my part, jerking it makes me a calmer, happier, more compassionate person. I am confident in my body. I am exultant in sex and sensitive to anyone I’m lucky enough to share my sex with. And in compartmentalizing masturbation as separate from the finer pursuits of life, I feel more mindful of my surroundings, not less.

It’s worth recalling that the formal, theological case against masturbation is identical to that against contraception and gay marriage. It is sodomy, as defined in the early modern period, i.e. ejaculation outside the vagina of a married female. So, as I argued at length a decade ago, we are all sodomites now. Men, anyway. Has any priest now living not masturbated?

For the record, I could never grasp why this was so wrong. My instinctual reaction to my first teenage orgasm was total wonderment. Of course, I had been taught nothing about this strange liquid coming out of my dick. It happened while I was reading – of all things – one of the Don Camillo short stories by Giovannino Guareschi. Not the most predictable erotic trigger – but when you’re fourteen, it could be the ceiling and you’d hit yourself in the eye if you weren’t careful.

To me, having this amazing thing suddenly come alive in my body was so obviously marvelous, so instantly ecstatic, it never occurred to me that God forbade me to forsake it. Why give me this 24-hour, unlosable instrument of blind, transcendent pleasure – and then bid me not to touch it? I had never experienced anything so simply pleasurable in my whole life until then. If we’re talking natural law, all I can say is that masturbation was the single most natural thing I had ever done at the moment in my life. More natural than watching television or riding a bus. If I felt guilt, it required some excruciating effort – until I realized that the most effective thing to trigger the constantly loaded rifle was thinking of another man. Usually naked. I had no porn or access to it. So I drew the men I wanted (and they all looked scarily like my husband). It was only then that the culture began to bear down on my nature.

But as I’ve grown older, and mercifully less driven by my dick, I can see the point of self-denial. In your teens, you have a constant unstoppable production of more sperm than could ever merely reproduce (another natural refutation of natural law). By your forties (unless I’ve just had my testosterone shot), not so much. So a little self-restraint definitely increases the pleasure and intensity of the orgasm you eventually get. And no, I feel no guilt about it whatever. It’s so psychically natural, so obviously intuitive, it was the first step for me toward dismantling the strange doctrines of natural law on human sexuality, devised in the early middle ages by men who knew a lot at the time – but tiny shards of truth compared to what we know now.

Wank on, my brothers and sisters. Wank on.

Ask Dreher Anything: “A Club Of Epistemic Closure”

Rod explains why he is not a Republican:

Rod recently discussed his political evolution and the current state of conservatism:

When I was in college, and first became a conservative, it was the liberals who had a reputation as rigid, doctrinaire, snide, and off-putting. I’m generalizing, but in those days, liberals were the ones who were far more likely to be brittle, who weren’t willing to look around and adjust their prescriptions to changing circumstances, who seemed disconnected from the world as it was. It seemed to me that liberals had emotional and ideological touchstones in a bygone political and cultural era, and they dealt with changing times by insisting on greater ideological purity in the ranks. Whatever else 1980s liberalism wasn’t, it wasn’t attractive. It seemed outdated and exhausted, both in terms of substantive policies and in terms of the way it presented itself to the public.

I began my college career as a liberal, and it slowly began to dawn on me that I didn’t really believe in liberalism so much as I couldn’t stand Reagan and the people who loved him. I spent my freshman year fuming over the fact that my dad and all his friends were Reagan Democrats living in false consciousness; it never once occurred to me to wonder why it was working-class men had ceased to identify with the Democratic Party, and whether or not liberalism had anything wrong with it. My side was losing, but we found it easier to blame the fools who voted for Reagan, or to blame Reagan for being such an accomplished liar, than to examine ourselves and our own beliefs. (When I did begin to do that, my liberalism, which was primarily attitudinal, faded away.)

This is pretty much the case with conservatism today, I’m afraid. We could argue, and should argue, over what the policies of conservative government should be today; that’s not my point in this blog entry. My point here is that there is no creative ferment on the Right, no breathing space, few places where new ideas can emerge. All the energy on the Right seems aimed at hunting down the heretics within. That, and making life as hard as possible for the opposition, not because they have something better in mind, but as an end in itself. 

His previous Ask Anything videos are here, here, here and here. Be sure to check out his new book, The Little Way of Ruthie Leming: A Southern Girl, a Small Town, and the Secret of a Good Life. Ask Anything archive here.

The Failure Of Gun Control: Reax

Tomasky praises the president’s remarks (above) after the Senate’s gun-control bill failed:

Obama’s words were the most powerful he’s delivered in years. Call it failed if you want, but this was leadership: knowing that he was probably going to lose on the Hill, but putting everything he had into the fight anyway. He took on not only the NRA and its whores in Congress, he took on the blasé complacency of a pundit class that said repeatedly: he’ll never win, so why do this; he should have struck while the iron was hot; he should have talked to Republicans more. Yes, it was clear that a challenge to the NRA was likely to lose, but that isn’t what always should dictate a politician’s actions. He behaved out of conviction. This is rare enough among politicians that Obama certainly should not be nitpicked for this or that little thing he did or didn’t do.

Jacob Sullum differs:

Obama does a fine job of empathizing with the parents of Adam Lanza’s victims. But that is something any decent human being should be able to manage. Where he has trouble, despite his lip service to the idea of putting himself in the other guy’s shoes, is in empathizing with his opponents. He not only says they are wrong, which is to be expected. He refuses to concede that people who disagree with him about gun control are acting in good faith, based on what they believe to be sound reasons—that they, like him, are doing what they think is right. His self-righteous solipsism is striking even for a politician.

But the way in which the NRA re-framed the debate dishonestly was “bad faith.” And after Heller, and more than a decade of looser gun restrictions, what more do Second Amendment enthusiasts want? When you look at the balance of things – and I’m not a big enthusiast for more gun control, but see the obvious sanity of universal background checks – the NRA has taken its own achievements as the middle ground and keeps moving ever further right. They remind me of AIPAC – and they distort public policy just as toxically. Drum looks ahead:

President Obama was right to call this “round one.” This kind of thing is a long-term fight for public opinion, and only after you get the public firmly on your side do you have any real chance of passing serious legislation. So the question today for liberals is simple: Is this issue important enough to keep banging away on it for years on end, the way the NRA does? If not, nothing will ever happen.

In an earlier post, Drum examines public opinion on gun control:

Gun control proposals poll decently all the time. But the plain truth is that there are only a small number of people who feel really strongly about it, and they mostly live in urban blue districts already. Outside of that, pro-gun control opinion is about an inch deep. This is a classic case where poll literalism leads you completely astray. Without measuring intensity of feeling, that 90 percent number is meaningless.

Chait adds:

Almost everybody may support background checks, but not every American knows the actual content of every bill that gets a vote. Look at health-care reform. Americans overwhelmingly favor nearly every provision of Obamacare, but oppose the law because they had a general sense of not liking it. Likewise, opponents have turned the debate into a general discussion of “gun control,” which is way less popular than a specific law about background checks. Lisa Murkowski explains her No vote thusly: “In Alaska you’re pretty much pro-gun. That about sums it up.”

Adam Winkler wonders if proposing an assault weapons ban was a mistake:

If President Obama had pushed for a law only requiring universal background checks—maybe coupled with the NRA’s proposal for more funding for school security—he might have been able to persuade Congress to consider his proposals in February, when Newtown was fresher in our collective memory. The four-month delay enabled the NRA to rally its troops—and, more importantly, its allies in Congress.

Weigel’s perspective:

Manchin-Toomey was “branded” about as well as any gun bill can be, endorsed by a man whose state handed Barack Obama a defeat in every county and a man who spent most of his life in politics trying to primary Republicans. The watered-down bill was only as watery as a background checks bill that narrowly failed in 1999, with more Republicans supporting it. Democrats had come to view the NRA as unsavory liars who had to be beaten on something legislatively, just as they were beaten at the polls in 2016, to shift back the center of debate. They failed.

Choosing A Special Needs Child, Ctd

A reader writes:

I’m hydrocephalic, and the condition was able to be treated at birth through a shunt. (I was born in 1976). Let your reader know that the condition is fairly “fixable” now in certain instances, if detected early. My mother spent many years in fear that a specific painkiller she took during pregnancy contributed to my condition, but it really appears to have been a one-off in our case; my three siblings are unaffected. I have to say that I was unaware that hydrocephalus could be carried genetically in this manner, but it makes sense. However, I don’t know what my parents would have done had modern technology been available, or indeed what I myself would have done in this instance. It’s a personal decision, and I imagine the severity of what the doctor detects will dictate what counsel is given to the parents.

Another addresses Andrew Soloman’s piece:

I am a pediatric intensive care physician who took care of a child with trisomy 18 who ultimately died, and I want to share my perspective on the issue of caring for a child with severe genetic defects. Trisomy 18 is quite different from trisomy 21 (Down Syndrome) and, in general, has a very grim prognosis. With this chromosomal abnormality, multiple organ systems can be involved (neurologic, cardiac and digestive tract commonly) and until relatively recently most institutions did not recommend intervention. Moreover, in children in whom interventions are performed, most will still die before reaching one year of life.

The child who I helped take care of had a malformed brain with hydrocephalus and also had seizures.

The suck-and-swallow mechanism was not intact so the child had to be tube-fed. There was also a heart defect that required surgery with cardiopulmonary bypass. The child had a malformed airway and had to have a tracheostomy placed to undergo the surgery. The digestive tract was malformed, the stomach was so small that it couldn’t hold very large volumes and therefore the child had to be fed small amounts continuously for 24 hours per day.

The mother for this child received good prenatal care. She was counseled about the trisomy 18 diagnosis and opted to carry the child to term. Once the child was born, she was a strong advocate for her child and wanted every medical intervention performed that could potentially prolong life. The child spent its entire life, 3 months, in an ICU.

After the heart surgery and tracheostomy placement, the child couldn’t be separated from a mechanical ventilator and was dependent on a breathing machine. There were complications after the heart surgery that required placement of a pacemaker. In adults, pacemakers are hardly noticeable. In a 5-lb child, the device takes up half the abdomen. This became a serious problem. As a result of her small stomach and inability to tolerate adequate caloric intake, she was malnourished, had inadequate fat stores and the device began to erode through her skin.

At times we supplemented her with IV nutrition with central venous lines. These IVs that go into large vessels have significant risk associated with them, including infection and serious blood clots. As a result we don’t leave them into too long. This meant were constantly sticking this child with needles trying to get IVs in superficial veins.  In addition, we also had to draw blood for labs to monitor responses to therapies. IV placement and phlebotomy can be challenging in otherwise normal children much less one who is this ill.

I have no doubt this child suffered. A lot. We provided drugs to help alleviate pain and anxiety. This child became dependent on opiates and benzodiazepines. In light of all the other medical problems, this was relatively small one. However, if the child wasn’t sedated, the child was miserable.  And if we tried to reduce the medications, the child had symptoms of withdrawal.

The mother never left the bedside. She was clearly bonded with her child and the child was definitely soothed when the mother was there. Because the child was frequently unstable, the mother did not get to hold the child very often. The mother learned how to take care of the tracheostomy, the feeding tube. You couldn’t ask for a more attentive parent.

There were costs of her devotion, however. The family lived some distance from the hospital and this mother had two other toddler-aged healthy children who she didn’t see very much because she was always in the hospital. While she and her husband agreed to carry the child to term, they were on very different pages regarding which medical interventions to pursue and for how long. There were financial hardships including getting to and from the hospital, childcare, etc. The child ultimately ended up acquiring a serious pneumonia and cardiovascular instability and sepsis. The mother decided to compassionately stop medical interventions and we disconnected the child from the ventilator and the mother held her dying child.

In this case, the mother chose to take this on. Even in light of all the bad news we physicians bombarded her with, she pressed on.  She joined an online support group of mothers of children with trisomy 18 children. She told us many times that we, the medical team, couldn’t take her hope away. I agree with her. I didn’t want to take her hope away. That isn’t my role nor do I want it to be. I can’t provide false hope either. The struggle I had, and continue to have, is did I do the best I could in treating and advocating for this patient? This child spent its entire life in an ICU, drugged, unable to be held for much of the time, hooked to machinery, being poked and prodded with needles.

From a medical decision-making standpoint, we do not operate in a patriarchal system. The presumption is that parents, unusual circumstances not withstanding, will make decisions in the best interest of their child. Children, almost universally, cannot have advanced directives, and with babies, the point is moot. I have no doubt that the mother believed she was acting in the best interest of her child and I also believe the medical team addressed suffering and quality of life with this mother.  While medical futility applies in a very small number of cases, we wrestle with the moral and ethics of medical interventions all of the time.

The legislation being proposed in North Dakota could have very real costs, in every sense. I’ve provided only one example; there are many more like this. Not everyone will have the resources that the mother I describe above, as limited as her resources were. Divorces are very common in families who have children with serious medical conditions. There is also a very serious economic toll both to the individual family and the healthcare system at large.

Of course all of that pales in comparison to the emotional and physical pain and suffering that a patient and family go through when caring for a baby with a devastating and terminal diagnosis. It is one thing for families (or a mother) to chose to take this on; it’s quite another to force them.

Bill Keller, Still Flailing

Inside the New York Times

[Re-posted from earlier today.]

There was something almost poignant about a post yesterday by former NYT executive editor Bill Keller. It’s his way of explaining why he decided the Times could not use the plain word ‘torture’ to describe torture – when it was conducted by the Bush administration. He conflates the issue with the other t-word, terrorism, as if there were some kind of analogy. There isn’t. What happened in Benghazi was an act of terror, as Obama said the following day. What happened in Boston was an act of terror. The only circumspection about the word should be in the immediate aftermath of explosions when it seems to me prudent not to jump to conclusions. So the fire at the JFK Library Monday was not an act of terror.

The most it can take to reach the conclusion about terror is a few days. Yet the New York Times has refused to use the word ‘torture’ for years in its news pages and is still avoiding it. Keller was behind that decision. Future historians of the press will note how the most powerful single journalistic institution in the country simply caved to government and partisan pressure – even on the use of the English language.

Keller denies this. He says the avoidance of the word was because there was an ongoing debate about the legal meaning of torture, and therefore the NYT should have stayed neutral.

The editors (I was one at the time) argued that what constituted torture was still a matter of debate, that this issue was not just linguistic but legal and had not yet been resolved by a court, and that the word was commonly applied to such a range of practices as to be imprecise. We contended that the best approach was to describe the techniques as fully as possible and let readers draw their own conclusions.

Keller writes that the issue of what torture is “had not yet been resolved by a court”. Really?

Let us take, for example, a torture technique both Bush and Cheney have openly bragged about authorizing: waterboarding. Has no court adjudicated the matter? I refer Keller to page 371 of the Constitution Project report, which details countless examples of US courts finding waterboarding unequivocally to be torture:

In the early 20th century, U.S. Army Captain Elwin Glenn was court-martialed for administering the “water cure” to civilians during the combat operations in the Philippines. Japanese military personnel were convicted of war crimes by the International Military Tribunal for the Far East for using the “water treatment” method on POWs. And several lower-ranking soldiers were convicted of waterboarding, a war crime, in the years following the war.

Several state courts have decided cases involving waterboarding as well. In White v. State, the Mississippi Supreme Court threw out a 1922 murder conviction because the defendant’s confession had been obtained using the “water cure.” In that case, men held the appellant down while one stood on him and the other poured water into his nose in order to gain a confession. The court described this treatment as “barbarous” and “brutal treatment,” “causing pain and horror.”

In Cavazos v. State, the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals similarly reversed a murder conviction where officers had extracted a confession by coercive means, including the water cure. The Cavazos court found in 1942 that the trial judge had improperly admitted a confession that was “obtained by force and physical and mental torture.”

Four decades after Cavazos, four Texas law-enforcement officers who had waterboarded suspects were convicted of “violating and conspiring to violate the civil rights of prisoners in their custody.” The defendants, a sheriff and three deputies, had “draped a towel over each man’s face and pour[ed] water over it until the men gagged.” While not considering the nature of the treatment itself on appeal, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit in 1984 repeatedly described the actions of the sheriff and deputies as “torture.”

While all of the above cases were decided prior to Convention Against Torture’s ratification, U.S. courts have held that waterboarding is a form of torture after the U.S.’s ratification as well. For example, in In re Estate of Ferdinand E. Marcos Human Rights Litigation, the U.S. District Court for the District Court of Hawaii specifically listed waterboarding (or “water cure”) as one form of torture practiced by the Marcos regime, which used such techniques against political dissidents who then brought their claims in U.S. courts when seeking asylum. The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit subsequently supported this finding.

The Marcos regime used waterboarding against political dissidents while it was in control of the Philippines, and it was the basis of many claims by victims in the ensuing litigation in American courts.

To repeat: Keller writes in his post that the issue of whether waterboarding was torture “had not yet been resolved by a court.” It had – and in no single case had there been any equivocation at all. Waterboarding was explicitly defined as torture by the Bush State Department and the Convention Against Torture. It is a war crime – or the law and the English language mean nothing. The same is true for a litany of other authorized abuses – which have clear, legal and regulatory status as torture. Will the former editor of the Times correct a factual error?

At any time during his position as NYT executive editor, Mr Keller could also have looked up the legal definition, which is not in dispute:

[A]n act committed by a person acting under the color of law specifically intended to inflict severe physical or mental pain or suffering (other than pain or suffering incidental to lawful sanctions) upon another person within his custody or physical control.

So allow me to remind Mr Keller of what his own newspaper, among others, reported about what was authorized by the president himself:

using dogs to terrorize prisoners; stripping detainees naked and hooding them; isolating people in windowless cells for weeks and even months on end; freezing prisoners to near-death and reviving them and repeating the hypothermia; contorting prisoners into stress positions that create unbearable pain in the muscles and joints; cramming prisoners into upright coffins in painful positions with minimal air; near-drowning, on a waterboard, of human beings—in one case 183 times—even after they have cooperated with interrogators.

And in many cases – it was many of the above combined – and several confirmed cases of being tortured to death. How can anyone not see that these techniques clearly “inflict severe physical or mental pain or suffering” on people completely under the government’s control? There is not now and never has been a debate about this.

So why Keller’s bizarre refusal to call it by its proper name? The reason is simple. Keller knew that publishing the word torture with respect to president Bush and his administration was a factual allegation of war crimes. Such an accusation would have caused all the usual suspects to deride the NYT as a left-liberal rag, with a partisan agenda. There would have been huge partisan political blowback. It might also have prevented NYT reporters from getting access to anyone in the Bush administration. Keller basically admits as much:

Now that I reside in the opinion zone, I use the word “torture” without hesitation, but I still believe that editors in the news pages should be a little slow to preempt the judgment of readers, or to use language that carries a suggestion of political posture.

Does the nonpartisan report made public today mean that what is “torture” in the Opinion pages can now be “torture” in the news pages? Has the noun shed some of its partisan freight? Watch that space.

“Language that carries a suggestion of political posture.” But what if that language is the plain truth?

Let me just say that I have a different view of the Fourth Estate than Keller does. I believe that a newspaper should report what it can in plain English, without regard to anyone else’s views on the matter, and whatever the positions of the political parties. It should publish what it deems to be true by its own methods and conclusions.

Keller, in contrast, believes a newspaper should not publish the truth if one political party has decided – arbitrarily and in accord with its own legal self-interests – that there is a “debate” about it. It’s an almost classic Fallowsian “false equivalence” moment. There is, for example, a debate about evolution. Does the NYT use a euphemism because the theory of natural selection is fiercely opposed by a large number of Americans? Does it routinely refer to “the theory of natural selection which many Americans dispute”. Of course not. They can report on polarizing issues in plain English in most cases. But not when something as profound as a president committing war crimes is concerned. Not, in other words, when you really need an independent and free press.

He also writes: “the word was commonly applied to such a range of practices as to be imprecise.” But that reveals a deep misunderstanding of the laws against torture. They are broadly drawn because that was the entire point: to rule out of bounds anything even approaching torture or cruel and inhuman conduct. In 2003, president Bush made the following statement:

I call on all governments to join with the United States and the community of law-abiding nations in prohibiting, investigating, and prosecuting all acts of torture and in undertaking to prevent other cruel and unusual punishment. I call on all nations to speak out against torture in all its forms and to make ending torture an essential part of their diplomacy.

There you have the president himself defining torture as broadly and clearly as the statute. And yet Keller was incapable of doing the same – out of fear of seeming biased.

To take another specific example of the US government taking this approach to torture, look at the asylum cases decided by the Justice Department and the immigration services under the Department of Homeland Security. You can examine the rules here. There is simply no doubt that an asylum-seeker who had evidence of being waterboarded by a foreign government would be granted asylum by the US. Because he had been tortured. Or imagine if an American soldier were captured by Iran and water-boarded. Would the New York Times refuse to say he was tortured? Seriously?

Keller knew the truth and his newspaper did sterling work in uncovering it. But he refused to tell the legal truth in plain English because he couldn’t take the political whirlwind that would ensue. He’s now searching for an excuse to decide that the issue was once vague but now clear and so we can all move along quietly please.

I’m sorry, but no. Keller needs to take responsibility for a key failure of nerve at a vital moment in the history of basic human rights. In this he is sadly like the president: against torture, except when it might mean serious political headwinds. History will condemn them both – but nothing is more damaging to the reputation of a newspaper than cowardice and equivocation in the face of such glaringly obvious facts.

(Photo: Inside the ‘page one meeting’ with New York Times Editor Bill Keller, May, 2008 in New York City. There are two daily meeting one at 10:30am and the other at 4pm to discuss what stories will be used on the front page of the paper, with the section editors and senior editors. By Jonathan Torgovnik/Edit by Getty Images.)

The Safety Of Marathons

Lydia DePillis argues that marathons are impossible to secure completely. Alyssa thinks tight security “would fundamentally change the nature of marathoning for both participants and spectators”:

As Erin Gloria Ryan wrote for Jezebel, much of the value of these events is in the interaction between large numbers of runners and large numbers of viewers in close proximity to them. “The spectators — people who show up and cheer with noisemakers and high fives and encouraging cheers and magic-markered tagboard signs that read “YOU ALL ARE CRAZY! KEEP RUNNING!”— are the people who matter most to runners,” she explained. ” Without those people, a marathon would just be an exercise in self-abuse from a large group of crazies. But there is meaning in marathoning: the people who watch.”

Russell Saunders zooms out and observes “the ironic failure of terrorism”:

It shouldn’t be an act of courage to dine out in Tel Aviv. It’s shouldn’t be an act of courage to buy groceries in Baghdad. It shouldn’t be an act of courage to earn your paycheck in a skyscraper in Manhattan.

And then it becomes one.

Which is the ironic failure of terrorism. Because of course people will continue to dine out in Tel Aviv and go to market in Baghdad and step on the elevator in New York City. Where previously they did so without thinking, now they do so in a quietly defiant way. Because people will refuse to obey the dictates of the depraved and craven, and will go on living their lives. They will locate the courage within themselves. They will keep running marathons.

Bruce Schneier’s words of advice:

The damage from terrorism is primarily emotional. To the extent this terrorist attack succeeds has very little do with the attack itself. It’s all about our reaction. We must refuse to be terrorized. Imagine if the bombs were found and moved at the last second, and no one died, but everyone was just as scared. The terrorists would have succeeded anyway. If you are scared, they win. If you refuse to be scared, they lose, no matter how much carnage they commit.