Fretting over space junk is universal among people who care about satellites or space travel. Even partisans in Congress agree that it is a problem. “The scientists who predicted climate change started the same way I did,” [space-junk expert and astrophysicist Don] Kessler muses. “They were thinking about what would happen if we keep dumping things into the air around us. I was thinking about what happens if we do it in space.”
Yet space pollution talks have not been poisoned by political division.
A plan to clean up space is held back by different kind of political paralysis than partisanship. In the United States, three separate agencies handle licensing for various aspects of a commercial satellite launch. Another set of rules governs military activities, with yet another for civilian government research. Who has authority to enforce rules or mete out punishment is murky. Moreover, some Defense Department satellite orbits are classified, as is the reason the department deployed an anti-satellite weapon of its own in 2008 after China’s test the previous year. Any discussion about space regulation, such as one held during a meeting of the House Committee on Science, Space, and Technology in May, is filled with bureaucratic verbs that end in -ize (legitimize,compartmentalize, theorize). Too much remained unknown, lawmakers concluded, so they weren’t “ready to legislate yet.”
For years, the [American Academy of Pediatrics] has told parents to avoid using screens with children younger than 2. It’s a recommendation based on an understandable concern that parents will substitute screen-watching for the warm, real-world interactions children need. But it doesn’t allow for the possibility that cuddle moments might be possible with a screen on the lap.
Worse, the “no screens” dictates have led to confusion.
As a journalist who has spent a decade reviewing research on screentime and young children, I have spoken with families across the country about how they use technology with their children. Parents have told me about exhausting maneuvers they have attempted to keep their baby’s head turned away from screens when their older children are watching. One mother in Portland, Ore., was visibly upset when she approached me after a public forum on the subject. She and her 1-year-old had been Skyping with her mother in China, and she desperately wanted to keep doing so because they all loved the interactions, but she worried that something emanating from the screen would harm her baby. In fact, a 2013 study in the research journal Child Development shows the opposite: Webcam-like interactions with loved ones can help young children form bonds and learn new words.
Perhaps not coincidentally this week, in the wake of gamergate, The New Republic, as part of its 100th anniversary, has republished my June 2000 essay, “Male Culture Should Be More Than Beer, Sex, and Cars”. After bemoaning the often sexist tropes promoted in glossy men’s magazines, I argue:
The notion of the “gentleman,” or indeed any notion of masculinity attached to gentility, has almost vanished from the cultural air. What happened, one wonders, and why?
I guess you could start by observing that many areas of life that were once “gentlemanly” have simply been opened to women and thus effectively demasculinized. A college education, for one thing, along with all the journals, books, and conversations that go along with it, is now thoroughly—and rightly—integrated. Education is no longer a function of becoming a man but a function of becoming a nongendered citizen. There are whole swaths of public life—business, politics, sports, and so forth—that once inculcated a form of refined masculinity but are now unsexed. Even military schools and seminaries, once the ultimate male bastions, have thrown open their doors to women.
I’m not going to quibble with this. Why should I? Greater opportunity for women is probably the most significant gain for human freedom in the last century. But with this gain has come a somewhat unexpected problem: How do we restore a sense of masculinity that is vaguely civilized? Take their exclusive vocations away, remove their institutions, de-gender their clubs and schools and workplaces, and you leave men with more than a little cultural bewilderment. The only things left that are predominantly male—sex with women, beer, gadgets, sex with women, cars, beer, and more gadgets, to judge from men’s magazines—tend to be, shall we say, lacking in elevation.
A certain type of feminism is, I think, part of the problem.
By denying any deep biological or psychological difference between the sexes, some influential feminists refuse to countenance any special treatment for men and boys. They see even the ethic of the gentleman as sexist and regard the excrescences of the current male pop culture as a function of willful hostility to women rather than the clumsy attempt to find something—anything—that men still have in common. So, while women are allowed an autonomous culture and seem to have little problem making it civilized, men are left to their own devices, with increasingly worrying results.
Take a look at education. American boys are now far behind girls in high school. As [Christina Hoff] Sommers points out in her book [The War Against Boys], the Department of Education reports that “the gap in reading proficiency between males and females is roughly equivalent to about one and a half years of schooling.” The gender gap in American colleges is now ten percentage points—55 percent of students are women and 45 percent are men—and growing fast. Yet any attempts to address this problem with single-sex classes or schools for boys, for example, meet with ferocious opposition and more often than not get struck down in the courts. The more extreme examples of this ideology come in the ludicrous attempts to police gender stereotypes as early as kindergarten, even when those “stereotypes” conform to the way little boys and little girls have naturally interacted, or not interacted, for millennia.
You can understand how we got here, of course. For far too long, girls and women were second-class citizens, marginalized, frustrated, punished, and denied the possibility of advancement. But a visit to any American college campus today will show how far we have come from those pernicious days. Instead, we are arguably at the beginning of a different crisis—a crisis of the American male. Until we find a way for men to chart a course that is not dependent on the subjugation of women and yet is unmistakably their own, that crisis will continue.
William McPherson describes how he became impoverished and what it’s like:
If you’re poor, what might have been a minor annoyance, or even a major inconvenience, becomes something of a disaster. Your hard drive crashes? Who’s going to pay for the recovery of its data, not to mention the new computer? I’m not playing solitaire on this machine; the hard drive holds my work, virtually my life. It is not a luxury for me but a necessity. I need dental work. Anybody got $10,000? Dentists are not a luxury. Dental disease can make you seriously ill. Lose your cellphone? What may be a luxury to some is a necessity to me. Without that telephone and that computer, my life as I have known it would cease to exist. Not long after, so would I. I am not eager for that to happen. Need to go to a funeral hundreds of miles away? Who pays for the plane ticket? In the case of the funeral, my nephew paid for the plane ticket. My daughter and son-in-law paid for the dental work.
Sometimes, I find it deeply humiliating that I am dependent on such kindnesses when I would prefer that the kindnesses flow the other way. Most of the time, though, I am just extremely grateful for the help of family and friends. It’s not so much humiliating as it is humbling, which is a good thing.
I am ashamed to have gotten myself into this situation. Unlike many who are born, live, and die in poverty, I got where I am today through my own efforts. I can’t blame anyone else. Perhaps, it should be humiliating to reveal myself like this to the eyes of any passing stranger or friend; more humiliating to friends, actually, some of whom knew me in another life. Most of my friends probably don’t realize or would rather not realize just how parlous my situation is. Just as well. We’d both be embarrassed.
As McPherson concedes, he didn’t take as seriously as he ought to have done the importance of saving, investing wisely, and living conservatively. Though he was never rich, the key factor here seems to be his inability in the past to imagine what poverty would be like, and that it would be a possibility for someone like him.
I think this is me. I mean, I have been guided by a good financial planner for the past seven or eight years, and through conservative investing and saving, have built up a decent amount of financial security. But I live in fear that I’m missing something, and through my own extravagance — hey, why not buy those expensive pork chops for that French dish you want to cook this weekend? — I will have left the gates of the city open at night, and the enemy will come in. I read that piece by William McPherson and think: yep, that could easily be me one day.
Nothing makes conservatives more angry than the belief, which they think is widespread among liberals, that they are stupid. That if only conservatives read as much as the left or had the intellectual capacity of the left, they would see things the way the left sees them.
Jonathan Cohn insists that the wool wasn’t pulled over Americans’ eyes:
Did the Obama Administration engage in some creative salesmanship of its own?
Of course it did. And in one very regrettable instance, it misled the public about how the plan would work out. Obama repeatedly told people, without qualification, that they could keep their insurance if they liked it. In fact, many people who bought insurance their own and held plans that didn’t live up to the new law’s standards would have to give them up.
Most ended up learning this in the worst possible way: When a cancellation notice from an insurance company arrived in the mail last fall, and without a working Obamacare website to check out their new options. These people constituted a small number of people, relative to the whole population, and it’s still not clear how many lost plans because insurers seized the moment to drop less profitable products in the market. Had Obama merely said “most people” could keep their plans, or “if you have a good plan already, you can keep it,” he would have been fine. He didn’t.
But accusations that Obama and his allies systematically misrepresented the law in other important ways—or hid its key features from the public—don’t gibe with the historical record. The official debate over its provisions lasted approximately a year, the unofficial debate stretched back even farther than that, and during that time analysts pored over details and partisans on both sides argued over virtually every aspect.
Ezra adds that Gruber “was really, really frustrated by Washington’s games”:
He was really annoyed at politicians framing things and writing legislative language to support their press releases rather than the final law. As involved as he’s been in the policymaking process, Gruber is, first and foremost, an MIT economist. And he’s got little patience for Washington’s tendency to take clean, straightforward policies and complicate them in the name of politics. ….
But Gruber did something stupid here: he tried to look knowing and clever to his audience by dismissing the intelligence of voters. His actual point there is ridiculous. The idea that most voters were paying close attention to subtle framing decisions around risk pooling or excise taxes or even mandates is absurd. Voters aren’t dumb. They just don’t follow politics closely. When Washington tries to trick people, it’s almost always trying to trick itself.
On the other side of the debate, Peter Suderman uses the administration’s spin against it:
Responding over the weekend to questions about Gruber’s statements, President Obama pushed back on Gruber’s role, labeling him “some adviser who was never on our staff.” Gruber’s remarks, Obama said, were “not a reflection on the actual process that was run” when crafting and passing Obamacare.
These reactions from Obama and others were, for the most part, technically true—but nonetheless misleading about Gruber’s influence on the law. At a minimum, they were not fully transparent about his role. In attempting to downplay Gruber’s remarks, Obamacare’s supporters had instead proved him right.
You have a tendency to hate Internet mobs even when they’re right. Matt Taylor’s shirt was staggeringly inappropriate for a professional workplace, particularly when he’s been tasked to be the public face of his organization on the day of its greatest triumph. He deserves the heat for thinking that was acceptable attire – no matter what the woman who made it for him says. Her opinion ought to be secondary to that of the women who had to work with him (and all the colleagues and supervisors who didn’t question that choice of clothing).
But you can prove me wrong: Wear a Tom of Finland shirt the next time you’re on Bill Maher’s show. Don’t let the culture police win!
Another writes:
Thank you for covering Gamergate. I was mostly unaware of the issue until you brought it up. Now I am beginning to understand its significance. Today, some clicking around on Gamergate brought me to two places that I think are telling about all of this. The first was someone disparaging you, and saying “there’s no way to use the phrase ‘creeping misandry’ and not be laughed out of the room.” The second was this screed by Daily Beast columnist and WAM supporter Samantha Allen. It’s opening lines are “i’m a misandrist. that means i hate men.”
Another reader on “why you can’t be a male feminist these days”:
I’m about the same age as you, Andrew. I believe in equal pay for equal work. I believe in women’s reproductive health, to include abortion without interference from the government, and that it should be part of a basic health insurance policy. I believe a woman should be able to do any job a man does (and as a former infantryman, that took some work on my part). I have several bosses who are women (some younger than myself) who deserve to be in their position and would do well moving further up the org chart. I believe women should be free from sexual violence and perpetrators should be punished accordingly. In short, I believe everything classic feminism stood for to the best of my knowledge.
That said, there are so many people out there now (my Facebook feed is all about this) who follow what I consider a form of feminism that is exclusionary.
It is an all-encompassing worldview and everything, no matter how far afield, must fit into that worldview. The only thing I can compare it to is a real Marxist, if you’ve met one. Going to the bathroom to them is an integral part of the workers’ struggle (Marxists are the only people I’ve come across like this, so they are what I most easily compare it to). To hear them talk, I clearly have never had a consensual sexual encounter and must therefore be a rapist. At a minimum, I perpetuate the patriarchy and contribute to rape culture. This is non-stop wail I read everywhere I go online. Even though I’m on their side generally, I just can’t support them verbally because, whether they intend to or not, they are including me in their diatribes. I’m quite sure I’m not alone feeling this way. While you will hear it said that there is ‘always a fringe element’, its not true. This seems to be the majority. I’m reminded of the great Robin Williams movie The World According to Garp. In that movie, there is a group of feminists who are so anti-male, they don’t want Garp (or any male) to attend his mother’s funeral. It doesn’t matter what the content of his heart is, what matters is what’s between his legs. And that is what feminism is supposed to be fighting against.
That is why there is a movement for “why I don’t need feminism”. It’s not that they don’t want equality for women. They don’t want equality for women at the unreasoned expense of all men.
Another:
A couple of quick things you can do to at least keep up the pretense of not having a blind-spot where issues of feminism, gamergate and Twitter are concerned:
1) Not use the term “Social Justice Warrior” as an unironic derogative. (You’ve already taken baby steps in this regard.)
2) Not refer to a few people being banned from a platform created by a private company as a “Gender War.”
3) Really just stay away from warfare rhetoric altogether, particularly as a way to disparage and patronize people on the other side of the argument for you. (I’d say this to any offenders on the feminist side of the coin, as well. It’s just oogie.)
4) Maybe run even just one Dissent round-up post on this issue that doesn’t have your qualifying statements and nudgy asides after every quote. This is the only Dish thread in recent memory in which you haven’t published a single post of unqualified dissent. Even your latest “Dissent of the Day” on the matter has a response from you that’s as long or longer than the text from the person you’re quoting. Usually you’re more than happy to air the voices of the people who disagree with you and let them stand for themselves, in their own dissent posts. For some reason, where this issue is concerned, you’re incapable of even pretending to just sit back and listen for a little while.
That last point – “you haven’t published a single post of unqualified dissent” – is empirically untrue. Go here to read a strong female dissent, “the last word on the gamergate furore.” And views from bloggers different than my own are here, here, here and here, to list just a handful of recent posts. A reader links to yet another contrasting view:
Please try to find more feminist critics. Here’s an article from Slate that has the exact opposite take as you on Dr. Taylor’s shirt, using evidence the exact opposite of yours.
Another also thinks our coverage is wanting:
When it comes to racial issues you seem to understand that you simply haven’t had the life experiences to speak in a serious way on the topic without that acknowledgement. As a result, you often quote or defer to the likes of Ta-Nehisi Coates, etc. and take those experiences seriously. You are not a woman, you will never understand what it is like to grow up as a female, work as a female, experience life culturally, interpersonally, electronically as a female. Perhaps it is time you learn to defer a bit on those topics to those that do.
“Femi-left”?! Seriously, Andrew, you are one shitty, dismissive catchphrase away from me canceling my subscription (and I paid more than the usual, too). I hate to sound like a cranky subscriber at a theatre, and I hate even more the thought of losing your daily deluge of fascinating content, but your complete and utter inability to respond to women’s issues with even a modicum of respect for the opposition is currently cheese-grating my brain. You sound like a parody of Bill O’Reilly performed by a college sketch comedy group. I’ve never sent two e-mails to a website in one day in my life, but … well, here we are.
A reader who appreciates our coverage:
I just read the dissent post regarding your “scorn of feminism” and it made me remember why I love this site. There are so few people taking a logical, well-argued stand against identity politics without actually arguing FOR racism, sexism or homophobia.
I pissed off some family members this weekend by asking why/when the term “oriental” was considered racist. I was not appropriately satisfied with the explanation, “Hello! White privilege.” Asking for more than that is, apparently, a bridge too far, and asking the question itself is considered insulting and somewhat racist. Yeah, maybe not tightly related to issues around feminism, but it seems like the left, at this moment, is very very concerned with policing speech. Look at the response to Colbert’s comedy routine, or the move to rename the “Washington Redskins.”
As I’ve been mulling this over, I think there are two primary things that bother me about this. The first, is that by creating a set of rules (you are not allowed to say x, or y, or question this in any way), liberals are creating an easy way to identify those who are in the group and those who are out. If you don’t use the right words and follow all the rules, then we can ostracize you and treat you like shit. Which, let’s be honest, is a LOT more fun that listening to people and creating a respectful dialog.
The other thing that bothers me, is that policing language is cheap. The left seems to have found a way to be both self-righteous and not actually do anything hard. We make take a stand against the word “Redskins” but no actual change is going to happen in the lives of said Native Americans. They will still be poor, still live in devastated communities, and still die young. But it’s a lot easier to change the name of a football team than it is to go work for $20K/year at a food bank or homeless shelter out on the reservation.
So, yes, thank you for being a voice of reason in all of this. If we are going to have a free society, then it needs to be able to tolerate open debate.
One that note, the far-left blog Feministing wondered about the above episode, “Is South Park turning feminist?”:
Obviously there are issues with the gendering of this episode, such as the assumption that no girl would ever find farting funny (I sure do), that no guy would ever find queefing funny, and of course the avoidance of the fact that girls do indeed fart ourselves. Not to mention the reduction of the entire feminist movement into queefing rights.
But that’s what South Park does best: Takes an social movement or trend and highlights extreme stereotypes to bring to light the most ridiculous elements of that movement. So I didn’t really find my sexism-alert piqued by this episode and actually found it pretty funny. I felt like it was more the hypocrisy of certain taboo subjects that was more under attack here than anything else. It was certainly brave of the creators to even mention queefing at all, probably the most taboo of all taboo bodily functions.
One more reader ends us on a deadly serious note:
Thanks for posting on the Indian sterilization mess. One aspect you left out of your analysis is how there’s a women’s rights angle to this as well. Male sterilization is far less invasive and far safer than female, and yet disproportionately India’s program targets women. There are a lot of reasons for that, but it can’t be denied that the patriarchal nature of India’s society definitely plays a big role. The whole situation is beyond horrifying, not just because of the senseless deaths at the hands of misguided government programs, but because it reveals how little India values one half of its population.
Please please please give this story as much air time as you did the crazy thought-policing of Twitter by “feminist activists” and Gamergate. I hate to see feminism reduced to a bunch of Americans whining about people saying not-so-nice things about them on the Internet when elsewhere women are literally dying of neglect. If women’s rights in this country have descended to the level of suppressing free speech, then clearly it is time to move our attentions elsewhere.
What is so galling about the president’s pending circumvention of federal immigration law is that the White House hasn’t even attempted to justify it on grounds of necessity — no doubt because any effort to do so would be risible. The nation obviously faces no immigration emergency that could possibly justify the kind of extralegal action that Obama is contemplating. Cultivating a new constituency for the Democratic Party certainly doesn’t rise to that level, but neither does a big-hearted attempt to stop often cruel deportations of individuals and families residing in this country illegally.
Along the same lines, Douthat hits back at the argument that Obama’s actions don’t matter because they can be reversed by the next president:
As long as the United States elects its chief executives it will always be true that one president’s unilateral policy move can be theoretically reversed by the next one. But that reality doesn’t really tell us much of anything about whether a particular moves claims too much power for the executive branch itself.
Even in the fairly unlikely event that Chris Christie or Marco Rubio cancels an Obama amnesty, that is, the power itself will still have been claimed and exercised, the line rubbed out and crossed; the move will still exist as a precedent, a model, a case study in how a president can push the envelope when Congress doesn’t act as he deems fit.
Which is why it would have unreasonable to expect, say, liberal and libertarian critics of George W. Bush’s expansive claims of wartime authority to be mollified by being told: “Don’t worry, when you elect a president, you can run Guantanamo and the black sites and the N.S.A. the way you want, so stop complaining and just focus on the next election.” Those critics did focus on the next election, and in 2008 they won it, and put a liberal constitutional lawyer in the Oval Office in Bush’s stead. But in the end the Bush administration created precedents and facts on the ground that his notionally civil libertarian successor just accepted, and claimed powers that a liberal president has often (if oh-so-reluctantly) exploited to the hilt
Benjamin Wittes fails to see what laws Obama is breaking:
Republicans are tossing around all sorts of rhetoric about Obama’s decision to proceed unilaterally. John Boehner has floated the idea of litigating the matter. Some Republicans have described such an “amnesty” as a constitutional crisis. Some have even talked about impeachment. All of that assumes, of course, that the coming action is illegal, that the statute itself doesn’t give Obama authority to decide to stay his hand with respect to lots of deportations. Yet I have seen no news story or legal analysis that contains an actual argument to that effect. …
Obama himself has sown doubt about this own authority to effectuate this policy outcome without congressional involvement—stating in the past that he would love to do it, but did not think he had the legal authority. But at least as I read the relevant provisions of the Immigration and Naturalization Act, the statute actually gives him wide discretion to decline to deport non-criminal aliens who are legally deportable. Specifically, it contains no directive requiring the administration to pursue garden variety deportation cases. In fact, it has very little to say at all—except with respect to aliens who have committed crimes—about what happens if the President just doesn’t feel like deporting people. That silence seems to me to convey the authority not to act, both in the case of an individual whose circumstances authorities find compelling and also in the case of five million people whose circumstances authorities find compelling or whose status authorities choose for policy reasons to regularize.
Japan’s economy is officially in a recession again, after its GDP shrank for two consecutive quarters. An increase in the country’s sales tax in April is believed to have been the tipping point:
“No part of Japan’s economy looks encouraging,” said Yoshiki Shinke, chief economist at Dai-ichi Life Research Institute, who had the weakest forecast in a Bloomberg News survey, with a 0.8% growth estimate for real GDP. “Today’s data will leave another traumatic memory for Japanese politicians about sales tax hikes.” For Prime Minister Shinzo Abe, the report probably guarantees he will put off the tax increase scheduled for October 2015, a move that people familiar with the matter have said will trigger a snap election next month. Japan also tipped into a recession after a 1997 consumption-levy rise, leading to the fall of the government of the day.
Sure enough, Abe called a snap election today to secure a popular mandate for delaying the next planned tax hike. Matt O’Brien faults the prime minister for putting the brakes on fiscal stimulus and turning toward austerity while the economy was still too weak:
The problem … is that the government has started working at cross purposes with the central bank.
See, at first, the government was spending money to jumpstart growth, and the Bank of Japan (BOJ) was buying bonds with newly-printed money to do the same. It was enough to send unemployment down to 3.6 percent now, and inflation finally up into positive territory. But then, six months ago, the government became more worried about its debt of 230 percent of GDP than it was about the recovery. It raised the sales tax from 5 to 8 percent, and the economy promptly tanked. The BOJ has responded by buying even more bonds with even more newly-printed money, but not before domestic prices, as measured by the GDP deflator, began falling again, this time at a -0.3 percent pace.
Abenomics, in other words, has gone from being fiscal and monetary stimulus to fiscal austerity and even more monetary stimulus—and that, at least for now, has brought back deflation.
The Bloomberg View editors also blame a lack of fiscal stimulus … twenty years ago, that is:
[M]ost economists agree it would have been much better if Japan had done two things after its asset-price bubble burst in the early 1990s: pursued a much more ambitious fiscal stimulus program, and moved quickly to force banks to recognize losses and recapitalize.
Instead, Japan’s ill-timed effort to balance its budget with a consumption-tax increase in 1997 sent the economy into recession, and a paralyzed banking sector contributed to an extended period of stagnation that has done much more to worsen the debt burden than well-targeted government spending would have. From 1993 through 2013, gross government debt grew at an average annualized rate of 5.3 percent — a pace that normal economic growth would have largely neutralized. In the absence of that growth, the gross-debt-to-GDP ratio went from 80 percent to more than 240 percent. That’s by far the highest among 179 countries tracked by the International Monetary Fund.
Danny Vinik hopes the US doesn’t make the same mistakes:
[I]it’s very easy for policymakers to cut off the growth if they implement dumb policies, as Japan did with the VAT increase. In particular, this means that the Federal Reserve should not raise interest rates from zero until workers actually see significant wage growth. So far, Fed Chair Janet Yellen has demonstrated a commitment to ignoring inflation hawks inside and outside the central bank. She must continue to do so. It also means that Congress cannot raise taxes on broad swaths of Americans or make significant cuts to government spending
Tyler Cowen is surprised that anyone is surprised:
Unemployment in Japan already had fallen to about three and a half percent. So how much of a miracle could Abenomics accomplish in the first place? Not much, not even for committed Keynesians. Commentators have grown to expect so much of the Phillips curve these days, but still a mechanism for the output boost is required and the Phillips curve (at best) holds only in some contexts. Japan simply hasn’t had that many laborers to put back to work. Getting more women in the workforce, as Abe has tried to do, is a positive development, but that is not mainly about macro policy nor is it mainly about the short run.
In the same vein, McArdle extracts a lesson about the limited powers of policy:
Despite a really good package of reforms, Japan’s economy is still so fragile that a 3 percent hike in the sales tax (even one accompanied by a $51 billion stimulus program) is enough to push it back into recession. …
What this suggests to me is that there may simply be limits on what good economic policy can achieve. This is not a very useful thing for an economics columnist to write, because then what are we supposed to suggest week after week? But there it is: Japan’s economic problems, particularly its long demographic shift, may simply not be very amenable to better policy. Japan’s exports have a lot more competition than they used to, and the country is heading for the demographics of an Assisted Living facility. Better monetary policy won’t change either of those facts.
Ben Casselman adds that Japan’s unexpected slide into recession “should also give pause to economists in the U.S.”:
When the Bureau of Economic Analysis said the U.S. economy contracted at a 2.1 percent rate earlier this year, most economists shrugged it off as a one-off fluke driven by bad weather. They appear to have been correct: The U.S. went on to post its best consecutive quarters of growth since the recession. But that outcome was far from guaranteed. As I noted at the time, negative quarters are rare outside of recessions. Economists are notoriously terrible at forecasting downturns: Most economists failed to “predict” the last U.S. recession even after it had already begun. (They also miss in the other direction, forecasting recessions that never took place.)
I’ve been struggling with the issue of precedents for Obama’s proposed deferral of deportation initiative, so it behooves me to link to Mark Krikorian’s argument that the Reagan and Bush deferrals should not be counted as apposite. His first point is numerical:
Despite claims at the time that “as many as 1.5 million” illegal aliens might benefit from the policy, the actual number was much, much smaller. In 1990, Congress passed legislation granting green cards to “legalization dependents” — in effect codifying the executive action Bush had taken a just few months earlier. That (lawful) measure actually cast the net wider than Bush’s action, and yet only about 140,000 people took advantage of it — less than one-tenth the number advocates claim.
But could it be that the purported beneficiaries of the current deferral are also being over-estimated? What matters, surely, is how many children Reagan and Bush thought would be protected by their executive actions, if we are looking for a precise precedent of presidential intent. And the Reagan/Bush precedent did give the deferred the right to work. There’s also the argument that as a percentage of the total population of illegal immigrants, the numbers are not so dissimilar. In 1990, there were an estimated 3.5 million illegal immigrants in the US – so deferring deportation for 1.5 million meant deferring it for 43 percent of the relevant population. In 2014, there are 11.7 million illegal immigrants, of which up to 4 million would be affected by the proposed deferral. That’s 34 percent or 42 percent if you include the DREAMERs. Seems like a rough precedent to me.
Then Kirkorian argues that the Reagan/Bush precedent was a mere tidying up after the 1986 amnesty – and not a unilateral attempt to bypass the Congress:
It was a coda, a tying up of loose ends, for something that Congress had actually enacted, and thus arguably a legitimate part of executing the law — which is, after all, the function of the executive. Obama’s threatened move, on the other hand, is directly contrary to Congress’s decision not to pass an amnesty. In effect, Bush was saying “Congress has acted and I’m doing my best to implement its directives,” while Obama is saying “Congress has not done my bidding, so I’m going to implement my own directives.”
But a tidying up can mean many things. In this case, it meant giving a reprieve from deportation that the law did not itself contain. Yes, it was subsequently superseded by the 1990 law – but that indicates to me that it needed a law to make it more than an executive decision. And yet that executive action nonetheless went ahead.
It seems pretty clear to me that Obama may not be as out on a limb as some Republicans are claiming – but that he is pushing his luck in ways that, as I’ve argued before, are likely to hurt him and even the cause he seeks. He could make immigration a political liability for Democrats rather than for Republicans; or at the very least be credibly described as an initiator of partisan conflict, with unforeseen consequences. If I were advising POTUS, I’d urge that he use this threat as a way to negotiate an expeditious immigration reform bill. If that fails, by all means blame the Republicans. But it would be an act of great recklessness – both for his future and his legacy – to press ahead regardless.
Here’s a modest proposal that might help us bridge some differences: an avoidance of arguments in the gender debate that there is no legitimate debate to be had. There is always a debate to be had in any area of human inquiry or life – because most social and political questions weigh one good against another. So, to take an obvious example, the fight over “affirmative consent” balances the security of women from assault and rape against the due process rights of the accused. These things conflict in a liberal polity – because in a liberal world, moral, collective imperatives cannot properly come at the expense of individual injustice.
And it is simply a fact that there are cases of false allegations of rape, just as there are false accusations of every sort of crime. They’re very small in number, and we may exaggerate the problem, but they do exist. My instinct, for what it’s worth, in almost all these cases is to believe the woman. That goes for most alleged crimes and offenses regarding gender, including harassment in the workplace. Readers may have gotten the wrong impression from me about this, but from Anita Hill to Paula Jones, I’ve long supported the women’s side in some of these high profile cases. But there is always another side, and that requires some consideration. Even Bill Clinton deserved that. And what troubles me is the assertion by some on the fem-left side that there is only one side ever. And that even questioning that assertion is a sign of moral failure.
You might think that someone given a platform at the New York Times, like Yale law professor Jed Rubenfeld was in Sunday’s paper, might have done more than simply note that women are attacked “in appalling numbers” and colleges mishandle rape cases … The worst offense is Rubenfeld’s apparent belief that there is a “debate” to be had – as if there are two equal sides, both with reasonable and legitimate points. There are not. On the one side, there are the 20% of college women who can expect to be victimized by rapists and would-be rapists; on the other side is a bunch of adult men (and a few women) worrying themselves to death that a few college-aged men might have to find a new college to attend.
That echoes Ezra Klein’s endorsement of expelling male students accused of rape without due process. The contention is that it is neither legitimate nor reasonable to worry about someone being punished for a terrible crime he did not commit. And if this is something that worries you, then you really need to be educated by those more informed on the issue before you open your mouth:
If you can’t talk about rape without blaming victims, don’t talk about rape.
If you do happen to express concern about individuals losing due process in defending themselves from a charge that will follow them their entire life, you are one of the following: a male (ugh); a rapist-excuser; a rapist-enabler; or a “regressive rape apologist.” Or even worse, you are a “rape-truther” even if you cite three actual cases of alleged false accusations. The TPM piece that used that term did not prove that those cases didn’t exist, it merely insisted that they cannot exist. Remember “trutherism” was coined to describe delusional maniacs who believed the US government was behind the 9/11 attacks, despite massive, voluminous, unimpeachable evidence that this was not the case. But a college rape case we don’t even know the details of? This is a way not of engaging in debate, but of shutting it down.
Over the years, I’ve learned the various tricks to prevent free and open discussion: you’re not educated enough to talk about it; you’re male/female/black/white/gay/straight/Jewish/gentile or whatever and that disqualifies you from an opinion; you’re irresponsible even to raise the issue. But the over-arching theme is simply describing an argument as a moral delinquency rather than an intellectual mistake. If that is the nature of our public discourse, we are no longer in a discourse at all. We are in a church.
The Dish 