Obsidian Wings

When rape is Your Tax Dollars at Work

by Doctor Science

This post is about the attack on Lara Logan, and rape as a weapon of war and policy.

Summary: Sexualized violence, rape, and even gang rape are not just signs of bestiality, barbarism, or boys inevitably being boys: they can be military and police tactics, and they are part of the toolbox of U.S. as well as Egyptian military/intelligence forces.

SERIOUS TRIGGER AND RAGE WARNING.

Your sports open thread

by liberal japonicus

One area that has never really gotten much love here is sports. According to my rather spotty memory, back in the distant past, Sebastian talked about his volleyball playing, and Slarti talked a bit about competitive swimming, which isn't really a sport so much as a freakish ability of some people (I kid, I keeed!) Eric shows up from time to time with Yankee talk and there is a Red Sox contingent lurking, but those seem more lifestyle issues than having anything to do with sports. And I have memories of some commenters who talked a bit about sports (at the risk of offending others, I have memories of the commenter bedtime for bonzo, whose handle was related to a pet rather than a slight at Reagan, trying to start some discussion of NFL football) And I find there was a Super Bowl open thread for the Saints and the Colts. But I don't think we've never really much sports here (though readers are encouraged to go thru the archives to prove me wrong). Hence this open thread. 

One reason why that may be is that we are an eclectic bunch here, and, while there is a US focus, ObWi lacks a particular national identity. Crooked Timber often has rugby and cricket, (the latter sport fascinates me because the notion of sledging, not because I don't think trash talk doesn't happen in US sports, but because you have pretty jaw-dropping sledging incidents that seem to be common knowledge among fans). There's the fantasy baseball league over at LGM, and that the name of John Cole's cat is Tunch speaks volumes (though John Cole's admirable broad-mindedness is exemplified by getting Randy Paul to talk about soccer née football). 

I always think that it is fortunate that I left the US right after college, because had I not, I would be one of those sports fanatics (not that there's anything wrong with that). That love of factoids and anecdotes still remains, but was probably channelled into other kinds of trivia. It's also interesting that in some sense, that sports mentality has entered into our political discourse, for better or worse, with <a href="http://fivethirtyeight.blogs.nytimes.com/">Nate Silver</a> taking his sabermetrics to politics, and Keith Olbermann counting down and Gregg Easterbrook writing about politics. Like I said, better or worse.

So, your weekend open thread. It doesn't have to be about sports, but it doesn't not have to be about sports. Play ball (but play nice)!

what do you do when the grand jury wants your tweets? (Updated)

by fiddler

What do an Icelandic parliamentarian, a US computer researcher and a Dutch businessman have in common? They're challenging the US government's right to get Twitter to disclose their private information under sealed court order.

A hearing on this took place Tuesday in a federal court in Alexandria, Virginia, but no decision was reached; the judge is to issue a written opinion later.

The Electronic Freedom Foundation and the ACLU are representing Birgitta Jonsdottir, a member of the Parliament of Iceland. Dutch entrepreneur and hacker Rop Gonggrijp, and U.S. computer programmer Jacob Appelbaum are represented by private law firms as well as local counsel in Virginia.

From the Washington Post article written before the hearing, which did not name the defendants:

The dispute cuts to the core of the question of whether WikiLeaks allies are part of a criminal conspiracy or a political discussion. It also challenges the Obama administration's argument that it can demand to see computer data and read months' worth of private messages, even if they have nothing to do with WikiLeaks.

The international implications haven't been ignored:

Iceland's foreign ministry last month summoned the US ambassador in Reykjavik to express "serious concern" about the bid to obtain personal information about Jonsdottir, the Icelandic MP.

Jonsdottir, an early WikiLeaks supporter who distanced herself from the site a few months ago, is an active promoter of freedom of information and a member of the Icelandic parliament's foreign affairs committee.

Related (if only in my mind)

by liberal japonicus

John Emerson's guest post raised a number of issues, but as it was talking about media and the left's relation to it, what it highlighted for me was the tendency of the Left (for certain values of Left) to always have to find a balancing point between the calling out different aspects, even if they are your allies, or waving the banner of solidarity. More sarcastically, one could say that I was wondering why the standard formation for a firing squad on the Left is a circle.

Two items came up that I think are related to it. The first is via LGM and it concerns the fact that the academic journal, Gender and Politics, refused to accept for peer review a paper about research related to questions of the LBGT community and said in the letter that it was not going to accept any research on those questions. An open letter written by an academic in the field is included.

I'll start off by saying that this is a pretty stupid thing, and I stand by that. However, in the LGM comments, one person notes that this is one aspect of a debate in a lot of areas and notes that, despite the stupidity of the above, the move from Women Studies to Gender Studies to Gender and Sexuality studies returns women to an invisible state. The commenter says "So I think there are legitimate political concerns at work here but they are going about addressing them completely incorrectly and in a way that is likely to do more long-term damage."

Another area where this manifests itself is in the question of how race is defined. The NYTimes had this Room for Debate section which discusses the question of the Education Department's new mixed race category. I don't care too much for the format, it is like a little sampler tray of opinions, but it is instructive to see who is talking about it and what they are saying. The participants are (in order they are listed, but the NY Times basically has the pieces linked in a circle, so you can start with any of them and move around) are

• Lani Guinier
• Eric Liu
• Shelby Steele
• Anthony Carnevale
• Susan Graham
• Gerald Torres
• Ranier Spencer

Of the contributors, Shelby Steele and Susan Graham (who I had never heard of) are the most enthusiastic advocates of the mixed race category. Other interesting points were raised but the simple fact of Shelby Steele advocating this deserves some attention.

Gayl Jones, an African American writer whose books I highly recommend (Corregidora and Mosquito are two must reads) once said something to the effect that diversity was simply whites way of trying to dilute blackness. It's not hard to see her point when you see Shelby Steele waving the flag of mixed race categories.

I think one reason that the Left always has these problems is that there is a constant tension between the question of having solidarity and demanding your own space. There is not a simple template to be placed on these questions to derive an answer. Each instance has to be examined for its own history and peculiarities.

Albert Camus wrote a short story entitled the Artist at Work, In the collection of Exile and the Kingdom. In it, an unknown painter finds success late in life and is unable to cope with it. He secludes himself from his family and friends and works, isolated, in his loft. He collapses, partially from exhaustion, but also because he hears the sounds of his family laughing, and life in the outside world. As he is being checked out by the doctor, Camus tells us that the painting he has locked himself away with is a canvas blank except for a small word in the center, too small to be read, except that it could either be solitaire or solidaire. So it remains.

The Revolution Will Not Be Televised; It Will And Has Been Tweeted

by Gary Farber

Revolutions have happened in the Mideast?  How?  Why?  Because this is the 21st century, and the revolution is online.

A picture is worth a thousand words, and I will give you 5000 in five pictures:

 
 
 
 

 

 

What happened?  This.   

[...] 

The exchange on Facebook was part of a remarkable two-year collaboration that has given birth to a new force in the Arab world — a pan-Arab youth movement dedicated to spreading democracy in a region without it. Young Egyptian and Tunisian activists brainstormed on the use of technology to evade surveillance, commiserated about torture and traded practical tips on how to stand up to rubber bullets and organize barricades.

The Curious Urgency of Now

by Eric Martin

Like Erik (sic) Kain, I find myself puzzling at the sudden, arbitrary hyperfocus on deficits, debt and fiscal austerity:

The notion that we need to balance the budget and pay down the debt right now is just taken for granted with no real attempt to explain why.

Is inflation out of control? No, not even close. Are our creditors closing our accounts? No, because our creditors know that all we need to do to pay them off is raise taxes or get out of this recession. When growth picks back up deficits will shrink. The deficit is not a problem in the first place. The whole thing is just a ruse.

Meanwhile, unemployment remains sky-high and so do corporate profits.

However, if you turn on the Sunday talkies, or flip to the Op-Ed pages of the major dailies, Washington elites are in the grip of austerity fever - placing the onus on the Obama administration to address both long term and short term fiscal issues in a way that was never asked of Bush.  But why? It's not as if Obama invented the deficit or debt (just look at the arc of each during Bush's 8 years), and the throes of the deepest recession since the Great Depression is the exact wrong time to get religion on fiscal discipline (or in this instance, join the cult).

Yet Republicans barely bat an eyelash at the stark hypocrisy of grasping the mantle of fiscal discipline after the GOP-dominated Bush years (during many of which the GOP controlled both Houses of Congress and the White House).  Along those lines, Kain cuts to the heart of the incoherence of these putative budget hawks: if reducing deficits and the debt were really so urgent, why not raise taxes? 

Or, even, why not let Bush's massive, multi-trillion dollar, deficit exploding tax cuts simply expire as they were, ostensibly, designed to do? (of course, if deficits and debt are such bad thing, why support these tax cuts in the first place?)  Or, even further, at least let the portion of those tax cuts that flow EXCLUSIVELY to the wealthiest Americans expire (the wealthiest also share in tax cuts when lower bracket rates are reduced because of the tiered structure of tax brackets, but the lower and middle classes don't enjoy the benefits of upper bracket rate cuts in kind)?

While I'm sympathetic to Keynesian arguments about holding-off on tax increases (or not allowing prior tax cuts to expire) during a recession, that argument is only persuasive if the speaker is not simultaneously calling for massive cuts in government expenditures during that same recession. Cafeteria Keynesianism doesn't fly.

The fact that the vast majority of Republican lawmakers won't countenance tax increases (even in boom times), or even allow for the inclusion of tax cuts in the revenue-neutral paygo framework, is revealing of the true lack of concern about running deficits and carrying debt.  Similarly, the treatment of the gargantuan defense budget as sacrosanct and untouchable belies claims of concerns about such matters.  The disconnect in rhetoric and policy recommendations is reminiscent of the constant evocations of the existential importance of the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, but the reluctance to ask Americans to pony up the money to pay for them. Something doesn't add up.

In reality, this new-found urgency around deficits and debt is, for many GOP stalwarts, a means to assail entitlement programs that have been targets since their inception, as well as an opportunity to weaken public sector unions and otherwise gut the relatively tiny discretionary spending component of our Federal budget.  As a bonus, the constant carping about spending during Democratic administrations reinforces advantageous - if erroneous - political narratives.

A Kind Of Moderation

Guest post by Thomas Nephew, longtime blogger, posted by Gary Farber.

Gary has been kind enough to invite me to post here, and I'm overcoming some real jitters to give it a try.  

Obsidian Wings!  One of the top blog sites and one of the top online communities of the past decade, hence pretty much of all time.  Writing that could make you simultaneously rend your garments and thank the gods somebody, somewhere had the guts and the gift to say it - whether as writers like Katherine, Publius, Lindsay, Hilzoy, Eric, or G'Kar/Andrew, or commenters like Nell, KCinDC, or Gary.  (Just to name a few, and not to overlook the rest.)  Still not sure I'll belong.

Aside from jitters, though, I was also not sure how I'd fit with ObWi's recognizable "voice" -- probably basically hilzoy's, but somehow the whole site's as well. 

I have my own little blog, which I named "newsrack" once upon a time, and "newsrackblog.com" now.  I imagined I'd cover the ebb and flow of news from all over, but I couldn't do it: the Twitter-like pace of a Willis, a Reynolds, a Sullivan, a Marshall awes me and completely eludes me.  

I nevertheless think I've sometimes written some fairly good stuff there, usually when I stick to a topic for a while, learn more about it, research it, and finally start to get across to *myself* what the heck interests me about it.  

I call those "jags", and I've been on a few:   Iraq.  Iraq. (More on that in a moment.) Torture.  Bankruptcy bill.  Texasgate. Impeachment.  Executive power.  Civil War/Reconstruction.  Wal-Mart.  Fair Share Health Care.  Feingold 2010.  FISA Amendment Act.  License plate scanners.  A general sense of disgust with the media. Disappointed In Obama.  D'oh!

all politics is local

by russell

So said Tip O'Neill lo these many years ago, and it still is so.  Politics is about public life, which is lived by specific, concrete people, in specific, concrete places, at specific, concrete times.

So, a quick note from the town where I live, a few miles up the coast from Boston.  The topic is the yeoman-like efforts of our town employees to clear the snow from our local roads.

The take-away:

Unlike many other communities, the town does not hire private contractors to help plow the streets. Instead, members of all the town’s departments — Cemetery, Water and Sewer, Park and Recreation, Tree and School — come together to help out with snow removal, providing an efficient and cost-effective method.

It's cheaper and more efficient for my town to use its public employees to clear the snow from the roads, than to privatize that work and hire it out to contractors.

A public issue, addressed by public effort, using public money and public resources.  It makes my civic-minded little heart go pit-a-pat.

The only thing I'll add to the article is that, even if were not cheaper to use public resources, it would still make better sense to do so than to hire the work out, because *it's more important that the snow be cleared than that it be done as cheaply as possible*.  The cost savings, which has basically allowed the town to handle this year's extraordinary snowfall without going into the red, is gravy.

And the town employees do such a good job that folks are inspired to chip in and buy them lunch.  Even though they're already sucking on that big fat public teat.

I got no larger point to make here other than to note that, in this case at least, government is not the problem.  In fact, for matters of the general public good, it's an excellent solution.

The Media in Sixteen Snappy Paragraphs

Guest Post by John Emerson, posted by Gary Farber, to cover Gary while traveling, but who was delayed by hotel internet service going out.

(Everything below is expressed in its maximal form, as per my normal modus operandi. Readers may want to trim certain passages in accordance with their own tastes.)

Everyone talks about the media, but no one has been able to do anything about it. I share the common opinion that the disaster of contemporary American politics is in large part the result of the corruption and dishonesty of the media, and I also believe that this corruption is deep-rooted and unlikely to change, and that as a result we are between a rock and a hard place somewhere up shit creek. Eight years ago I thought that the internet would change things, but that hasn’t seemed to have happened. A lot of us are now better-informed than the media want us to be. But there are not enough of us and we remain a powerless minority, even (it has turned out) within the Democratic Party.

I am not trying to replace the libraries of media criticism that already exist, but merely to sum up my understanding of the situation in a few snappy phrases.

AMBIENT OPINION

 

Newton's Third Law #3, 4th UPDATE, Saturday 2/12, 5:50 p.m. EST

by fiddler

 

Previous Newton's Third Law posts are Newton's Third Law, with two updates, written Wednesday and Thursday, posted Friday midday; and Newton's Third Law 3rd update, written and posted Friday. Now that it's Saturday, most of the new articles are roundups of older ones, but I've found (and been sent) some things that didn't surface before -- articles about methods, connections, ethical and legal questions and more. As in previous posts, all typos and bad grammar in original source material have been left unedited. I have also not corrected for variant spellings of HBGary.