The Republic of Dissent

Absolute justice

Pertinent stuff from Any Davidson on the Steubenville's rape trial:

There is something deeply harmful in all of the adults reinforcing the idea that the lives of teen-age boys are destroyed when a girl says what they have done. There is also something incomplete about just replying that they deserved the consequences (as much as they do). For one thing, it can mean asking a sixteen-year-old to be the one to judge the weight of her own trauma. It isn’t trivializing the seriousness of the sentence to say that teen-agers always think, when one door is closed, that everything is over, and that it’s the job of grownups to explain that it isn’t. A different life is not a worthless one. (Absent parents, not incidentally, are a theme of this story.)

The problem is that Americans are as obsessed with absolute justice as they are with absolute freedom.

Collective guilt

Great stuff from Sadhvi Sharma:

The Delhi rape has led to an outburst of middle-class angst about modern India and its populace, and has generated widespread demand for more authoritarian social control. Commentators have turned this extreme act of violence into a symbol of nationwide decay, encouraging every Indian to assume guilt. With everything from Bollywood to Indian family values, from economic growth to parenting style, being called into question, the reaction to the rape appears more and more removed from the incident itself.(...)There is something perverse about the way we’re all encouraged to feel culpable for this crime. The aspiring, emerging nation of India appears simultaneously anxious about its economic and social transformations, and particularly about how those transformations are impacting on a certain class of men, who are apparently ill-equipped to deal with them. ‘Is the sight of a young, smartly-dressed educated female professional generating a sense of displacement in men?’, asks one journalist. The feminist writer Urvashi Butalia thinks an increase in the incidence of rape in India is related to the slowing down of economies in recent years and the fact that the ‘slice of the pie’ is getting smaller. That is, faced with rapid economic and cultural change, the ordinary Indian male becomes an even more brutal creature.

Tragedies encourage irrationality and oversimplifications for accepting that le mal, evil, unconscionable acts are banal and that shit happens is usually difficult and so unsatisfying!  

Newtown and Nakedness

Best thing I read about the Newtown tragedy so far from Bill Benzon:

Remember the story of the Emperor's New Clothes? The Emperor parades before the town proudly display his costly and gorgeous new outfit, NOT! For, as everyone sees, he's naked. But no one says anything for fear of displeasing the Emperor. And then one little boy blurts out "he's bloody naked!" and the whole delusion collapses.

Everyone saw what the boy saw, but no one knew that their neighbor saw the same thing. Everyone was quaking in their boots in fear that they, and they alone, couldn't see the Emperor's fine raiment. Therefore, there must be something terribly wrong with them. But there wasn't. Their eyesight was fine. The little boy's cry showed them that.

These terrible gun tragedies are like the little boy's cry. Now we all can see IT. But what is this IT that we can see, and why do we so quickly forget that we saw it? Why does seeing IT seem to make this failure of vision even worse? For that's what it does: "But after moments of healing, the partisan divide in attitudes toward guns has seemed only to accelerate after similar past events, as in Columbine, Colo." Just what is it that's been polarizing the American body politic over the last forty years?

Perpetuity

Interesting assertion from Frank Furedi:

It is important to realise that much of the conventional wisdom on the impact of abusive behaviour is driven by moral revulsion rather than by disinterested research. Of course, it is entirely legitimate morally to condemn behaviour that society deems evil. But moral condemnation should not be confused with a medical diagnosis. Nor is it an alternative to seeking and gaining clarity on the matter at hand. We do no favours to those who have suffered at the hands of adult predators if we treat them as the casualties of a moral drama.

The problem with modern societies is that they not only like victims, they love the idea of perpetual victimhood and enduring 'sin' because it makes it easier to sacralize and indeed objectify victims instead of empathizing truly with them to allow them to remain people tout simplement.

Sin and crime

From Duleep Allirajah over at Spiked on the fight against racism in English football:

Racist speech is, in other words, a modern taboo. It is no longer seen as the expression of a political ideology but as something more akin to a sin. Anti-racism, by the same token, is no longer a political project but an inquisition against racial name-calling.

Hum, something is rotten in the State of Denmark...I suspect that it is the fact that modern societies are too eager to abdicate the responsibility that they have in educating their members rather than to criminalize all of their shortcomings whether or not they become criminal acts. 

Murder in America

Scary stuff from the Economist's Democracy in America blog:

Murder rates are about four times higher in America than in western Europe. And guns are not the only reason; murder by stabbing and clubbing is higher, too. The murder rate is higher among blacks, but American whites are more violent than European whites. The South is America's most violent region; both blacks and whites in the South are more violent than those in the northeast. In other words, the murder rate is highest in those states that most disdain the sovereign ("government") and champion self-reliance.

The weaponization of sexual violence

La phrase du matin is from Lara Logan, CBS foreign affairs correspondent, on the news that another french reporter, Sonia Dridi was 'sexually assaulted' in Egypt:

Sexual violence is a way of denying women journalists access to the story in Egypt (...) It’s not accidental. It’s by design.

NYPD

From Ullrich Fichtner via Spiegel:

The NYPD developed a worldwide reputation for its "zero tolerance" policy and its great successes in the 1990s. The city was on the brink in the 1980s, with New York's image shaped by pictures of burning garbage cans in the Bronx. That changed with the arrival of Mayor Rudy Giuliani, who would soon become famous, and his equally well-known police chief, Bill Bratton. They substantially beefed up the police force and organized it like a business, with strict quality control procedures, applying statistical methods and considerable pressure to succeed. New York became safer and cleaner.

But scandals also became more and more common around the turn of the millennium. Police brutality became an issue, as did the NYPD's blind severity and intimidating presence. The debate over these concerns would undoubtedly have continued if Sept. 11 hadn't permanently changed everything. All of a sudden the NYPD, which until then had regularly faced sharp criticism from citizens' advocacy groups, politicians and the media for every misstep, became an untouchable force made up of heroes. It was no longer kosher to criticize the police, and anyone who did was seen as behaving in a somehow un-American way.

It's always interesting to see New York from the eyes of an 'outsider' and of 'foreigner.'

The sad thing here is that the city is, I believed, frozen because its politicians are more interested in being national celebrities than in local management.  Thus, the New York political class are un-New York for they lack the guts to have a ballsy and worldly vision for the ex greatest city in the world.  

To like a 'rapist'

I agree with Alan A on this:

(...) many people were shocked by the support – from the film industry, this time – for the fugitive Roman Polanski, who drugged and sodomised a child. How could Whoopi Goldberg opine that this was not “rape-rape”?

Well, you’re seeing this happening again, with Assange.  The message is clear: if you like a rapist, and particularly if you like the rapist’s politics, if you see him as “one of us”, then rape is just fine and dandy.

R.a.c.i.s.t

Words to munch on this weekend from Belle Waring slamming the idea  hat racism has nothing to do with normalcy :

If someone is “a racist” it is not because he is a like a Nazi with a uniform and everything, and pledges allegiance to the flag of racism, and goes around shouting “I hate Mexican people!” Well, to be fair, he might shout that if he were drunk and had smoked some of the cottonmouth killer, or were on MySpace. And those dudes in Stormfront exist. And racist skinheads too dumb to join Stormfront. Nonetheless, in ordinary speech one only means “hey, he said a thing that was racially prejudiced,” or “she told a racist joke,” or “he threw a crumpled-up beer can at that broke-ass African-American gentleman walking right beside the road (South Carolina doesn’t hold much truck with sidewalks) while shouting ‘f%cK you n1gger!,’” or “she collects these weird racist yam crate-labels from Louisiana in the ‘30s and I am not sure her motives are entirely pure.” (May God help me on this one, a collector sells them in Takoma Park at vintage fairs and sometimes I succumb. They’re so cool! She’s a 65-year-old Black lady, so she’s off the hook. OR IS SHE?!).

I agree with Waring. Nevertheless,  I wish she wouldn't stop at the surface and question also the assumption that all racist acts are equal and that all racists are the worst  people in the world.  For example, Belle Waring asserts that for all of his 'nice' deeds and 'normal' life, George Zimmerman, the shooter of Trayvon Martin, is a racist. I wonder whether if he has to be a racist, to be guilty and also whether it is possible for him to be racist and not be guilty.

In short, is the racism of the shooter in this case the sole determinant of guilt? I don't think that it is. 

 

A stubborn nostalgia for America's racist past

Sugary excerpt of the month from Shelby Steele's article on Trayvon Martin:

In fact Trayvon's sad fate clearly sent a quiver of perverse happiness all across America's civil rights establishment, and throughout the mainstream media as well. His death was vindication of the "poetic truth" that these establishments live by. Poetic truth is like poetic license where one breaks grammatical rules for effect. Better to break the rule than lose the effect. Poetic truth lies just a little; it bends the actual truth in order to highlight what it believes is a larger and more important truth.

The civil rights community and the liberal media live by the poetic truth that America is still a reflexively racist society, and that this remains the great barrier to black equality. But this "truth" has a lot of lie in it. America has greatly evolved since the 1960s. There are no longer any respectable advocates of racial segregation. And blacks today are nine times more likely to be killed by other blacks than by whites.

If Trayvon Martin was a victim of white racism (hard to conceive since the shooter is apparently Hispanic), his murder would be an anomaly, not a commonplace. It would be a bizarre exception to the way so many young black males are murdered today. If there must be a generalization in all this—a call "to turn the moment into a movement"—it would have to be a movement against blacks who kill other blacks. The absurdity of Messrs. Jackson and Sharpton is that they want to make a movement out of an anomaly. Black teenagers today are afraid of other black teenagers, not whites.

So the idea that Trayvon Martin is today's Emmett Till, as the Rev. Jackson has said, suggests nothing less than a stubborn nostalgia for America's racist past. In that bygone era civil rights leaders and white liberals stood on the highest moral ground. They literally knew themselves—given their genuine longing to see racism overcome—as historically transformative people. If the world resisted them, as it surely did, it only made them larger than life.

I can't disagree with Shelby Steele (I don't even want to because I like him even when I disagree with him, he is often right on 'race' but almost always wrong on international politics issues ). In this case, I don't fully agree with him for I would nuance some of his assertions. That said, he is right on one essential point: the 'we shall overcome' narrative cripples America's present and future by making the past sacred, thus omnipotent and precisely impossible to overcome because it would mean taking responsibility and accepting that justice can't be absolute for freedom to be meaningful.

Race, racialism, and America

I would like to say that I agree with Nathalie Rothschild on this but I cannot:

The clamour to identify with Martin, to state publicly that you are on his side and to demand an investigation into the killing, shows just how unacceptable racism is today in America. And so it is curious that so many are still drawing parallels between today and the era of state-sanctioned and socially accepted discrimination and violence against blacks.

No doubt, there are still racists around, as evidenced by offensive posts about Martin online, including on the white supremacist website Stormfront. There is also a great deal of prejudice out there, as shown by attempts by right-wing bloggers to present Martin as a menace. But there is, thankfully, far less state-sanctioned discrimination against black people. Racism is not endemic. To claim, as several anti-racists have, that Zimmerman’s killing of Martin was a modern-day lynching is pure hyperbole. Beyond a few hate-spewing cranks, you’d be hard pressed to find anyone who openly defends attacking black people because they are black. Today, the US has a president who can say of a boy like Trayvon Martin that, if he had a son, he would look like him.

I don't agree with Rothschild because in America, race isn't about race and racism and anti-racism are therefore meaningless notions to move the dialogue forward or to provide answer to the complex issue of justice.

It's the hoodie, stupid!

Via Mister Fish:

Something is rotten in the state of America and Obama, I have to say it, isn't helping by making himself part of the story believing that he is America.  There is a need in America when it comes to tragedies such as the one of Trayvon Martin for more than emotions, powerful assertions, or symbolism. There is for a fearless willingness to transgress the current morbid narrative to avoid justifying the unjustifiable and demanding absolute justice.

Rape and perfect victims

Good summary of the DSK Affair:

The lesson here seems clear:  if you think you’ll get raped and want to bring a case about it to trial, try to live a blameless life.

Of course, the above sentence is troublesome, but it reflects a disturbing reality. I never believed that DSK would be convicted. What troubles me is that behind my certitude was solely the realization that it would have been extremely difficult for the accuser to be clean enough to convince a jury that a man  whose 'status' and 'identity' give him the presumption of decency and thus makes it hard believe that he could just snap and rape.

The issue isn't about class (it is but not in the traditional sense) and race, but one of gender and to  see it one needs only to imagine what would be happening if the roles were reversed.  Let me say it more clearly and bluntly: DSK could afford to have a 'past,' a less than perfect  sexual history, the accused could not afford to have any problematic past history and to do dumbt and dishonest things before and after the incident. I'm not talking here about DSK's guilt or innocence and that is what bugs me for it doesn't matter whether he did it or not for the central issue is and always was the ability of the accuser to be the perfect victim and the fact that she is far from perfect dooms the case.

I'm not implying that she is a victim of her past, but rather that who she is much more than what she did killed this case for there was always going to be something to make her not credible. That said, the District Attorney should let DSK go already especially if he doesn't believe his own witness.

Honestly, I have to say that I hope that she made the whole thing up, it would make what is happening less vile. I hope also that DSK is an innocent man; my problem is that I know that the accuser's lies don't make her necessarily an impostor (in the sense that she made the whole thing up), but that it doesn't matter. In spite of my own tribulations, I do not believe that anybody ought to have her/his life destroyed when there is reasonable doubt and there is undoubtedly more than reasonable doubts in this case. What bugs me is that those doubts have become reasonable because of the accuser/victim, but that's the way the American judicial system words and it has already shown its shortcomings.

Feeling angry

I agree with John Holbo on this:

One thing we’re getting a lot in the Strauss-Kahn case, which we always get in the early days of any high-profile case, is a lot of conditional expression of emotion. ‘Our sentiments are firmly with the alleged victim, if indeed she proves to be one.’ ‘I am profoundly outraged by DSK’s behavior, should he prove to have behaved in this manner.’ This is appropriate, even obligatory, but also somewhat absurd. There is no such thing as conditional anger. There’s just anger. Either you are angry or not. It’s not as though you will find out how you are actually feeling now only at some distant point in the future when the facts are in.

We need to talk about French machismo and chauvinism

Sugary excerpt of the day from Isabelle Germain on l'affaire DSK:

(...) in France, the media reaction to the attempted rape charge confirms that when a rape or sexual assault is reported, the alleged perpetrator quickly morphs into victim – and vice versa.
The news of Strauss-Kahn's arrest for allegedly assaulting a housekeeper at the hotel where he was staying immediately prompted astonishment: how could this successful politician take the risk of committing an offence that could lead, in the US, to 30 years behind bars? Conversely, was this in fact a political conspiracy, contrived by his powerful enemies? Friends and allies were certainly quick to rush to his defence: Bernard-Henri Lévy has vouched for his good character and Robert Badinter, husband of prominent feminist Élisabeth, insisted on French radio that he had been unfairly and deliberately "destroyed before any trial". Either way, the spotlight focuses on the potentially ruined politician, and not his alleged victim.

Fast comment: when you listen to French media discussing l'affaire DSK, the US is described as a moralist and unrefined country too influenced by religious zealots and feminists and whose barbaric judicial system is in the middle ages!

One of the greatest French contradiction has always been that it wants both to stand apart and to set the norms for civilization. I can't even imagine what would be happening if the shoe wee in the other foot, no actually I can imagine with how pleasure the French press would be saying 'Hey this is France not America, get over it!'

That said my love for France is eternal! It is something greater and stronger than both of us!

Adult obsessions damage childhood

I agree with Frank Furedi on this:

Adult obsessions with sex are recycled through the discussion of children. As a result, society tends to sexualise children through interpreting youngsters’ behaviour as if it is driven by adult motives. The adult world – including many child experts and policymakers – often see sexual motives behind normal children’s behaviour. We live in a world where six-year-old children are expelled from school for inappropriate sexual behaviour, where a 10-year-old boy is put on the Sex Offenders’ Register for touching a girl, and where playing ‘doctors and nurses’ is increasingly interpreted as the precursor to an act of sexual violence.
Sadly, ‘inappropriate sexual behaviour’ by young children has become a new policy obsession. Typically, the difference between ‘inappropriate’ and ‘appropriate’ behaviour is in the eye of the beholder.

Congo as the rape country

Frightening:

Sexual violence has become increasingly pervasive in the east of the Democratic Republic of the Congo where civilian rape has risen 17-fold in the past few years, says a report released today by Oxfam.
The study found that 38% of rapes were committed by civilians in 2008, compared with less than 1% in 2004. "These findings imply a normalisation of rape among the civilian population, suggesting the erosion of all constructive social mechanisms that ought to protect civilians from sexual violence," it said.
Armed groups, including the army and Congolese and Rwandan militias, have raped tens of thousands of women in Congo. But the report, Now, the World is Without Me, said about 56% of sexual assaults were committed by armed men in homes in the presence of the victim's families, including their children. About 16% reported were in fields, and 15% in forests. Incidents of sexual slavery were reported by 12% of women surveyed, with some held hostage for years.

I'm just wondering why, if women and their rights are so important, a war isn't been fought to liberate them in Congo or at the very least to enable them not to live with the fear of getting rape.

Child sacrifice and witchcraft

More scary proofs of the destructiveness of irrational and inhuman superstitions and traditions:

The practice of human sacrifice is on the rise in Uganda, as measured by ritual killings where body parts, often facial features or genitals, are cut off for use in ceremonies. The number of people killed in ritual murders last year rose to a new high of at least 15 children and 14 adults, up from just three cases in 2007, according to police. The informal count is much higher -- 154 suspects were arrested last year and 50 taken to court over ritual killings.
Children in particular are common victims, according to a US State Department report released this month. The US spent $500 000 to train 2 000 Ugandan police last year to investigate offences related to human trafficking, including ritual killings.
The problem is bad enough that last year the police established an Anti-Human Sacrifice Taskforce. Posters on police station walls show a sinister stranger luring two young girls into a car below bold letters that call on parents to "Prevent Child Sacrifice".
Human sacrifices have been recorded throughout history and still occur in many countries, including India, Indonesia, South Africa, Gabon and Tanzania. One traditional healer in Uganda, when asked about the phenomenon, pointed to the story told in Genesis, when God asked Abraham to sacrifice a son.

What is alarming is that this trend is going to continue because our time is one where it is possible to claim that cultures are sacred and to use faith to justify the unjustifiable.

The Pope as a normal being

I agree with Christopher Hitchens on this, but I recognize the rest of the world doesn't agree with us:

For Ratzinger, the sole test of a good priest is this: Is he obedient and discreet and loyal to the traditionalist wing of the church?(...)This is what makes the scandal an institutional one and not a matter of delinquency here and there. The church needs and wants control of the very young and asks their parents to entrust their children to certain "confessors," who until recently enjoyed enormous prestige and immunity. It cannot afford to admit that many of these confessors, and their superiors, are calcified sadists who cannot believe their luck. Nor can it afford to admit that the church regularly abandoned the children and did its best to protect and sometimes even promote their tormentors. So instead it is whiningly and falsely asserting that all charges against the pope—none of them surfacing except from within the Catholic community—are part of a plan to embarrass him.
This hasn't been true so far, but it ought to be true from now on. This grisly little man is not above or outside the law. He is the titular head of a small state. We know more and more of the names of the children who were victims and of the pederasts who were his pets.

Hitchens is right on principle, and it doesn't not matter here for the Pope is a powerful little grisly man who will never have to answer any question. He is the head of the most powerful church and that fact protects him. It makes him in fact above the law. There are always going to be priests, people willing to fall on their swords for Benedict XVI, believing that martyrdom will earn them a special place in paradise if someone dares to examine the Vatican's role in all the sex abuse scandals.

Coulter and Canada

As always, Ann Coulter knows how to be dignified after suffering 'a setback' in Canada, here is her reaction:

You guys used to be so cool. You were smokers. You had epic hockey fights. We had half our comedians from Canada. Now you’re all a bunch of girls named Francois.

I wish Coulter had been able to speak in Ottawa and  that Canadians to the contrary of American had been able to put her down nicely by showing her that she doesn't deserve to be taken seriously even though she is entitled to speak and by not taken the bait of antagonism and just ignoring. I will bet by favorite left toe that Coulter isn't going to have the guts to go through with her threat to file a human-right complaint alleging that she was the victim of hate speech. That would be a further proof that she is commercial figure who only believe in her principles when they protect her or earn her a few bucks.

Rehabilitating Child killers

I agree with Julian Baggini on this:

(...) when we ask how much we should try to rehabilitate child killers, for instance, it is wrong to think that forgiveness should be the key motivation. It is not for the legal system to forgive. Justice in such cases is rather about giving the right answers to four main questions. First, were the killers sufficiently responsible for their actions for us to regard retribution as of primary importance? Second, would prioritising rehabilitation threaten public safety? Third, would prioritising rehabilitation weaken deterrence against similar future crimes? And four, would rehabilitation actually work?
The best reasons we have for thinking that the Norwegians dealt with their child killers better than we did with the Bulger killers is because the answers to these questions in most such cases is no, no, no and yes. It has nothing to do with forgiveness being a superior virtue. To prioritise the rehabilitation of violent criminals who knew what they had done and posed a danger to the public just because we thought it good to forgive them would be a terrible mistake. More than that: it would be unforgiveable.

Unfortunately, most societies, most notably, the United States aren't Norway and believe less in rehabilitation even for child killers than in punishment and retribution because they were born bad and that there is nothing that society can do except protect itself from them.

Sex, pleasure, and rape

Julius Malema, one of Jacob Zuma's preeminent supports and  president African National Congress Youth League on sex, pleasure, and women:

When a woman didn't enjoy it, she leaves early in the morning. Those who had a nice time will wait until the sun comes out, request breakfast and ask for taxi money.

Well no wonder South Africa has one of the countries where rape is the most prevalent. Too many people there seem to believe not only rape rape, but in rape rape rape.

The global war on crime

I agree with this:

America must recognise that not all the terror its suffers from abroad is the work of terrorists. Since the destruction of the twin towers in 2001, the West has been so consumed by terrorism that it has focused insufficiently on criminality. Somalia, Afghanistan, Pakistan’s lawless tribal regions,North Korea, Albania, the Balkans — these and other failed or failing states demand at least as much of our attention. If oil-rich but tottering Nigeria, for instance, were to tumble, the impact on both Africa and the world would be catastrophic.
These are not necessarily terrorist havens, but their actions can have terrifying consequences for the West none the less. It is time the war on terror was matched more rigorously by a global war on crime.

I think that the single-minded focus on terrorism has been to the detriment of the fight against so many crimes, which have also dangerous consequences. The point is that single-mindedness is never an effective way to ensure security and political stability in a world that is too integrated, too complicated, too interdependent for its ills to be solved solely by the 'war on terror.'

Criticizing lawyers

Quote of the day from David Luban:

There is simply no parallel between criticizing lawyers for violating the law and assassinating their characters for representing the "wrong" clients.

Soliciting, gender and race

Cath Elliott and Thierry Schaffauser on the reason why soliticiting should be criminalis5a :

Criminalisation of soliciting is a sexist law and it's one that concerns all women, because any woman who goes out at night without being accompanied by a man can be suspected of soliciting. All women should have the right to occupy public and nocturnal spaces, legally, and without fear of harassment or violence.
Criminalisation of soliciting is also racist. It's frequently used, for example, to arrest migrant sex workers/prostitutes and deport them. Victims of trafficking deserve our protection; they should have the legal right to choose to live in the UK for as long as they want, and they should not face deportation back to countries where they run the risk of being re-trafficked by those who trafficked them here in the first place.
Soliciting shouldn't be an offence and it shouldn't be classified as antisocial behaviour. If society doesn't want sex workers/prostitutes working on the streets, then measures should be taken to provide those who are at risk of sexual exploitation with better economic options, routes out or professional reorientation, and harm-reduction help when they suffer drug and other addictions. Repression is never a solution: it only pushes those who are among the most vulnerable away into more remote and dangerous areas.

I have the strong suspicion that the arguments of Elliott and Schaffauser although they evoke both race and gender would never be listened to in the US because it is a religious country, which still views sex through a moral narrow prism, which for example why Tiger Wood is no longer the one.

Desexualization and the purity of childhood

Thought-provoking points from Jacob over at the Third Estate on the Desexualization of Children and the obsessive need to preserve their innocence at all costs:

Would it not be more concerning to live in a society in which no 15 year-olds wanted to look at breasts? If, upon coming of age young men and women were given the choice of eating the fruit of the tree of knowledge regardless of the fact that this very knowledge is there social condition? Of course we must protect children from damage that can be done to them, just as we should protect any person, and in many ways children are a vulnerable group. But it is a mistake to believe that childhood is a special place separate from all other parts of life. The preservation of such a Christian ideal is the preservation of no life at all.
If we are to ever promote plural sexualities, sexual liberation, self-identity, self-control, and radical approaches to gender, then we must open up the sexual sphere for discussion and education. A starved man will eat anything, whilst a man with a plentiful supply of food will be able to develop taste and appreciation of some foods, and distaste at others. In proposing that we keep our children de-sexualised, we run the risk of never allowing them the critical moment in which they can differentiate between sexual practices they like or dislike, approve of or disapprove of.

Why am I convinced that gender is key of this issue? I guess it is because I know that most of the time desexualization means absolute purity in the case of girls in most cultures and the avoidance of male predators and homosexuality when it comes to boys. My point is that parents/society are more likely to tolerate "sexualized" boys as long as they don't do it with each other or with another guy or are careful while still being little manly men. At the same, their fear of sexualized girls is that they will come to like sex so much that they will become sluts, tease, and attract men who, of course, can never help themselves and control their natural impulses to possess a "female" body. In any case, it is because of that difference in treatment, that it is easier to argue that girls of 13 are fu*ckable, pardon my French, but not boys who still innocent and only truly love their mummies even if they fantasize about  Playboy models.

A miscarriage may become a murder.... in Utah

Just one comment comes to me when I read this "Only in America":

A proposed Utah law that would open women who suffer a miscarriage to possible criminal prosecution and life imprisonment has enraged feminists and civil rights activists across the United States.
Adopted overwhelmingly by both sides of the state legislature in Salt Lake City earlier this month, the draft bill is now awaiting the signature of the state's Republican Governor, Gary Herbert. It is not clear if the growing national controversy surrounding the proposed law will slow or even stay his pen.
While the main thrust of the law is to enable prosecutors in the majority-Mormon state to pursue women who seek illegal, unsupervised forms of abortion, it includes a provision that could trigger murder charges against women found guilty of an "intentional, knowing or reckless act" that leads to a miscarriage. Some say this could include drinking one glass of wine too many, walking on an icy pavement or skiing.

The Wire and Ideology

For some reason, I missed The Wire while is on Television, I ike to believe that law school is the sole culprit of that outrageous omission. However, I have started watching it recently and I have been surprised about how addictive it is and how it manages to use stereotypes without being offensive. Thus, it is also because I'm both a new and late fan of the Wire that I enjoyed reading Andrew Seal's post on The Wire comparing it to the Hurt Locker (which was a good movie) and offering some explanations for the reason of its popularity, Sugary excerpt:

But I also think we can view The Wire as a multi-protagonist version of this genre, although it is certainly more canny about the possibilities of truly sinking beneath ideology. It has also been seen as a sort of “post-” or “non-ideological” text, and one of the remarkable things about it is how readily anyone can find their own ideology validated in it—conservatives see indictments of welfare policies as surely as liberals see indictments of the drug war. (Liberals are more right, but that’s not the point.) To return full-circle, I think it is very possible to read The Wire as the survival story par excellence of our time, and to see fraternity as its greatest ideal—again, a broken ideal, but nevertheless, the ideal and central theme of the show. And it too features a very extreme distinction between foot-soldiers and commanders, and some of its central plots are about the impossibility of moving from one position to the other. And, although, as I said, it is never innocent of the pervasiveness of ideology, one of its most straightforward points is that the “higher-ups” in the police force, the government, or the newspaper are more ideological, more given to justifying their actions through abstractions. Bullshit, in words more appropriate to the subject, always rises.
Obviously it is no great scandal to talk about the unparalleled success of The Wire in achieving its vision; I think it is also very reasonable to suggest that its success is part of a broader turn toward this particular strategy of using survival as a figure for a sub-ideological space in narrative, a margin between a non-resistance to ideology and an ultimate refusal of nihilism. I see this particular paradigm as culturally dominant in contemporary depictions of conflict and violence, and likely to become more so.

The coming of age of revenge porn

I have to admit that I didn't know what revenge porn was until I read this:

The first recorded use of the word revenge occurred in 1375, and porn came into common parlance in 1962, as shorthand for pornography. But the combination of the words is very much of the moment. Indeed, revenge porn popped up on Urban Dictionary as recently as October 2007, defined as "homemade porn uploaded by an ex-girlfriend or (usually) ex-boyfriend after particularly vicious breakup as a means of humiliating the ex."
While the act can lead to criminal charges, there's some debate over whether revenge porn, per se, ought to be codified as a crime. What's clear, however, is that it is part of the digital-age Zeitgeist. The ease of recording and transmitting sexually explicit images, the rise of Internet exhibitionism, and the ubiquity of a Girls Gone Wild mentality have created the contemporary version of writing "Jenny gives good head" on the bathroom wall.
The celebrity sex tape also factors into the revenge-porn equation. The release of salacious footage of two well-known figures—or even a rumor that such footage exists—qualifies not only as fodder for the weeklies but also as an acceptable form of self-promotion.

My view on the question is that revenge porn essentially shows that sex has been both infantilized and commercialized. Revenge porn exists and has had to become a crime because sex isn't even about pleasure anymore, but solely about consumption and possession. This fact means that the loss of the sex partner or his/her betrayal is equivocated with the loss of a piece of bling bling that has to be destroyed so that nobody else can have it. In our age, porn is to sexuality what fastfood is to nutrition and revenge porn is solely a proof that the flesh has become junk food.

Diversity shouldn't be an absolute value

The Boston Globe has a worth-reading article on Major Nidal Malik Hasan,  the main suspect in the Fort Hood's massacre. It focuses on the reasons why in spite of all his faults, his expressed extreme views, his superiors never made decisions that would have made him less of a security risk to others. Sugary excerpt:

The Globe was permitted to review the Army’s more complete findings on the condition that it not name supervisory officers who did not act, some of whom are facing possible disciplinary action.
In searching for explanations for why superiors did not move to revoke Hasan’s security clearances or expel him from the Army, the report portrays colleagues and superiors as possibly reluctant to lose one of the Army’s few Muslim mental health specialists.
The report concludes that because the Army had attracted only one Muslim psychiatrist in addition to Hasan since 2001, “it is possible some were afraid’’ of losing such diversity “and thus were willing to overlook Hasan’s deficiencies as an officer.’’
“Several of his supervisors explicitly mentioned Hasan’s potential to inform our understanding of Islamic culture and how it relates to the current conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan,’’ the investigators found.
In one classroom incident not previously described by the Army - which parallels another episode around the same time that has received press attention - Hasan gave a presentation in August 2007 titled “Is the War on Terrorism a War on Islam: An Islamic Perspective.’’
But the presentation was “shut down’’ by the instructor because Hasan appeared to be defending terrorism. Witnesses told investigators that Hasan became visibly upset as a result.

This episode is an example of the fact that in America, especially in organizations that need to "diversify visibly" for political, societal or economical reasons,  there is an overemphasis on people's ethnicity, religion or any other trait that make them a member of a minority group. There is very little focus on their individuality and on the reality that those traits are not necessarily (and I would argue rarely) the defining factors in their identity. In any case, diversity is becoming too much an absolute value because it camouflages the fact that America doesn't know how else to deal with its race problem, its segregating consequences, and the fact that it still believes that people with certain traits, from different races and religion faiths are all alike and that thus, their mere presence in certain surroundings are absolute proofs of openness and progressiveness. In short, diversity has become a totem.

Unlawful intimacy

I'm listening to a great program from Radio Four on Rape and current attitudes toward it  (hat tip: Feminist Philosophy). What has baffled me so far (I'm not done listening) is the suggesting by the only woman on the panel that there ought to be a different category for "a sexual assault" that does not happen on street and where the woman is attacked by a complete stranger. She suggests the use of the express "unlawful intimacy."  Another illustration of the power of language, why not just use the expression rape rape rape rape to suggest that the guy isn't a barbarian and the girl might just be impure, stupid, manipulative, or simply unaware rouée .

The ticking bomb scenario

I'm yet to see someone address the ticking bomb scenario used by too many to justify torture as well as Paul Sagar does here:

The ticking bomb scenario is a fantasy dreamed up by philosophers to test-out our intuitive and/or reasoned responses to a bizarre situation, to tease out exactly where our moral sensibilities lie. It is certainly not supposed to be the basis for legislative policy decisions, for example.
But let’s suppose, for the sake of philosophy, that we are in the (impossible) ticking bomb scenario. Is it wrong to torture our suspect? Yes. Because torture is a morally horrific thing to do to another human being, regardless of the well-intentioned motives that may (but usually don’t) lie behind it.So, should we therefore not torture the suspect? No. Because in this situation torturing one man is the lesser of two evils: letting the bomb go off and hundreds of thousands dying is morally more repugnant and unacceptable than torturing one man. But the point is precisely that this is a situation of choosing the lesser of two evils. Just because in this situation preventing the bomb going off is morally more important than not torturing our suspect, it doesn’t follow that the torture therefore becomes OK. It’s still a terrible thing to do. It is still morally wrong.
That’s a very important point to recognise: even when – under highly idealised, utterly abstracted non-real world conditions – we concede torture may be required, it’s still wrong. And that’s the tragedy of ethical existence: sometimes one simply has to do wrong things. “Here I stand, I can do no other”.

John Woo and others damaged severely (and I hope not irreparably) the moral compass of America and of all the others who believed that they were fighting "evil" by arguing shamelessly that they should apply situational ethics when their security is at risk  Sagar's points show that the goal of ethics is precisely to stop people who are making the argument that they are moral from using particularities either real or imagine to justify the abject.. 

Torture and other niceties

I agree fully with Adrian Hamilton on this: 

Torture isn't a matter of niceties. You can argue the circumstances in which you might feel it useful or even necessary. You can try and épater le bien-pensant by writing "A Modest Proposal for Preventing Poor People in Britain from Being Endangered by Torturing Their Children and Their Mothers", only without Jonathan Swift's wit or intention to satirise.
You can sincerely believe it right to cripple the grannies and dismember the family pets in what you conceive of the greater community good. What you cannot do, as the Government is trying to, is get around the fact that Britain, along with most of the developed world, has decided to ban the practice.
And for good reason. After centuries of abuse, torture has been found to be neither productive nor containable. It rarely provides accurate intelligence. It produces fantasy and misleading information born out of the desperation of the victim. For all the discussion of the "ticking time bomb" and the films of Dirty Harry and Spooks, there is no reported case where an explosion has been prevented because of the use of torture.
What its proponents never like to answer is the question of just who would decide who should be tortured. The answer, of course, is the "state". And once you add that to the equation you are on a straight line to General Pinochet, Saddam Hussein and all those other characters whom successive British governments were wont to support in their heyday.

A beer and six cane strokes

Thought-provoking story in Der Spiegel about a woman in Malaysia sentenced to six cane strokes for having a beer in a hotel:

The whole thing began in July 2008. Kartika took a long weekend trip to a beach-side hotel in Malaysia with a few friends, a relaxing break from the stressful daily grind. Her husband, Muhammad Afandi Amir, watched the children while she was gone. Born in Singapore and a member of the country's Muslim Malay minority, he makes his living as a computer technician.
In the afternoon, Kartika checked into the Legend resort hotel in Cherating, whose slogan is "discover heaven on earth." The hotel has an international clientele, so the six guests from Singapore aroused little interest when they met up in the hotel bar in the evening and ordered a small Tiger Beer each.
Beer is available throughout Malaysia. The 7-Eleven convenience store chain, for example, offers nine different varieties, from Singapore's Tiger Beer to Guinness from Ireland and Carlsberg from Denmark. About 26 percent of Malaysians are of Chinese descent, while 8 percent are of Indian descent and 12 percent belong to indigenous populations. The alcohol ban affects only the Muslims, including the 53 percent of the population who are Malays. These last are the group that has steered the country's fortunes since its independence. Shariah law also affects only the Muslims, and is enforced especially strictly in three of Malaysia's 13 states. The Legend hotel is located in one of those three: Pahang.
The young women in the hotel bar raised their glasses to each other at around 6 p.m. Kartika was the only Muslim in the group -- the rest were Chinese and Indian. None of them seem to take particularly seriously the strict alcohol ban that applied to Kartika. The waiter didn't seem to care either; at least, he didn't ask to see her identity card, which would have shown her religious affiliation.
Half an hour later, religious police came storming into the hotel foyer. Was it a routine check? Or had an informer in the hotel blown the whistle? Kartika was the only one brought in to the station, where she had to give a urine sample. The police questioning lasted until 6 a.m. And at some point during her interrogation, Kartika admitted to occasionally posing for advertising photographs in Singapore. The keepers of the country's religious code were suddenly all ears.

Competition of victimhoods

Interesting, disconcerting, but I'm afraid true analysis from Brendan O'Neill (I promise to get over my Polanski's obsession soon):

But perhaps the worst aspect of the Polanski affair is the competition of victimhoods. It is testimony to the domination of the victim culture in contemporary society that both Polanski haters and Polanski defenders, both sides in this bizarre re-enactment of the Culture War of the 1960s and its aftermath, have used the language of victimology to make their case. For many American and British commentators this is all about Samantha Gailey, whom they have transformed into the archetypal and eternally symbolic victim of the alleged great evil of our time, Child Abuse. ‘Remember: Polanski raped a child’, says a headline in Salon, in an article that provides sordid, misery-memoir-style details of what Polanski did with his penis to Gailey’s vagina and anus. For European observers, by contrast, Polanski’s actions can be explained by his own victimised past, especially during the Holocaust. We have to understand his ‘life tragedies’ and how they moulded him, says one filmmaker . Anne Applebaum, the American commentator who spends much of her time in Europe, says Polanski fled America in 1978 because of his ‘understandable fear of irrational punishment. Polanski’s mother died in Auschwitz. His father survived in Mauthausen. He himself survived the Krakow ghetto.’ (Applebaum fails to disclose that she is married to the Polish foreign minister, Radoslaw Sikorski, who is actively campaigning against Polanski’s extradition.)
This spat in victimology confirms that the politics of victimhood, the pursuit of law, politics and morality in the name of respecting and helping victims, dominates debate on both sides of the Atlantic, but in the Anglo-American sphere it is the victim of child abuse that is most sacrosanct, while in Europe it is the victims of the Holocaust who enjoy the greatest, most unquestioned moral authority – to the extent that Polanski’s pretty cowardly fleeing of America in 1978 can be excused as a latent reaction by a tortured man to the emotional horrors of Auschwitz

Disgusting mise en scène

Bill Wyman has a great article on the Polanski Affair, the salacious documentary that confirmed the fanatical belief of many of his admirers that he was the true victim in this care, and on the role that the media plays in this case. Disturbing sugary excerpt:

In "Wanted and Desired," it's weird how detached Zenovich [the director] stays from the victim, and how she undermines her in subtle ways. The tone is set early on, when a friend of Polanski's tells of being woken up and informed that the director had been arrested. The moment is actually played for laughs, with interspersed shots of a worried Mia Farrow using the phone in a scene from "Rosemary's Baby."
A filmmaker attuned to the psychological undercurrents of the characters in her drama might have been conscious of the state of a 13-year-old girl, who had just been drugged and raped and had spent the next period of time at a police station reliving the incident; and shaken by the story of "Rosemary's Baby" -- that, too, about a horrifically abused woman.
But the scene isn't used to illustrate the victim's story -- it's about poor Roman. He's the person making the desperate phone call. It's an odd juxtaposition when you think about it. That's when the friend, having just been told Polanski has been arrested, says, "This is somebody who could not be a rapist!" Here again, Zenovich is playing with semantics. It's obvious the friend was saying he couldn't imagine Polanski, say, following a woman down the street and grabbing her in an alley.
If Zenovich wasn't tipping the scales in Polanski's favor, she could have asked the guy, "Well, what about statutory rape, having sex with an underage girl? Could you imagine him doing that?"
We also hear people note, meaningfully, that meeting someone like Polanski could help a potential young actress's career. Such a remark about a grown woman would be slightly offensive; about a 13-year-old it's exceedingly so. The girl told police at the time she had repeatedly told Polanski no; on the screen Zenovich runs a line to that effect from the girl's grand jury testimony, but immediately follows it with a quote from Polanski's: "She was not unresponsive." This creates a subtle he-said-she-said dynamic that, in a case in which consent isn't a issue, represents another bit of moral prestidigitation.
It's strange to see a female filmmaker anchor her documentary's arguments with such atavistic attitudes. It gets worse: In the media circus of the time, some of the European press reported that the victim hadn't been a virgin.

I feel dirty just hearing people doing everything to justify having sex with a 13 year old girl just because they love the movies or are moved by the personal history of the man who had sex with her. In many less developed countries. perverts who have sex with little girls always argue that their victims are women, that they provoked them, that they wanted it or that they weren't pure anyway. I guess that we can no longer argue that the "West" cares more women than the rest.

Justice for all

I agree with this:

It is easy for people to be swayed by considerations of personality in such cases as the Polanski arrest. In general the law does well if it addresses itself to individuals and their circumstances rather than imposing rigid blanket laws that contradict justice as often as they serve it, precisely because they ignore the special individual circumstances. But with the great crimes of rape, murder and genocide, prosecution and punishment are about society’s struggle to protect itself now and in the future against the worst aspects of its own members’ behaviour. There is room for a degree of compassion towards prisoners even if they have committed monstrous crimes, but there is no room for failing to punish the crime itself.
In line with these thoughts, and with the regret that comes from having to acknowledge yet set aside two things, namely the existence of human frailty and the contribution gifted individuals such as Roman Polanski make to society, I conclude that it is right that the United States authorities are seeking to extradite him to serve his sentence for rape. Neither fame nor wealth, neither time nor distance, should render anyone immune to laws protecting against serious crimes against other human beings.

Ideologizing history

Well, I'm always amused when I read an interesting ideological take(and wrong,it isn't wrong because ideological even though the ideology of Andrew Klavan contributes to his misreading of history)  on French and American History :

It seems to me that the last several decades in America have been a weird echo of the decades in Europe around the coming of the nineteenth century—and that no figure can serve as a better guide to both wisdom and error than William Wordsworth, one of the greatest of the British Romantic poets and, in many ways, the very model of a modern neoconservative, defending the West’s liberal tradition against radicalism.
My argument in brief is this. The French Revolution was the historical tragedy that recurred as farce in America’s 1960s. Cranky-cons like myself tend, when thinking of the Revolution, to skip right ahead to the bloody parts, like a 12-year-old watching Friday the 13th on DVD. But the French overthrow of what Wordsworth called “the meagre, stale, forbidding ways of custom, law and statute” provided young Europeans with the same sort of goose of utopian hope that the Age of Aquarius gave the young here. “Bliss was it in that dawn to be alive,” Wordsworth famously recalled in later years. “But to be young was very heaven!” What aging boomer boring his grandchildren with tales of Woodstock wouldn’t say much the same?

Divided we fall

Disturbing story, I have to say that it's difficult not to believe Henry Louis Gates Jr. but I'm trying to imagine if he were less likable and less educated, what would have happened and what the perception would have been

On vengeance and justice

I find Norm Geras's following point on vengeance and justice thought-provoking:

(...) justice is not exhausted by the aim of retribution, by its punitive purpose. It must pay attention to the possible rehabilitation of the wrongdoer. Furthermore retribution, and therefore the retributive element within remedial justice, is not the same as revenge. The desiderata of proportionality and, where appropriate, mitigation mean that just punishment may not be excessive, where revenge sometimes is excessive. It 'may' not be, in the sense both that it isn't justified if it's disproportionate and so must not be, and that in certain circumstances it is permitted to be less severe even than what would be proportionate and so could well be.

Last week, I wrote that I thought that the Madoff's sentence wasn't punitive. What I meant wasn't that he should have received more time in jail, but rather that the condemnation didn't punish his crime in the sense that it was inadequate and that it didn't serve any purpose other than to shatter the few years that he has on earth. The American system of justice is so obsessed with the idea of retribution that it focuses rarely on doing the right thing or rather on incorporating other ideas such as remedial and reformative justice in its sentencing on the people found guilty. I don't think that that Madoff spending the rest of his life in justice accomplishes anything moreover, I think it jut shows that America doesn't know how to deal with his crime and encourages that the idea that white collar crimes are crimes that can pay.

Stats don't lie !?

Oh boy!:

The truth is, violent white-on-black crime is a rarity in Britain, by comparison – although white-on-Asian crime is rather less so. The overwhelming bulk of violent street crime in London is committed by young black men, and in numerous cases against white people, although one would not impute a racial motive; the statistics suggest that young black male criminals are quite happy to stab or shoot anybody who hoves into view with either a bulging wallet, a mobile phone or an assumed reflection of disrespec’ in their eyes.
Apologies if this offends – but that’s how it is. At most, the African Caribbean population of London is about 12% of the whole. But black males are responsible for nearly 60% of arrests for robbery – and the overwhelming majority of gun crime, most of it black-on-black violence.
We skirt this issue, mostly for decent, if deluding reasons – that a proportion of young black males is more likely to commit violent crime than other sectors of the population. It is a form of racism, though, to assume that the problem is simply a given, and unalterable – but we have been hamstrung in our attempts to deal with it for reasons of political correctness.
The propensity of some young black males to underachieve at school and later commit crimes of violence has been seen for too long as a roguish expression of cultural diversity, exacerbated by our own inherent racism and economic oppression; in other words, it’s not their fault. Indeed the culture of violence, misogyny and epic drug abuse, exemplified in rap music, has been lapped up by a bovine liberal white culture that finds the vibrancy and “edginess” of gangsta rap something in which we should all exult and indeed emulate.

The freedom to hate

Alexander Cockburn argues against the Hate Crimes Prevention Act :

The problem with the Hate Crimes Prevention Act is that it creates a thought crime. After all, violent acts like assault or murder or rape carry specific and very serious penalties for the perpetrators, if convicted. (The Laramie roofers were convicted of murder anyway, and will spend the rest of their lives behind bars.) Motive does not enter the matter. And how will a prosecutor prove that a lesbian was murdered because of her sexual preference or because the mugger who stabbed her in the darkened entry to her building did so because she refused to give him her handbag?
As Representative Lamar Smith, ranking Republican on the House Judiciary Committee, protested: "All violent crimes must be vigorously prosecuted. Unfortunately, this bill undermines one of the most basic principles of our criminal justice system - equal justice for all. Justice will now depend on the race, gender, sexual orientation, disability or other protected status of the victim. It will allow different penalties to be imposed for the same crime."
Advocates insist that the Hate Crimes Act will deal only with crimes of violence and have nothing whatsoever to do with limiting free speech or thought. But given the way case law evolves, and the manner in which ambitious prosecutors advance their political careers, there will be an irresistible incentive to bring indictments against anyone speaking hatefully about members of protected categories of people. Speech itself will become a 'violent act' and therefore unlawful.

I agree with the assertion that Hate Crime Prevention Act will have dangerous consequences and that it will not be an effective mechanism against hate crimes. I would like to be on the popular side on those who argue for that legislation because it would give me the feel good illusion that it is an act that would stop horrific crimes, but I know better. What worries me the most about such kind of legislation is that it places the emphasis on what differentiates people instead on reasserting the fact that they shouldn't matter because we are all equal under the law and that a crime is a crime is a crime. I think that the issue here is that the Hate Crime Prevention Act in fact reaffirms the viewpoint of those who commit crimes against gays, blacks, or any other group of people, it reaffirms the idea that those differences matter and are of so importance that the law must take them into account. The purpose of the rule of law is not to satisfy any emotional need that people have whether they are victims or not or whether those needs are justified or baseless, the rule of law exist in society to remind people precisely that people aren't slaves to their passions and that punishment isn't about vengeance or making a great emotional point about hate and other vile motives that criminals have. In modern societies, people even when they are capable of barbaric actions must be allowed to hate and it is the responsibility, the obligation to find other ways than punishment through laws to change their ways. It is difficult to resist the temptation to obtain absolute justice in our societies, but we must resist it because as Camus asserted absolute justice negates freedom.

Effective torture

Marc Thiesse, a former Bush official, affirms in an op-ed in the Washington Post that torture worked:

Critics claim that enhanced techniques do not produce good intelligence because people will say anything to get the techniques to stop. But the memos note that, "as Abu Zubaydah himself explained with respect to enhanced techniques, 'brothers who are captured and interrogated are permitted by Allah to provide information when they believe they have reached the limit of their ability to withhold it in the face of psychological and physical hardship." In other words, the terrorists are called by their faith to resist as far as they can -- and once they have done so, they are free to tell everything they know. This is because of their belief that "Islam will ultimately dominate the world and that this victory is inevitable." The job of the interrogator is to safely help the terrorist do his duty to Allah, so he then feels liberated to speak freely.
This is the secret to the program's success. And the Obama administration's decision to share this secret with the terrorists threatens our national security. Al-Qaeda will use this information and other details in the memos to train its operatives to resist questioning and withhold information on planned attacks.

In my opinion, the fact that the effectiveness of torture is even discussed shows that the US has lost the moral high ground. For the next few decades,  this issue will remain relevant not only in the United States, but  also in the world because the Bush administration opened the door and the Democrats let them do it by allowing the argument to be about whether torture can protect America from ruthless terrorists as if that was the main consideration, as if the central question was whether the end justify the means. The problem here is that the way the Obama administration released the torture memos, the arguments that it made to justify the release and its refusal to do more makes it possible for torture to become again an acceptable way to insure the security of Americans when it comes under attacked and feels that it has no other means to defend itself.

Democracy, rape, and Afghanistan

Quote of the day from Mohammad Asif Mohseni, a top Afghan Cleric defending the Afghan rape law:

The Westerners claim that they have brought democracy to Afghanistan. What does democracy mean? It means government by the people for the people. They should let the people use these democratic rights. (...) In Shariah law, it states that a woman cannot go out without the permission of her husband.(...)It is essential for the woman to submit to the man's sexual desire. (...) If she is not sick, and if she does not have another problem, it is the right of a man to ask for sex and she should make herself ready for it. This is the right of a man.

This should make the nation building efforts fun in Afghanistan especially if it ends up creating a country that resembles parts of Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, or Iran.

Talking about IT

When Glenn Loury talks about race, I listen because he doesn't preach and is willing to go there intellectually without holding on to a complex of superiority or inferiority that would make discussion, challenges to his viewpoint impossible. Sugary excerpt:

No big city police officer is “colorblind” nor, arguably, can any afford to be. Crime and punishment in America have a color — just turn on a television, or open a magazine, or listen carefully to the rhetoric of a political campaign — and you will see what I mean. The fact is that, in this society as in any other, order is maintained by the threat and the use of force. We enjoy our good lives because we are shielded by the forces of law and order upon which we rely to keep the unruly at bay. Yet, in this society to an extent unlike virtually any other, those bearing the heavy burden of order-enforcement belong, in numbers far exceeding their presence in the population at large, to racially defined and historically marginalized groups. Why should this be so? And how can those charged with the supervision of our penal apparatus sleep well at night knowing that it is so?

Hitchens on Lessing

Christopher Hitchens has some praise for Doris Lessing, whom he believes (I agree with him), deserves the Nobel Prize:

Harold Bloom might conceivably be right (actually, if it matters, I do think he is right) to say that Lessing hasn't written much of importance for the last 15 or so years. But that's not to say that she shouldn't have received the Nobel laurels 20 years ago, if not sooner. (It was Hemingway who first acidly pointed out that authors tend to get the big prize either too early or too late. In his own case, he compared it with swimming ashore under his own steam and then being hit over the head with a life belt.)

To review the depth and extent of Lessing's work is to appreciate that some writers really do live for language and are willing to take risks for it. It's also to understand that there is some relationship between the hunger for truth and the search for the right words. This struggle may be ultimately indefinable and even undecidable, but one damn well knows it when one sees it.

Puritanism and Sexual Harassment

Christopher Caldwell has a striking take on sexual harassment in his column in the Financial Times. He takes the examples of Clarence Thomas, Bill Clinton, and Isiah Thomas to argue that sexual harassment is no longer about the use of power by powerful people to obtain sex, but rather about the coming back of Puritanism in an American society that has a problem with sex and doesn’t want it to happen in anything, but proper situation. I think that the examples, which Caldwell uses to make his point are too different to be the illustration of the same point and that although it is true that American society does have a strong puritanical side because religion too easily permeates through every part of society, most Americans are on the side of Caldwell on the issue of sexual harassment. Americans tend to believe that sexual harassment is rarely a serious issue and that it gives too much power to women over men who are too willing to use it to destroy a man out of that legendary female vindictiveness, which makes people scream in front of the types of situation that Hell Hath no Fury like a Woman Scorned. The point is that rape and sexual harassment cases are ones where the accuser is, more often than not, refused the status of victim even after a court recognized that a crime or a tort was committed. There is always the suspicion that she asked for it, that she was too sensitive, that she placed in a situation where what happened to her was unavoidable or that she should just accept manliness and the laws of nature. Sugary excerpt:

But it has become a feature of sexual-harassment cases that actual and imputed torts are hard to disentangle from personal gripes and political agendas. “What I did here I did for every working woman in America,” said Ms Sanders. This is not the sign of a strong argument. If a serious wrong has been done, it should not matter if the victim is the only one on earth. To allude to comrades-in-suffering shifts the focus from the case’s merits to the social change it can effect.

[…] Ms Sanders wept when she described how Stephon Marbury, the Knicks’ 30-year-old star, had had a consensual fling with an intern, 24. “They basically had sexual relations,” she said. The feminist writer, Rebecca Traister, complained in New York magazine that Marbury “wasn’t held accountable” for the tryst. But accountable to whom, one might ask, besides Mrs Marbury? One suspects “sexual harassment” is being used as a euphemism, and that what its promoters really want back are the old laws against fornication. […] Reviving puritanical mores is not what the concept of sexual harassment – as originally laid out by the University of Michigan legal philosopher Catharine MacKinnon – was meant to achieve. The core of sexual harassment is “sex forced by power”. Women are often in a position of “hierarchical vulnerability” where they cannot respond to sexual advances as fully free agents. There is nothing absurd or revolutionary about this idea. Hierarchical vulnerability is obvious in the offence of “sexual abuse of a ward”, which applies, for instance, to a prison guard propositioning a prisoner. […] The problem is that this logic is hard to translate to a broad public. The Isiah Thomas case shows that juries are seldom subtle enough to figure out when hierarchy is being abused to get sex. Instead, they use sexual-harassment law to criminalise either hierarchy per se or sexuality per se. The Clinton impeachment and the Hill-Thomas affair, meanwhile, show that sexual harassment – because it often combines the gravest accusations of immorality with the lowest standards of proof – is ideally suited as a weapon of unaccountable defamation.

Celebrities and Glamorous humanitarianism

Emily Hill does something very easy in her latest article on Spiked: she picks on Angelina Jolie by arguing that she has started what she terms to be the “Celebrity Colonization of Africa.” I think that the fact that she uses that term shows that she is missing the point and that she lacks the right perspective for she doesn’t seem to understand that the value of humanitarianism goes beyond image and is secondary to lights and glamorous charity. Sugary excerpt:

Angelina is holier than thou, and me. She’s adopting the world’s children, doing her bit for landmines, saying a lot of ‘aware’ stuff in interviews. Maybe you haven’t been paying attention to her words of wisdom; fortunately, modern-day Christians have. And in what could become a more glamorous version of those little knitted ‘What Would Jesus Do?’ bracelets, Christians in rural Golant in Cornwall, England, are devoting Evensong this Sunday to asking ‘What would Jesus say to Angelina Jolie?’ I’m serious. I rang Philip de Grey Water, vicar of St Sampson’s Church where the Angelina sermon will take place, to find out exactly what He would say to Angelina. But the vicar wasn’t in. His wife assured me that he will upload his sermon on to the web straight after delivering it, so that all outside the parish and around the world can discover what Christ would say to St Angelina.

Hill’s sanctimonious tone and the disdain that she seems to have for celebrity humanitarian are symptomatic of something that has been undermining Africa and the so called third world for years and that is the soft-bigotry of low and impossible expectations, which lead people to view Africa as this different or pitiful place where only the chosen and the pure should dare to go. I disagree for I believe that the overemphasis on the difference of Africa and its exogenous nature is what make difficult for people such as Emily Hill to understand that it is a continent like any other and that Africans are naïve, but people who understand self-interest and the concept of celebrity. What disturbs me about Hill’s diatribe against Angelina Jolie is that she is assuming that Africans are not only poor and powerless, but that they are also simpletons who don’t know how the world works, have no understandings of the complexity of humanitarianism and human behavior, and who can therefore only be exploited and victimized by celebrities. The fact that Africans and other citizens from less developed countries are poor doesn’t mean that they are stupid and devoid of any sophistication. The fact that most of them welcome Jolie and other celebrities should make Hill hesitate before criticizing just for the sake of criticism and of grandstanding to give her complex of superiority the form of reason and good sense. Jolie isn’t exploiting poor and helpless people; she is helping by attracting the attention of the world to them. It may not be enough, but it is something. Moreover, it is a lot more than those who point their finger at her because they feel uneasy about the facts that she gives meaning to celebrity are doing. Jolie’s and other celebrities’ motives are secondary and to me they don’t matter because I don’t believe in purity and in selflessness. I don’t think that to do good, you need to be perfect, to be selfless, to live in slums of Calcutta, and to become ascetic.

The most important question is whether celebrity humanitarianism helps and I think that it does. Everything else is fluff and without much significance. Celebrities are people who are allowed to do good their way as long as long they help. They aren’t little devils with horns who should content themselves with fame while letting humanitarianism to who people who are purer or more selfless so not to irritate Emily Hill. Poverty and difference should not be sacralized and should be an excuse for inaction under the pretext that actions motivated by self-interest and that come with the glamor and the noise of celebrity are always bad and that what matters isn’t the effects of the help, but who provides it. Acts and consequences are what matters. Whether humanitarianism is done under the lights of camera and by celebrities, who may be self-serving is irrelevant. The situation in Africa and in other places is just so dire that the first preoccupation of the people to whom the famous hand is extended is that respect and survival and nothing else.

Drinking the blood of tyrants

Michael Walzer argues that the death penalty is acceptable for tyrants such as Saddam Hussein and others even when if the death penalty is unacceptable. His argument that there isn’t no contradiction between believing in the immorality of the death penalty and believing that people who butcher their own people should be killed:

I don’t believe that the state should kill people convicted of crimes against other people, even of terrible crimes. Except when it is resisting military attack or helping others who are under attack, the state should not be in the killing business; its first commitment is to the preservation of life. But a tyrant has committed crimes not simply against individuals but against the solidarity of the citizens, against the commonwealth, against the very idea of a political community. And that seems to raise the stakes; a tyrant is not an ordinary criminal.

Assassinating a tyrant poses no moral problems. Here is a ruler fully empowered and actively engaged, right now, in the oppression of his subjects: his prisons are crowded, his torturers are at work, his death squads roam the country, his tax collectors are extortionate. He is at war with his subjects—actually, not metaphorically—and killing him is a legitimate act of war. Tyrannicide is an honorable killing, and the killers are commonly honored. But now imagine the same tyrant overthrown: he is a prisoner of war; he cannot simply be killed. Shouldn’t he be brought to trial for his crimes and, if convicted, punished in a just and humane way? He is powerless now, locked up, in prison garb—why should we treat him differently than we believe all prisoners should be treated?

The answer to Walzer’s question is a resounding no, because by arguing for the death penalty in the worse of cases he is legitimating it in all cases since the question no longer becomes its immorality, but its application in the appropriate case. There will always be somebody to argue with passion and convincingly that tyranny isn’t the only crime, which deserves such a final and bloody punishment. In the case of the death penalty, exceptions kill the rule because it is impossible both say never and sometimes. The death penalty isn’t about the criminal, it isn’t about the convicted felon with dirty hands, and it is about the rest of society and about whether it wants to lower itself to the level of the culprit instead of refusing to follow him/her in the gutter. The issue isn't what tyrants deserve, but what whether society should choose not to uphold its standards for the person who least respected it. There is no middle ground in this issue. It is impossible to divide the baby.