Baltimore: too much, too little

The New Neo Posted on by

What else did the rioting people of Baltimore expect?

Riot against police, attack them as they go about making arrests, demand that authorities indict six of them for actions and/or oversights that in any other climate would probably be considered either merely doing their duty or mild oversights that unfortunately led to the death of a man in custody, and what do you get?

Police doing the absolute minimum, reluctant to take much action at all in your neighborhood lest they be arrested, too.

Then it’s time to complain, because the human costs are high:

Now West Baltimore residents worry they’ve been abandoned by the officers they once accused of harassing them. In recent weeks, some neighborhoods have become like the Wild West without a lawman around, residents said.

“Before it was over-policing. Now there’s no police,” said Donnail “Dreads” Lee, 34, who lives in the Gilmor Homes, the public housing complex where Gray, 25, was arrested.

“I haven’t seen the police since the riots,” Lee said. “People feel as though they can do things and get away with it. I see people walking with guns almost every single day, because they know the police aren’t pulling them up like they used to.”

Police Commissioner Anthony Batts said last week his officers “are not holding back” from policing tough neighborhoods, but they are encountering dangerous hostility in the Western District.

“Our officers tell me that when officers pull up, they have 30 to 50 people surrounding them at any time,” Batts said.

At a City Council meeting Wednesday, Batts said officers have expressed concern they could be arrested for making mistakes.

“What is happening, there is a lot of levels of confusion in the police organization. There are people who have pain, there are people who are hurt, there are people who are frustrated, there are people who are angry,” Batts said. “There are people, and they’ve said this to me, ‘If I get out of my car and make a stop for a reasonable suspicion that leads to probable cause but I make a mistake on it, will I be arrested?’ They pull up to a scene and another officer has done something that they don’t know, it may be illegal, will they be arrested for it? Those are things they are asking.”

The Baltimore situation has been mishandled from start to finish by the authorities, especially the mayor. Anarchy was allowed to take hold. The indictments were at the behest of the mob (always a mistake), and although they calmed things down somewhat in terms of rioting, they certainly didn’t calm things down in terms of crime. Long-term goals were sacrificed for an illusory short-term gain.

Police are not martyrs, and there is no requirement that they be martyrs. If you prick them, do they not bleed? The people in the inner city of Baltimore no doubt have had some bona fide beefs against the police; it would be odd if that were not so, because police are human and they are doing an extraordinarily difficult job requiring the utmost in courage, patience, and fairness.

But the people of Baltimore are finding that the cure is almost certainly far worse than the disease. If this entire episode has any redeeming value, it may be that more and more people will realize that the great majority of the problems in Baltimore’s inner city are generated by the criminals in the community rather than the police who are trying to control them.

Getting credit for getting naked: a trip back in time

The New Neo Posted on by

There’s been quite a bit of brouhaha about this course:

Visual arts students at the University of California, San Diego, must exhibit themselves in the buff before a naked class of 20 and a nude professor or fail an upper-level course, a disgusted mom told KGTV-TV.

But faculty members and former students defend the elective course and maintain that “performing the self” class participants may also employ figurative nudity to pass the final.

The issue is over a syllabus entry that refers to an “erotic self” assignment, requiring students to “create a gesture that traces the outlines or speaks about your ”˜erotic self(s).’”…

“We had a choice between being nude or doing something emotionally ”˜naked’ and every student but one chose to do the nude performance,” one commenter said. “It was uncomfortable for some of us but we were adults and knew what we were getting ourselves into from day one of the class.”

Count me unsurprised, because this sort of thing is hardly new. How do I know that? I encountered something similar in a graduate program in counseling in which I was briefly enrolled during the late 70s. I was a few years out of school but still quite young, which was typical of the students there.

The program had regular courses, but it also featured shorter workshops that a graduate student could take for less credit. I was a full-time student there, enrolled in a two-day workshop that was supposed to be about something like “Reading Body Language.” As an ex-dancer, I figured this would be right up my alley, but unlike some of the students I hadn’t heard the advance buzz about the course, which was that it involved getting naked.

The students were to sit in a semicircle on the floor towards the front of the room as the professor, a woman, explained what was about to happen. There were probably about twenty of us. We were instructed to go up to the front of the room two by two (our choice of a partner), face the audience, and disrobe. Then, standing next to each other, we were to rotate slowly around with quarter-turns, and then have the class members evaluate our posture and body language and what it meant about our psyches.

The teacher was careful to explain that no one had to disrobe any more than he/she felt comfortable with, but she encouraged us to go the full monty because that would be the most valuable in terms of the learning process. I was uncomfortable not just with the idea of disrobing myself, but with the idea of sitting there at the feet of a succession of naked people, most of whom I had never met before and most of whom (actually, all of whom) I had no desire to see naked. And that’s true even though we were all pretty young at the time.

I still remember the first volunteer, although I don’t recall who he was paired with. He seemed incredibly eager to do this; practically jumped up from his perch on the floor in order to go first. I realized almost immediately, as in one fluid motion he unzipped the one-piece jumpsuit he’d worn for the occasion and revealed that he had nothing whatsoever on under it, that he had known about the exercise in advance and planned ahead by choosing his outfit carefully.

I formulated my own plan. I volunteered to be in the second pairing. As I stood before the group, I slowly and carefully removed my shoes and socks, and then gave a little speech. In it I said that I was very uncomfortable with the exercise as a whole. I did not think we were trained properly to evaluate people’s bodies. I did not think this exercise had any educational value. I thought that people were going to feel coerced and pressured to remove more than they felt okay about even though they were given the choice, because of the group pressure involved. Most people didn’t want to convey the idea that they were wimps. So I had volunteered early in order to act as an example for anyone who might be feeling uncomfortable but shy about saying it, and I invited anyone who felt that way to join me in my pairing. One person did.

Even clothed, it was disturbing to be up there, pivoting and posing. I noticed that as the day wore on—and about half the students completely disrobed, with the remainder coming very close—I retained the same sense of outrage and upset, mostly about the subtle coercion and the stupidity of the assignment in general.

In order to get credit we had to write a paper on the experience. I used mine to criticize the workshop, among other things. I still have it in my files; it’s one of the few papers I’ve saved from my time in school. The following is an excerpt from it:

One reason for my feelings [of discomfort] seemed to be a sense of violation of my human dignity, even with my clothes on, at being coolly analyzed by a group of observers, even in the name of learning. I have a very well-developed sense of privacy and prefer to choose those with whom I become intimate, and I felt this sense to be violated both as an observer and a subject. It seemed very different from a dressing-room situation in which I am comfortable with seeing the nude bodies of strangers. Everyone’s tension level seemed very high, and there was something very cold, analytic, and coercive about the situation, at least as I perceived it. The extreme and dramatic image that kept coming to my mind, making me very sad and anxious, was that of concentration camp victims. It is certainly no accident that they were asked to disrobe in public before being killed, because of the sense of humiliation it engendered…

I realize that you, as leader, made it clear that we were able to resist the group pressure to disrobe if it didn’t feel right to us. I don’t know if the people who might be hurt the most by going along with the group pressure would be able to resist it. Also, it was nearly impossible, as an observer, to resist the group pressure to be instantly intimate by watching the nudity of others. I, as an observer, did not perceive the atmosphere to be particularly supportive or mature. I really felt that it was more an exercise in group inclusion than a teaching exercise. To me, the emphasis was not on learning to study the body as a therapeutic tool (after all, few of us will see our patients in the nude), but on the students themselves as clients, patients, group members, and fellow-travelers on the road to self-awareness…I was personally troubled by a confusion as to your aims and the aims of the other students. When I say it seemed to be a group inclusion exercise, I mean this in the same sense as an initiation rite. And, as with many initiations, the group seemed to feel that the more difficult the initiation the more valuable the group therefore must be.

I realize that I am probably a minority of one in this group, but I wanted to write about it to tell you how a certain type of fairly private, reserved person might react. I am sure that some people have similar reactions, and perhaps you don’t often get feedback from them.

Later, I wrote:

…that is one big danger of [such exercises]. Acting-out, exhibitionist personalities are given the perfect stage on which to show each other how “free”‘ they are. To me, it proves nothing, except the potency of groups and the willingness of most people to follow the leader.

Looking back over thirty-five years later, I am struck by a few things, but they all come under the heading of plus ça change, plus c’est la méme chose. One was how set my personality already seemed to be. Another was that, although I wrote this back when I was politically liberal—and didn’t see anything the least bit political in the situation or in my paper—it not only was deeply political but my stance revealed my conservatism without my realizing it, as well as my commitment to the rights of the individual and my awareness of follow-the-leader group coercion. It’s also clear how much the educational system had already attained its current liberal stance and attitudes.

I dropped out of the program entirely shortly after that. It was about twenty years before I went back and got my degree, in another program and another time.

Public opinion polls comparing the Republican candidates…

The New Neo Posted on by

…are pretty worthless at this point, including those that compare them to Hillary.

But here’s the latest.

The only thing I take from the polls is that this will be a long hard slog among the myriad Republican candidates. But we already knew that.

Actually, there’s one more thing I take from the polls, and that’s that Hillary Clinton is doing way better than she should be. But we already knew that, as well.

Rest assured: the Iran negotiations are in the very best of hands

The New Neo Posted on by

Or rather, mouths.

As if things were not bad enough, we now have the appointment of one of our very favorite spokespeople to the Iran negotiations team:

Acting State Department Spokesperson Marie Harf is being promoted to Senior Advisor for Strategic Communications to Secretary of State John Kerry.

Harf will focus on negotiations between the U.S. and Iran on nuclear weapons.

Perhaps this is not as bad as it seems. Perhaps she will merely be relaying messages to Kerry (although I’m not sure she can even do that with accuracy). I’m not even sure this qualifies as a promotion, because it means we’ll be seeing less of her.

Harf certainly has shown the single trait that Obama cares about in his subordinates: enough dogged loyalty to be willing to take a lot of punishment and spew out a lot of garbage for Team Obama.

[NOTE: See this for previous posts of mine that feature Harf.]

The crowded Republican field

The New Neo Posted on by

Rand Paul is on the outs, say quite a few people, including Dana Milbank, Bobby Jindal, and Chris Christie, all for somewhat different reasons.

Well, I never thought Paul had a chance. He is a better version of his dad, but like him he still voices enough idiosyncratic positions that are too far to the extreme libertarian side of things for most voters to stomach.

I also think that both Jindal and Christie are toast in terms of election 2016. Jindal doesn’t have the “it” factor, although I think highly of him. I can’t define exactly what this “it” factor is, but I know it when I see it, and although I don’t think it should be so important I am realist enough to acknowledge that it is. Christie, unlike Jindal, has almost too much personality, and his doesn’t wear well over time, although it’s a type of personality that I, being from New York City, find very familiar and almost soothing, along with the accent (yeah, go figure). Christie also is too far to the left to please the Republican base, and Bridgegate has somehow managed to successfully taint him (just as the MSM intended) even though he was actually uninvolved. Continue reading →

Obamacare, the states, and the “drafting error”

The New Neo Posted on by

About the current claims that, back when Obamacare was being drafted, that language about the necessity of state exchanges for subsidies just sort of snuck in there by accident and/or error, Megan Mcardle writes:

1. This is not new.

2. This is incomplete.

3. This is not legally relevant, for good reason.

4. If it were legally relevant, it would not be as helpful to the case as liberals think.

This is not the first time a media outlet has talked to folks who were involved in the process, and recorded them saying that they never, no way and no how, intended to deny subsidies to states–or reasoning, like Olympia Snowe in Pear’s article, that they couldn’t have set it up this way, because it would be crazy to choose a structure that threatened subsidies for people in states that didn’t set up exchanges.

These articles, however, often don’t provide important counterarguments. For example: Congress indisputably chose exactly that crazy, insane, totally inconceivable structure for the Medicaid expansion passed in the same law. In fact, it was considerably more coercive…

Or consider the “drafting error” interpretation that many politicians have offered. Here’s a puzzle about that…: At several points during the drafting process, people kept adding the phrase “established by the state” to the middle of “exchange established under Section 1311,”…This language survived the process of merging and reconciling bills, even while other sections were amended to ensure parity of requirements on federal and state exchanges…

Read the whole thing, it you’re interested in the legal niceties.

Betsy Newmark expands on some of the many reasons why “we didn’t really mean it” just doesn’t cut it in explaining why Obamacare was drafted the way it was vis a vis the states setting up their own exchanges:

The government has not made this “drafting error” argument in either its brief or oral argument; instead the defendants argue that “exchange established by the state” is a term of art that includes exchanges not established by the state. There’s good reason for this. The “drafting error” argument requires admitting that at some point “established by the state” was deliberately written into law to mean, well, exchanges established by individual states, something that the government has no interest in saying, because contrary to apparently popular belief, “drafting error” is not a magic word that forces the Supreme Court to give you a mulligan. As Adler points out, Elena Kagan recently wrote in another case that, “This Court has no roving license, in even ordinary cases of statutory interpretation, to disregard clear language simply on the view that (in [the IRS’s] words) Congress ‘must have intended’ something broader.”

However, even if this were accurate, and even if the court were inclined to broadly rewrite statutes to what the legislators wanted them to be, none of Pear’s interviews would carry any weight toward that end. The Supreme Court isn’t much interested in post-hoc statements of legislative intent….

Actually, this is not crazy, but very wise. Memory is incredibly fallible, especially about stuff you’re highly motivated to believe.

We now have two cases of wonks who were closely connected to the drafting process, who said at one point that the King interpretation of the statute is insane to anyone who followed the construction of the law … and can be found on tape at an earlier point (in one case, during the legislative process) advancing exactly the theory that they subsequently declared completely and obviously insane. Do I think that their later argument was a strategic lie? No, despite conservative shouts that I am being naive. Scout’s honor, cross my heart and hope to die, I think that they simply forgot what they’d earlier believed.

I’m not sure why that word “simply” is in there, because Newmark doesn’t appear to think that this “forgetting” is a simple act. After all, the forgetting isn’t random; it only goes in one direction, that which furthers what the party needs it to be at any given time. IMHO it is more akin to the “forgetting” that leads, as Winston Smith’s interlocutor O’Brien says in Nineteen Eighty-Four, to the conviction that 2 + 2 = 5 if the party needs it to.

I have explored this phenomenon before, and I think the following quote from Whittaker Chambers’ Witness describes it better than anything I’ve ever read:

When I first knew him, Harry Freeman [who later become the assistant US chief of Tass, the Soviet news service] was just out of Cornell University, where he had brilliantly majored in history”¦the best mind that I was to meet among the American Communist intellectuals. It was an entirely new type of mind to me. No matter how favorable his opinion had been to an individual or his political role, if that person fell from grace in the Communist Party, Harry Freeman changed his opinion about him instantly. That was not strange, that was a commonplace of Communist behavior. What was strange was that Harry seemed to change without any effort or embarrassment. There seemed to vanish from his mind any recollection that he had ever held any opinion other than the approved one. If you taxed him with his former views, he would show surprise, and that surprise would be authentic. He would then demonstrate to you, in a series of mental acrobatics so flexible that the shifts were all but untraceable, that he had never thought anything else.

In that same post, I go on to write:

Of course, rationalization and denial of facts that don’t fit a person’s previously held beliefs is not just a province of the Left. It’s a general human trait, and that is why a mind is a difficult thing to change. But the Left carefully nurtures, fosters, advocates, and even requires this sort of denial, whereas it is my observation that the Right (and this was something that was formative in my own change experience), while hardly immune, is much less demanding that its adherents dismiss and deny logic and inconvenient facts.

The courts…

The New Neo Posted on by

…get it right on blocking elements of Obama’s amnesty.

For now, anyway:

The decision means that a lower court ruling blocking millions of illegal immigrants from obtaining work permits and otherwise avoiding deportation will be allowed to stand, delaying the implementation until the court case is resolved.

Twenty-six states have joined the suit against the administration’s policy.

Now what?:

The Obama administration can now turn to the U.S. Supreme Court for a green light to proceed with the program, or Justice Department officials could wait until the 5th Circuit rules on the merits of U.S. District Court Judge Andrew Hanen’s legal rationale for the injunction he entered in February. A different panel of the appeals court is expected to hear arguments on those issues in early July.

The three 5th Circuit judges deciding the case were randomly selected. Two of the three judges selected were appointed by Republican presidents, while the other was appointed by Obama.

The vote today was 2-1. The breakdown of who voted for what was exactly as you would expect. That’s one of the reasons that electing Republicans is important—they get to appoint judges, and although it doesn’t always work out perfectly (i.e. Roberts and some others) it usually does make a difference in holding the line.

Prager on the differences between left and right

The New Neo Posted on by

[Hat tip: commenter “Artfldgr.”]

Columnist Dennis Prager is a changer, although his change happened many moons ago—he says that Carter is the last Democrat he voted for:

Obviously, I underwent an intellectual change. And it wasn’t easy. Becoming a Republican was emotionally and psychologically like converting to another religion.

In fact, when I first voted Republican I felt as if I had abandoned the Jewish people. To be a Jew meant being a Democrat. It was that simple. It was — and remains — that fundamental to many American Jews’ identity.

Therefore, it took a lot of thought to undergo this conversion. I had to understand both liberalism and conservatism. Indeed, I have spent a lifetime in a quest to do so.

Changers have the advantage of having looked at life (and politics, and history) from both sides now, as in the Joni Mitchell song. Prager is planning a series of columns explaining some of the fundamental differences between left and right as he sees them.

Should be worth reading.

Is support of ISIS on social media protected speech?

The New Neo Posted on by

I don’t have a definitive answer to the question posed by the title of this post. But I know that it’s an important question.

ISIS is a modern phenomenon. Violence and terrorism is an old, old one, but the internet has exponentially enhanced the ability of such evil to reach a huge number of people around the entire globe. Geography is no longer any barrier, and ISIS has been able to unite the most barbaric bloodthirstiness of times gone by with an up-to-date ability to excite and recruit people with it, to organize and spread the word, and to do it in ways that often protect the identity of the perpetrators. If the government wants to use its own ability to spy on ISIS supporters, it has to activate methods of surveillance that offend the sensibilities of a free people.

ISIS thus can use our own dedication to liberty to undermine that liberty. I suppose ’twas ever thus for groups that seek to undermine the US, but never before has there been such a combination of primitive blood lust, religious fanaticism, and sophisticated use of the most modern methods of reaching the public from which to draw supporters. “Worrisome” doesn’t even begin to describe it.

This Fox article [hat tip: Amy Miller at Legal Insurrection] indicates that there has been so much internet chatter from supporters of ISIS as well as actual members planning violence that US intelligence is having trouble separating out the more serious from the mere talkers:

“The large number of social media postings by US-based ISIL supporters is challenging for investigators in differentiating those supporters focused only on promoting pro-ISIL rhetoric, which may be protected speech, vice [versus] detecting those prepared to engage in violence on the group’s behalf,” the bulletin said.

The bulletin warned the “reach and popularity” of social media platforms has made it easier for U.S.-based extremists to “identify and connect” with foreign terrorist organizations, which can “potentially direct” them. It said the FBI estimates there are “hundreds, possibly thousands” of people in the U.S. getting “recruitment overtures or directives to attack the United States,” and ISIS is using social media in “unprecedented ways” to send messages advocating attacks in the U.S.

ISIS is not a group that is benign in any of its manifestations. It has no redeeming social importance, not even any social service front like many other terrorist organizations use to justify themselves to the naive. It doesn’t hide its intention to wreak havoc on the Middle Eastern countries in which it is most active, and in the west and this country too. It does not make a secret of the fact that it is marshaling its forces to do so through terrorist attacks of a greater ferocity than has been previously known.

So, what are the limits of protected speech? Is supporting an organization like ISIS okay as long as the government can’t find a smoking gun? When does speech cross over into what’s called a “true threat” or sedition, or giving “material support” to a terrorist group, none of which are protected speech?

John Carlin, assistant AG for national security, seems to think it would be a good idea to try ISIS supporters as terrorists:

He suggested the Justice Department could bring prosecutions under the law against providing material support to a terrorist organization. His remarks were believed to be the first time a U.S. official has ever said that people who assist ISIS with online media could face criminal prosecution.

Carlin was asked at the conference whether he would “consider criminal charges” against people who are “proliferating ISIS social media.”

His answer: “Yes. You need to look at the particular facts and evidence.” But Carlin noted that the United States could use the material support law to prosecute “technical expertise” to a designated terrorist organization. And spreading the word for ISIS online could count as such expertise.

That does seem to be a bit of a stretch. On the other hand, ISIS has such special and extreme characteristics that supporting that group is worse than supporting other terrorist groups—even Islamic terrorists such as Hamas, for example—because of ISIS’s extreme barbarity and global ambitions, including an imminent plan to attack the population of the US. Ignoring the fact that they are recruiting in this country would seem to be a good example of the Constitution as a suicide pact.

Of course, the most effective thing to do to blunt the appeal of ISIS would be to defeat and humiliate them in Syria and Iraq. But the Obama administration doesn’t seem to have the will to mount a serious attempt to do that now, before the “JV” has metastasized even further.