Weinstein unveiled: what the Farrow article reveals

The New Neo Posted on by

Even though I’ve twice said that the Weinstein story fills me with a sense of exhaustion, I’m writing about it at least one more time—not because of Weinstein himself, but because of how much his tale says about the use of power and intimidation to instill fear and shame in some victims and potential victims, and how it can compromise other people to become confederates in that process. Since writing yesterday’s post on the subject, I’ve read the Ronan Farrow expose on Weinstein that appeared in The New Yorker, and I suggest you read it, too.

I think I may have an answer, or at least a partial answer, to the question of why this story came out now. Weinstein stories appeared almost simultaneously in both the New Yorker and the NY Times, with the latter article coming out first. Farrow himself has said that he’s been researching the Weinstein article for ten months. He first shopped it to NBC, where he’s employed, but they didn’t run it (read this for a discussion of why; the answer, at least according to that article, appears to have been intimidation and fear). After NBC wouldn’t run it, Farrow shopped it to the New Yorker and they decided to go with it. NBC says they declined it because it wasn’t well-sourced enough (it was a different and earlier version than was ultimately published in the New Yorker), but I very much doubt that was the reason. Farrow has also said that he was threatened with a lawsuit by Weinstein.

Farrow has a personal reason for relentlessly pursuing the story, and that personal reason’s name is Woody Allen. Allen didn’t just have sex with Ronan’s sister Soon-Yi when she had barely reached the age of legal majurity (he later married her), resulting in enormous family upheaval and estrangement, but Farrow’s sister Dylan has alleged that Allen sexually abused her (Dylan, that is) as a child. It’s no surprise that the Weinstein abuses—which Ronan Farrow, with his Hollywood connections, had to have heard about for quite some time—pressed a button for him. He’s a determined guy, and he wasn’t going to back off from this no matter who threatened him with a lawsuit.

As far as the Times story goes—I believe that the Times got wind of the Farrow story brewing, and they didn’t want to be scooped by Farrow and The New Yorker. So they got their own story together—somewhat more hurriedly—and ran with it. I also believe that Farrow may have been particularly good at getting the women to talk because of his own activism on behalf of his sister Dylan, and his understanding of the phenomenon of sexual abuse in situations in which there is a potential abuse of power.

There is also speculation that the person who turned Weinstein in to the Times was none other than Weinstein’s own brother:

Bob Weinstein, who co-founded The Weinstein Company with his brother and who currently serves as a board member, has reportedly been trying for years to unseat Harvey Weinstein as the sole head of the studio.

‘Bob’s wanted Harvey out for years,’ a former staffer told Page Six.

The source claimed that ‘the two brothers are becoming increasingly suspicious of each other.’

It has even been suggested that Bob Weinstein ‘may have even fed this story’ to the Times as a means of orchestrating Harvey Weinstein’s downfall…

A statement issued by four board members said that The Weinstein Company will be run in the meantime by Bob Weinstein and David Glasser, the president and COO.

I suppose it’s possible; it would certainly make a good movie plot. But I hold with my theory that it was Farrow who led the charge, and the Times that followed. I think that if Weinstein’s brother did feed information to the Times, it was probably because he smelled the blood in the water as a result of rumors that Farrow was getting the women to tell him their stories.

The Farrow article describes a repetitive pattern of behavior by Weinstein. The exact details differ in each of the cases, but Weinstein’s alleged modus operandi is similar in each. Get the woman alone—by subterfuge, if necessary. Touch her on a breast or other private place, and/or expose yourself. Ignore repeated “no’s” and keep on going. Sometimes force was not necessary. The woman’s isolation, the overwhelming size and strength of Weinstein, and the fear (either of an implied danger or through an explicit threat) of career repercussions and/or legal action and/or other forms of reputation assassination was enough to induce some women to surrender.

I say “surrender” rather than “agree” or “cooperate” because that is what it seems like to me. The women felt overpowered by a hostile force that could harm them greatly. Their “no’s” were completely ignored by the physically overpowering Weinstein, and they stopped saying “no” after a while because of increasing fear and hopelessness as well as shame.

This was not a playful domination game for them. This was the real thing, and the danger they felt was real as well. They were not on dates gone bad—they weren’t on dates at all. These were meetings for ostensible professional reasons, prior to Weinstein’s turning the tables on them.

As I was reading the article I realized that some of these accounts had the ring of familiarity. Because of my training, I’ve had to read a great deal of information about child abusers, and that’s what I started thinking about. These women were not children, of course, but they were uniformly young and new to the profession at the time of the assaults, and Weinstein held all the power cards, both physical and professional and in the realm of media and public relations as well.

Child abusers often choose certain children they see as particularly vulnerable in some way, and then they groom them by being nice to them so that by the time of the sexual advance the abuser knows how to coerce the child—either through flattery or threat or lies or whatever will do the trick. Legally, children cannot give consent, but they often surrender out of fear and/or confusion. The women Weinstein came on to were adults and could have given legal consent, but they felt a similar fear and confusion.

A different classic ploy of child abusers—in this case, those who approach children they’ve never met before—is to tell the child they’ve lost a puppy, and then to ask the child to help them look for it. A puppy! What could be more enticing? The child eagerly starts to assist in the search, and is led to an isolated spot where the assault occurs. In the accounts in the Farrow article, a meeting about a part in a movie was the puppy Weinstein held out to get the women into a compromising position (often through trickery in which the meeting started out including other people but ended up being just with Weinstein), and all the rest followed. In his case, though—unlike the child abusers—not only was the woman an adult, but there really was a puppy, at least in the metaphoric sense. The “puppy” was the movie role—and maybe other future movie roles, as well as fame and fortune—and the woman knew it. That puppy was what led the women to take an initial meeting with him, and then Weinstein used his tried and true methods of coercion mixed with fear afterwards.

There are differences in how far it went for each of the women Farrow interviewed. Some, like Mira Sorvino, successfully fended off his advances (she came up with a clever ploy to accomplish this). Sorvino believes she paid a price professionally as a result of her refusal, and I’m inclined to believe her. Some submitted one time and never again placed themselves in a position in which they were near Weinstein. One recent victim went to the police and later wore a wire in a talk with Weinstein (an audio has been made public). At least one of the Weinstein accusers, Asia Argento, later developed a consensual sexual relationship with him that seems to have been motivated in part by shame and resignation and in part by what he could do for her.

I think what was going on with Weinstein—in addition to the abuse of power to satisfy his own desires—was his ability to rationalize to himself what was happening. I think the following statement Weinstein is said to have made to a young woman named Emily Nestor, who was seeking a job on the production end of things, may express Weinstein’s way of changing his own internal narrative to salve whatever he might still possess that could be called a shred of a conscience:

In Nestor’s account of the exchange, Weinstein said, “Oh, the girls always say no. You know, ‘No, no.’ And then they have a beer or two and then they’re throwing themselves at me.” In a tone that Nestor described as “very weirdly proud,” Weinstein added “that he’d never had to do anything like Bill Cosby.” She assumed that he meant he’d never drugged a woman.

Weinstein may have thought himself so powerfully irresistible that no woman could actually say “no” to him and mean it. Or he may have been lying to Nestor, and the knowledge of doing something sexual to these women against their will was one of the things that most turned him on.

Rosanna Arquette is an actress who described an incident to Farrow in which she refused Weinstein’s advances. When he kept pressuring her, describing how he’d helped the careers of other women who’d given in, she reports having said to him, “I will never be that girl.” Arquette believes her career suffered as a result, and she kept silent out of fear that he would further harm her.

What causes one person to say “I will never be that girl”? And what causes others to become “that girl,” sometimes much against their better judgment? Inner strength, a sense of morality, courage, all those things we seek to instill in people are often sorely lacking or just aren’t powerful enough to overcome fear and/or ambition.

People who worked for Weinstein and who knew that he was arranging such meetings and in some cases helped him to do it weren’t sexually compromised themselves. But they were morally (and even spiritually) compromised. Farrow talked to some of them, too, and it seems to me that they have been feeling considerable amounts of guilt and shame, and saw talking to him as one small way to expiate at least some of their own guilt.

Who on earth thinks Weinstein is the only one? He may have gone further than most, but it isn’t for nothing that people say power corrupts, and absolute power corrupts absolutely.

[NOTE: For those who are curious, here was my take on the October 2016 disclosure of the Trump “pussy” remarks.]

Further thoughts on the Harvey Weinstein silence

The New Neo Posted on by

In my earlier post about Harvey Weinstein, I wrote:

I must admit this story fills me with a feeling of exhaustion. I guess I always assumed that Hollywood was rife with the kind of behavior of which Weinstein is accused, and that everyone – I mean everyone – who goes to Hollywood to make movies is aware of it. That doesn’t make it right, of course. It’s wrong.

My sense of exhaustion has only increased, and so I refer you to others if you want to read in-depth treatments of Weinstein’s behavior and of the reactions—and non-reactions—to it.

I reiterate that whether a person (adult person, that is) who went to Hollywood to be an actress was ignorant or not about Weinstein’s reputation as a particularly offensive and bold sexual harasser, anyone who goes into that field has to have heard of the casting couch. And anyone with the slightest sense should have thought about what her response would be in such a situation with a powerful man who could make or break her career, including whether or not to tell the world if and when such propositions were made to her.

Some people will decide to sleep with such a person. Some will decide to refuse and resist. And some will decide the world needs to know.

The latter type are the bravest, I believe (if they are telling the truth; false accusations are another thing entirely). And one thing I learned long long ago is that not everyone is brave, and/or that people are brave to different degrees. In addition, there are different types of bravery. There is physical courage and emotional courage and moral courage, and courage in private life vs. public life, and they’re not all the same thing nor are they possessed to the same degree by the same person.

All of that is a lead-in to the fact that I am not surprised that few if any people spoke up about Weinstein. My own experiences in courageous speaking-up about those in power have mostly been in academia and involved matters other than sexual harassment. I’ve been in the “speaking up” position several times even though I don’t think of myself as a courageous person and I believe I’m correct on that score rather than modest. Why have I spoken up several times in academic settings (to criticize certain professors, particularly when I was in graduate school)? In my case, for whatever reason, the possible repercussions didn’t bother me at all—in part because my record in various schools had given me a certain amount of academic confidence, and in part because I wasn’t at all certain I wanted to go into the field for which I was then training.

So for me, although the stakes may have seemed high—for example, other students would often come up to me after I spoke and say they agreed with me, but they refused to go public, citing fear of bad grades or bad recommendations—I didn’t personally regard the stakes as all that high. That definitely helped me to have courage. I like to think I would have done the same even if I felt I was taking a greater risk, but who knows? And for the actresses who were the recipients of the unwanted advances of Harvey Weinstein, they probably kept their mouths shut about what he’d done because to speak out publicly probably would have meant their careers would have taken a nosedive. At least, that was almost certainly their calculation, whether they admit it or not.

I’m not excusing Weinstein’s behavior. I’m just wondering why anyone is surprised at the previous silence from the actresses. There’s also the political overlay (he was a big Democratic mover and shaker), but for most people I think what usually stops them from speaking out is the fear of negative personal repercussions, in this case career repercussions. For reporters who knew and kept silent, however, the political was probably in the forefront of their motives for keeping quiet. After all, aren’t reporters supposedly intrepid truth-tellers, in the business of “speaking truth to power,” afflicting the comfortable and comforting the afflicted?

[NOTE: This entire post assumes that the charges against Weinstein are true. That does not mean that all his accusers are telling the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth. However, in the case of Weinstein, there’s so much smoke that it’s highly probable that there was a great deal of fire.]

Messing with the Las Vegas shooting timeline

The New Neo Posted on by

This news sure isn’t going to engender a lot of trust in the police’s competence and/or veracity:

The gunman in the Las Vegas massacre first shot a hotel security officer about six minutes before opening fire on an outdoor concert, a new revelation in the timeline of the deadliest mass shooting in U.S. history.

Jesus Campos, who was injured in the leg during the shooting, investigated “sounds of drilling” coming from the 32nd-floor room of the Mandalay Bay resort where killer Stephen Paddock was staying, authorities said at a late-afternoon press briefing.

Paddock, who had an arsenal of rifles and ammunition in his room, was drilling holes through a wall in preparation for his well-planned attack, which included not only firing bullets at the concert-goers below, but also the planting of at least 50 pounds of explosives in his car.

Moments later, Campos was shot in the leg by Paddock, an injury he would survive. The time of the shooting was 9:59 p.m. Las Vegas time ”” about six minutes before Paddock began spraying bullets into the crowd. He killed 58 and injured nearly 500 before fatally shooting himself as police closed in.

It’s very confusing, because Campos had been previously described by police as a hero who helped stop the slaughter by interrupting Paddock while he was killing concertgoers, diverting the shooter’s attention from the carnage he was creating. Where did police get that earlier information, and how did they get it so wrong? From Campos? From someone else? What caused them to revise the information, and how sure are they that they’ve got it straight now? If they don’t do that, they run the risk of having people disbelieve everything they say. And because there already were plenty of people who disbelieve everything the police say, the omission of the details of the reason for the change of information given out by police is glaring (at least, I havn’t been about to locate any of these details).

The old timeline made a certain amount of sense. The new one does not; at least not yet, with such incomplete information. Why the six minute pause before Paddock began to shoot in the direction of the concert? What was Paddock doing during those six minutes? Or had he just not fully set up his sniper’s nest yet? My guess is that they haven’t a clue.

And why didn’t Campos get any effective backup after being shot through the door and being the target of about 200 bullets? Did he lack the ability to radio anyone or even to use a cell phone to call anyone? Are security guards put on the job at this hotel without any modern communication devices of the sort that most civilians carry on their person at all times? Or was the hotel informed, and someone down the line failed to call the proper authorities? Or were the proper authorities just slow in coming? According to the new timeline, when was Campos located by police? Had Paddock not yet begun to shoot at the crowd, or had he already started the massacre, or was all the shooting over and was everything silent at the time? And if Paddock hadn’t yet begun the mass murdering when the police found Campos in the hallway, what summoned those police in the first place? The sound of the gunfire at Campos? Was everything quiet by the time they got there? If so, why did they wait for the arrival of the SWAT team to storm the room? And if they waited because they thought the shooting at Campos (that had already ended) was all the shooting that was going to occur during the entire incident, why did they think that? And surely, once Paddock re-commenced shooting (this time at the crowd, although they wouldn’t have known that was his target), wouldn’t they have been disabused of the notion that all the shooting was over?

In other words, were they completely unequipped to do business with an active shooter? Did they fire at Paddock at all? If not, why not? Were they fearful that innocent people were in the room with him and might be harmed by police gunfire? But if he was actively shooting, why would they not think it better to fire at him, despite the possible presence of others, than to allow him free reign to do whatever he might be doing as an active shooter?

And when did the SWAT team get there? Who summoned them? The original explanation—that police arrived as the shooting all stopped and the massacre was over, and that they thought they could take their time for that reason—made some sense. But it falls apart if they had actually arrived before the massacre and then heard Paddock start firing again, or if they had arrived in the middle of the massacre.

And, as before, there are still the questions of why Paddock stopped shooting and at what time he killed himself and why.

There’s little doubt that the process of getting information from the police department to the public about the Las Vegas shooting has been a mess. And it sounds to me as though the investigation itself has been a mess. That’s very unfortunate, because there already were enough mysteries and conspiracy theories being generated to fill a book, or several books, most of them by Tom Clancy.

Police also have now changed the timeline of when Paddock checked into the hotel, saying it was three days earlier than they had originally stated, so that he’d been there about a week prior to the killings. Authorities also have located about 200 surveillance video photos of Paddock around Las Vegas during that time, and in the photos he is always alone.

I can’t fault anyone who doubts nearly all of the information coming from police at this point. Personally, however, I believe that it’s almost always incorrect to ascribe to conspiracy that which could be explained by incompetence.

[NOTE: Another point on which I’d love to have some clarification but so far have found none: what type of police are we talking about at the different points on the timeline? In other words, if Campos was shot first and was an unarmed security guard, when did the first armed police arrive? Were they members of the general Las Vegas police force, or are we talking about armed security guards at the hotel? If the latter, was it a private security detail, and what was their training about how to deal with an active or inactive shooter? When did the SWAT teams arrive? Who called them?

I would expect each tier of security to have different reactions and training for an active and/or inactive shooter situation. But the information I’m getting on this is both sparse and confused.]

On SCOTUS and gerrymandering:

The New Neo Posted on by

The gerrymandering case before the Supreme Court is one of those things I’ve been meaning to research in depth but haven’t had the time to do yet. My gut feeling has been that gerrymandering is bad, but it’s done by both sides and is part of the general awfulness of politics, and I’m not at all sure I want the federal government to intervene. But that’s just my preliminary reaction.

Today I noticed this piece in National Review that said essentially the same thing:

…[Republican government]…is often messy, unseemly, partisan, hypocritical, and unprincipled. Self-interested politicians double as the referees, which means that there is always a danger that the rules will be written to benefit one side over the other. Shorn of the broader historical context, any individual infraction can seem like an existential threat to democracy itself. But in fact democracy is constantly facing such threats. This is in the very nature of self-government, and it is one reason the Framers divided power among so many different governing bodies. “If men were angels,” Madison wrote in Federalist No. 51, “no government would be necessary.”

The question is, What do we do about it? Let’s stipulate that partisan gerrymanders, at least in their extreme forms, are bad, and that technological advances in the last quarter-century have made them easier to draw. Do we really want the Supreme Court ”” nine, isolated lawyers in Washington, D.C. ”” making decisions about what is and is not appropriate for every legislative district in the nation? That strikes me as a far greater danger to self-government than gerrymandering. After all, partisan gerrymanders are by nature ephemeral.

Partisan identification is a fluid quality; electoral waves have a habit of sweeping out each side from time to time, regardless of the strength of a gerrymander; and the census every ten years guarantees that all district lines have to be redrawn eventually. Gerrymanders can be overcome, and they usually are. On the other hand, the Supreme Court is insulated from the back-and-forth of democratic politics. If it lays down a bad or misguided rule, it will be exceedingly difficult to undo. The Court ”” unlike every other branch in government ”” has carved out for itself an unassailable authority. Its rulings are not really subject to checks and balances, let alone popular sovereignty. What it says, goes ”” unless or until it can be persuaded to change its mind.

Seems correct to me.

And here’s an exceptionally informative article about some of the details of Gill v. Whitford, the Wisconsin case currently before SCOTUS in which they will decide whether the Republican-drawn districts are constitutional. I suggest you read the whole thing, because it’s a bit complicated, but here’s a discussion of some of the issues involved:

In considering the case, the Court will rely heavily upon the “efficiency gap,” a mathematical exercise based on how many votes each party “wastes.” The theory goes like this: The goal of gerrymandering is to win as many districts as possible with the voters your party has, and this is done by dividing those voters into districts where they are a majority but not a very big one ”” 51 percent of the vote wins an election just as much as 80 percent does, so those “extra” voters will do more good for the party elsewhere. And when an area is so dominated by the other party’s voters that there’s no way to win it, gerrymandering entails packing as many of the other party’s voters as possible into that district to reduce their sway elsewhere. Thus votes are “wasted” when they are cast for a losing candidate, and when they are above and beyond what a winning candidate needed to win. The “efficiency gap” measures the partisan disparity in wasted votes ”” and in Wisconsin there is an efficiency gap that favors Republicans.

That might seem to be the objective standard that the Court has pined for in the past. But the efficiency gap is a deeply partisan model. As Guy Harrison and Jason Torchinsky have explained, it fails to take account of numerous factors, including that Democratic voters tend to cluster in big cities, which necessarily affects how they are spread out (or not) among districts. As a result, the Republican-drawn Wisconsin districts, which have relatively normal-looking and fair boundaries, appear unreasonably partisan through the lens of the efficiency gap, while clearly politicized Democrat-drawn districts look appropriate.

As I said, I suggest you read the whole thing if you want to understand what the article is getting it. But the conclusion is this:

Perhaps the most fascinating aspect of gerrymandering is that by this measure, the widely accepted one, Democrats are probably more at fault than Republicans in the war they say they’re trying to win. Simply put, Democrats stand to gain far more from redrawing districts on weirdly shaped political lines than Republicans do.

Geography factors a great deal into why one party tends to win more congressional elections; as mentioned above, Democratic voters are packed densely into large cities, while Republicans are spread throughout the country more evenly. This “unintentional gerrymandering” leads to a national average bias of five points nationwide for the GOP. So while Gill may make politically motivated redistricting seem like a Republican problem, some of the most dramatic gerrymanders are actually the fault of Democrats, attempting to maximize their power in heavily blue states or hold on to seats when they swing toward the right.

The end of ISIS?

The New Neo Posted on by

You’d think this might be even bigger news than it seems to be so far:

Nearly a thousand Islamic State fighters have surrendered to Kurdish forces after the terror group lost its last major city in Iraq, The New York Times reports.

Many of the dejected fighters reportedly have soiled themselves and await interrogation and trial by Kurdish authorities. The mass surrender of the terrorist group is particularly unusual for ISIS, who’ve made a point of fighting to the very last man. In many cases the group made the last days of battle painful for the opposing force by deploying waves of suicide bombers.

One fighter recalled to TheNYT that the ISIS governor of the town of Hawija himself gave the order to surrender in mass. “I believe if the governors are telling us to surrender, it really means that this is the end,” he lamented.

“The speed at which the enemy gave up surprised me,” Operation Inherent Resolve commander Lt. Gen. Paul Funk told USATODAY after the battle. “Their leaders are abandoning them.”

The situation may have reached a tipping point. Part of the huge draw of ISIS was that its fighters were seen as powerful winners. Once they start losing, and the losing has gone on and on, their aura of invincibility is gone along with a great deal of their dubious and bloodthirsty appeal. Who wants to die for a bunch of losers? Who wants the flowing rivers of blood to be their own?

Of course, this doesn’t mean ISIS is gone for good. Terror networks have a habit of reconstituting themselves in different form, like that guy in “The Terminator.” Which guy? You know, this guy:

For Columbus Day: statues with footnotes

The New Neo Posted on by

A little over a month ago, in the heat of the war against statues, New York’s Mayor de Blasio expressed the thought that perhaps an explanatory note might be helpful in dealing with the dreadful conundrum represented by the offending statue of Christopher Columbus:

Facing mounting criticism of his plan to remove some of the city’s monuments ”” possibly including the Christopher Columbus statue in Columbus Circle ”” Mayor de Blasio went to Plan”‰B on Monday.

For the first time, the mayor said that instead of the heave-ho, contested monuments might get plaques that offer explanations of the historical figures they depict.

“I think there’s been a misunderstanding of what options could be utilized,” the mayor said at an unrelated press conference in Brooklyn. “There’s more than one way to address this. I don’t think anyone should leap to any conclusions. They should see how this commission does its work and what it presents.”

De Blasio predicted that many statues reviewed by a panel he expects to convene within days will be left alone.

Some might gain historical context with an explanatory plaque, while the most divisive monuments would be recommended for removal.

How long would the note on that plaque need to be, I wonder?

The stock of Christopher Columbus has fallen in recent years as a result of the general campaign on the part of the left by figures such as Howard Zinn to emphasize the bad in American history and to elevate native Americans as uniformly good in comparison, as well as specific campaigns to make people more aware of the bad things white people of yore such as Columbus actually did. There was a Marxian slant because Columbus was also considered the man who brought capitalistic greed to this hemisphere.

The Columbus Day battle is also—although most people may not realize this—a struggle between two ethnic identity groups: native Americans and Italians, the latter being the people who spearheaded so much of the recognition of Columbus in this country in the first place. And the Ku Klux Klan had a role, as well.

You can read some of this Columbus Day history in this National Review article in which Jennifer C. Braceras describes the situation [emphasis mine]:

Here, in the United States, the anti-Columbus movement was sparked by white supremacists nearly 100 years ago. In the 1920s, the Ku Klux Klan promoted negative characterizations of Columbus in order to vilify Catholics and immigrants, many of whom celebrated Columbus not only as a source of ethnic and religious pride but also as a symbol of the free and diverse society that resulted from the European presence here. The Klan tried to prevent the erection of monuments to the Great Navigator, burned crosses in opposition to efforts to honor him, and argued that commemorations of his voyage were part of a papal plot. Rather than honor a Catholic explorer from the Mediterranean, Klansmen proposed honoring the Norseman Leif Eriksson as discoverer of the New World and a symbol of white pride.

So it’s not just the left that can play the identity game, or get incensed about statues:

In the 1920s, from coast to coast, members of the Ku Klux Klan opposed Columbus. In Richmond, they tried to stop the erection of a Columbus monument. In Pennsylvania, they burned fiery crosses to threaten those celebrating Columbus. The Klan newspaper, The American Standard, attacked honoring Columbus ”” on the basis that a holiday for him was some sort of papal plot.

The Klan was no fan of Columbus. He stood athwart their nativist desire for a country pure in its Anglo-Saxon and Protestant origins.

What Americans have forgotten is that white supremacy has historically sought not only the denigration of African-Americans and Jews but also of Catholics ”” and among them Hispanics ”” ascribing to the latter all manner of harmful stereotypes as brutal criminals and sexual predators. This narrative is known throughout the Spanish-speaking world and in academic circles as the “Black Legend.”

Historian Philip Wayne Powell wrote of this smear campaign: “The basic premise of the Black Legend is that Spaniards have shown themselves, historically, to be uniquely cruel, bigoted, tyrannical, obscurantist, lazy, fanatical, greedy, and treacherous; that is, that they differ so much from other peoples in these traits that Spaniards and Spanish history must be viewed and understood in terms not ordinarily used in describing and interpreting other peoples.”

It began as a tool of Anglo supremacy over its Iberian foes during the competition for territory on this continent, but as Powell notes, it was “extended to form part of a larger picture of English moral, racial and religious superiority over the Spaniard” ”” and we might well add, those who sailed for Spain.

In the rush to judge and deface, few remember that it was Spain that forbade slavery of most Native Americans and made them Spanish citizens. Fewer still remember that Columbus seems to have faced arrest by his fellow explorers for punishing ”” even executing ”” those who had abused Native Americans. And almost no one recalls that it was not Columbus but the exaggerating zealot Bartolome De Las Casas, who is most often cited in smearing Spanish exploration and with it Columbus, who was the one who proposed African slavery for the New World.

When I first wrote a draft for this post over a month ago, I hadn’t yet seen those articles I just quoted and I was doing my own research on Columbus. My goal was to determine (as best I could) the truth about what Columbus actually had done. I encountered the confusing information these quotes allude to—tales of Columbus’ devotion to slavery and his stand against it, discussions of whether the natives Columbus brought back to Spain were actually slaves or not, talk of the vicious violence of Columbus’ men and the reasons they gave for whatever violence did occur.

I also could not help but note that most of the tales of the awfulness of Columbus and the Spaniards came from one person, the aforementioned Bartolome de las Casas. Reading some excerpts from his work, I felt the buzz of possible propaganda. For example, just about everyone has agreed that a great deal of native American suffering was the result of the diseases that came from the European contact and for which the natives had no natural defenses; this is really not disputed. But de las Casas doesn’t seem to even mention it in passages where it would have been highly appropriate to have done so.

I refer to quotes such as this:

Among reasons for this criticism [of Columbus] is the treatment and disappearance of the native Taino people of Hispaniola, where Columbus began a rudimentary tribute system for gold and cotton. The people disappeared rapidly after contact with the Spanish because of overwork and the first pandemic of European diseases, which struck Hispaniola after 1519. De las Casas records that when he first came to Hispaniola in 1508, “there were 60,000 people living on this island, including the Indians; so that from 1494 to 1508, over three million people had perished from war, slavery, and the mines. Who in future generations will believe this? I myself writing it as a knowledgeable eyewitness can hardly believe it….”

‘War slavery, and the mines”—shouldn’t “disease” or “pestilence” be in there somewhere, too? And it also occurred to me that de las Casas, as a one-time supporter of slavery in the Americas, may have been writing to try to frantically expiate his own feelings of guilt. So I independently came to the conclusion that de las Casas might have been the Howard Zinn of his day, only with a different philosophy and different motives. And, since de las Casas appears to be practically the only chronicler of what happened between the Spaniards (plus the Italian Columbus) and the natives—except the Spanish themselves—I found it impossible to tell who was telling the truth and who either lying or exaggerating.

For each side, a certain amount of self-interest seems to have been involved. Perhaps the truth lies somewhere in-between? If so, it wouldn’t be the first time.

So I’m still trying to imagine what would be written on that plaque of de Blasio’s (New York still has a large population with Italian ancestry, and that would include de Blasio on his mother’s side only).

One of the “contexts” I’d like to see—if in fact context is ever provided—is the fact that at the time all of this happened, slavery was common all over the world, to different degrees and with different details. Columbus’ opening up of the New World to the Old enabled slavery to traverse oceans, which was a great evil. But even many of the indigenous people in the Americas whom Columbus had “discovered” (although apparently not the specific cultures he personally encountered there) had the practice of enslaving people they captured in war.

Note also this observation on the Arawaks, made by Columbus, writing in his journal on October 12, 1492 (the first Columbus Day, as it were) [emphasis mine]:

Many of the men I have seen have scars on their bodies, and when I made signs to them to find out how this happened, they indicated that people from other nearby islands come to San Salvador to capture them; they defend themselves the best they can. I believe that people from the mainland come here to take them as slaves. They ought to make good and skilled servants, for they repeat very quickly whatever we say to them. I think they can very easily be made Christians, for they seem to have no religion. If it pleases our Lord, I will take six of them to Your Highnesses when I depart, in order that they may learn our language.”

When trying to determine the truth of what actually happened between Columbus and the natives, one thing is certain: it ended up with a lot of death and destruction for the natives, and many of the early Spanish didn’t exactly flourish in the New World themselves although they did significantly better. Also from Wiki [emphasis mine]:

The native Taino people of the island were systematically enslaved via the encomienda system implemented by Columbus, which resembled a feudal system in Medieval Europe. Disease played a significant role in the destruction of the natives. Indirect evidence suggests that some serious illness may have arrived with the 1500 colonists who accompanied Columbus’s second expedition in 1493. And by the end of 1494, disease and famine had claimed two-thirds of the Spanish settlers. When the first pandemic finally struck in 1519 it wiped out much of the remaining native population.

Now for a little more about the “Black Legend“:

A testimony of the time accuses Columbus of brutality against the natives and forced labor. Las Casas, son of the merchant Pedro de las Casas who accompanied Columbus on his second voyage, described Columbus’s treatment of the natives in his History of the Indies. The writings of Las Casas are seen by some historians as exaggerated and biased. Their anti-Spanish sentiment was used by writers of Spain’s rivals as a convenient basis for the Black Legend historiography. They were already used in Flemish anti-Spanish propaganda during the Eighty Years’ War. Today the degree to which Las Casas’s descriptions of Spanish colonization represent a reasonable or wildly exaggerated picture is still debated among some scholars. For example, historian Lewis Hanke considers Las Casas to have exaggerated the atrocities in his accounts and thereby contributed to the Black Legend propaganda. Historian Benjamin Keen on the other hand found them likely to be more or less accurate. In Charles Gibson’s 1964 monograph The Aztecs under Spanish Rule, the first comprehensive study of the documentary sources of relations between Indians and Spaniards in New Spain (colonial Mexico), he concludes that the Black Legend builds upon the record of deliberate sadism. It flourishes in an atmosphere of indignation which removes the issue from the category of objective understanding. It is insufficient in its understanding of institutions of colonial history.”

This historical ill-treatment of Amerindians, common in many European colonies in the Americas, was used as propaganda in works of competing European powers to create slander and animosity against the Spanish Empire. The work of Las Casas was first cited in English with the 1583 publication The Spanish Colonie, or Brief Chronicle of the Actes and Gestes of the Spaniards in the West Indies, at a time when England was preparing for war against Spain in the Netherlands. The biased use of such works, including the distortion or exaggeration of their contents, is part of the anti-Spanish historical propaganda or Black Legend.

From the perspective of history and the colonization of the Americas, all European powers that colonized the Americas, such as England, Portugal, the Netherlands and others, were guilty of the ill-treatment of indigenous peoples.

One of my favorite phrases in the above quote is “removes the issue from the category of objective understanding.” This issue has certainly been “removed”—at least for now—from the categogy of my objective understanding, except that I am firmly convinced that each side was motivated greatly by the need to create effective propaganda in what I think can be rightly called a case of competing “narratives.”

Or, as Allan Bloom once put it:

You know, we’ve all read history. Everybody, you know, world history, and weren’t all past ages maaaad? There were slaves, there were kings””I don’t think there’s a single student who reads the history of England and doesn’t say that that was crazy. You know “that’s wonderful, you gotta know history, and be open to things and so on,” but they’re not open to those things because they know that that was crazy. I mean, the latest transformation of history is as a history of the enslavement of women, which means to say that it was all crazy””up till now.

Our historical knowledge is really a history which praises, ends up praising, ourselves””how much wiser [voice drips with sarcasm] we are, how we have seen through the errors of the past”¦Hegel already knew this danger of history, of the historical human being, when he said that every German gymnasium professor teaches that Alexander the Great conquered the world because he had a pathological love of power. And the proof that the teacher does not have a pathological love of power is that he has not conquered the world. [laughter] We have set up standards of normalcy while speaking of cultural relativism, but there is no question that we think we understand what cultures are, and what kind of mistakes they make.

Happy Columbus Day!

Love and Trouble

The New Neo Posted on by

I recently read—or rather, skimmed—a book I got out of the library entitled Love and Trouble, by Claire Dederer. I’d grabbed it from the library shelf without really studying it because I was in a hurry and the title intrigued me.

But it actually wasn’t about love and it wasn’t so much about trouble, either. It was a slightly-interesting self-description of the life and times of a certain type of person. Call her a sexaholic or whatever the term-du-jour might be these days, but Dederer appears to be someone who is compulsively, repetitively sexual, and who cares little about such niceties as who her partners (one at a time, by the way, at least in her case) might be.

Why would I read such a book? Well, I didn’t know it was about that at first. Then, I kept waiting for the explanation and the insight, because the author (who was in her 40s when the book was written, married and faithful to her now-husband and struggling against the temptation to return to the old ways of her extremely promiscuous single days) is certainly intelligent and a pretty decent writer in terms of technical skill.

But no such luck. It was a puzzling and (to me) somewhat repellent memoir that showed little emotion except depression and even less self-awareness.

So why am I writing about the book? The part of the book I found especially interesting was the author’s depiction of herself as virtually irresistible. No, she doesn’t use that exact word. But time and again she describes how men (and some women) come on to her continually and everywhere–in the street, at parties, in classes.

It seems this forty-something woman can barely leave her home without being besieged by propositions and flirts. It’s as though she’s sending out strong sexual smoke signals, smells or pheromones or some other powerful je ne sais quoi.

This is a phenomenon I believe can happen with some women, because I’ve observed it. Over my lifetime I’ve had several friends and/or acquaintances who describe people as almost universally reacting to them exactly that way. I’ve personally witnessed some of it (not directed at me; my conquests have been a far more modest number). And—as with Dederer, from her photo on the book jacket—these people don’t seem (to me, at least) any more attractive, any nicer, any funnier, any more charming, any more anything I can detect, than most other women. Nor do the ones I know dress provocatively, or even act in an obviously provocative way.

It’s something else, and I’m not sure exactly what, because the ones I know have no distinguishing characteristics I can discern that would explain it.

I once read a biography of Ava Gardner. Now she (unlike the women I’m describing) was absolutely gorgeous. She was also a hypersexual person. And it seems very telling to me that Gardner is quoted as having said, “In bed, I’ve always known I’m on safe ground.”

I don’t think the majority of women would say that about sex in their single years. I don’t even think the majority of men would say it. Women and men may like sex and want sex, but “safe ground”? And with a succession of strangers? That experience of sex with a succession of near-strangers may be many things to many people, but I don’t think most women, anyway, would describe one of those things as a feeling of safety.

But I believe Ava Gardner sincerely felt she could do no wrong in bed and that it was therefore a very very safe place for her. And in her book Dederer describes herself in very similar terms—sex is the thing she’s best at, the place she feels safe and also powerful no matter who’s her bed partner. And she’s drawn to having this experience again and again and again, with a great variety of men.

You might think her story is a simple one, as in, “She’s just a slut.” Maybe you also think her problem is lack of religion. But I don’t see it that way. The vast majority of people without religion don’t act like Dederer, and there are plenty of people who are religious who struggle against the same sort of thing and lose the struggle.

No, I think something else is going on, but reading the book gave me no insight as to what it might be.

Gun control changer

The New Neo Posted on by

Leah Libresco, who used to write for the statistics site FiveThirtyEight (headed by Nate Silver), describes how the more she studied—in the mathematical, statistical sense—about gun-inflicted deaths and gun control, the more she changed her mind on the subject:

Before I started researching gun deaths, gun-control policy used to frustrate me. I wished the National Rifle Association would stop blocking common-sense gun-control reforms such as banning assault weapons, restricting silencers, shrinking magazine sizes and all the other measures that could make guns less deadly.

Then, my colleagues and I at FiveThirtyEight spent three months analyzing all 33,000 lives ended by guns each year in the United States, and I wound up frustrated in a whole new way. We looked at what interventions might have saved those people, and the case for the policies I’d lobbied for crumbled when I examined the evidence. The best ideas left standing were narrowly tailored interventions to protect subtypes of potential victims, not broad attempts to limit the lethality of guns.

I researched the strictly tightened gun laws in Britain and Australia and concluded that they didn’t prove much about what America’s policy should be. Neither nation experienced drops in mass shootings or other gun related-crime that could be attributed to their buybacks and bans. Mass shootings were too rare in Australia for their absence after the buyback program to be clear evidence of progress. And in both Australia and Britain, the gun restrictions had an ambiguous effect on other gun-related crimes or deaths.

Libresco was brave to write her article. Gun control is one of the topics that rouses the most emotion of all, and that’s saying something. As a left-to-righter, I have become convinced (as Libresco has) that the statistics don’t generally support more gun control, although I wouldn’t oppose a few tweaks such as banning bump stocks.

Because Libresco is one of the somewhat small group of people who change their minds when encountering facts that contradict their previously-held opinions, I became curious about her. I discovered when I did a little research that this is not her first change experience. She’s written a book on her conversion from atheist to Catholic. That’s different of course, because she didn’t base it on the numbers—although in a strange way she did. This is one highly mathematical person. Here she talks about her experience:

Free speech in Canada

The New Neo Posted on by

I had somehow missed the fact that an extraordinary law called C-16 passed Canada’s Senate in mid-June of 2017 by overwhelming numbers, sliding the country further down the slippery slope of the tyranny of hate speech laws:

Canada’s Senate passed the Justin Trudeau Liberals’ transgender rights bill unamended this afternoon by a vote of 67 to 11, with three abstentions.

The bill adds “gender expression” and “gender identity” to Canada’s Human Rights Code and to the Criminal Code’s hate crime section. With the Senate clearing the bill with no amendments, it requires only royal assent in the House of Commons to become law [that assent was given a few days later, so the bill is now law].

Critics warn that under Bill C-16, Canadians who deny gender theory could be charged with hate crimes, fined, jailed, and compelled to undergo anti-bias training.

Foremost among these critics is University of Toronto psychology professor Dr. Jordan Peterson, who along with lawyer D. Jared Brown, told the Senate committee that Bill C-16 is an unprecedented threat to freedom of expression and codifies a spurious ideology of gender identity in law.

I have long known that the US is the only country in the world with laws that adequately defend freedom of speech (for now, anyway). I’ve also long known that in Canada anti-hate-speech laws have been used to try to silence people such as Mark Steyn who criticize Muslims. But I didn’t really know just how far the Canadian campaign against free speech had gone, although I have to say I’m also not surprised.

Here’s a video showing a discussion about this, where Jordan Peterson (professor at the U. of Toronto who has become fairly famous as a result of his stand against C-16) responds to a pro-C-16 activist. It’s quite an exchange. I’ve cued it up to give you a couple of minutes of the most dramatic part. I warn you, though—if you’re easily perturbed, take a chill pill or a bit of wine before you watch it, because your blood might start boiling at some of it. Peterson is the guy with the graying temples, by the way:

I find certain parts particularly chilling. There’s the part at about 16:12, where the eyeglassed person says “…because people have been making complaints about your behavior,” and then gives that little smile on “yes.” But in particular there is minute 16:56, where that same person asks in a quiet voice, “Are you open to learning?”

I imagine that’s what some said as they sent people to the Gulag, or in any of the many places around the world where there’s been no thoughtcrime that a little re-education couldn’t fix.

[NOTE: When I wrote a draft of this post a day or two ago, I didn’t think we in the US were as close to doing this as we apparently were, although of course I realized it could happen. Well, California’s the trailblazer.

Just for nursing homes—right? I’m sure they’ll stop there.

Look, if you want to work in a nursing home and the nursing home wants you to treat all residents with respect and call them by their preferred pronouns as part of that respect, fine. If you don’t do it, they can fire you because you’re not complying with their policies. But criminalizing this offense is wrong, wrong, wrong.]