Peter Martins quits

The New Neo Posted on by

This story may not mean much to you, but it does to me: in the midst of allegations of abuse, Peter Martins has retired from the directorship of the New York City Ballet, although he denies any wrongdoing.

Here’s more information on some of the allegations, which mostly seem to involve physical rather than sexual abuse.

In 1993, Jeffrey Edwards was a soloist with New York City Ballet when he did something radical, at least for the company: He accused Peter Martins, the powerful ballet master in chief, of verbal and physical abuse, and reported him.

“I brought a complaint to the general manager, company manager and the dancers’ union, describing Peter’s conduct in detail,” Mr. Edwards said in a recent statement to The New York Times.

The union, the American Guild of Musical Artists, confirmed that it had received the complaint. But to all appearances, nothing much happened. Mr. Martins continued in his role as leader of City Ballet and the School of American Ballet, and Mr. Edwards left the company shortly thereafter.

The next year, Victor Ostrovsky, a 12-year-old student at the ballet school, had his own run-in with Mr. Martins. During a dress rehearsal, Mr. Ostrovsky said he was horsing around onstage with other children when Mr. Martins became enraged and grabbed him by the back of the neck in what Mr. Ostrovsky called “a death lock.”

“He’s yanking me around to the left and to the right, he’s digging his left thumb and his middle finger ”” I felt like he was piercing my muscle,” Mr. Ostrovsky said in a telephone interview. “I started crying and sobbing profusely.”

I doubt any of this would have come out if Martins wasn’t already quite disliked by a lot of people.

I’ve already written about Martins and his flaws and strengths, as well as sexual harassment and other forms of abuse in the dance world, here. I’ll just add that although Martins—about whom the scuttlebutt in the dance world has been bad for at least forty years, when I first heard some of it—is not a widely-beloved figure (to say the least), his alleged behavior isn’t really so very unusual. Milder types of abuse are rampant in the dance world. A significant amount of dance training involves (or used to involve, when I was coming up) verbal abuse, although there also were many teachers who didn’t engage in it. But commenting on the body and its flaws (and in particular on overweight) was and perhaps still is so common as to be standard, and engaging in name-calling and insults certainly used to be a daily occurrence with a great many teachers.

Dancing also involves physical abuse, although most of it is self-inflicted with encouragement by some teachers and company directors and choreographers—forcing a turnout or extension, dancing on pointe till you bleed. Also, touching dancers and jerking them around harshly, sometimes enough to cause pain, is not unusual. It’s even happened to me, although fortunately not to the point of being injured. Have I ever seen anyone hit? I can’t recall, but I certainly saw treatment I’d call abusive.

Sex between directors and dancers most definitely exists, too, usually consensual although often influenced and encouraged by ambition on the part of the underling. I wrote about that before, too:

Ballet differs from other arts (and certainly from politics or broadcasting or even acting) in that the body is completely the instrument, the mechanism by which that art is expressed. There is nothing else, not even talk (as in acting). Not only that, but the way the body looks is nearly as important as the way it moves, or at least inextricably connected with it. It’s no exaggeration to say that virtually every dancer in the professional dance world is a physically beautiful person with an extraordinarily beautiful body. And even the older directors (such as, for example, Martins) have an aging version of the same, and often a personal magnetism and power that cannot be denied. It was part of the reason they were stars, although not all directors were once performers or stars…

What’s more, there’s often a lot of interaction and touching in the choreography and in the studio, even during class. Teachers touch their students all the time””that’s how they convey what’s needed””adjusting a hand, helping the dancer bend in the right direction by giving a little push, turning the head just so. Partners touch their partners all the time, and the communion between partners can be extraordinarily intimate. It can also lead to an actual romance (and of course sex) in real life””what little the dancers have of real life, that is, after the rigors of taking class and rehearsals and performances and shoe preparation and all the rest.

Company directors (the heterosexual ones, that is; I know less about the habits of the gay directors, but I’m assuming the story is not too different) often sleep with their dancers. They even sometimes marry them; Balanchine, for example, was famous for this, having married (and divorced) a whole series of them.

So the idea in ballet is not to eliminate the sex or the touching””I think that would be impossible””but to eliminate the harassment. How would “harassment” be defined in a world like that? Unwanted touching? Touching that goes beyond what’s required for the class or the choreography or the correction? Whether there is a quid pro quo for the sex: “sleep with me and I’ll make you a star”?

Some directors and some dance teachers are kind and gentle. But it’s not the least bit unusual for them not to be kind and gentle at all. And then there’s the strangeness (and intensity) of many dancers. I remember, for example, taking class in my early twenties at a large and famous dance studio (affiliated with a dance company) in Manhattan. The class was so large that we were squished together and had to turn diagonally away from the barre in order to be able to kick our legs upward. This is not an unusual practice, but it meant that at certain times—because the barres were portable, and they were pulled away from the walls so that dancers could hold onto them from both sides—I was practically nose-to-nose with perfect strangers sweating up a storm.

I recall in one particular class that the young woman opposite me started crying after getting a correction from the teacher, and didn’t stop crying for the entire barre. It was disconcerting. She wasn’t sobbing, but her tears were flowing all through the exercises (which last close to a half hour). I tried to whisper to her—although I didn’t know her—“Don’t let it bother you; it’s not worth it” or some such platitude. But other dancers near me, who knew her better than I did, shrugged and told me not to bother. “She does this practically all the time” they said.

And by the way, in the ballet world abusive behavior by directors and teachers is not limited to men. Ballet is in certain ways an equal opportunity endeavor.

[NOTE: Here’s a former New York City ballet dancer saying Martins was perfectly fine with her. I have little doubt that it’s true.

This woman also has written about George Balanchine. Her article has a glaring omission, however, and IMHO it’s one that makes the article unfair to Balanchine. She neglects to mention that at the time she visited Balanchine in the hospital and the events she relates took place, he was suffering from the disease that killed him not too long afterward, Creutzfeldt-Jakob, a brain disease that leads to (among other things) senility and personality changes. That said, before he got sick Balanchine certainly had a well-known history of sleeping with his dancers—he married quite a few of them, too.]

Change and history: the Times gets a new publisher

The New Neo Posted on by

NY Times publisher Arthur Ochs (“Pinch”) Sulzberger Jr. (66) has retired, to be replaced by his son A.G. Sulzberger (37) as of January first. The change was announced last month. A.G. represents the fifth generation of the family to run the Times since patriarch Adolph Ochs bought the paper in 1896.

Donald Trump welcomed the new Times head this way:

Can’t say I disagree with him.

It also happens that I drafted a post a week or two ago on the subject of the history of the Times. So here it is, with a few additions.

We often talk about how opinion and fact journalism have increasingly merged in the last half-century. That’s a change, one I wrote about at length in my two-part series on Walter Cronkite.

But it’s also important to note that opinion journalism itself has changed, too. For example, not that long ago William Safire used to write for the NY Times, not as its resident token “conservative” who is not really conservative (a la Ross Douthat or Bret Stephens), but as a highly respected long-time (and by “long-time” I mean looooong time; Safire started his column in 1973 and left in 2005) mainstream columnist. He was pretty middle-of-the-road moderate Republican for the most part. In addition, I can’t think of any opinion columnist in the Times of that day who exhibited anything like the left-leaning extremes of Paul Krugman or Frank Rich, for example (Walter Duranty was somewhat of an anomaly at the time, and anyway he wasn’t a columnist).

The Times actually started out as a Republican paper but turned Democratic during the last quarter of the 19th Century. In the partisan atmosphere of papers of the time, Adolph Ochs (whom Trump references in his tweet, and who acquired the Times in 1896) decided that a good and rather unique niche to carve out would be that of objectivity. And for the most part, with some exceptions, the paper was fairly objective (at least, compared to today), although always strongly and consistently liberal Democratic.

Prior to Pinch’s coming to power there was his father (“Punch”), who published the paper from 1963 to 1990, when Pinch took over. Under Punch, Abe Rosenthal was executive editor from 1977-1988. Glenn Reynolds wrote about Rosenthal (and about the Times’ history in general) in an excellent 2011 book review, and when you read the following quote from Reynold’s piece you’ll see how far the Times has strayed from Rosenthal’s days:

As [Gray Lady Down author] McGowan makes clear, maintaining this [objective] position took constant effort. Abe Rosenthal, who ran the paper from 1977 through 1986 (and whom McGowan regards as the Times’ best editor), warned that because of the staff’s overwhelmingly liberal political leanings, “you have to keep your hand on the tiller and steer to the right, or it’ll drift off to the left.” Rosenthal was also particularly concerned about keeping political opinions out of the culture sections and news reports ”” under his supervision, there were to be no “editorial needles.”

That’s exactly and precisely what’s missing today. Oh, I have little doubt that today’s fact and opinion journalists at the Time are aware that they are overwhelming liberal—how could they not be? But the idea of steering to the right would be anathema, and why would they want to avoid drifting to the left? They are there to speak truth to power, to question authority, to stop people like Donald Trump and to march in the footsteps of Woodward and Bernstein.

Rosenthal certainly made some decisions that most people on the right would consider partisan in the sense of leaning left. But, still, it was better than it later became, paticularly in terms of those “needles.” Here’s another Rosenthal quote:

He once told a reporter who demanded to exercise his rights by marching in a street demonstration he was assigned to cover: “OK, the rule is, you can [make love to] an elephant if you want to, but if you do you can’t cover the circus.” We call that “the Rosenthal rule.”

(I’m going to assume that “[make love to]” stands in for the F-word there.)

When Punch was replaced by Pinch in 1992, that’s when a bigger change in the paper’s editorial stance occurred:

Unlike his father, Arthur Ochs “Punch” Sulzberger Sr., Pinch was less concerned with balancing either the coverage or the books, and instead began to run the Times as a sort of upscale Village Voice: not a great news organization that tried to tell the truth as accurately as possible, but a snarky in-group publication that told its increasingly homogeneous audience things it wanted to hear. The difference between generations is summed up neatly in this anecdote:

“Walking across Boston Common one day discussing the war, Punch asked Arthur Jr. which he would like to see get shot if an American soldier came across a North Vietnamese soldier in battle. Arthur Jr. defiantly answered that he would like the American to get shot because it was the other guy’s country. For Punch, the remark bordered on treason, and the two began shouting. Sulzberger Jr. later said that his father’s inquiry was the dumbest question he had ever heard in his life.”

That probably gives you all the information you need to know about Pinch, but I’ll add a bit more:

Fast-forward a few years and Pinch, now firmly ensconced ”” despite resistance from the board of directors ”” as publisher, cancels [Abe] Rosenthal’s op-ed column, leaving Rosenthal feeling “betrayed and heartbroken.” Pinch wanted something new at the Times, and he got it, something that avoided the dumb questions of his father’s generation.

Pinch wanted edge, something with a New Leftish angle, and, above all, diversity. He told critics that if the Times was alienating older white-male readers, then “we’re doing something right.” He hired Howell Raines as editorial-page editor, a man suffering, McGowan writes, from “a lifelong sense of Southern guilt” and “a simplistic, perhaps even Manichean political vision.”

Raines wasn’t interested in nuance, and under his direction, the Times editorial pages became a vehicle for preaching more than for converting. Meanwhile, Pinch was allowing politics to seep into first culture, and then news coverage, all while pushing ever-greater efforts at “diversity” hiring onto the paper’s news divisions.

Now almost all the Times reporters and opinion writers are f-ing elephants and covering the circus, and it’s considered great.

I wanted to know something about A.G., and so I took a look at this recent interview with him in the Times-friendly New Yorker. One statement I found to be of special interest was this:

I’ve always had a theory that decent journalists are contrarians by nature, because they have to ask tough questions of people…And, like any decent journalist, I have a contrarian streak, and I actually spent most of my life not thinking I would go into journalism.

That strikes me as almost humorously youthful, because A.G. then goes on to say that he decided to go into journalism shortly after college (Brown). Since’s he’s now 37 and has been in journalism his entire adult life, that means that when he says “most of my life” he’s talking about childhood and his teen years.

Another interesting statement by A.G.—one that’s less personal—is the following:

One thing I’d say about the subscription model that we didn’t expect, which was an unintended benefit of this strategic shift we made, is that everyone in the New York Times today wakes up thinking how can we serve our readers. That’s aligned our journalistic mission and all of our business incentives in a really clean and consistent way.

Earlier in the interview A.G. had said that, with falling advertising revenue in the media, the paper now relies for 2/3 of its money on reader subscriptions. It used to be that their revenues were 80% from advertising. That’s a big big change, and the way I read the above quote is that the Times has to feed its liberal/left readers more and more red meat.

Makes sense, doesn’t it? If the paper pulled more to the middle, those revenue-generating subscribers would drop the Times like a hot potato.

A.G. doesn’t think the paper is liberal. As a frequent reader—and analyzer—of Times coverage (as well as a long-time critic of A.G.’s interviewer, New Yorker editor David Remnick), I’d probably have found the following exchange between Remnick and A.G. amusing if I didn’t see it as dangerous:

D.R.: For many in the general public, the New York Times is seen as a liberal newspaper. True or false?

A.G.S.: False. And I can send you all the hate mail that I’ve gotten from our aggressive coverage of the Clinton campaign.

D.R.: O.K., but do you really think that it’s possible to argue that the New York Times, by and large, isn’t both populated by people who are left of center, and that the tone of the newspaper isn’t left of center?

A.G.S.: We’re committed to a really old-fashioned notion. It’s a notion that isn’t too popular these days, which is reporting the news “without fear or favor.” Those are words that my great-great-grandfather, Adolph Ochs, wrote in our initial mission statement. What that means to me is reporting on the world aggressively, searching for the truth wherever it leads, and not putting our thumb on the scale. I really deeply admire my colleagues’ commitment to that. We strive to understand every side of the story, and to convey it fairly.

D.R.: Do you believe in the notion of objectivity?

A.G.S.: I do believe in the notion of objectivity. I think it’s something you have to work at; I think it’s something that we don’t always get right.

D.R.: I have a hard time with the notion of objectivity. Objectivity, to me, sounds to me like what you do in a science lab. Fairness is another matter. I struggle with that””the notion of objectivity. You think it’s possible to accommodate it?

A.G.S.: You know, I think fairness is a word that comes pretty close to me, too, if you want to call it fairness. The point is the discipline of trying to strip away your own biases””whether they come from a worldview or lived experience””and to try to tell a story in a way that’s fair to all the participants in it.

Why did I call that exchange “dangerous”? Both men hold a lot of power through their publications. You may scoff at both the Times and the New Yorker, but they are both still highly influential with a huge number of people whose minds and viewpoints are both shaped by them and reinforced by them. Either A.G. and Remnick actually believe they are objective/fair, or they are lying about it. Fools or knaves, or fools/knaves. As usual, take your pick.

And if the Times actually does become fair and/or objective under A.G., I’ll be happy to say I was wrong.

2018 predictions

The New Neo Posted on by

First of all, Happy New Year once again!

You may have noticed I don’t tend to make a whole lot of predictions. Every now and then, though, I offer one up. For example (and of course, here I’m remembering the ones that came true), I predicted right after Obama’s election in 2012 that Hillary Clinton would run in 2016, and that she’d have an excellent chance of winning. Well, she came awfully close, didn’t she?

And then there was the time in 2010 when I made this prediction about an Obama second term. I thought that, if he did get re-elected, his second term would look like this:

And then, and then””voila! Four more years! Four years in which he won’t have to answer to the electorate at all. He will be unleashed to do whatever it is he really wants. And does anyone think that would look moderate at all?

In my mind I never really thought that Trump would win the 2016 election (although I always thought there was a possibility). But quite early on I believed that he had an excellent chance of winning the nomination. Here’s my post from August of 2015:

From the start of Trump’s rise in the polls I’ve taken him very seriously as a phenomenon. I haven’t understood those who casually asserted “He’s never going to win the nomination.” I’ve long thought he could, because the force of that appeal is obvious, and he’s somehow made himself immune to being criticized for anything he says. His niche is “the more outrageous, the better,” and the more extreme his utterances the more his supporters seem to like him””although not all of what he says is extreme, of course, and some is just common sense.

If I were one of the other Republican candidates I’d be very very scared. And if I were one of the Democratic candidates I’d be scared, too.

I’m sure I made other predictions that didn’t turn out to be so prescient. But fortunately, I don’t remember what they were.

As a member of the Legal Insurrection group, this year I was asked to make three predictions for 2018 and to offer one resolution for the New Year. Here’s the post where you can read the responses of the entire LI crew. Most of the writers were much wordier than I; I was uncharacteristically brief—maybe due to my general reluctance to make predictions. Here’s my offering, though:

1. At the Oscars, most of Hollywood will manage to be self-congratulatory about its own sins.
2. There will be several articles a day in the MSM about how Donald Trump is about to have a breakdown and that everyone on the White House staff is worried. But Donald Trump will not have a breakdown.
3. We will never hear from a single one of Roy Moore’s accusers again.

My New Year’s resolution is not to make any more predictions for 2018. I may even stick to it for a few weeks.

And you?

Happy New Year!

The New Neo Posted on by

It’s Sunday. I usually take the day off on Sundays, although if there’s something big going on—or if the spirit happens to move me—I post anyway.

Today the spirit moves me to comment on New Year’s Eve, one of my least favorite holidays even when I was young. In part it’s because I’m not a drinker (have I told you that I’m not a drinker?). In part it’s because I’ve always been hyper-conscious of the passage of time. And as I’ve gotten older, and time has curiously accelerated, that consciousness has only increased.

2018??? Excuse me, but how on earth did we get that far into the 2000s? I’ve only recently gotten it into my head that the 1900s were a long time ago (almost 20 years), but it still doesn’t feel that way to me. I still have to do the math to remind myself.

One thing I must say is that the past year has been exceedingly interesting. I have a hunch that 2018 will be, as well. Right after the 2016 election, I wrote:

Before the polls closed yesterday, I was having dinner with a friend who’s a liberal Democrat. She worked for Hillary and voted for Hillary, but she wasn’t a fervent Hillary admirer. None of the returns had come in yet, but we were talking about the election and the possibility of a Trump victory. I didn’t think it likely but I was definite that it was a possibility, and not a distant one, either. She and I agreed that a Clinton presidency would probably be more predictable in terms of her behavior as president, and that a Trump presidency would be more unpredictable.

And then she surprised me by musing, “But I’m almost hoping he wins, because I’m very curious what it would be like. It would be exciting.”

And I agree. Of course, “exciting” is a double-edged sword. And I don’t think most Hillary supporters would agree with her sense of adventure.

Well, it has turned out to be “exciting.” And no, most Hillary supporters didn’t (and don’t) agree with her, to say the least.

Tonight I’m going to a friend’s house. She’s having a low-key party. I’ll stay up till midnight because I always stay up till midnight. And I’ll hope the year 2018 turns out to be exciting in a good way.

And to all of you: Happy New Year!!

animated-happy-new-year-image-0094

The gift that keeps on giving: puppies and kittens

The New Neo Posted on by

[NOTE: I meant to put this up right before Christmas, but it slipped my mind.]

A while back I spent several smiling hours on YouTube watching the reactions of people receiving a puppy or kitten as a gift. The thing that struck me is that their reactions are so very similar—as you can see. You’ll need a tolerance for high-pitched squealing, though—and I’m not talking about the sound the puppies are making:

I think a puppy or kitten is a risky gift. But my guess is that most of these people were already on record as wanting a pet.

And this video, featuring children as the recipients, might be even better:

Talking about “Cat Person”

The New Neo Posted on by

You may have heard there’s been a lot of internet buzz about a recent New Yorker short story called “Cat Person,” especially among young people. It’s about a 20-year-old college student who meets an “older man” (he turns out to be 34, but the reader doesn’t learn that for quite some time), gets into a back-and-forth texting relationship with him, then goes on a date and sleeps with him that night despite deciding somewhere in the middle of the encounter that she isn’t really all that into him.

That brief summary doesn’t quite to give you the flavor of the story; if you’re interested, take a look. This particular story reminds me of the sort of thing that used to come out of one of my writing group (I had a writing group with some very proficient members). It’s sexually graphic but not unusually so for this day and age, and its main strength is telling the reader a lot about the hesitations and assumptions going on the mind of the female protagonist as she negotiates the “courtship” (if it can be called that), the “date” (if it can be called that), and the sex (it definitely can’t be called “lovemaking”) with this man.

The story has what I consider a cheap ending, a bit of an O.Henry twist (just a tiny bit) and then an abrupt stop that indicates to me that the author didn’t really know what to do with her characters at the end. What interests me more than the story, though, is the enormous amount of internet discussion about it, which you can easily read by Googling and which is taking place at many many venues.

I’ve read quite a bit of the discussion, and no one whose comments I’ve read seems to agree with me on the story. Maybe that’s because I may be twice as old (or three times as old) as most of the people participating in that discussion. But I saw “Cat Person” as a description of today’s hookup culture, in which people who don’t know each other end up in bed together, where women are sometimes the initial sexual aggressors (that was true in the story) and yet don’t know their own minds (also true in the story), and leave themselves open to being very vulnerable in situations they might even perceive as dangerous (and might even be dangerous), if only because they are alone with someone they really don’t know at all.

I increasingly find the world of the young to be a distant country, one that doesn’t seem as though it would be an especially pleasant one in which to reside.

[ADDENDUM: By the way, no cats appear in the story, unlike in this post.]

I wonder…

The New Neo Posted on by

…when I see articles like this one written by Charles P. Pierce and published in Esquire, entitled “Trump’s New York Times Interview Is a Portrait of a Man in Cognitive Decline,” just how it might feel to be on the left and to be continually finessed by a man in such cognitive decline.

Or how the author thinks Trump managed to win the GOP nomination despite his cognitive decline (I know, that one’s easy: Republicans are both stupid and evil, and so they will vote for a man in cognitive decline as long as he says the right buzzwords).

Or how the author thinks Trump managed to be elected over Hillary Clinton despite his cognitive decline (I know, that one’s easy, too: the American people are both stupid and evil, and so they will vote for a man in cognitive decline as long as he says the right buzzwords. Plus, Hillary was unfairly hurt by [fill in the blank, including but not limited to Russian collusion, Comey, voter fraud, gender bigotry]).

So I guess I don’t really wonder after all.

Iran: the police and protestors

The New Neo Posted on by

There have been large anti-government protests in Iran for several days—and, unlike in this country, the “resistance” in Iran runs the real risk of being shot for its pains. Until today, that hadn’t happened in the current round of protests, but recently news was reported by the Saudis that three protestors had been killed by the Revolutionary Guards. The news hasn’t been confirmed yet, however, so I’m not sure the account of their deaths can be trusted.

More:

Reuters reported that footage on social media showed riot police clubbing and arresting the demonstrators, and said protesters were also arrested elsewhere in Tehran.

It also reported anti-Khamenei marches in the western towns of Dorud and Shahr-e Kord, and quoted reports that Iranian forces used tear gas against protesters.

There were also counter-demonstrations “held on Saturday to mark the defeat of the last major protest movement in 2009.” You may remember those 2009 demonstrations; President Obama was criticized for not supporting the protestors, and the mullahs were successful in cracking down on the movement. That might have happened anyway, of course, but Obama’s actions (or inactions) certainly didn’t hurt the mullahs. He was already courting the government of Iran in hopes that they’d ultimately make a deal, which of course they did.

Here’s an article I wrote for PJ back in 2009 about Obama’s cutting off funding for the Human Rights Documentation Center:

It’s a shock because, according to the Boston Globe, the group has been “widely seen as the most comprehensive clearing house of documents related to human rights abuses in Iran,” and it would appear that such work is needed now more than ever. It’s a mystery because no explanation for the denial of the center’s funding request has been given by Harry Edwards, spokesman for the agency responsible for the decision (USAID).

What are we to make of this? Glenn Reynolds writes: “They’re planning a sellout, and data on what the Iranians are doing to their protesters would make it more embarrassing.”…

…The Obama administration might be following Takeyh’s prescription, with the cutoff of center funding (and the mildness of Obama’s earlier remarks after the travesty of the Iranian elections and the regime’s harsh treatment of demonstrators) being analogous to Nixon’s third tactic, the easing of rhetoric and criticism. This entire approach, however, depends on some huge unknowns: What do the Iranian leaders really want? How serious are their threats, and are they rational actors who can be negotiated with?

Obama bet on the latter, and the infamous Iran Deal was the result.

Why did I lead this post with the story about the possible death of demonstrators at the hands of police? Historically speaking, in Iran and elsewhere, it has been a game-changer and turning point when police and/or the army refuse to fire on demonstrators. Police and the army are the enforcers of any tyrannical regime, and without them it’s a lot harder to contain a population sick of its leaders.

I wrote at length about this phenomenon here and here (both written in 2009):

However, the real questions are (1) how far the demonstrators are willing to go, and how much violence against them are they willing to absorb; (2) how far the mullahs are willing to go, and how much violence they are willing to perpetrate; and (3) will the police, the Guards, and other forces called in by the mullahs to quell the crowds be willing to fire on them, or will they stay their hands?

That last question may be the most important of all. Like all tyrants, the mullahs can do little without the help of the vast numbers of henchmen they employ, and without the exercise of fear. Sometimes there is a great deal of opposition and unrest under the radar screen even within the groups assisting tyrants, and once dissatisfaction as a whole reaches a critical mass and events transpire to release it, there can be a sudden change and a refusal to defend the regime.

That’s why this tweet by Amir Taheri yesterday caught my eye:

Another tweet of interest from Taheri, this one posted today:

I have no idea whether he’s correct or not, but it’s certainly of interest. Trump has a chance to react in a way that’s different than Obama, but I’m not sure what approach would be both effective and realistic. At any rate, this has been the response so far:

[NOTE: “The world is watching” conjures up this moment for those of us old enough to remember.]

Faith, hope, the tax bill, and charity

The New Neo Posted on by

There have been a great many claims that the new tax bill passed by the GOP will have a chilling effect on charitable giving because it reduces the incentive represented by a tax deduction by increasing the standard deduction. In other words, fewer people will feel the need to itemize their deductions (particularly on the lower end of tax filers), and it’s only by itemizing that people get to count charitable deductions into the deduction mix.

You can find all sorts of estimates of the amount that charitable giving will supposedly be reduced as a result, but I have yet to see an article that explains exactly and in detail how those estimates are arrived at. In addition, quite a few of the slightly more detailed articles I’ve read were written after only the House version had been passed and therefore don’t reflect anything about the updated unified version that became law.

I’ve also read comments around the blogosphere and at news sites where many commenters give the impression that they think the GOP meanies have eliminated the tax deduction for charitable contributions, which is certainly not the case. To be fair, most of the articles try to make it clear that this is not the case, but apparently some people who read only the headlines have gotten the wrong impression, or just don’t understand the way tax deductions work (and on that last point I can sympathize).

But the bigger bucks donors will still have plenty of incentive to give to charity, since they will still be itemizing their deductions because they will have total deductions higher than the new standard deductions. And many small givers (like me, for example) rarely or never itemized because it wasn’t worth it to them, and yet many of them (like me, for example) nevertheless regularly gave money to charity. The fact that I couldn’t deduct that money didn’t mean that I didn’t give it. Nor did it mean I gave less.

I don’t think it’s possible to estimate how many people operate like I did, because their charitable contributions don’t appear on their tax returns.

The new standard deduction potentially handicaps only those charity-givers in the middle range of giving—that is, people who gave to charity under the old rules because their itemized deductions would then become higher than the old standard deduction (in 2017, $6,350 for a single and $12,700 for a couple). We don’t know (at least, I’ve never seen an article specifying) what percentage of charity-givers that represents or how much they now give.

Just as importantly, we don’t know why that group gave to charity or how their giving habits would change if they began to take the higher standard deduction rather than itemizing as they used to. In other word, how much did the fact that they could itemize those contributions determine whether they gave to charity and/or how much they gave to charity? Remember also that the new standard deduction level does not change the itemization picture for those who weren’t itemizing their deductions in the first place—who tend to be on the lower income end of things. Nor will it affect the people who were already itemizing deductions and will continue to do so—who tend to be on the higher income end of things.

For this middle group who used to itemize but now probably will take the standard deduction, will they actually contribute less to charity? In other words, were they giving to charity before only in order to get that higher deduction? Remember, these are not the big charity-givers—we’re not talking people who give $100,000 to charity a year. We’re talking about charitable contributions that are maybe in the few thousands range.

If you want to understand how a contribution of that sort used to affect a person’s taxes under the old rules, see this for example. It goes through the figures for a hypothetical single individual with an income of $50K who gave $9K to charity (that, by the way, is a MUCH higher percentage of income than most people give; it is not typical at all). The savings on that person’s taxes under the old rules would be $800, which is definitely something. But of course that would be offset by the $9K of the gift. In other words, the person gives a gift of $9K and yet it only costs the person $8.2K to do so. The tax deduction is nice, but the person’s income goes down $8.2K by giving that gift. Looking at that, one can only conclude that the person must be giving to charity because that person wants to give to charity, not because of the relatively small tax deduction the person ends up getting. Is the person giving more because of that $800 deduction than then he/she otherwise would? Perhaps, but there’s more to the picture. That “more” includes whether the person’s general tax burden is going up or down, and whether the person’s income and/or wealth is going up because of the improved economy.

Let’s say that same person gets a higher standard deduction under the new bill and perhaps even sees his/her taxes go down in other ways. I can easily see the same person giving exactly the same amount as before to charity (maybe even more) because he or she has more money now to begin with. I can also see people in the lower income levels, who perhaps didn’t give to charity before, starting to do so because they have more income to keep in the first place.

Not only might people tend to give to charity as the economy improves in general, but a big reason people do give is that they’re religious. They’re not going to lose that particular motive for charitable giving because of the new law, either.

For some unknown reason, donations from the middle class have decreased in recent years, even before this tax bill:

Data unveiled not long ago by Indiana University’s Lilly Family School of Philanthropy on its website, Generosity for Life, shows that volunteering and charitable giving overall has fallen 11 percent since the early 2000s. Another study, released last year by the Institute for Policy Studies, found that “while itemized charitable deductions from donors making $100,000 or more increased by 40 percent, itemized charitable deductions from donors making less than $100,000 declined by 34 percent”¦ According to one estimate, low-dollar and midrange donors to national public charities have declined by as much as 25 percent over the 10 years from 2005 to 2015. These are the people who have traditionally made up the vast majority of donor files and lists for most national nonprofits since their inception.”

There are a few possible reasons for this decline in giving. Secularization is one, but the bigger factor is probably that most U.S. households have experienced flat incomes for many years in an era of soaring inequality. Many people lost ground during the Great Recession and have not recovered. At the same time, housing and healthcare costs have soared. So it’s no surprise that ordinary folks don’t give as much as in the past; they can’t afford to.

It’s actually possible, IMHO, that these rates will increase rather than decrease if the economy keeps being strong and people have more money in their pockets. That’s true at many levels of income. I’m not saying this will happen. But I’m saying it’s highly possible.

Chess whiz

The New Neo Posted on by

Remember this post about the teenaged Iranian siblings who were banned from playing chess on their national team?:

Dorsa and Borna Derakhshani, two of the country’s leading youth chess players, were told they can no longer be part of the national team.

Dorsa, an 18-year-old student in Spain, was banned after she did not wear a head covering during the Tradewise Gibraltar Chess Festival earlier this month.

Her 15-year-old brother, Borna, who still lives in Iran, was told he couldn’t compete after playing a match against Israeli chess player Alexander Husman during the same tournament.

Now Dorsa has written an op-ed in the NY Times explaining why she has defected from Iran to the US:

From 2011 until 2015 I played for the Iranian national team. I had to follow the official Iranian dress code, which requires women to cover their hair in public. I understood that being a member of the team meant that I was an official representative of the country, so I never broke the rules. But I chafed under them.

By 2015, when I was 17 years old, it was clear to me that other things mattered more to the federation than talent. Just one example: I had won the Asian championship three times in a row when I arrived at the tournament in India in 2014. I was favored to win, given my record. Yet federation officials weren’t focused on my game, but on my clothing. On the very first day of the tournament, they told me my jeans were too tight. I told them I would not participate in the round unless they stopped scolding me.

In the end, I played and won that tournament in India. But time and time again, those in charge of the Iranian national team showed that they cared more about the scarf covering my hair than the brain under it…

My parents have always been my champions and I never wanted to leave home and live without them. But under the circumstances, they decided it was the wise decision to make ”” not just for my chess career, but for me as a person…

The last time I felt this kind of stability was at my high school in Tehran. The school was a haven for me, a place where I could express myself and the teachers fully respected the students. I have craved to be in a similar environment and, finally, I have found it. What’s more, I managed to join the U.S. federation in a matter of weeks ”” a rarity and something I remain deeply grateful for.

Unlike on the Iranian team, I am now surrounded by people who respect me as a player and don’t care or notice what I look like. Unlike on the Iranian team, where the officials could ignore a player’s earned right to play a tournament and replace that player with someone they preferred, here the rules are consistent and fair.

In this sense, America at its best reflects the best values of chess. Chess doesn’t care how old you are or what you wear. It doesn’t care about what gender you are, or how much money you have. It is blind to all of that. It cares only about merit.

That’s why I’m applying for United States citizenship and why I hope to someday represent this country in the Olympics.

I applaud Derakhshani, and wish her great success. I also wonder what’s going to happen to her younger brother and her parents, who apparently remain behind. I also wonder how long chess will continue to be just about merit. Many things aren’t, these days.

[NOTE: Actually, one category chess does pay some attention to is gender. Dorsa is certainly correct that in terms of winning games or championships, chess doesn’t care, but in other ways gender is an issue. There are a lot fewer female than male participants and champions, and many people have wondered why. See this and this, for example.]

How cold is it?

The New Neo Posted on by

So cold that yesterday when I came in from the cold (not a spy) and I washed my hands, the cold water coming from the tap felt warmish.

And I’d had my super-warm mittens on while outside.

And I was only outside for maybe fifteen minutes.

Further reflections on living in New York—and that couple in the 300 square foot apartment

The New Neo Posted on by

[NOTE: Here’s the original post.]

Commenter “skeptic” writes:

Neo, I think you are on to something here even if you may not realize it. The dweeb couple in the video also raised my, and many of your commenters’) hackles even though they clearly do not bother you. This is just an example of the urban vs. smaller city+rural divide that so profoundly affects our politics. You are clearly a big city gal so you seem immune or a lot less sensitive to it than most of your readers.

Why do leftists congregate in big cities? Regardless of the reason, they do…

…The current meme by the Democrats is the limits on state and local tax deductions in the new tax bill will lead to a large migration by Leftists from cities to the hinterlands thus eliminating the Republicans’ advantage. But seeing how this couple puts up with living in their shoebox convinces me that they will not move back to Oklahoma not matter what they pay in taxes.

I grew up in New York, but it was a section of the city far enough away from Manhattan that it was relatively suburban. And of course this was many many decades ago, when Manhattan itself was less hectic and crowded and expensive. But it was already hectic and crowded and expensive enough for me. I loved it, though, because of the theater, dance, restaurants, stores, and bustling streets full of dynamic people.

Yes, some of those people were crazy and/or dangerous, even then. But fewer of them. And it seemed a small price to pay for all the rest of the benefits. The city was also relatively affordable; one could imagine living there on a non-astronomical salary and not living in a shoebox, although it was always more expensive than elsewhere and you had to make do with being somewhat cramped. Now, of course, it’s gotten far worse.

But despite all of this I never felt that I was going to live there when I grew up. I’m not sure why, because a lot of my friends and family stayed there and never really doubted that they would. I felt—in a way I couldn’t and still can’t quite describe—that I really didn’t belong there and that it was not my real home.

Of course, I don’t think I ever found a real home. But that’s another story.

I left New York at seventeen to go away to college and I never lived in New York again, although I stayed there for as long as a couple of months when I was in my 20s. I still visit often, and I usually enjoy my visits or at least portions of them. But I rarely regret my decision to move away when young; New York still doesn’t feel like a good fit for me. The main thing I do regret about not living there is that had I stayed and bought property aeons ago, I could sell it now for a pretty penny and move just about anywhere on earth. Instead, I’m quite limited as to where I can live.

But I still ♥ New York, although you might say I have a lover’s quarrel with it.

And that’s why I feel I deeply understand why a couple like the one in the video will put up with living in such cramped quarters to be able to sample the offerings of the city, which are myriad.

However, I take issue with “skeptic’s” comment at the end: “they will not move back to Oklahoma no matter what they pay in taxes.” Actually, there’s a good chance they might. They might never strike it rich enough to move out of that teeny tiny place, for example, and they might get tired of that—especially if they have children.

People come to New York for the experience and/or a job, but they often move away after a few years— sometimes back to where they came from, sometimes to some other place. They’re tired of the city or disappointed or they want something else or they’ve extracted what they wanted.

There’s a song from the 1970 Stephen Sondheim musical “Company” that captures this phenomenon. The show is one I like very much, but it’s not produced all that often outside the city, perhaps because it’s so New Yorky. Another reason may be that some of the songs are quite difficult to sing, including the following one called “Another Hundred People.” I’ve posted the original version, because I think it’s the best rendition of all the ones I listened to on YouTube. The words are here; note the lines, “and every day/some go away”: