It’s in our moral and constitutional DNA that we take extraordinary pains to safeguard the rights of the accused, even when it means letting the guilty go free. But we also believe in justice, and the fact is that sexual assault is a brutal reality of modern campus life, abetted in too many instances by a culture of binge drinking.
.. Another girl at my college had reported a rape and had been forced to sit through peer mediation with her rapist. I didn’t want to go through that. I was a strong, tough girl. The prospect of losing a case seemed worse to me than the prospect of sucking it up and moving on.
.. It seems to me that conservatives and mainstream liberals have abdicated concern about sexual assault to the far left. It’s an astounding moral blind spot, and frankly it breaks my heart.
.. In an era where I had to choose between voting for a man who had bragged about sexual assault or a woman who had enabled a husband accused of it, in an era where we can’t even convict Bill Cosby of sexual assault
.. the general public still has to be convinced that rape and sexual harassment are real problems. It’s easy to believe there’s an epidemic of false accusations, but not that there’s too much sexual assault.
.. I know in my bones that Brock Turner got convicted only because he assaulted that girl in public. If it had happened like it had happened to me, in an empty house, with no one to see — if there had been no photos — that boy would have walked away with nothing at all. He would have been as unscathed as the one who raped me.
.. so many of the conservative men in my life won’t listen to me on this argument until I tell them my story. So here I am. I was raped. He got away with it, because I didn’t know enough to do everything right and because I was a “bad victim.” I had been drinking. I had no witnesses. There was nothing the law could do for me.
Hurricanes, Climate and the Capitalist Offset
Reply
Texans will find few consolations in the wake of a hurricane as terrifying as Harvey. But here, at least, is one: A biblical storm has hit them, and the death toll —38 as of this writing — is mercifully low, given its intensity.
.. This is not how it plays out in much of the world. In 1998, Hurricane Mitch ripped through Central America and killed anywhere between 11,000 and 19,000 people, mostly in Honduras and Nicaragua. Nearly a decade later Cyclone Nargis slammed into Myanmar and a staggering 138,000 people perished.
.. The storm will be a “speed bump” to Houston’s $503 billion economy, according to Moody’s
.. he expects the storm to derail growth for about two months.
.. Climate activists often claim that unchecked economic growth and the things that go with are principal causes of environmental destruction. In reality, growth is the great offset. It’s a big part of the reason why, despite our warming planet, mortality rates from storms have declined from .11 per 100,000 in the 1900s to .04 per 100,000 in the 2010s
.. growth isn’t just a matter of parking lots paving over paradise. It also underwrites safety standards, funds scientific research, builds spillways and wastewater plants, creates “green jobs,” subsidizes Elon Musk, sets aside prime real estate for conservation
.. it’s also only one of four Category 4 or 5 hurricanes to make landfall in the United States since 1970. By contrast, more than twice as many such storms made landfall between 1922 and 1969.
Trump, Obama and the Politics of Evasion
O.K., now here’s hoping you’re revolted by each of the six preceding points. Because, if you are, then maybe we can at last rethink the policy of euphemism, obfuscation, denial and semantic yoga that typified the Obama administration’s discussions of another form of terrorism.
.. Islamist terrorism, or what former Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano used to call “man-caused disasters”
.. Napolitano’s “man-caused disasters” didn’t survive the political laugh test, but the fantastically elastic phrase “violent extremism” did.
.. there is a record of what Obama believed were the causes of terrorism. “Extremely poor societies and weak states,” Obama explained in 2007, “provide optimal breeding grounds for disease, terrorism and conflict.”
.. “lack of opportunity for jobs” as the “root causes that lead people to join these groups.”
.. If Iran had taken Americans hostage and killed hundreds of our soldiers, well, as Obama often noted, hadn’t we helped overthrow the Mossadegh government back in 1953?
.. it indicts him all the more, since it’s precisely the sort of bizarre and blatant evasiveness he used to denounce in his predecessor.
.. But it should also be a reminder that when it comes to looking the other way in the face of extremism and violence, failing to call evil groups by their correct names and providing economic alibis for moral depravity, liberals have their own accounts to settle.
Comments
.. Obama’s reluctance to conflate “Islam” with terrorism and violence was a credible effort to differentiate the vast and growing world population of muslims from the aberrant, militant minority of radical Islamists. It was a formalist, intellectual position, easy to misunderstand, and vulnerable to exploitation by Republicans and Right Wingers wishing to exploit blind hatred (for political gain) of muslims based on horrific terrorist stereotypes.
I don’t see the equivalence between the Obama administration’s carefully considered strategy to separate religion from politics, and the Donald’s unwillingness to confront the re emergent darkness of an unamerican fascist movement.
.. Wow – even with this, the right wing cannot avoid false equivalence.
Let me say this in simple language that Brett can understand. If the response to C’ville was to say “this proves that all white people must be monitored and condemned because they are all fascists”, or “this means that all christians and all supporters of the second amendment are dangers to the republic”, then we might have a comparable situation. But that didn’t happen.
.. However, they never avoided condemnation of the acts of violence. It is a world of difference.
.. The first difference is that the KKK and white supremacists are white and we know lots of people who are white but do not hold these ideologies. Therefore, we do not paint all white people with the broad brush of white supremacists who may incite violence. We are not passing white people in the street looking at them suspiciously or designing laws to discriminate against white people because they may harbor these views but since we can’t tell just by looking at them, we’ll just treat all white people as potential violent white supremacists.
Conversely, not many of us know any Muslims, or at least not well. So, our beliefs about them are developed by what we see on TV. If we only see this group of people as a bunch of terrorists, then every Muslim we meet are going to viewed as a potential terrorist.
.. The Obama Administration was walking on eggshells to protect millions of innocent Muslims from vengeful people who target them because of how they look, where they come from, how they worship.
Trying to balance public safety against the appropriate condemnation of violent jihadists, and people who use their religion as an excuse to murder and brutalize others, and as an excuse to commit mass murder for political gains is a tricky proposition.
The truth is that James Alex Fields, and Dylan Roof are cut from the same cloth, inspired by vile and evil rhetoric, as the lone wolf Islamic terrorists. But the other truth is that angry mobs are unlikely to go and attack random white people assuming they are terrorists. That’s not true for Muslims, as we saw in Kansas, just being there got two Indian men shot, or at the Sikh temple, or at the recent Mosque bombing.
.. This is a great example of why it’s been so hard for moderates to talk with conservatives. The conservative response is always: “But Obama” or “What about her emails”. Where’s the frank evaluation of Trump’s response?
.. Criticizing specific Islamist beliefs (e.g. martyrdom, Paradise, jihad, apostasy, etc.) is criticism of ideas, not bigotry against people. Criticism of these illiberal ideas is as legitimate and worthy an enterprise as criticism of the alt-right’s ideology. In fact, criticizing the ideology of both Islamism and the alt-right isn’t just intellectually honest – it’s also the *liberal* thing to do.
.. Linking terrorism to Islam ties all Muslims to terrorism. Linking terrorism to white supremacists ties only white supremacists to terrorism, not all white people. The situations are not equivalent.
Besides, what Obama did is part of a critique of Obama. It’s not a validation of Trump, who is operating in different circumstances. He has the burden of riches, not blackness. Trump is an independent individual supposedly capable of making his own choices and decisions, and he is entirely responsible for those.
.. Jeffery Goldberg had a long essay in The Atlantic explaining why he thought Obama’s soft talk on terrorism was tolerable – his actions, according to Goldberg, killed many terrorists and thus he was walking softly and carrying a big stick. I don’t agree but its a fair point.
We’ll see if Trump’s Justice Dept. carries a big stick re: Nazis and KKK. It must.
.. This weekend wasn’t the time for Trump to drag in the Antifa groups but they will have to be reckoned with at some point: what they did in Berkeley, Hamburg and so many other places- harassing, assaulting, rioting, vandalizing and looting behind balaclavas and kerchiefs – tears at the social fabric and is dangerous business: anarchy for the sake of anarchy.
.. Here’s a frank evaluation of Trump’s response. His statement was a measured 100% accurate response which nicely summed up the situation. Violent National Socialists (Nazis) were confronted by violent International Socialists (Antifa), and a young woman whose connections to either group is unclear, is now dead. Until you condemn both sides, your just playing partisan politics.
Trump’s Foreign Policy: The Conservatives’ Report Card
Yes, Machiavelli did say it was better to be feared than loved. But the great Florentine also said, “a prince ought to inspire fear in such a way that, if he does not win love, he avoids hatred.”
Much of this is self-inflicted. Trump didn’t need to start his presidency by
- infuriating the president of Mexico on the eve of a planned visit to Washington, or by
- comparing the American intelligence community to Nazi Germany,
- or by throwing a tantrum with the prime minister of Australia.
- He didn’t need to demand that Seoul pay for missile defenses that would protect American troops in the event of war with North Korea,
- or toy with our NATO allies as he mulled whether to reaffirm our mutual-defense obligations.
Trump could have avoided all of this. He didn’t, either because his personality is defective or because he thinks humiliation is an appropriate tool of presidential power. Character is destiny, conservatives used to think. We are living this destiny.
.. In Hamburg this month, Trump again showed how eager he was to oblige his man-crush in the Kremlin, this time at the expense of Israel.
But the deeper flaw of Trump’s foreign policy isn’t psychological. It’s philosophical
.. “The world is not a ‘global community’ but an arena where nations, nongovernmental actors and businesses engage and compete for advantage,” McMaster and Gary Cohn
.. Mark this as the shift from internationalism to transactionalism; from a values-based foreign policy rooted in Alexis de Tocqueville’s notion of “self-interest, rightly understood” to an approach that might be called neo-Maguirism, after “Jerry Maguire.” To wit: “Show me the money!”
It’s not that the administration has done everything wrong, at least by conservative lights: It’s always possible to do the right thing for the wrong reason.
.. But if serious conservatives believe in anything, it’s that we really are, as Lincoln said, “the last best hope of earth,” and that our foreign policy should be equal to that hope.