Category Archives: Commentary

All written commentary.

Op-Ed: Chinese Peacekeepers in Africa?

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Excerpt from my latest op-ed on the need for Chinese peacekeepers in South Sudan:

China has long been a major, if quiet, contributor of troops to United Nations peacekeeping missions around the world. In the violent aftermath of an alleged attempted coup this week in Juba, the capital of South Sudan, the time is ripe to think about changing that stance. As China rises in world status, it must also take on more global responsibilities.

The United Nations mission in South Sudan reported that 400-500 people were killed in street battles and crossfire, within the first two days alone. As many as 20,000 civilians may have sought refuge on UN bases in the country.

South Sudan became independent from the rest of Sudan by referendum in 2011, and its strongest foreign partner is China. That country buys 82% of South Sudan’s oil exports and provides infrastructural development investments. Indeed, China was a major player in securing the peaceful partition of Sudan last decade, as the largest trading partner of both states.

First Amendment refresher (Duck Dynasty edition)

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I don’t really know what “Duck Dynasty” is or who the guy in question is, but that’s not really going to be the point of the post. Other people have already done more than enough to critique his highly problematic comments to GQ, which ran the gamut from revisionist racism to antisemitism to homophobia. I’ll leave it to those folks to tackle the content of the remarks.

I’m more interested in the crazed reaction by some U.S. conservatives to the man’s indefinite suspension from his TV show as a result of his bigoted statements.

In particular, comments from Republican Gov. Bobby Jindal of Louisiana — who seems far too eager to embrace this hateful man as a fellow Louisianan — caught my attention because of how wildly misguided they were. Jindal referred to the suspension as a “messed up situation.” He added:

“In fact, I remember when TV networks believed in the First Amendment. It is a messed up situation when Miley Cyrus gets a laugh, and Phil Robertson gets suspended.”

Setting aside the weirdly off-base comparison to tasteless (and appropriative) but not crazily bigoted performance by Cyrus earlier this year, we immediately arrive at the straw man claim implying that TV networks don’t support the First Amendment anymore, but once did.

Let’s cross that argument off right away: the networks are not suppressing someone’s right to be heard — he got heard already, in GQ — and this isn’t a news program breaking news that the powers that be might want held under wraps. It’s an entertainment program and his comments weren’t really in line with the show’s core mission which I presume involves hunting ducks on reality television (or establishing a heritable leadership system based on duck lineages?). So that’s a misdirected argument.

Congress shall make no law

bill-of-rightsAnd now we arrive at the second argument, that the first amendment is being violated by suspending this man for his vile comments. This is, simply put, mind-bogglingly idiotic.

The First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution states:

Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.

Curiously, it does not say, “Privately owned television companies must give everyone air time to say whatever they want to, without repercussions, and must not suspend any of their employees for expressing views the network disagrees with.”

Conservatives, Jindal among them, seem hell-bent on trying to convince everyone that “Freedom of Speech” under the Bill of Rights means anyone has the right to say anything, anywhere, at any time, with zero consequences or rebuttal.

Most frequently, of course, we hear this trotted out in opposition to “political correctness” — the closet bigot’s disparaging term for showing a modicum of sympathy toward others’ feelings and life experiences. Despite the extreme comments made by this Duck Dynasty guy, he’s getting the same defensive treatment, even though government is nowhere to be seen in the equation.

For whatever reason, conservatives are under the mistaken impression that if you say something, whether it be factually wrong or socially offensive, no one is allowed to correct you or dismiss you due to the First Amendment. In fact, as is quite obvious from the text of the amendment, the only party restricted from limiting your free speech is the government. Everyone else is free to respond and even punish you, if in a position to do so.

This is not a mistake or loophole. This is very intentional in the design of the amendment and its subsequent interpretation by many a Federal jurist.

Balancing act

There are essentially three factors to be balanced on the issue of freedom of expression in any scenario. It’s impossible to accommodate all three fully, and so we weigh them against each other, as a society, for both general purposes and specific cases. These factors are:

  1. Your ability to express your belief/opinion
  2. Your expression’s security consequences
  3. Your expression’s consequences for other people’s rights

The first factor is always present. Usually only one of the other two is a major consideration at a time, in specific cases.

The second is pretty self-explanatory. It’s the one about whether government can restrict your expression/speech if it will endanger the public. We weigh that factor based on how immediate the threat is, what kind of danger would arise from it, etc.

While it’s not very common here in legal cases, other liberal democracies have placed great weight on the third point. Europe, for example, has many laws against hate speech. The premise is that hate speech does not occur in a vacuum, but rather within a cultural context, and is very damaging — mentally, emotionally, etc. — to the targeted population. Hate speech, by this reasoning, is thus an infringement of the rights of others to be left alone and not be psychologically abused by horrible bigots constantly.

Therefore, those societies have empowered their governments to restrict freedom of speech in the areas of hate speech and other inflammatory categories. They believe that government is the best vehicle for curbing such speech and maintaining social harmony.

Marketplace of ideas

In contrast, the United States has developed a much more libertarian approach to freedom of speech, based on the 18th century ethos of the Framers. They believed in concepts like the marketplace of ideas, where viewpoints could be traded on a free exchange. Early concepts from Adam Smith’s late 18th century work on the study of economics and trade came to be seen as apt metaphors for how ideas circulate.

So just like competition allows some providers of goods & services to rise to the top in real markets, the libertarian view on speech says that the best solution to problems like hate speech is to let it compete freely with counter-speech — rather than government intervening as regulators — and the rationality and supremacy of less horrid counter-speech will prevail.

Thus, if the public responds angrily to some idiot’s hateful comments, this is not an infringement of free speech. It is the system “working” according to the American principles of how the intellectual free market is supposed to work.

In pure free market economics, if people vote with their wallets against one company’s product, it’s meant to fail. Likewise, if people vote with their wallets against a TV network keeping someone on the air and the network pulls that person, it means that that person has failed. The free market has spoken.

Saying that a network shouldn’t pull someone for expressing hate speech because it’s counter to American ideals of freedom of expression is completely wrong. Saying it’s counter to the First Amendment is just totally irrelevant as well as being wrong.

The system worked

We can and should have a debate at some point about whether our “marketplace of ideas” approach to hate speech is really the best course — it does take a pretty severe toll on the minority and disempowered populations who take the brunt of the hate, in contrast with the comfortable intellectual exchange between unoppressed white, straight, cis males — but for the moment, this is the system we have and, in this case at least, it more or less worked as intended.

But it only works if the public is allowed to do its job and shoot down and de-fund terrible hatemongers to punish them for their views. When someone gets suspended or fired by the private sector for expressing hateful views publicly, that’s the outcome we’re supposed to see. That’s not a “messed up situation.” That’s the enforcement mechanism.

Freedom of speech in the United States just means the government (usually) can’t tell you to be quiet. It has never meant freedom to say stupid things without consequences.

Recovery Accomplished (for the rich)

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The Federal Reserve today announced it would start dialing back its “quantitative easing” stimulus measure next month. Despite Wall Street’s complaints that the policy was encouraging too much stocks speculation (because it discouraged investments in U.S. treasury bonds), outgoing Chairman Ben Bernanke had previously pledged to keep it going until certain indicators of economic recovery were met. Apparently he now feels the jobs market outlook — not the actual numbers — is positive enough to satisfy his terms. The Democratic nominee to replace him, Janet Yellen, is going along with it for the moment, although she tends to be more strongly in favor of emphasizing employment goals over inflation goals.

Meanwhile, in Real America, rising stock prices are utterly irrelevant because they aren’t translating to higher wages for the workers at those companies and because more than half the U.S. population doesn’t own any shares anyway. Plus, there are still more people looking for work than there are jobs available. But by all means, let’s save Wall Street speculators from their own out-of-control greed to prevent them from re-bubbling and then re-crashing the economy while they play around with their spare money instead of being “job-creators.” Time to taper stimulative measures despite persistently low job growth because big-money investors are too eager to gamble in the markets.

NH State Rep: Scott Brown *is* Tyranny

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Francis-SmithA state legislator to the north of former Senator Brown’s former state believes that Scott Brown is tyranny incarnate and that a second American Revolution may be necessary to halt his evil, semi-moderate ways (i.e. his support for an assault-weapons ban).

Or at least a lot of standing around shouting about Scott Brown, while waving guns and ammunition, may be necessary. Followed by an armed insurrection against the dictatorship that is a social policy agenda fifty plus years behind every other advanced economy.

Read more

Women in Egypt want their basic human rights back

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egypt-coat-of-armsA recent survey of hundreds of gender experts from the region found Egypt to be the worst place for women in the Arab World right now, due to the chaos of the Arab Spring aftermath. Even Saudi Arabia came out ahead. Egypt has long had legal rights on paper for women, but in practice it hasn’t held up — and has gotten dramatically worse since the fall of the Mubarak government in early 2011.

9 in 10 women ages 15-49 have been mutilated, 99% have been aggressively harassed or sexually assaulted. Grievous assaults have occurred in full view of hundreds with no one intervening. Contrary to the messaging of opponents of the Muslim Brotherhood who claimed political Islam was the main threat to secular rights for women and others, the situation for Egyptian women has worsened even further under the military coup government installed in July of this year. Many of the pro-coup protesters have been among some of the worst public offenders. Now, Egyptian women are fighting back.

Trigger warning for the article linked above.

Is Thailand facing tea party-style obstruction?

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To expand further upon my much longer essay on recent protests in Thailand and Ukraine, Thailand needs to get itself together. This is such a mess. In sum: One party coalition (TRT or PPP) has won every democratic election since 2001, the first after its creation. The main opposition party has lost every election since 1992. Instead of figuring out how to broaden their appeal and campaign in new areas of the country, that party is throwing yet another tantrum in the streets and literally demanding the ruling party leadership leave the country (to join the members they have already forced out previously).

Instead of changing their electoral approach to try to win for a change, they are simply saying that voters have been duped. And now that early elections have been called, they are still protesting because of course they realize they’re going to lose yet another election. Sore-loserism like this is not a good look and it’s bad for democracy.

Because of the deep affection that the governing party has in the north and northeast of the country, scholars say, it would be very difficult for the Democrat Party to reverse its two-decade losing streak in national elections. In the last elections, held in July 2011, the governing party received 15.7 million votes, compared with 11.4 million for the Democrats.

Mr. Suthep, the protest leader, said that low-income Thais, many of whom support Mr. Thaksin, “had been completely fooled for 10 years.”

Although the opposition has repeatedly said that Mr. Thaksin has maintained his power by buying votes, two of Thailand’s leading political researchers wrote in an article last week that the allegation was “dangerous nonsense” because it was policies, not vote buying, that had cemented the loyalty of many voters in the provinces to Mr. Thaksin. Mr. Thaksin instituted universal health care and microloans to farmers that were very popular among rural voters.

Yes, it’s quite shocking that voters might vote with a party that speaks to their needs and provides key programs to support them in their hour of need … and against a party that serves much narrower interests from a different region and which has supported a military coup against their preferred party (after boycotting an election no less). Voters “must” be sheep simply because they have a different ideological position!

Of course whenever the Thai opposition has been brought to power by non-electoral means, such as the military coup or the banning of the first iteration of the ruling party, they have been driven out again by voters at the very next election. Why? Because even when given the opportunity to enact policy on which to campaign, they have failed to sway the majority.

It brings to mind the recent attitude of U.S. Republicans (particularly those aligned with the tea party types) who are increasingly restricted to a single geographic region and find themselves unable to win back full control of the government. Their response has been to try to shut down the government and block any policymaking whatsoever. The Republican base consistently also expresses aloud the same view as Thai opposition leaders — that the voters are only voting for the majority party because they’ve been hoodwinked and paid for.

Listen to the echoes from Thailand:

“I understand that democracy means being governed by a majority,” said Chaiwat Chairoongrueng, a 36-year-old civil servant protesting last week. “But you cannot use the majority to rule over everything.”

Protesters did little to hide their sense of superiority, echoing the leaders of the demonstration who repeatedly described the demonstrators as “good people” fighting evil.

“We are the middle class, we are educated and we know best,” said Saowanee Usanakornkul, 43, from southern Thailand who took part in the protest. “We know what is right and wrong,” she said. “But the poor don’t know anything. They elect the people who give them money.”

Rather than developing an alternative policy program that will achieve similar goals — which they may not in fact be interested in achieving anyway — upon which they could campaign, they have chosen to blame the voters, throw a tantrum, and bring everything to a screeching halt.

That’s not how a functioning democracy works. If you lose repeatedly at the ballot box (in free elections!), you’re doing something wrong. So you change course and find new ways to appeal to voters and target new groups of voters. You don’t boycott, you don’t throw tantrums, you don’t take to the streets, you don’t shut the government down, and you don’t overthrow the government.

Boston gun control billboard updated

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Many folks from the greater Boston area are quite familiar with the huge anti-gun-violence billboard that’s been up in Boston for nearly two decades, outside Fenway Park along the Mass Pike. It’s reportedly the largest billboard in America.

Every so often, the Stop Handgun Violence group responsible for it, changes the specific message, though its focus is usually related to gun deaths of children. They have just updated it with a counter showing the number of gun deaths in the United States since the Sandy Hook massacre a year ago. You can read their press release here.

Credit: Anne Mostue of WGBH Boston.

Credit: Anne Mostue of WGBH Boston.

Meanwhile, even today there was another school shooting, just miles from Columbine High School. In a separate incident, a young mother was shot when she tried to take a handgun away from a 23 month old baby, who was playing it with it. Over five hundred children are killed every year in America due to gun accidents in the home and other gunshot incidents.

The Boston Globe published a front page story on Thursday, entitled:
Newtown far from a catalyst for gun control: In a year since school shootings, many states loosen their laws

President Obama […] made it his personal mission: “Are we really prepared to say that we’re powerless in the face of such carnage, that the politics are too hard?”

Much of the politics, in the end, turned against him. Today, it is easier, not harder, to carry a gun in many parts of the nation than it was before the Newtown massacre last Dec. 14.

More than 1,500 bills were filed in state legislatures amid a chorus of grieving voices from shattered families. And while several reliably blue states enacted major reforms, far more states, more than two dozen, passed laws that weakened gun control. Many expanded the number of places where concealed weapons are permitted.

The federal effort, championed by Obama, failed in April in the face of Senate opposition to expanded background checks, a ban on assault weapons, and limits on ammunition magazines. In Colorado, two state senators were recalled by voters for supporting tougher gun restrictions in the wake of horrific killings at a movie theater in Aurora. A third state senator resigned rather than face a recall.

Yes, more states rolled back controls than those who expanded them.

Recall in Rhode Island

Just next door to both Massachusetts and Connecticut, the little town of Exeter Rhode Island has exploded in vitriol as gun advocates campaign to recall four town council members who dared to try to move concealed-carry permitting from the overwhelmed and under-resourced town clerk’s office to the state attorney general’s office, which used to handle it anyway as recently as 2011.

Under Rhode Island law, it’s much easier to get a local permit than a state permit, so many gun owners get theirs through the local authorities who are less free to refuse permits. What’s the distinction?

State law mandates that local authorities “shall” grant the permit to a qualified applicant — but the attorney general “may” issue a permit, giving that office more discretion.

In general, Rhode Island towns and cities do local licensing through their police force, but the town of Exeter is too small to have its own police force. So a few years ago, a town council member who also happens to own a gun store, insisted the town clerk had to start issuing the licenses instead, even though they were not adequately prepared to handle the task.

Shortly thereafter, the other council members decided that they should actually probably hand it off to the state attorney general’s office, which could do more thorough checks on applicants but who also had more authority to deny permits. The (now-former) town councilman who owns a gun store has led a nasty recall election campaign against the four members (out of five) who pragmatically and for safety reasons thought the matter should be referred to professionals (though it would require a state legislative act to codify the exemption and thus hasn’t even taken effect yet).

This is literally the smallest possible measure of gun control possible — restoring the situation to how it was two years ago with a one word distinction in the level of permit availability — and yet the gun advocates are trying to run everyone out of office. (In a particularly bizarre twist, the recall process there stipulates that offices recalled are filled by the losing candidate in the previous election.)

The campaign has been extremely vicious and filled with lots of big cash from the wider gun rights movement, as well as allegations that during the petition phase the pro-gun side told senior citizens the council members were secretly trying to raise their property taxes.

Voters there will head to the polls tomorrow.