Does that Star-Spangled Banner Yet Wave

Checking in on Sheriff Joe:

A diet of bread and water is the punishment for dozens of Arizona inmates who allegedly defaced American flags placed in their jail cells.

[...]

"These inmates have destroyed the American flag that was placed in their cells," Arpaio said. "Tearing them, writing on them, stepping on them, throwing them in the toilet, trash or wherever they feel. It's a disgrace ... this is government property that they are destroying, and we will take action against those who act this way."

The flags are part of a push for patriotism in county jail cells that includes listening to the "Star-Spangled Banner" every morning and "God Bless America" every night over the intercom system.

Piping in patriotic songs and hanging flags in a notoriously abusive prison and then punishing the inmates with bread and water when they don't show adequate appreciation. It'd be difficult to make-up a better Orwellian America mash-up.

Friendly Rivalry

Without a doubt, the most important thing about this story is that JDate and Christian Mingle collaborate on an annual survey.

Also, Jews are less likely to cheat. So that's good.

David Hirsh's 101 Lesson on Opposing BDS

David Hirsh, in a masterful post gets all the key points of the anti-racist and counter-anti-Semitic movement against the BDS in one place. This is a necessary resource (Engage is already a necessary resource, but this post is an absolutely invaluable compilation).

The Wheel Never Stops Turning

Ta-Nehisi Coates writes:

From time to time, someone will ask why I write so much about racism. The underlying charge is that a writer should cease to follow his curiosities. I might well retort that Paul Krugman should stop writing about the economy, or Jeff Goldberg should stop writing about the Middle East. The difference is that the world which racism made is seen as a niche issue, with no real import. "Gender" and "women's issues" are often regarded in the same way.

And I thought that was strange, because of course plenty of people do say Jeff Goldberg should stop writing about the Middle East -- less because it is viewed as a "niche" issue and more because Goldberg is viewed as a niche person. Specifically, it is often argued that -- as a Jew with substantial ties to Israel -- Goldberg is biased, that he should leave the discussion to neutral, non-partisan gentile hands.

I'm reminded of the post I wrote about Judge A. Leon Higginbotham's opinion declining to recuse himself in an employment discrimination suit (Local Union 542, Int'l Union of Operating Eng'rs, 388 F. Supp. 155 (E.D. Pa. 1974)). Judge Higginbotham was black and a known civil rights advocate, and therefore, according to the defendants, biased. One of the examples Judge Higginbotham cited in declining to recuse himself was his Jewish colleagues:

I am pleased to see that my distinguished colleagues on the bench who are Jewish serve on committees of the Jewish Community Relations Council, on the boards of Jewish publications, and are active in other affairs of the Jewish community. I respect them, for they recognize that the American experience has often been marred by pervasive anti-Semitism. I would think less of them if they felt that they had to repudiate their heritage in order to be impartial judges. (180)

My post, of course, turned the full circle -- in response to people who do say that Jews should not speak or should not be in positions of authority on matters relating to Jewish interests -- I used Judge Higginbotham's powerful opinion as a counterpoint. Higginbotham uses the example of Jews to help Blacks, I use the example of Blacks to help Jews. There's no jealousy, only an example that can help check a common foe.

And on the flipside, why do we see the same rhetorical tropes used to silence Jews and Blacks alike, in seemingly such different contexts? Well why wouldn't we? If a given tactic for maintaining a particular hierarchy has worked for one group, why wouldn't it be adopted and utilized by others trying to preserve different hierarchies? The issue here isn't that all oppressions are fundamentally the same, or any such trite nonsense. But oppression is, after all, ultimately about results. Racists take their cues on what has worked for anti-Semites, and vice versa. The prevalence of rhetoric that asserts Jews shouldn't speak on Jewish issues, versus that Blacks shouldn't speak on Black issues, depends primarily on (a) the relative well-being of the groups in question and (b) what community of speakers you're dealing with.

UNESCO Cancels(?) Jews in Israel Exhibit

Repeat after me: The UN is a neutral organization which is not remotely hostile to Jews qua Jews:

The Obama administration is “deeply disappointed” with a decision by UNESCO, the United Nation’s cultural arm, to cancel the opening of an exhibition on the Jewish presence in the land of Israel and is seeking its placement “as soon as possible.”

Complaints by Arab states led UNESCO to cancel the exhibition, organized by the Simon Wiesenthal Center along with the governments of Canada and Montenegro. It was scheduled to open Jan. 20 at the Paris headquarters of the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization.

“The United States is deeply disappointed and has engaged with senior levels at UNESCO to confirm that the action to postpone does not represent a cancellation and to underscore our interest in seeing the exhibit proceed as soon as possible,” a State Department official said, speaking on customary anonymity. “We trust that UNESCO will approach this issue fairly and in a manner consistent with the organization’s guidelines and past precedent.”

UNESCO director-general Irina Bokova said Wednesday in a letter to the Simon Wiesenthal Center that the exhibit, titled “The People, the Book, the Land — 3,500 years of ties between the Jewish people and the Land of Israel,” would be postponed indefinitely. She said the decision arose out of UNESCO’s support for peace talks between Israel and the Palestinian Authority.

One can almost see the crocodile from which the Arab League's tears emerge:

The cancellation followed a letter sent to Bokova on Jan. 14 by the Arab group at UNESCO. “The Arab group is deeply disturbed by the exhibition, which it condemns,” said the letter from the group’s president, Abdullah Elmealmi.

“This cause is championed by those who oppose peace efforts,” Elmealmi said. “The media campaign accompanying the exhibition will inevitably damage the peace talks, the incessant efforts of U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry and UNESCO’s neutrality.”

If peace talks are so fragile such that acknowledging Jews have a connection to Israel will damage them, surely we are doomed. Though I suppose that all depends on what terms one expects "peace" to occur on.

UPDATE: UNESCO's statement is here.

UPDATE 2x: It now appears that the exhibit will open in June after a six month delay.

... That Magical Time of Year When a Worker's Thoughts Turn To Love

Various permutations of this essay by Miya Tokumitsu, which attacks the concept of "Doing What You Love" (DWYL), has been making the blogospheric rounds to much applause. Allow me to dissent. Tokumitsu does not do nearly enough to demonstrate a causal link between the DWYL mentality and erasure of the lives of working class. Indeed, if anything DWYL is a valuable contributor to our understanding of "work", including for the "non-creative" working class.

Summarizing and simplifying, Tokumitsu observes that there only certain classes of jobs, typically held by certain classes of people, which are even candidates to be a job one might "love". The vast majority of jobs, including jobs necessary for the maintenance of "loved" jobs, are not going to be particularly fun or intellectually stimulating no matter what we do. Therefore, DWYL is inherently classist: "labor that is done out of motives or needs other than love--which is, in fact, most labor--is erased." Meanwhile, DWYL encourages exploitation -- it is basically a way to make workers content with getting less in the way of tangible proceeds in favor of nebulous emotional satisfaction.

As someone who has in the past few years done both a job that I loved (in the classic DWYL form), and a job that, we shall say, does not fit into that category, I feel well-positioned to discuss this issue. And given that the latter job paid triple the former (loved) one, I can even speak to the trade-off between tangible and intangible job benefits.

But let's not start with me; let's start instead with the claim that DWYL is class-divisive and "erases" workers whose jobs are not candidates to be loved. Put bluntly, I'm skeptical that the wealthy need the aid of a mantra to forget about the life and working conditions of the lower classes. That's really more of the default setting. The alternative to caring about how workers feel about their jobs emotionally is not necessarily caring about what workers get out of their jobs tangibly -- it can very easily be (and historically has been) caring about neither. A similar critique can be leveled at her claim that if someone does not obtain profit from pursuing their passion, DWYL implies that the fault must be in their enthusiasm. While I've never actually heard that assertion made, I admit I'm never surprised at the capacity of some people to attribute any deficiency in the lives of the working class to their own deficiencies. Suffice to say, this tendency predates DWYL, it is not caused by it.

What DWYL recognizes is that the tangible products of a job are not sufficient to provide for fulfilling lives. One can be tangibly provided for at market rates and still not have "enough". In other words, DWYL is in many respects a (admittedly inchoate) statement about a substantive entitlements -- that we are not owed just whatever dollar amount our employer puts in our pocket, but some level of happiness, dignity, and respect out of our job. Those values should be included in our calculus of what workers are provided.

Indeed, some of her treatment of improved intangible working conditions strikes me as almost incomprehensible. She quotes Marc Bousquet as saying that the "loved" academic job environment actually presents a model for corporations:

How to emulate the academic workplace and get people to work at a high level of intellectual and emotional intensity for fifty or sixty hours a week for bartenders’ wages or less? Is there any way we can get our employees to swoon over their desks, murmuring “I love what I do” in response to greater workloads and smaller paychecks? How can we get our workers to be like faculty and deny that they work at all? How can we adjust our corporate culture to resemble campus culture, so that our workforce will fall in love with their work too?

From this analysis, she concludes "Nothing makes exploitation go down easier than convincing workers that they are doing what they love."

Reading the above, one would think that the way a corporation makes people love what they do is by casting an incantation or spiking the cafeteria with hallucinogenic drugs. In reality, to make workers happy by means other than a pay raise, one has to do things that make workers happier with their jobs. Those are real benefits, not chimeras -- I'd take my less-paying but more loved job over my less-loved, better paying counterpart in a heartbeat. The trade-off isn't infinite, of course, but all that demonstrates is that neither the tangible nor intangible proceeds of work are sufficient for self-fulfillment.

Which cycles us back to those workers whose jobs are not and cannot be made loveable. We should say here that almost any job can be made, if not loveable, than at least more likeable -- by being treated fairly and with respect, for instance, or by having some security such that one isn't not in constant dread of being tossed on the street. But even to the extent these jobs lie beyond true DWYL, the concept still matters because it provides a contrast to the prevailing counternarrative -- "the value of a honest day's work." That mantra, which by my lights is far more likely to represent the real competitor to DWYL (as compared to some sort of cross-class solidarity pressing for higher salaries for everyone), cares neither whether the worker is happy or whether they getting significant tangible returns -- value comes from working whatever job the market provides at whatever rate the market pays. I'm reminded of the archetypical 50s parent who, upon hearing that his son isn't happy at work, bellows that "You hate your job? I hated my job too! That's the point of a job!"



DWYL recognizes, at the very least, that the emotional side is important -- and anytime the American cultural zeitgeist recognizes any form of substantive entitlement as necessary for a fulfilled life, I'm inclined to jump on it. And to the extent we do view DWYL as a form of substantive entitlement and we simultaneously reckon with the fact that certain people are not (and likely cannot get it), that does provide a fulcrum from which those people can leverage a claim for greater tangible benefits as compensation. Of course, I'm not saying it's a guarantee that thinking about DWYL will cause wealthier Americans to recognize the deprivations faced by their working class peers -- as I said, wealthy Americans hardly need any excuse to ignore others outside their class. But attribute the lack of cross-class consciousness to DWYL is difficult to justify.

The bottom line is that the notion that we can view work solely through the lens of the monetary returns workers get doesn't cohere to how people of any class actually view their work. We don't just want "fulfillment" or "respect", but we don't just want a dollar figure either. It's obviously true that if one is being paid little, the marginal value of each additional dollar is going to be higher compared to additional "respect" or whatnot. But that doesn't change the fact that thinking about work in a way that's helpful to workers requires a holistic approach. DWYL matters because it is a recognition about what workers are owed, and any sort of public understanding of the proceeds of work that starts from what workers deserve, rather than what the market deigns to give them, is in my book a good thing

Lesbian Filipina Caregiver wins Israel's "X-Factor"

Pinkwashing! Brownwashing! Poorwashing! Songwashing! Every form of washing imaginable:

Rose Fostanes, a diminutive 47-year-old Filipina caregiver, has emerged as the newest star of Israeli reality television, winning the singing competition “X-Factor Israel” on Tuesday and establishing herself as something of a national phenomenon.
"
In an upset victory, Fostanes beat out three other finalists by performing crowd-pleasing renditions of Frank Sinatra’s "My Way," Alicia Keys' "If I Ain't Got You," and "Sweet Dreams" by the Eurythmics.

Fostanes arrived in Israel six years ago to work as a caregiver so, like millions of other Filipino workers around the world, she could send money back home to her family and her girlfriend.

Obviously, I support anyone who picks "Sweet Dreams" as part of their finals run.

To Take a Totally Random Example

Say what you will about the D.C. Circuit's net neutrality decision, but I can't get too upset at any decision that illustrates how the internet works by referencing the hypothetical journey of "a video of a cat" from YouTube to the discerning internet consuemr ("who then views and hopefully enjoys the cat.").

Also quotable: "After all, even a federal agency is entitled to a little pride."

"I Decide"

Ta-Nehisi Coates quotes Frederick Douglass' wife:

It is easy to say, as has been carelessly said by some in commenting upon Mr. Douglass' life and career, that the intellectual power, the ambition, the talent which he displayed, were inheritances from his white father; that the colored strain disappeared except as it gave the hue to his skin; and that to all intents and purposes Frederick Douglass was a white man.

In parallel, he notes the ideology of German anti-Semites when encountering a Jew whom, for whatever reason, they liked: "I decide who is a Jew." Marcus Garvey made a similar observation, stating that "whenever Blacks do anything useful, they are no longer Blacks."

At the end of it all, as Coates says, these "isms" are about power. Power is rarely so directionless as to necessitate the slaughter or enslavement of every member of the outgroup. It can maintain its "good Jews" or its "model minorities". After all, even the most bigoted can Have Black Friends. Depending on what one wants to do, one can either define the favored Jew (or whomever) as an exceptional falsehood, or as the only authentic Jew. Though seemingly opposite, the two moves have much the same effect -- to announce that the bulk of the Jewish community is lesser and subhuman, worthy of the scorn and prejudice heaped among them. Those few, special few who are allowed to escape (in part) its grasp are not taken to disprove the prejudice but to confirm it.

The Ashkenazi Jewish Name Tree

A list of origins for prominent Ashkenazi Jewish names -- an interesting article indeed! My name is not on there (presumably because it is too obscure), but I happen to know that "Schraub" means "screw" in German. As in the hardware sense, not in the prostitution sense. So presumably somebody was in that line of work.

Also interesting that there is a name associated with Jews who descended from Khazars -- Kagan. This, to me, is particularly noteworthy given that the article contends most Jews didn't adopt last names until the 17th century or later. The Khazar empire died out in the 11th century -- some 600 years earlier -- and I wouldn't have thought that any Jews who did trace their lineage to Khazar converts would have maintained that connection as part of their familial history or lineage (such that they'd adopt it as a last name). It's just a shame Justice Kagan has already been seated on the Supreme Court -- she could have been asked about it at her confirmation hearings.

Update: Looks like that Kagan/Khazar thing is likely bogus. Oh well.

New Year's Resolutions: 2014

I nearly forgot one of this blog's most venerated traditions: New Year's resolutions! Unforgivable (except that I did, in fact, remember). Previous installments here, and, like we do every year, we start with last year's resolutions:

Met: 1, 3, 4, 10, 11, 12, 13 (amazingly enough! I didn't find the books until I moved to DC), 14 (I honestly feel like this is true).

Missed: 2, 7, 8 (I think -- I don't actually remember), 9.

Pick 'em: 5, 6.

Not bad, all told. I think we can consider the resolution-side of last year a success, if nothing else. But time marches on, and so to we move to this year's resolutions!

1) Publish an article, or have one accepted for publication (other than Academic Freedom versus Academic Legitimacy). (Met)

2) Keep the frequency of anxiety attacks to "sporadic". (Pick 'em)

3) Feel decently competent in an additional area of law beyond my current speciality. (Pick 'em)

4) Attend a Devils game (cheating -- Jill already got me tickets for my birthday). (Met)

5) Spend money while still being financially responsible. (Met)

6) Get the blog's average hits back over 100/day. (Missed)

7) Stay in contact with my law advisers. (Met)

8) Finish a book. (Met -- pulp Star Wars fiction counts!)

9) Finish my secret project for Judge Murphy. (Missed)

10) Find a new computer and/or console game I like. (Met)

11) Attend the Carleton Reunion (again)! (Met)

12) Stay in contact with the academic community. (Met)

13) Work frequently with people whom I like working with frequently. (Met)

14) Be in a position where I am looking forward to next year. (Pick 'em -- looking forward to it right up until about August, where things get very hazy).

Weekend Roundup: 01/04/13

Busy times at work, but yet I've actually been more productive as a blogger than normal. Weird. Anyway, clearing the browser windows a bit:

An exceptionally entertaining story about ex-Rep. Roscoe Bartlett (R-MD), who used to represent western Maryland before being gerrymandered out, and his efforts to go off the grid. "The oddest Congressman" indeed.

Hussein Ibish to people who try to leverage the story of Jesus to favor Israeli Jews or Arab Palestinians: Stop it. You're being stupid and you don't understand how history works. Just stop it.

Omar Khadr, convicted of throwing a grenade at American soldiers during a battle in Afghanistan, now is trying to get a normal education.

A fascinating blog about a recent law grad who (after being no-offered by his sumemr firm) is now selling perfume at a department store. Sometimes, when I reflect on my job, I think "that could be me" (mostly with relief, but admittedly occasionally with wistfulness).

Torturing: The Data

This is a great chart:

The x-axis shows the five years before and after a country ratified the CAT. Year 0 is the year that the country ratified the CAT. For example, year 0 for the United States was 1994, while year 0 for Nicaragua was 2005. The line shows the average torture score for countries during the five years leading up to ratification and the five years following ratification (where 0 refers to frequent torture and 2 refers to no torture). If the average country had reduced torture during this period, then the line would have sloped up.

You'll notice the line does not really slope at all. Anyone can sign a piece of paper, people.

Crime Control

Eugene Volokh comments on assault weapons bans which reference "pistol grips". The rationale for targeting such grips is that they make it easier to spray-fire while shooting from the hip. Volokh observes that spray-firing from the hip is far less accurate than aiming down one's sights, and therefore a criminal who fires in such a manner is less dangerous than one who does not.

In terms of what Volokh is "missing", I think it is that he is envisioning a different type of criminal than the enactors of the bill are. Volokh imagines a criminal who is specifically aiming to kill a particular person, in which case it is better for said criminal to be less accurate. When I think of spray-firing, though, I think of a criminal whose primary goal is to instill terror (as in a drive-by shooting, though I don't know how one fires a gun from a moving car). The primary objective is not to hit a particular target, and moreover to the extent there might be a specific target the shooter also probably doesn't care too much about collateral damage. As far as I'm concerned, I'm less frightened of a criminal trying to assassinate me specifically than I am about being in the wrong place at the wrong time when some thug is trying to "send a message" or whatever. I think there are fewer criminals interested in shooting me particularly than there are criminals who don't care who gets shot at all. Or to borrow from an old war saying: "Don't worry about the bullet with your name on it. Worry about the piece of shrapnel marked 'occupant.'"

In short, we target this grip because it seems most appealing to a particular type of criminal who is particularly unconcerned with human life. As Volokh notes, this may mean we are proportionately less concerned about criminals who are quite concerned about human life and are making a deliberate and conscious choice to end it. And this may even mean that we're not optimizing the number of murders we could be deterring, though this is less certain.

This, to me, is illustrative of a broader phenomenon: we want to control our criminals. Not just in the sense that we don't want them to commit crime -- though that too, of course -- but in that we want our crimes to occur in controlled, predictable, non-random manners. Far scarier than the aggregate statistics of being a crime victim is the prospect that being a crime victim might be entirely a manner of a caprice. Consider this interview with longtime defense attorney Sam Dalton:

Two men commit an armed robbery on the same night. The first man is a father of four. His family is about to be evicted. Or if you want to make him less sympathetic, let's say he's a drug addict who needs money to buy his next fix. He's nervous, he's sweaty. He's desperate, and he's panicky. He approaches his victim and roughly accosts him. He puts his gun to the victim's head. He's screaming profanities. He screams out for his victim's wallet, then screams louder and threatens the victim for moving too slowly. He takes his money and runs off. His victim is terribly frightened.

In the second scenario, our mugger is calm, cool, and methodical. He approaches his victim from the front, puts a light hand on the victim's back, and slowly and unemotionally explains that he has a gun in his coat pocket. He tells his victim that if he hands over his wallet, no one will get hurt, and they can both be on their way. The victim hands it over. The mugger walks off. The victim is angry at just having been robbed, but he isn't terrified. And he was never in real fear for his life.

Which of the two armed robbers is likely to get the longer sentence? Almost certainly the first one. Which of the two is the bigger threat to society? Unquestionably the second one. In fact, the second one is not only a likely career criminal, he's more likely to actually kill someone. The first one is scared because he knows he's doing something wrong. He feels some empathy for his victim. He's committing a crime of necessity. That isn't to say it excuses him. But his aggression comes from fear. The second mugger is incapable of empathy, or has learned to turn it off. He's cold-blooded.

So you see we impose punishment based on fear and a desire for retribution, not based on rational evaluations of what crimes and criminals are most dangerous.

This, I think, is a major motivator here. With the second mugger, or the "aim down the sights" criminal, we know the script. We know what we have to do to walk away (physically) unharmed. The first mugger, or the spray-from-the-hip gangbanger, doesn't allow us that luxury. It is scarier precisely because it is completely out of our control.

Does Dalton raise a good point that we should care more about harm than about what is scary? Sure. But it is not entirely unreasonable to target certain types of criminal activity -- and the devices that enable them -- because they make us feel more unsafe. After all, a large part of crime control isn't about actually playing the efficiency game and figuring out when the costs of crime control are justified based on tangible losses. A large part of it is based on creating the feeling of security and safety; so that stepping onto the street isn't itself a source of anxiety and panic. That's worthwhile in of itself. And where we can help create that feeling of safety at the minor cost of prohibiting a grip which, as Volokh's post observes, is apparently not particularly useful for legitimate social purposes -- that trade doesn't seem unwarranted.

This is Black Privilege

A list of all the privileges of being Black. Don't forget flying first class on Southwest!

Silent Night

War on Christmas? Somalia, show us how it's done!

A directive released on Tuesday by the Ministry of Justice and Religious Affairs stated that no Christian festivities could be held in Somalia….

“We alert fellow Muslims in Somalia that some festivities to mark Christian Days will take place around the world in this week,” said [the Director of the Religious Matters] during [a] press conference [to announce the ban], adding: “It is prohibited to celebrate those days in this country.”

[The Director General of the Ministry of Justice and Religious Affairs], on his part, stated that all security and law enforcement agencies had been instructed to counter any such celebrations….

The officials did not say anything on whether non-Muslim foreign workers or residents could celebrate or not.

It is the first time that a Somali government bans the celebrations since the last central government collapsed in 1991.

All I Want for Christmas

What I want for Christmas is better "best of Buffy [character]" videos on YouTube. Important note: If it's set to any sort of music -- any sort of music -- it doesn't count.

Have a happy holiday, everyone!

Free Speech and the Private Sphere

I've been thinking about the concept of "free speech" as applied to private criticism. This has come up most recently in the flap over Duck Dynasty star Phil Robertson's statements regarding gays and Blacks, and the resulting calls to boycott the show. Some people have responded by saying the critics are violating Robertson's free speech rights. Others have replied that no such thing is occurring, since we are not talking about government censorship but rather private counter-criticism -- free speech in its own right. Take Popehat, for example:

The phrase "the spirit of the First Amendment" often signals approaching nonsense. So, regrettably, does the phrase "free speech" when uncoupled from constitutional free speech principles. These terms often smuggle unprincipled and internally inconsistent concepts — like the doctrine of the Preferred+ First Speaker. The doctrine of the Preferred First Speaker holds that when Person A speaks, listeners B, C, and D should refrain from their full range of constitutionally protected expression to preserve the ability of Person A to speak without fear of non-governmental consequences that Person A doesn't like. The doctrine of the Preferred First Speaker applies different levels of scrutiny and judgment to the first person who speaks and the second person who reacts to them; it asks "why was it necessary for you to say that" or "what was your motive in saying that" or "did you consider how that would impact someone" to the second person and not the first. It's ultimately incoherent as a theory of freedom of expression.

These are good points, particularly the idea of the Preferred First Speaker. So the following isn't meant to be critical.

But what does it mean that so many people really seem to believe that private retaliation -- whether in tangible forms such as economic boycotts or firing someone from a job, or even intangible form such as overly vitriolic responses -- poses a threat to free speech on par with government censorship? Does that mean we have to maybe reevaluate the concept a bit?

After all, if the issue really is just a problem of "chilling", private actors can do that nearly as well as the government. Maybe not quite as efficiently -- the government's power to imprison you is difficult to top -- but most people would view the loss of their job or even the loss of fraternity as a sufficiently grave deterrent to avoid voicing certain opinions. And as everything from the continued worries over "cyberbullying" to my own "Criticism as Punishment" post indicate, people seem to perceive these sorts of private sanctions as punitive in nature.

Again, none of this is to say that we should actually treat hostile private reactions to speech as on par with government censorship of speech. A functioning public sphere requires that we be able to criticize, sometimes harshly, and requires that we be able to react negatively towards the speech of others, even stridently. But again, the fact that there is such a large popular consensus that is a real and genuine problem does counsel that this is a problem that requires deeper thoughts than just drawing a line between public and private and leaving it at that.

Off My Game

Sen. Rand Paul (R-KY) and Rep. Peter King (R-NY) square off over surveillance programs. That's no surprise.

Paul, a Kentucky Republican with strong tea party-backing, and King are both considered likely GOP presidential candidates in 2016.

Paul I knew about. But King? I hadn't heard anything suggesting King was a presidential candidate. Now, I'm not as plugged into this world as I used to be, but I would have thought I'd hear some rumblings. But no, it turns out I just missed the memo.

In any event, I think King is too "iconoclastic" (if you will) to be a likely 2016 standard-bearer. But I have to think that the 2016 GOP primary will be one of the more bizarre in recent memory anyway, so who knows?

"Publish It Already" Roundup

I have an article coming out very soon in the Florida International University Law Review that is, I think, quite pertinent to some ... high-profile issues ... that have recently come up. But "very soon" isn't soon enough. Argh.

Some things taking up browser space:

* * *

A white former(?) prosecutor gets himself arrested, both to see what the criminal justice system is like from the other side and, inadvertently, to discover just how hard it is to get arrested if you're a white guy in a suit.

David Hirsh writes an open letter to Claire Potter, who famously opposed-then-supported the ASA BDS resolution. Potter responds here. I'd greatly appreciate if Hirsh continued this conversation; his energy to do such things vastly exceeds my own, and Potter's response was not just unconvincing, but worrisome in how seemingly little thought she's given to the application of her radical politics to the Jewish context. Anti-Semitism, for her, seems to be a slur that impedes open discussion, rather than a central point of analysis anytime largely non-Jewish institutions act upon their Jewish counterparts.

Walter Russell Mead has a stellar essay on the ASA boycott. I would quibble slightly at where he draws the line regarding anti-Semitism, but it's mostly semantic -- I don't think anti-Semitism necessarily requires conscious or even unconscious malign intent. Though I might set that threshold for saying a person is anti-Semitic, it is not a necessary condition for an action to be. If an action is taken without due regard and consideration for Jewish rights and equality, that's anti-Semitic regardless of the intention of the actor (the corollary being, one can say or do something anti-Semitic without being anti-Semitic). There is no right to opine on marginalized minorities without knowing about them.

In just a few days, two universities (Brandeis and Penn State - Harrisburg) have pulled out of the ASA.

Finally, on a happier note, my congratulatiosn to Mais Ali-Saleh, valedictorian at Israel's Technion University (Israel's premier tech university). Ali-Saleh is a Muslim Arab woman, and I have no doubt that she's faced considerable discrimination. But that makes her perseverance and accomplishments more laudable. Incidentally, if Ms. Ali-Saleh did ask to speak at an ASA invent (and, we'll say, in her "official capacity" as Technion's valedictorian), would she be boycotted? If the answer is yes, it seems to run counter to the movement's supposed goals of solidarity. If it is no, then the boycott is overtly discriminating against Jews. A tough call, and a question I've long wondered how BDSers would answer.