When Shaming Works

The next time anyone tries to tell you that shaming is always bad, you should evoke with the name of Marte Deborah Dalelv.

When the 24-year-old Norwegian woman was raped in Dubai, she reported the crime to the police. They responded to the complaint by charging her with having sex outside of marriage. Eventually they sentenced her to sixteen months in prison.

This provoked a worldwide outcry and considerable embarrassment for Dubai. Thus, the local authorities decided that they needed to save face. They pardoned Marte Deborah Dalelv. She is free to leave the country.

Why did the authorities change their mind?

They want Dubai to become a great cosmopolitan metropolis. They want it to be a place people want to come to in order to do business. To fulfill that vision it will have to discard many aspects of its medieval legal system.

Score one for shaming.

Nate Silver Is Leaving the New York Times

Apparently, the New York Times and ESPN got involved in a bidding war for the services of boy genius Nate Silver.

As everyone knows, Silver’s blog, accessed through the Times site, drove massive amounts of traffic to the Old Gray Lady. Most especially since Silver’s statistical analysis of polling data was far more accurate than anyone else’s during the last election.

The polls were all over the lot; Silver was on the money.

Such success reaps rewards. And when it came to rewarding Silver, the Times was playing out of its league.

The market capitalization of the New York Times Co. is around $1.8 billion. It makes a profit of around $117 million. ESPN is owned by the Disney Company which earns over $5 billion against its market cap of $116 billion.

Sentiment aside, the Times was outgunned. Its honchos offered Silver as much as they could, but they could never match whatever ESPN was offering. Besides, ESPN is giving Silver an opportunity to practice his rough magic on the world of sports, something that the boy wizard loves. And since Disney also owns ABC, the new deal offers Silver far more media exposure.

Recently, the Times also lost a senior political correspondent, Jeff Zeleny to ABC News.

We are watching a competition between the old and new media. It seems inevitable that the old media will not be able to compete.

When the Times failed to hold on to Nate Silver it did not react with dignity and grace, wishing him good luck and godspeed.

Not at all, Times men and women reacted like sore losers. Apparently, they do not teach sportsmanship on West 41^st St.

Yesterday, the Times’ Public Editor, Margaret Sullivan commented on the paper’s great loss.

She reported office gossip, to the effect that Silver and the Times were a poor fit. A newspaper that has done more than almost any other media outlet to make a fetish of diversity found that Nate Silver did not really belong in its wizened culture.

Sullivan outlines the situation:

Why did Nate Silver decide to leave The New York Times and accept an offer from ESPN?

That’s the cause of great speculation in media circles at the moment. As has been noted elsewhere, there’s no question that The Times made a big pitch to keep him and that the effort to do so involved those at the highest levels, including Jill Abramson, the executive editor, along with people on the business side. And there’s no doubt that decision-makers are disappointed.

After all, his star power was significant. And his ability to drive traffic – especially among young, non-newspaper readers with his FiveThirtyEight blog – was unmatched, and probably will remain so.

In his personal interactions with her Silver made a good impression:

In short, I found him a thoroughly decent person, generous with his time and more likely than not to take the high road in personal interactions.

After extolling Silver’s good character, Sullivan reports the insider trash talk that has followed Silver’s decision. She leaves the impression that a decent and generous person does not belong at the New York Times.

Evidently, Times men and women lack class:

I don’t think Nate Silver ever really fit into the Times culture and I think he was aware of that. He was, in a word, disruptive. Much like the Brad Pitt character in the movie “Moneyball” disrupted the old model of how to scout baseball players, Nate disrupted the traditional model of how to cover politics.

His entire probability-based way of looking at politics ran against the kind of political journalism that The Times specializes in: polling, the horse race, campaign coverage, analysis based on campaign-trail observation, and opinion writing, or “punditry,” as he put it, famously describing it as “fundamentally useless.” Of course, The Times is equally known for its in-depth and investigative reporting on politics.

His approach was to work against the narrative of politics – the “story” – and that made him always interesting to read. For me, both of these approaches have value and can live together just fine.

Silver does statistical probability. You may have noticed but statistics has become extremely important in the high tech world. If your children want to work at Google they should major in statistics.

So, Silver did not see politics in terms of the kind of narrative that Times reporters are peddling. He wanted to deal with facts and data, not the latest story line. He did not belong to the Tea Party, but he disrupted the Times culture because he dealt in facts and data.

Obviously, it isn’t the kind of journalism that the Times wants to present to the world. It would rather impose a narrative than analyze data.

One can only wonder how the Times newsroom explains the loss of Jeff Zeleny.

America the Sickly

Americans are far more likely to gnash their teeth over what is wrong with their country than to take pride in its greatness.

A few months ago the Institute of Medicine of the National Academies produced an extensive report that concluded that Americans, by and large, are a sickly lot. Compared to their peers in other advanced industrial nations, Americans do not live as long or as well or as healthy.

In the report’s words:

For many years, Americans have been dying at younger ages than people in almost all other high income countries. This disadvantage has been getting worse for three decades, especially among women. Not only are their lives shorter, but Americans also have a longstanding pattern of poorer health that is strikingly consistent and pervasive over the life course—at birth, during childhood and adolescence, for young and middle-aged adults, and for older adults.

The study measured several different categories:

When compared with the average of peer countries, Americans as a group fare worse in at least nine health areas:

1.      infant mortality and low birth weight

2.    injuries and homicides

3.    adolescent pregnancy and sexually transmitted infections

4.    HIV and AIDS

5.     drug-related deaths

6.    obesity and diabetes

7.     heart disease

8.    chronic lung disease

9.    disability

Naturally, one would want to parse these results to learn whether they apply to all communities equally or whether some communities, for example, are more prone to some health problems than others.

In their summary, the authors suggest that when you compare the most privileged Americans with their counterparts in other countries, ours still lag:

Several studies are now suggesting that even advantaged Americans— those who are white, insured, college-educated, or upper income—are in worse health than similar individuals in other countries.

I have not seen the full report, but it does not make very much sense to say that privileged whites, for example, are not far less likely to be victims of gun violence.

What is causing American sickliness? Apparently, the answer is bad habits.

The report observes:

  

Although Americans are currently less likely to smoke and may drink alcohol less heavily than people in peer countries, they consume the most calories per person, have higher rates of drug abuse, are less likely to use seat belts, are involved in more traffic accidents that involve alcohol, and are more likely to use firearms in acts of violence.

Naturally, some thinkers believe that we are being punished for not following the Swedish model of social democracy. An article from the New Scientist, recently republished on Slate, suggests that Americans are suffering because they refuse to expand the welfare state and introduce more socialist reforms. The author seems to believe that Swedes live longer because they have a softer form of capitalism. She suggests that we are suffering from free enterprise.

Even if you have never heard of causation/correlation arguments, a glance at the chart provided in the report shows that, while Sweden is marginally ahead of America, the nations that do the best are Switzerland and Australia. As it happens, both countries count among the top five freest nations on earth.

Be that as it may, Americans have a lot of bad personal habits. Most of them involve intemperance, sloth and cheap thrills.

We might consider these to be mental health issues, but it is also true that they involve ethics. They involve both personal and group ethics.

Smoking is no longer acceptable in polite American society, but drugs and alcohol certainly are. If, as the report suggests, in item 4, Americans suffer from a higher incidence of HIV/AIDS, and presumably other STDs, it is also true that everyone believes that promiscuous sexual behavior is a right protected by the constitution, and that it is good for your health.

When it comes to emotions, Americans are obliged to demonstrate severe guilt for their nation's manifold sins. National pride and patriotism are disparaged.

Considering the fact that the nation is positively awash in psychoactive medication, you have to wonder why Americans are suffering so much malaise and why they are trying to regulate their psyches by indulging in bad habits.

Americans appear to be using these bad habits to medicate their emotional distress, to numb themselves to the lingering depressive state that seems to have overtaken the country?

If you are feeling numb, you are likely to seek out thrills. The more powerful the thrill the greater the chance that it will break through your inability to feel pleasure. As for overeating and underexercising, people who have self-control and self-discipline, and who respect themselves do not use food as medication and do not avoid the gym.

I would suggest that Americans have been put in a national funk because they are constantly told that they must feel guilty for their nation’s sins. Feeling pride in the nation and expressing patriotism are routinely denounced as a failure to feel sufficiently guilty.

After all, depression is a lack of pride. But it is not merely about individual achievement. Pride, like shame, is shared. You might feel some pride in your personal performance, but if your team loses or if it has cheated its way to victory, you lose your right to enjoy personal pride.

Those who are in charge of school systems have put themselves in the business of producing guilt. All the while, they tell American children that they are entitled to high self esteem. No one needs to work hard to achieve anything. Self-esteem is given, not earned.

This means that far too many children have been turned into raving narcissists. They believe that they are the best, no matter the evidence. They do not understand that pride comes naturally with hard work and achievement.

But then, children are also taught that America is a major sinner nation. They are taught that America’s crimes and flaws overwhelm its successes. Since emotional well-being depends on belonging to a successful group, this teaching sets them up for depression.

Whether it is the schools or the media, we as a people are obsessed with everything we have done wrong: racism, sexism, homophobia, Islamophobia. If that does not suffice, add the crimes called Gitmo, Abu Ghraib and pollution.

We are called upon to feel badly for these sins and to atone for them by purifying our thought and voting for the right political party. In the meantime, we are being stripped of our pride, our confidence and our work ethic.

Our estimable First Lady once said that she did not feel proud of her country until her husband was nominated for president. The new nominee for UN Ambassador believes that America should be apologizing for its many international sins.

Many Americans voted for Barack Obama, a man of meager accomplishments because they wanted to do penance for slavery and racial segregation. Those Americans who believe that elections are about expiating sins are apparently ready to put Hillary Clinton in the White House in 2017. In that way we will apparently expiate our sin of sexism. And we will do so by electing a woman who has been systematically and publicly humiliated by her husband. Surely, her election will make us more respected around the world. If her election doesn’t boost national pride we will still believe that we are atoning for our sins.

One can only wonder why our elite intellectuals and psycho professionals have never considered the emotional consequences of depriving a people of its pride and burdening it with guilt.

Her Years of Living Sexlessly

One cringes at the notion. Twelve years without sex. This is far more radical than Hephzibah Anderson’s one year of abstinence.

Sophie Fontanel, a senior editor of French Elle, spent twelve years, from 27 to 39 living sexlessly. She preferred no sex to the bad sex she was having with her sexually sophisticated French lovers.

I am sure you want to know about her pre-abstinent sex life. The Telegraph has offered the juicy bits:

There were brief affairs with men she’d met in fashionable Parisian clubs or at parties; usually older, more often than not personable, who saw a tall, soignée brunette with an engaging smile – and, it seems, didn’t investigate further.

There were longer-lasting liaisons with men who expected her to conform to their desires. “One would wake me up at 4:30am or 5am to make love, night after night, and didn’t care that I couldn’t go back to sleep afterwards. I was always exhausted. You don’t say no because it takes almost as much time as doing it. Yet if I had to get up at night to get a glass of water and disturbed him, there were no end of recriminations.”

Forced to choose between bad sex and a good night’s sleep, Fontanel chose the latter. Can you blame her?

Anyway, Fontanel wrote a book called L’Envie about her experience and it was a major best seller in France. For those who see the French as world-class sexual sophisticates, it was surely a revelation.  (For the record, the French word envie is a lot closer to words like want and desire than it is to its English cousin, envy.)

The book is going to be published next month in English as: The Art of Sleeping Alone.

Naturally, in our enlightened time you cannot swear off sex and keep it to yourself. When Fontanel’s friends eventually caught on to what was going on they were horrified. They did not sympathize. They thought that she was suffering from a mental disease or defect, or that she didn’t really like men.

The Telegraph reported:

You can have the most outlandish sexual experiences, she says today, write them up like contemporary art dealer Catherine Millet – the author of the 2001 best-selling shocker The Sexual Life of Catherine M, which tells of Millet’s endless search for sex with unknowns encountered in rough bars or at public swapping parties – and no one will want to appear so gauche as to even suggest moral criticism. Admitting to abstinence? Drop the word at a dinner party, and see everyone’s scandalised faces. To them, it’s the worst obscenity. No wonder that early on Fontanel invented imaginary lovers rather than face her friends’ sometimes incredibly brutal reactions.

“I’ve been called frigid, abnormal, bitter, neurotic, a lesbian – stupid, really, because as a lesbian I would enjoy sex with women!” Acquaintances who ought to know better accused her of regressing to the most reactionary brand of Catholicism. 

This means that French culture has been thoroughly Freudized. Under the influence of psychoanalysis people have come to believe that they need to be open and honest about their sexuality and that plentiful sexual experience is the royal road to mental health.

Of course, the great Freudian promise is really a ruse. Being completely open about your sexuality will not improve your sex life. On the contrary, it will drain the fun out of it.

Fontanel has asserted that in France, a country that is renowned for its advanced notions of sensuality and sensuousness, life between the sheets is not as good as it appears:

We are liars, poor liars trying to mystify one another. Perhaps French people are especially big liars. At the very least, we are full of contradictions. If you visit Paris, you will notice that we are very thin, even if we are the country of bread and cheese. We are also very sexy, but maybe it’s only a show to save our reputation.

Her point is worth underscoring. People who advertise their sexuality, who display it on the public square, who present themselves as perfectly sexual and therefore perfectly healthy creatures, might just be putting on a show. I suspect that if your sex life is really good you are not be inclined to advertise the fact.

Fontanel also describes a culture where privacy has gone out of style. This is, as they say, the money quote:

As I wrote about my experiences, I thought a lot about privacy. I realized privacy is not about what you are doing so much as about what you are not doing. Privacy is that which you can hide — which, in our modern society, is not much. Sexuality is completely on display. Around me, children know about their parents’ sexuality; parents know about children’s sexuality. Where is the treasure of silence, of things not shown? Where is the mystery? Our openness is a good thing, for many reasons (of course!), but it has made indiscretion the norm. Everywhere, the question of “Who are you?” is answered with an explanation of sex. This is silly. We’re more than that. We’re poetry, we are floating creatures, sometimes happy sexually, and sometimes in a desert, even as we share our lives with someone.

Ah yes, the long forgotten virtue of discretion. If you want to improve your sex life, try it on.

Obama's Iraq: The Aftermath of Retreat

A year ago Barack Obama declared that the Iraq War was over, that we had won and that American troops were coming home.

CBS reported the story:

The president also used his speech to emphasize that he delivered on his promise to end the war in Iraq. He said 150,000 U.S. troops were pulled out and the last of them came home last December, including the 4th Brigade Combat Team from based at Fort Bliss.

"You left Iraq with honor," said the president, "your mission complete, your heads held high."

How are things going in Iraq today? Glad you asked. The Economist reports on Iraq’s current descent into violence:

AFTER a lull of nearly five years during which it seemed as if Iraq might be emerging from the legacy of its civil war, the country has been drawn back into a nightmare of spiralling attacks on a widening range of targets. The past four months have been among the bloodiest since 2008; nearly 3,000 people have been killed and over 7,000 injured. But the Islamic State of Iraq, the latest incarnation of al-Qaeda, now appears to have broadened its scope from its trademark attacks on security forces and Shia mosques and markets, to suicide-bombings of cafés and funeral gatherings.

In the north in Diyala, Kirkuk and Nineveh provinces and in Anbar province in the west, a struggle for control between a resurgent al-Qaeda, newer Sunni extremist groups and re-emerging Shia militias is fuelling a lethal mix. Iraqi security officials say they have captured or killed more than 70% of al-Qaeda’s people in Baghdad and that successful attacks on police stations and government ministries have waned.

But outside the capital, the threat is mounting. Al-Qaeda has regrouped in the surrounding tribal areas that have traditionally been used as staging posts for attacks on Baghdad. Regular strikes on police patrols and army checkpoints, as well as daily assassinations of officers and interior-ministry people, have kept security forces on the defensive.

If this is what Obama calls a completed and successful mission I would hate to see a mission that he considered a failure.

The notion that ending the war was a transcendent virtue, no matter how the war was ended and no matter the consequences is symptomatic of a failure to grasp reality. You can end the war by emerging victorious or by surrendering. Obama never seems to draw the distinction.

But, I forgot. In Obama’s world a mission is a success because he says it’s a success. Reality becomes insignificant when placed against the grand oratorical flourishes of our demagogue in chief.

Of course, the Economist supports the Obama administration. Thus, it fails to give Barack Obama any "credit" for the current state of affairs in Iraq. I promise you that no other major media outlet will see the connection. 

Jobs for the Inner Cities

It’s about time that the people speak truth to power. It’s about time that everyday citizens talk back to the politicians who believe that they should be dictating wage rates.

The Trayvon Martin story is getting all the ink, but the dispute over Walmart in Washington, D.C. is more important. Getting jobs into the inner cities is the real story.  

Facing the prospect that Walmart would open six stores in the district, the Washington City Council voted a bill requiring the retailer to pay a minimum wage of $12.50.

Citizens of Washington and former Mayor Anthony Williams have called on the mayor to veto the bill.

One is reminded of the fact that in New York City, Mayor Bloomberg has vetoed a number of such bills, only to have the City Council override his vetoes. Thus, no Walmarts in New York and no Kingsbridge Armory development project.

Reporting on the story the New York Times quotes Washingtonian Fred Reaves on the situation. Hopefully, his remarks signal a growing awareness by those who are being consigned to joblessness by such laws:

“Those big people in government, they don’t understand my situation,” said Fred Reaves, 45, who is unemployed and said he would gladly take a job at the current city minimum, $8.25.

“Eight-something, it’ll motivate you to start going to work,” Mr. Reaves said as he stood around the Skyland Town Center, a patch of barren asphalt and shuttered stores where Walmart planned to build. “You can start paying some bills. It will help you to come off public assistance.”

Stirrings from Mayor Gray’s office are encouraging:

Pedro Ribeiro, a spokesman for Mayor Gray, argued the opposite: minimum-wage jobs help the chronically unemployed take a first step into the work force.

“Yes, Walmart jobs are not great,” Mr. Ribeiro said. “But for some people, it will be their first employment and they’re not qualified to do anything else. We need that entry-level benchmark in the District.”

Also, this:

Victor L. Hoskins, the deputy mayor for development, said Walmart’s threat to cancel projects if the measure took effect was no bluff. He calculated that 4,000 retail and construction jobs were at stake from three of the projects.

“The question is not $8.25 versus $12.50,” Mr. Hoskins said. “The question is $8.25 versus zero. It’s called no jobs.”

Former Mayor Williams offers some comments in the Washington Post today:

Why have D.C. officials met yearly with firms, including Wal-Mart (yes, the retailer so reviled of late), and invited them to Washington? Because business investment leads to retail convenience and jobs, which lead to more business investment, more jobs, neighborhood amenities and, ultimately, the kind of virtuous cycle that we’re beginning to see in many areas of the city.

Regrettably, the LRAA [Large Retailer Accountability Act], while well-intentioned, sends the opposite message: that the District is indifferent, if not hostile, to business. Moreover, for all the damage the bill will do to the D.C. business climate, it won’t help that many residents.

It’s good to see that citizens are beginning to understand of the stakes in these political games. It would be better if the culprits had been identified. Everyone knows that these policies are being imposed by labor unions.

As a sidelight, in Spain, where the youth unemployment rate is over 60%, the government has just abolished all minimum wage laws.

"The Newsroom" Is Back

It’s not one of the times when you ask yourself: What was he thinking?

We know exactly what Aaron Sorkin was thinking when he put together his train wreck of a show: “The Newsroom.”

Acclaimed screenwriter Sorkin let fame go to his head. He knew he was a great writer, but he convinced himself that he was also a great thinker. He believed that his opinions were so obviously true that he could save the Republic by showing how the network news should be run.

He ended up showing us why he is not running the network news.

Imagine his surprise when the first season of “The Newsroom” was uniformly panned by television critics.

If Sorkin thought that having characters mouth politically correct bromides would cause the commentariat to swoon, he was very wrong.

Nevertheless, the show was renewed. Insider buzz suggested that Sorkin had learned his lesson and would be offering a new improved “Newroom” this year.

After watching the first show of the second season I can report that the buzz was wrong. The show continues to be propagandistic; the characters are still unsympathetic; they all speak too quickly; the plot lines still express adolescent liberalism. A great screenwriter like Sorkin should know that the approach makes for bad storytelling.

The lead character, Will McAvoy is a smug, self-righteous, self-important asshole… excuse the expression. It is impossible to care about McAvoy, or, for that matter, about any of the other characters. No audience is going to care about characters that are merely vehicles for disseminating the puerile political opinions of Aaron Sorkin.

When it comes to political opinion, this year Sorkin has chosen to double down on stupid. His first episode revolves around McAvoy’s statement that “the Tea Party is the American Taliban.” Admittedly, there are precincts where the Tea Party is routinely excoriated, even singled out for political persecution, but no one with a brain really believes that the Tea Party is the American Taliban.

Writing in the Guardian, not an organ of the Tea Party, Jeff Jarvis takes the full measure of Aaron Sorkin’s failure:

You could be forgiven for thinking that journalists hate  The Newsroom because we are unbearable, self-centered nitpickers who think the show doesn't tell our story.

But that's not why I hate The Newsroom.

You'd be right to theorize that we hate The Newsroom because:
• it is filled with sanctimonious showoff soliloquies by its creator, Aaron Sorkin
• It exploits headlines with hindsight instead of insight, though at least that gives the audience the foresight to dread what's coming (says The Onion: "Nation hoping 'The Newsroom' ends before Trayvon Martin storyline")
• It portrays women as ego-deprived, simpering, clumsy, man-dependent fools who are afraid to display their own intelligence and don't know how email works
• It portrays men as ego-sated, sexist, horny, loser oafs
• It – or rather, Sorkin – hates the Internet, the domain of "the pajama people"
• It forces its actors to talk faster than a New Yorker on a case of Red Bull and, worse, has them finish each others' sentences, which would make a real New Yorker just slap them.

In other words, the show fails because it’s all about Aaron Sorkin.

But Jarvis offers a cogent explanation for why journalists hate “The Newsroom.” They hate it because it makes them look like smug, self-righteous, self-important assholes.

Ultimately, Jarvis is disappointed by a missed opportunity:

On The Newsroom Sorkin's characters act mournful and mopey that they can't fix their sex lives or the world when what they should be fixing is their industry. And in truth, all they really do is read the news off TelePrompTers and get paid way too much to do so. They don't earn their ennui.

Sorkin could reinvent TV news. He could present us with a vision of what it could be. TV news could be good at explaining complex issues and narratives. It could be good at visualizing complex data. It could be good at telling us what we should know rather than what we already know. It could be good at giving us the point of view of witnesses -- real witnesses who now carry their own camera trucks in their pockets. It could be good at convening us to action.

But TV news isn't any of that that and neither is Sorkin's moody rendition of it in the show within his show. He merely takes TV news as it is and adds a layer of adolescent emotion and obnoxious rhetoric to it. That's why I hate The Newsroom.

While I mostly agree with Jarvis, I would add one slight qualification. There is no way on earth that Aaron Sorkin was going to reinvent televisions news. If he thought that he could, he should be treated for hubris. If he chosen a less ambitious project, one that involved telling an interesting story with characters we care about he might have succeeded. For having aimed too high, he failed.