Courtesy of the Washington Post, which has a lot of coverage.
Anne Laurie has been a Balloon Juice writer since 2009.
Late Night Graphic Artists Open Thread
First, artist and commentor Larime could use a little help:
My wife, Sylv Taylor, is bed-bound with Lupus and her laptop is the only link she has to the outside world. That laptop is also what she uses to create art, including coloring comics. It’s dying – it shut off 10 times in 3 hours today – and when it’s dead she’ll be utterly isolated and unable to create.
PLEASE consider helping in getting her a new laptop. If you can’t pledge, PLEASE share this on your journals and tell your friends. If her laptop dies and I can’t replace it, she’s going to have nothing to do and no one but me to talk to, all day, every day. This laptop is literally her life and her world.
The Indiegogo campaign is here. Thank you!
***********
Second, a documentary we can look forward to:
(Via Sharan Shetty at Slate)
Private Manning Remains Controversial
From the Washington Post:
PROVIDENCE, R.I. — Army Pvt. Chelsea Manning, who was previously known as Bradley Manning, wants estrogen treatments that would promote breast development and other female characteristics, which she’d be willing to pay for, while she’s incarcerated at the all-men military prison at Fort Leavenworth, Kan., her lawyer said.
Attorney David Coombs told The Associated Press on Monday that Manning hoped the military prison “will simply do the right thing” based on their request for hormone treatment so the soldier will not have to sue in military or civilian court. Coombs said at this point, Manning does not want sex-reassignment surgery and expects to be kept with men in prison where she’s serving time for leaking mountains of classified material to the anti-secrecy website WikiLeaks…
It wasn’t until they read a Courthouse News Service story that Manning decided to make the announcement. The story quoted prison spokeswoman Kimberly Lewis saying the prison would not provide hormone therapy. It was published Aug. 20, the day before Manning was sentenced to 35 years in prison for the leaks.
“It was Chelsea’s intent to do this all along,” Coombs said. “It was only after Fort Leavenworth had said that they would not provide any sort of medical treatment that we decided not to wait.”
Coombs said at this point, Manning does not want sex-reassignment surgery and expects to be kept with men in prison. Also, Coombs said he had seen online people objecting to taxpayer-funded hormone therapy and said if the Army wouldn’t pay for it, Manning would…
“It’s just to be comfortable in her own skin,” Coombs said…
In related news, turns out the Army really does represent all America, though not always officially, per Slate:
Brynn Tannehill is a former Navy helicopter pilot who condemns the actions of Bradley—now Chelsea—Manning. Tannehill used to fly naval attack helicopters, not entirely unlike the Apache helicopters shown in “Collateral Murder,” the video Manning sent to WikiLeaks revealing U.S. air strikes in Baghdad that left two Reuters journalists and a number of unarmed people dead. But after working as a pilot and analyst over 10 years and four deployments, Tannehill had to drop out of the military in 2010, when she began transitioning from a man to a woman.
Tannehill, who is now the director of advocacy at SPART*A, an organization that advocates for the rights of trans men and women serving in the military, worries Manning’s actions reflect badly on trans service members. “If you’re wondering if she’s being embraced as a hero in the military trans community, she is absolutely not,” Tannehill says. “People in our group can empathize with the strain that being transgender and closeted in the military causes, but we do not in any way, shape, or form think this excuses or mitigates what she did.”
The U.S. military doesn’t allow openly trans men and women to serve, even though it’s estimated that 20 percent of trans people have served, compared to 10 percent of the general U.S. population….
Maybe There Is No “Right Choice” In Syria
In case you thought you were cynical about the situation in Syria, here’s Gary Dolan (aka The War Nerd) at NSFWCorp:
Last week someone launched missiles with chemical warheads at El Ghouta, a Sunni suburb of Damascus. It’s still not clear how many people died, or what chemical agent killed them, but the obvious suspect is Assad’s Syrian Arab Army (SAA), because El Ghouta is a Sunni district, a frontline area in the fight between the Alawite SAA and “The Syrian Opposition.” Which means, basically, the Sunni.
And then something surprising happened. People objected…
What this burst of outrage really shows is a much older, sleazier scenario: A small power, out of favor with the big players, crossing a “red line” that’s drawn by the technology you use to massacre the other tribe, not the fact that you’re massacring civilians.
There are three factors that determine how much artificial world outrage a massacre sets off. First, the obvious one: Who committed it? Second: What technology did they use to commit it? Third: Who were the victims?…
That’s where the “chemical weapons” aspect of the El Ghouta attack comes in. The SAA has been killing Sunni civilians in huge numbers, to the absolute best of its ability, for more than two years. And that hasn’t really bothered anyone except other Sunni Muslims, other members of the same extended family.
The reason we were all fine with those deaths is that they were carried out with the kind of weapons we like and trust: Aircraft and missiles. One constant for war news across my whole life is that nobody minds what you do as long as you do it from a fighter jet. It’s amazing. This isn’t as random as it might seem. Those jets are very, very expensive—not just to buy but to maintain, because they’re as fragile as racehorses. So only the big boys, the powers we consider legit, can use them. That’s absolution in advance for anything they do, above all because “opinion leaders” who spin the news know those jets will never be used against them….
Chemical weapons scare us more than SCUDs or 1950s Soviet aircraft, because they’re illegitimate weapons favored by illegitimate powers. It was the Germans who introduced them in WW I, for which the Anglo-American cartel never forgave them. Since they were banned by the big powers according to the Geneva rules, they’re like an illustration of that NRA tautology that “when guns are outlawed, only outlaws will have guns,” or in this case, “Now that us big legit people have outlawed chemical weapons, anybody who uses them must be a rotten outsider.”
The last factor in deciding whether we get outraged or not is: Who got massacred? This is an interesting case. Like I said, the world has watched with a cold, calm eye while Assad killed tens of thousands of Sunni Syrians. In some quarters, the view is that you just can’t kill too many militant Sunni…
… The point is so much simpler than anyone will face. It’s not about chemicals, or death tolls, or even Syria. It’s about reminding two factions in an enemy tribe that you’re still in charge, and you control their death rates even when they think it’s them killing each other.
Much more at the link (for the next 48 hours, unless you’re also a subscriber).
Maybe There Is No “Right Choice” In SyriaPost + Comments (83)
Open Thread: PSA – “The March”
Watch The March – PREVIEW on PBS. See more from The March.
Tonight at 9pm, via commentor LAMH36:
‘The March’ is the story of the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom, told by the people who organized and participated in it. It includes interviews with some of the key actors; members of the inner circles of the core organizational groups; Hollywood supporters and civil rights campaigners; John F. Kennedy administration officials; and the ordinary people who became part of the crowd of thousands, who thronged to Washington D.C. by all and every means: plane, bus and car.
‘The March’ is the story of discrimination, defiance and victory told by the people who made it happen and whose lives it changed forever…
Open Thread: 70s v 80s?
Some people say that the 1970s were a trivial interim between the Glorious Youth Revolution of the 1960s and Reagan’s triumphant Morning in America election. I’ve always said this underrates the Seventies (even just for the social advances in ‘women’s lib’ and ‘gay pride’, which were not trivial even for those of us not female or LBGT). Then again, the degradation of American political culture by the self-styled Moral Majority in th Eighties remains, IMO, second only to the Reconstruction in its awfulness. So I was intrigued by Dahlia Lithwick’s latest:
Last week Justices Ruth Bader Ginsburg and Antonin Scalia each grabbed headlines with controversial late-summer comments about the dysfunctions of the current Supreme Court. Speaking to a Montana meeting of the Federalist Society last Monday, Scalia—evidently alluding to the recent marriage equality decisions—opined that “[i]t’s not up to the courts to invent new minorities that get special protections.” (There is no transcript of the event, as usual, so we have to rely on contemporaneous newspaper accounts and Twitter reports). Then, in a rare and wide-ranging interview with the New York Times’ Adam Liptak later in the week, Ginsburg offered up the view that this past term’s Voting Rights Act decision was “stunning in terms of activism,” and that the Roberts court, “if it’s measured in terms of readiness to overturn legislation … is one of the most activist courts in history.”
Predictably, the left-wing blogosphere reacted with horror at Scalia’s implication that the courts had “invented” a homosexual minority. And equally predictably, the right-wing blogosphere exploded in umbrage at Ginsburg’s suggestion that the Roberts court is “activist” and that the Voting Rights Act case was wrongly decided. It’s not hard to spot some important parallels between the two free-range justices—the most famous legal frenemies of their time—and their controversial public statements about the Roberts court. Both Scalia and Ginsburg are among the most senior members of the court. Scalia is 77, and Ginsburg is 80. Each is doubtless beginning to feel that there is much they will not accomplish in their remaining time on the bench, and each appears ever more willing to achieve with dissents, speeches, and interviews what can’t be done in the four corners of a majority opinion.
More importantly, both seem to be longing for some long-gone judicial era: Ginsburg evidently missing her own activist days as a women’s rights litigator, and Scalia missing the Ed Meese Revolution when everyone agreed that judges were utterly useless….
It’s tempting to suggest, then, based on the recent comments of the two, that it’s a wash. If the court’s radical liberal bomb-thrower and equally radical conservative firebrand are equally frustrated, maybe the Roberts court is tacking precisely down the middle. That assessment would be precisely wrong.….
Are Ballmer’s Executive Talents Underrated?
I’d be interested in the more technologically sophisticated Juicers’ opinion of this, by John Cassidy in the New Yorker:
… Ballmer isn’t a technologist; he’s a businessman who started out at Procter & Gamble. To describe him as a failure is to misunderstand how the technology industry works these days. At once oligopolistic and highly competitive, it is perhaps best described as an ongoing lottery in which the prizes, bestowed at irregular intervals, are temporary monopolies in a given market, such as P.C. operating systems, search, or tablets.
In this setup, there are two very different types of players, each with very different incentives: those entering the lotteries, and those who have already won one. The job of the lottery entrants, such as Zuckerberg when he launched Facebook, in 2004, and Karp when he launched Tumblr, in 2007, is to come up with innovative and exciting products that the judges—investors and the public—are likely to award first prize. (The contest is a lottery because there are often many competing products, with little to distinguish them save that one has first-mover advantage.) The job of the lottery winners is to make the most of their monopoly franchise, building it out and making it last as long as possible.
Most of Ballmer’s critics ignore this crucial distinction. They attack him for being a poor lottery entrant, but he wasn’t hired to play that game—he was chosen to run a company that had already won the prize. And, as a monopolist, he was pretty effective. Under the leadership of Gates and Ballmer, Microsoft dominated the computer business for more than two decades. In such a fast-moving industry, that’s a very long time. Only I.B.M. has had a comparable reign…
Some critics point to the fact that Microsoft’s share price has languished, but that’s based upon another misunderstanding. When a tech business like Microsoft or Google or Apple establishes a temporary monopoly, its stock price shoots up in anticipation of future profits. If the firm doesn’t fulfill its promise, its stock price collapses. If it does, it spends many years growing into its valuation, which is what Microsoft has done. Since the bursting of the tech bubble, in 2000, the company’s stock price hasn’t gone anywhere. But since 1986, when it went public, the stock is up more than five-hundredfold…
Are Ballmer’s Executive Talents Underrated?Post + Comments (106)