Tag: news

Last
night, the Pentagon announced that bombing operations by the U.S.
and its anti-ISIS coalition “partners” had begun over Syria. The
air campaign in Syria against ISIS, the Islamic State of Iraq and
al-Sham (or Syria), extends the U.S. war on the terrorist
group-cum-self-proclaimed caliphate from Iraq, where an American
air campaign began earlier this month. Barack Obama became the
fourth consecutive U.S. president to order air strikes in Iraq.
Predictably, the U.S. war against ISIS, which claims territory in
Iraq and Syria, has reached into Syria itself. The bombings in
Syria are a bad idea, writes Ed Krayewski, as is the wider war
against ISIS, for a host of reasons.

View this article.

Last
night, the Pentagon announced that bombing operations by the U.S.
and its anti-ISIS coalition “partners” had begun over Syria. The
air campaign in Syria against ISIS, the Islamic State of Iraq and
al-Sham (or Syria), extends the U.S. war on the terrorist
group-cum-self-proclaimed caliphate from Iraq, where an American
air campaign began earlier this month. Barack Obama became the
fourth consecutive U.S. president to order air strikes in Iraq.
Predictably, the U.S. war against ISIS, which claims territory in
Iraq and Syria, has reached into Syria itself. The bombings in
Syria are a bad idea, writes Ed Krayewski, as is the wider war
against ISIS, for a host of reasons.

View this article.

• President Barack Obama today
  said that his Syrian war “is not America’s fight alone.”
  Besides bombing ISIS, we also attacked an Al Qaeda affiliated
  called the “Khorasan Group,” which the Pentagon says
  poses a
  bigger threat. Sen. Tim Kaine (D-Va.) blames his
  fellow congress critters for being passively allowing a new
  “Cheney
  pre-emptive war doctrine,” because, obviously, the president
  can’t be expected to demonstrate any self-restraint, and Kaine
  can’t be expected to call it the “Obama pre-emptive war
  doctrine.”
• Speaking of Big O’s lack of self-restraint, he’s got a
  new executive order on climate change.
• Sen. Harry Reid (D-Nev.) says an
  Internet sales tax law “is long, long overdue.” Apparently not
  that long, because he’s waiting until after the midterm
  elections to try cramming this bad idea down America’s throat.
• Conservative filmmaker Dinesh D’Souza, who was found guilty of
  campaign finance fraud,
  will be spared from having to serve prison time. Before you
  applaud the former Reagan advisor, do you think you’d get the same
  treatment in court?
• Since some guy managed to get over the first one, there’s
  a new
  fence around the White House. Insert your own border joke
  here.
• Nearly forty years later, the U.S. is preparing to
  end its arms embargo on Vietnam. If only we could celebrate
  with Cuban cigars.
• The Ebola outbreak in Africa looks to be “far
  worse than the authorities acknowledge,” and the Center for
  Disease Control and Prevention estimates that in 4 months there
  could be
  1.4 million infected. The Food and Drug Administration just
  OK’d an
  experimental drug to fight the virus. 

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As calls to
“end” campus rape reach a fever pitch, I want to highlight a
few recent pieces on sexual consent from around the web. California
is currently
considering “affirmative consent”
legislation that would create a separate definition
of rape for college students, one in which the absense of
“affirmative, conscious, and voluntary” (though not
necessarily verbal) agreement to proceed at each step of sexual
activity would be considered assault. 

One of the biggest areas of controversy in
the legislation is a section concerning consent and
intoxication. “In the evaluation of complaints in the disciplinary
process,” the bill states, “it shall not be a valid excuse that the
accused believed that the complainant affirmatively consented…if
the accused knew or reasonably should have known that the
complainant was unable to consent to the sexual activity” because
of incapacitation “due to the influence of drugs, alcohol, or
medication.” Many have pointed out that this standard is awfully
vague, leaving much room for discretion in what constitutes
too incapacitated to consent.

Megan McArdle suggests that this is a feature, not a bug,
for those pushing affirmative-consent policies: 

Prosecutors, and regulators more generally, like vague standards
that are impossible to enforce consistently. It gives them a great
deal of discretion in whom they target and how. It is a threat that
can be wielded to force pleas to lesser crimes or other “voluntary”
actions that obviate the need for a messy trial they might
lose.

If university administrators moved to an affirmative-consent
standard by themselves, parents and alumni, particularly the
parents of sons, might complain. But if lawmakers force them to it
… well, it’s another weapon in the arsenal that allows them to
target men who, say, generate too many plausible but
impossible-to-prove complaints. The part of me that was a
potentially vulnerable college woman understands the desire. But
the part of me that is suspicious of authorities with broad and
vague powers nonetheless thinks we should look for a better
way.

At Bustle, Pamela Stubbart considers a

sexual assault case from Occidental College and articulates
something that’s long bothered me about the affirmative consent
movement:
If drunk people can’t give consent, how can they
perceive consent?

Everyone understands the intuition that a policy (and more
importantly, a real culture) of meaningful consent helps to protect
incapacitated people from non-incapacitated (or less-incapacitated)
potential assailants. But when both parties in a
sexual encounter are (by their own admissions) blackout drunk…it
doesn’t take a trained philosopher to point out the underlying
principle: if fall-down, blackout drunkenness really does
incapacitate someone morally and relieve them of
responsibility for their actions, for consistency’s sake that must
count both for ability to give consent and ability to
perceive it. The burden might be reasonably placed on the
clear initiator to prove that he or she was drunk, but in the
Occidental case, neither Jane nor John Doe denies that both were as
drunk as can be.

Fortunately, rapists do not get themselves blackout drunk and
then go out planning to rape people and “get away with it.” When
both people are that drunk,
and equally drunk, it’s usually the result of a
voluntary (if ill-advised) organic social situation. Here’s
the reality of the matter, which is kind of both good and bad news:
rape is not some kind of mutual poor decision or
drunken accident (which would make it easier to educate or engineer
away). Instead, there really are men who prey on women sexually,
often by getting them drunk.

Affirmative consent legislation suggests that misinterpreation
of consent is a major root of sexual violence. But
most rapes are committed by repeat offenders with calculated
agendas, not students confused about whether the absense of a ‘no’
means ‘yes’.

“Given the horrors of sexual assault, the desire to do something
is powerful and totally understandable,”
writes Freddie de Boer. “But the establishment of explicit
consent policies strikes me as a perfect example of the flawed
thinking of ‘we need to do something, this is something, therefore
we need to do this.'” He, too, sees affirmative consent laws as
promoting misunderstanding about rape: 

Rapists are those who engage in sexual behaviors against others
who have not consented to those behaviors. Whether the standard is
“no means no” or “only yes means yes,” rapists will violate that
standard, because they are rapists. Perhaps such policies will make
it easier to prosecute cases against offenders, but again—it is as
easy for someone to claim after the fact that he asked for and
received a yes as it is to claim after the fact that the other
person didn’t say no. These policies seem only to solve problems
under the assumption that many rapes are so-called “gray rapes,”
and yet anti-rape activists have long worked to insist that there
is no such thing, or that such situations are quite rare.

De Boer also sees hypocrisy in attempting to promote individual
agency and autonomy by requiring that agency be used in a very
particular way:  

One of the most important parts of the feminist project is
insisting that women own their own bodies. This has application to
abortion, where the pro-life movement seeks to take physical
control of women’s bodies away from them. And it has application to
rape. The insistence of those who work against rape is that only
the individual has the right to define appropriate and wanted
sexual practice. With the informed consent of all adult parties, no
sexual practice is illegitimate. Without that consent, no sexual
practice is permissible. This is a humane, moral standard that has
the benefit of simplicity in application and clarity in
responsibility.

But it stems first and foremost from the recognition of
individual ownership. To define the exact methods through which
individuals can request and give consent takes away that control
and turns it over to the state, or even more ludicrously, to a dean
or some academic grievance board. We should be expanding the
individual’s control over their own sexual practice, not lessening
it. And we should maintain the simplest standard that there is:
that if a person rejects a sexual advance, or is in such an
incapacitated state that they cannot rejected that advance, or is
under the power of the other party to the extent that they feel
compelled to consent, sexual contact cannot morally or legally take
place.

Yet mainstream feminists have taken up the cause of affirmative
consent on campus with vigor. It seems to epitomize critics’ charge
that these feminists are only concerned with the problems of the
privileged and middle-class. Only about one-third of Americans ever
earn a college degree. Only about six percent of Americans are
currently
enrolled in college, and far less on traditional college
campuses. Why are the intricacies of consent for this population so
much more important than, say, finding funding to test
the backlog
of rape kits—something that could help catch existing rapists
and protect people regardless of their educational attainment (or
incapacitation) level?

As calls to
“end” campus rape reach a fever pitch, I want to highlight a
few recent pieces on sexual consent from around the web. California
is currently
considering “affirmative consent”
legislation that would create a separate definition
of rape for college students, one in which the absense of
“affirmative, conscious, and voluntary” (though not
necessarily verbal) agreement to proceed at each step of sexual
activity would be considered assault. 

One of the biggest areas of controversy in
the legislation is a section concerning consent and
intoxication. “In the evaluation of complaints in the disciplinary
process,” the bill states, “it shall not be a valid excuse that the
accused believed that the complainant affirmatively consented…if
the accused knew or reasonably should have known that the
complainant was unable to consent to the sexual activity” because
of incapacitation “due to the influence of drugs, alcohol, or
medication.” Many have pointed out that this standard is awfully
vague, leaving much room for discretion in what constitutes
too incapacitated to consent.

Megan McArdle suggests that this is a feature, not a bug,
for those pushing affirmative-consent policies: 

Prosecutors, and regulators more generally, like vague standards
that are impossible to enforce consistently. It gives them a great
deal of discretion in whom they target and how. It is a threat that
can be wielded to force pleas to lesser crimes or other “voluntary”
actions that obviate the need for a messy trial they might
lose.

If university administrators moved to an affirmative-consent
standard by themselves, parents and alumni, particularly the
parents of sons, might complain. But if lawmakers force them to it
… well, it’s another weapon in the arsenal that allows them to
target men who, say, generate too many plausible but
impossible-to-prove complaints. The part of me that was a
potentially vulnerable college woman understands the desire. But
the part of me that is suspicious of authorities with broad and
vague powers nonetheless thinks we should look for a better
way.

At Bustle, Pamela Stubbart considers a

sexual assault case from Occidental College and articulates
something that’s long bothered me about the affirmative consent
movement:
If drunk people can’t give consent, how can they
perceive consent?

Everyone understands the intuition that a policy (and more
importantly, a real culture) of meaningful consent helps to protect
incapacitated people from non-incapacitated (or less-incapacitated)
potential assailants. But when both parties in a
sexual encounter are (by their own admissions) blackout drunk…it
doesn’t take a trained philosopher to point out the underlying
principle: if fall-down, blackout drunkenness really does
incapacitate someone morally and relieve them of
responsibility for their actions, for consistency’s sake that must
count both for ability to give consent and ability to
perceive it. The burden might be reasonably placed on the
clear initiator to prove that he or she was drunk, but in the
Occidental case, neither Jane nor John Doe denies that both were as
drunk as can be.

Fortunately, rapists do not get themselves blackout drunk and
then go out planning to rape people and “get away with it.” When
both people are that drunk,
and equally drunk, it’s usually the result of a
voluntary (if ill-advised) organic social situation. Here’s
the reality of the matter, which is kind of both good and bad news:
rape is not some kind of mutual poor decision or
drunken accident (which would make it easier to educate or engineer
away). Instead, there really are men who prey on women sexually,
often by getting them drunk.

Affirmative consent legislation suggests that misinterpreation
of consent is a major root of sexual violence. But
most rapes are committed by repeat offenders with calculated
agendas, not students confused about whether the absense of a ‘no’
means ‘yes’.

“Given the horrors of sexual assault, the desire to do something
is powerful and totally understandable,”
writes Freddie de Boer. “But the establishment of explicit
consent policies strikes me as a perfect example of the flawed
thinking of ‘we need to do something, this is something, therefore
we need to do this.'” He, too, sees affirmative consent laws as
promoting misunderstanding about rape: 

Rapists are those who engage in sexual behaviors against others
who have not consented to those behaviors. Whether the standard is
“no means no” or “only yes means yes,” rapists will violate that
standard, because they are rapists. Perhaps such policies will make
it easier to prosecute cases against offenders, but again—it is as
easy for someone to claim after the fact that he asked for and
received a yes as it is to claim after the fact that the other
person didn’t say no. These policies seem only to solve problems
under the assumption that many rapes are so-called “gray rapes,”
and yet anti-rape activists have long worked to insist that there
is no such thing, or that such situations are quite rare.

De Boer also sees hypocrisy in attempting to promote individual
agency and autonomy by requiring that agency be used in a very
particular way:  

One of the most important parts of the feminist project is
insisting that women own their own bodies. This has application to
abortion, where the pro-life movement seeks to take physical
control of women’s bodies away from them. And it has application to
rape. The insistence of those who work against rape is that only
the individual has the right to define appropriate and wanted
sexual practice. With the informed consent of all adult parties, no
sexual practice is illegitimate. Without that consent, no sexual
practice is permissible. This is a humane, moral standard that has
the benefit of simplicity in application and clarity in
responsibility.

But it stems first and foremost from the recognition of
individual ownership. To define the exact methods through which
individuals can request and give consent takes away that control
and turns it over to the state, or even more ludicrously, to a dean
or some academic grievance board. We should be expanding the
individual’s control over their own sexual practice, not lessening
it. And we should maintain the simplest standard that there is:
that if a person rejects a sexual advance, or is in such an
incapacitated state that they cannot rejected that advance, or is
under the power of the other party to the extent that they feel
compelled to consent, sexual contact cannot morally or legally take
place.

Yet mainstream feminists have taken up the cause of affirmative
consent on campus with vigor. It seems to epitomize critics’ charge
that these feminists are only concerned with the problems of the
privileged and middle-class. Only about one-third of Americans ever
earn a college degree. Only about six percent of Americans are
currently
enrolled in college, and far less on traditional college
campuses. Why are the intricacies of consent for this population so
much more important than, say, finding funding to test
the backlog
of rape kits—something that could help catch existing rapists
and protect people regardless of their educational attainment (or
incapacitation) level?

When
President Obama first announced that he had authorized a new round
of airstrikes in Iraq, he attempted to reassure the public that the
attacks would not lead to another war.

“I know that many of you are rightly concerned about any
American military action in Iraq,” he
said, “even limited strikes like these. I understand that.” He
offered a reminder that he ran for office in part to end the war in
Iraq. And he said he would not let a new war begin. 

“As Commander-in-Chief, I will not allow the United States to be
dragged into fighting another war in Iraq.” American forces would
play a support role only, “because there’s no American military
solution to the larger crisis in Iraq.” 

So much for “limited strikes.” The initial, narrowly targeted
campaign, a “humanitarian” mission to save a small group of people
trapped on a mountain in Iraq, according to that first speech,
quickly turned into a larger bombing campaign against militants in
Iraq and, as of last night, in Syria too. 

And Pentagon officials are saying that it’s not going end any
time soon. 

Via
The Hill:

“Last night’s strikes are the beginning of a credible and
sustainable persistent campaign to degrade and ultimately destroy”
ISIS, Army Lt. Gen. Bill Mayville told reporters.

“I would think of it in terms of years,” he added about the
length of the expected campaign against ISIS.

That sure didn’t take long. 

Really, this isn’t that surprising, considering that Obama has
already suggested the strikes could be part of an
extended military effort. But it is revealing. 

If you want to understand why Obama’s foreign policy job
approval ratings are falling, why people say they don’t trust the
executive branch, and why critics are suggesting that the Obama
administration can’t really be believed when officials promise that
ground troops won’t be part of the equation, then all you need to
do is take a look at the difference between what’s been promised
regarding the military operation against ISIS and what’s actually
happened in a space of less than two months.

The initial justification for strikes—a supposedly limited,
humanitarian mission to help a small group of desperate people on a
single mountain—turned out almost immediately to be a
pretext for a much larger effort to attack, degrade, and destroy
ISIS militants in two different countries, an effort that is now
projected to last years. All the while, the administration insists
that it’s not actually a “combat mission,” as if dropping bombs and
shooting missiles on hundreds of occasions, with the intention of
doing it hundreds more times, is somehow not really
combat. 

The implicit message of Obama’s speech last month was that you
could trust him, because he was war-weary too. The practical
message of the last two months, however, is that Obama is taking
the nation to war despite his campaign promises to the contrary,
and that he can’t be trusted at all.