Not a Very P.C. Thing to Say

How the language police are perverting liberalism.

Around 2 a.m. on December 12, four students approached the apartment of Omar Mahmood, a Muslim student at the University of Michigan, who had recently published a column in a school newspaper about his perspective as a minority on campus. The students, who were recorded on a building surveillance camera wearing baggy hooded sweatshirts to hide their identity, littered Mahmood’s doorway with copies of his column, scrawled with messages like “You scum embarrass us,” “Shut the fuck up,” and “DO YOU EVEN GO HERE?! LEAVE!!” They posted a picture of a demon and splattered eggs.

This might appear to be the sort of episode that would stoke the moral conscience of students on a progressive campus like Ann Arbor, and it was quickly agreed that an act of biased intimidation had taken place. But Mahmood was widely seen as the perpetrator rather than the victim. His column, published in the school’s conservative newspaper, had spoofed the culture of taking offense that pervades the campus. Mahmood satirically pretended to denounce “a white cis-gendered hetero upper-class man” who offered to help him up when he slipped, leading him to denounce “our barbaric attitude toward people of left-handydnyss.” The gentle tone of his mockery was closer to Charlie Brown than to Charlie Hebdo.

The Michigan Daily, where Mahmood also worked as a columnist and film critic, objected to the placement of his column in the conservative paper but hardly wanted his satirical column in its own pages. Mahmood later said that he was told by the editor that his column had created a “hostile environment,” in which at least one Daily staffer felt threatened, and that he must write a letter of apology to the staff. When he refused, the Daily fired him, and the subsequent vandalism of his apartment served to confirm his status as thought-criminal.

The episode would not have shocked anybody familiar with the campus scene from two decades earlier. In 1992, an episode along somewhat analogous lines took place, also in Ann Arbor. In this case, the offending party was the feminist videographer Carol Jacobsen, who had produced an exhibition documenting the lives of sex workers. The exhibition’s subjects presented their profession as a form of self-empowerment, a position that ran headlong against the theories of Catharine MacKinnon, a law professor at the university who had gained national renown for her radical feminist critique of the First Amendment as a tool of male privilege. MacKinnon’s beliefs nestled closely with an academic movement that was then being described, by its advocates as well as its critics, as “political correctness.” Michigan had already responded to the demands of pro-p.c. activists by imposing a campuswide speech code purporting to restrict all manner of discriminatory speech, only for it to be struck down as a First Amendment violation in federal court.

In Ann Arbor, MacKinnon had attracted a loyal following of students, many of whom copied her method of argument. The pro-MacKinnon students, upset over the display of pornographic video clips, descended upon Jacobsen’s exhibit and confiscated a videotape. There were speakers visiting campus for a conference on prostitution, and the video posed “a threat to their safety,” the students insisted.

This was the same inversion of victim and victimizer at work last December. In both cases, the threat was deemed not the angry mobs out to crush opposing ideas, but the ideas themselves. The theory animating both attacks turns out to be a durable one, with deep roots in the political left.

The recent mass murder of the staff members of Charlie Hebdo in Paris was met with immediate and unreserved fury and grief across the full range of the American political system. But while outrage at the violent act briefly united our generally quarrelsome political culture, the quarreling quickly resumed over deeper fissures. Were the slain satirists martyrs at the hands of religious fanaticism, or bullying spokesmen of privilege? Can the offensiveness of an idea be determined objectively, or only by recourse to the identity of the person taking offense? On Twitter, “Je Suis Charlie,” a slogan heralding free speech, was briefly one of the most popular news hashtags in history. But soon came the reactions (“Je Ne Suis Pas Charlie”) from those on the left accusing the newspaper of racism and those on the right identifying the cartoons as hate speech. Many media companies, including the New York Times, have declined to publish the cartoons the terrorists deemed offensive, a stance that has attracted strident criticism from some readers. These sudden, dramatic expressions of anguish against insensitivity and oversensitivity come at a moment when large segments of American culture have convulsed into censoriousness.

After political correctness burst onto the academic scene in the late ’80s and early ’90s, it went into a long remission. Now it has returned. Some of its expressions have a familiar tint, like the protesting of even mildly controversial speakers on college campuses. You may remember when 6,000 people at the University of California–Berkeley signed a petition last year to stop a commencement address by Bill Maher, who has criticized Islam (along with nearly all the other major world religions). Or when protesters at Smith College demanded the cancellation of a commencement address by Christine Lagarde, managing director of the International Monetary Fund, blaming the organization for “imperialist and patriarchal systems that oppress and abuse women worldwide.” Also last year, Rutgers protesters scared away Condoleezza Rice; others at Brandeis blocked Ayaan Hirsi Ali, a women’s-rights champion who is also a staunch critic of Islam; and those at Haverford successfully protested ­former Berkeley chancellor Robert Birgeneau, who was disqualified by an episode in which the school’s police used force against Occupy protesters.

At a growing number of campuses, professors now attach “trigger warnings” to texts that may upset students, and there is a campaign to eradicate “microaggressions,” or small social slights that might cause searing trauma. These newly fashionable terms merely repackage a central tenet of the first p.c. movement: that people should be expected to treat even faintly unpleasant ideas or behaviors as full-scale offenses. Stanford recently canceled a performance of Bloody Bloody Andrew Jackson after protests by Native American students. UCLA students staged a sit-in to protest microaggressions such as when a professor corrected a student’s decision to spell the word indigenous with an uppercase I — one example of many “perceived grammatical choices that in actuality reflect ideologies.” A theater group at Mount Holyoke College recently announced it would no longer put on The Vagina Monologues in part because the material excludes women without vaginas. These sorts of episodes now hardly even qualify as exceptional.

Trigger warnings aren’t much help in actually overcoming trauma — an analysis by the Institute of Medicine has found that the best approach is controlled exposure to it, and experts say avoidance can reinforce suffering. Indeed, one professor at a prestigious university told me that, just in the last few years, she has noticed a dramatic upsurge in her students’ sensitivity toward even the mildest social or ideological slights; she and her fellow faculty members are terrified of facing accusations of triggering trauma — or, more consequentially, violating her school’s new sexual-harassment policy — merely by carrying out the traditional academic work of intellectual exploration. “This is an environment of fear, believe it or not,” she told me by way of explaining her request for anonymity. It reminds her of the previous outbreak of political correctness — “Every other day I say to my friends, ‘How did we get back to 1991?’ ”

But it would be a mistake to categorize today’s p.c. culture as only an academic phenomenon. Political correctness is a style of politics in which the more radical members of the left attempt to regulate political discourse by defining opposing views as bigoted and illegitimate. Two decades ago, the only communities where the left could exert such hegemonic control lay within academia, which gave it an influence on intellectual life far out of proportion to its numeric size. Today’s political correctness flourishes most consequentially on social media, where it enjoys a frisson of cool and vast new cultural reach. And since social media is also now the milieu that hosts most political debate, the new p.c. has attained an influence over mainstream journalism and commentary beyond that of the old.

It also makes money. Every media company knows that stories about race and gender bias draw huge audiences, making identity politics a reliable profit center in a media industry beset by insecurity. A year ago, for instance, a photographer compiled images of Fordham students displaying signs recounting “an instance of racial microaggression they have faced.” The stories ranged from uncomfortable (“No, where are you really from?”) to relatively innocuous (“ ‘Can you read this?’ He showed me a Japanese character on his phone”). BuzzFeed published part of her project, and it has since received more than 2 million views. This is not an anomaly.

In a short period of time, the p.c. movement has assumed a towering presence in the psychic space of politically active people in general and the left in particular. “All over social media, there dwell armies of unpaid but widely read commentators, ready to launch hashtag campaigns and circulate Change.org petitions in response to the slightest of identity-politics missteps,” Rebecca Traister wrote recently in The New Republic.

Two and a half years ago, Hanna Rosin, a liberal journalist and longtime friend, wrote a book called The End of Men, which argued that a confluence of social and economic changes left women in a better position going forward than men, who were struggling to adapt to a new postindustrial order. Rosin, a self-identified feminist, has found herself unexpectedly assailed by feminist critics, who found her message of long-term female empowerment complacent and insufficiently concerned with the continuing reality of sexism. One Twitter hashtag, “#RIPpatriarchy,” became a label for critics to lampoon her thesis. Every new continuing demonstration of gender discrimination — a survey showing Americans still prefer male bosses; a person noticing a man on the subway occupying a seat and a half — would be tweeted out along with a mocking #RIPpatriarchy.

Her response since then has been to avoid committing a provocation, especially on Twitter. “If you tweet something straight­forwardly feminist, you immediately get a wave of love and favorites, but if you tweet something in a cranky feminist mode then the opposite happens,” she told me. “The price is too high; you feel like there might be banishment waiting for you.” Social media, where swarms of jeering critics can materialize in an instant, paradoxically creates this feeling of isolation. “You do immediately get the sense that it’s one against millions, even though it’s not.” Subjects of these massed attacks often describe an impulse to withdraw.

Political correctness is a term whose meaning has been gradually diluted since it became a flashpoint 25 years ago. People use the phrase to describe politeness (perhaps to excess), or evasion of hard truths, or (as a term of abuse by conservatives) liberalism in general. The confusion has made it more attractive to liberals, who share the goal of combating race and gender bias.

But political correctness is not a rigorous commitment to social equality so much as a system of left-wing ideological repression. Not only is it not a form of liberalism; it is antithetical to liberalism. Indeed, its most frequent victims turn out to be liberals themselves.

I am white and male, a fact that is certainly worth bearing in mind. I was also a student at the University of Michigan during the Jacobsen incident, and was attacked for writing an article for the campus paper defending the exhibit. If you consider this background and demographic information the very essence of my point of view, then there’s not much point in reading any further. But this pointlessness is exactly the point: Political correctness makes debate irrelevant and frequently impossible.

Under p.c. culture, the same idea can be expressed identically by two people but received differently depending on the race and sex of the individuals doing the expressing. This has led to elaborate norms and terminology within certain communities on the left. For instance, “mansplaining,” a concept popularized in 2008 by Rebecca Solnit, who described the tendency of men to patronizingly hold forth to women on subjects the woman knows better — in Solnit’s case, the man in question mansplained her own book to her. The fast popularization of the term speaks to how exasperating the phenomenon can be, and mansplaining has, at times, proved useful in identifying discrimination embedded in everyday rudeness. But it has now grown into an all-purpose term of abuse that can be used to discredit any argument by any man. (MSNBC host Melissa Harris-Perry once disdainfully called White House press secretary Jay Carney’s defense of the relative pay of men and women in the administration “man­splaining,” even though the question he responded to was posed by a male.) Mansplaining has since given rise to “whitesplaining” and “straightsplaining.” The phrase “solidarity is for white women,” used in a popular hashtag, broadly signifies any criticism of white feminists by nonwhite ones.

If a person who is accused of bias attempts to defend his intentions, he merely compounds his own guilt. (Here one might find oneself accused of man/white/straightsplaining.) It is likewise taboo to request that the accusation be rendered in a less hostile manner. This is called “tone policing.” If you are accused of bias, or “called out,” reflection and apology are the only acceptable response — to dispute a call-out only makes it worse. There is no allowance in p.c. culture for the possibility that the accusation may be erroneous. A white person or a man can achieve the status of “ally,” however, if he follows the rules of p.c. dialogue. A community, virtual or real, that adheres to the rules is deemed “safe.” The extensive terminology plays a crucial role, locking in shared ideological assumptions that make meaningful disagreement impossible.

Nearly every time I have mentioned the subject of p.c. to a female writer I know, she has told me about Binders Full of Women Writers, an invitation-only Facebook group started last year for women authors. The name came from Mitt Romney’s awkwardly phrased debate boast that as Massachusetts governor he had solicited names of female candidates for high-level posts, and became a form of viral mockery. Binders was created to give women writers a “laid-back” and “no-pressure” environment for conversation and professional networking. It was an attempt to alleviate the systemic under­representation of women in just about every aspect of American journalism and literature, and many members initially greeted the group as a welcome and even exhilarating source of social comfort and professional opportunity. “Suddenly you had the most powerful women in journalism and media all on the same page,” one former member, a liberal journalist in her 30s, recalls.

Binders, however, soon found itself frequently distracted by bitter identity-­politics recriminations, endlessly litigating the fraught requirements of p.c. discourse. “This was the first time I had felt this new kind of militancy,” says the same member, who requested anonymity for fear that her opinions would make her employer uncomfortable. Another sent me excerpts of the types of discussions that can make the group a kind of virtual mental prison.

On July 10, for instance, one member in Los Angeles started a conversation urging all participants to practice higher levels of racial awareness. “Without calling anyone out specifically, I’m going to note that if you’re discussing a contentious thread, and shooting the breeze … take a look at the faces in the user icons in that discussion,” she wrote. “Binders is pretty diverse, but if you’re not seeing many WOC/non-binary POC in your discussion, it’s quite possible that there are problematic assumptions being stated without being challenged.” (“POC” stands for “people of color.” “WOC” means “women of color.” “Non-binary” describes people who are either transgender or identify as a gender other than traditionally male or female.)

Two members responded lightly, one suggesting that such “call-outs” be addressed in private conversation and another joking that she was a “gluten free Jewish WWC” — or Woman Without Color. This set off more jokes and a vicious backlash. “It seems appropriate to hijack my suggestion with jokes. I see,” the Los Angeles member replied. “Apparently whatever WOC have to say is good for snark and jokes,” wrote another. Others continued: “The level of belittling, derailing, crappy jokes, and all around insensitivity here is astounding and also makes me feel very unsafe in this Big Binder.” “It is literally fucking insane. I am appalled and embarrassed.”

The suggestion that a call-out be communicated privately met with even deeper rage. A poet in Texas: “I’m not about to private message folks who have problematic racist, transphobic, anti-immigrant, and/or sexist language.” The L.A. member: “Because when POC speak on these conversations with snark and upset, we get Tone Argumented at, and I don’t really want to deal with the potential harm to me and mine.” Another writer: “You see people suggesting that PMs are a better way to handle racism? That’s telling us we are too vocal and we should pipe down.” A white Toronto member, sensing the group had dramatically underreacted, moved to rectify the situation: “JESUS FUCK, LIKE SERIOUSLY FUCK, I SEE MORE WHITE BINDERS POLICING WOC AND DEMANDING TO BE EDUCATED/UNEDUCATED AS IF IT’S A FUCKING NOBLE MISSION RATHER THAN I DUNNO SPEND TIME SHUTTING DOWN AND SHITTING ON RACIST DOUCHE CANOE BEHAVIOUR; WHAT ARE YOU GAINING BY THIS? WHAT ARE YOU DETRACTING? YOU NEED SCREENCAPS OF BURNING CROSSES TO BELIEVE RACIST SHIT IS HAPPENING? THIS THREAD IS PAINFUL. HUGS TO ALL THE WOC DURING THIS THREAD”

Every free society, facing the challenge of balancing freedom of expression against other values such as societal cohesion and tolerance, creates its own imperfect solution. France’s is especially convoluted and difficult to parse: It allows for satire and even blasphemy (like cartoons that run in Charlie Hebdo) but not for speech that incites violence toward individuals (like provocative comments made by the comedian Dieudonné M’bala M’bala). This may appear to Americans as a distinction without a difference, but our distinctions are also confused, as is our way of talking about free speech as it overlaps with our politics.

The right wing in the United States is unusually strong compared with other industrialized democracies, and it has spent two generations turning liberal into a feared buzzword with radical connotations. This long propaganda campaign has implanted the misperception — not only among conservatives but even many liberals — that liberals and “the left” stand for the same things.

It is true that liberals and leftists both want to make society more economically and socially egalitarian. But liberals still hold to the classic Enlightenment political tradition that cherishes individuals rights, freedom of expression, and the protection of a kind of free political marketplace. (So, for that matter, do most conservatives.)

The Marxist left has always dismissed liberalism’s commitment to protecting the rights of its political opponents — you know, the old line often misattributed to Voltaire, “I disapprove of what you have to say, but I’ll defend to the death your right to say it” — as hopelessly naïve. If you maintain equal political rights for the oppressive capitalists and their proletarian victims, this will simply keep in place society’s unequal power relations. Why respect the rights of the class whose power you’re trying to smash? And so, according to Marxist thinking, your political rights depend entirely on what class you belong to.

The modern far left has borrowed the Marxist critique of liberalism and substituted race and gender identities for economic ones. “The liberal view,” wrote MacKinnon 30 years ago, “is that abstract categories — like speech or equality — define systems. Every time you strengthen free speech in one place, you strengthen it everywhere. Strengthening the free speech of the Klan strengthens the free speech of Blacks.” She deemed this nonsensical: “It equates substantive powerlessness with substantive power and calls treating these the same, ‘equality.’ ”

Political correctness appeals to liberals because it claims to represent a more authentic and strident opposition to their shared enemy of race and gender bias. And of course liberals are correct not only to oppose racism and sexism but to grasp (in a way conservatives generally do not) that these biases cast a nefarious and continuing shadow over nearly every facet of American life. Since race and gender biases are embedded in our social and familial habits, our economic patterns, and even our subconscious minds, they need to be fought with some level of consciousness. The mere absence of overt discrimination will not do.

Liberals believe (or ought to believe) that social progress can continue while we maintain our traditional ideal of a free political marketplace where we can reason together as individuals. Political correctness challenges that bedrock liberal ideal. While politically less threatening than conservatism (the far right still commands far more power in American life), the p.c. left is actually more philosophically threatening. It is an undemocratic creed.

Bettina Aptheker, a professor of feminist studies at the University of California–Santa Cruz, recently wrote an essay commemorating the Berkeley Free Speech movement, in which she participated as a student in 1964. She now expressed a newfound skepticism in the merits of free speech. “Freedom of speech is a constitutional guarantee, but who gets to exercise it without the chilling restraints of censure depends very much on one’s location in the political and social cartography,” she wrote. “We [Free Speech movement] veterans … were too young and inexperienced in 1964 to know this, but we do now, and we speak with a new awareness, a new consciousness, and a new urgency that the wisdom of a true freedom is inexorably tied to who exercises power and for what ends.”

These ideas have more than theoretical power. Last March at University of ­California–Santa Barbara, in, ironically, a “free-speech zone,” a 16-year-old anti-abortion protester named Thrin Short and her 21-year-old sister Joan displayed a sign arrayed with graphic images of aborted fetuses. They caught the attention of Mireille Miller-Young, a professor of feminist studies. Miller-Young, angered by the sign, demanded that they take it down. When they refused, Miller-Young snatched the sign, took it back to her office to destroy it, and shoved one of the Short sisters on the way.

Speaking to police after the altercation, Miller-Young told them that the images of the fetuses had “triggered” her and violated her “personal right to go to work and not be in harm.” A Facebook group called “UCSB Microaggressions” declared themselves “in solidarity” with Miller-Young and urged the campus “to provide as much support as possible.”

By the prevailing standards of the American criminal-justice system, Miller-Young had engaged in vandalism, battery, and robbery. By the logic of the p.c. movement, she was the victim of a trigger and had acted in the righteous cause of social justice. Her colleagues across the country wrote letters to the sentencing judge pleading for leniency. Jennifer Morgan, an NYU professor, blamed the anti-­abortion protesters for instigating the confrontation through their exercise of free speech. “Miller-Young’s actions should be mitigated both by her history as an educator as well as by her conviction that the [anti-abortion] images were an assault on her students,” Morgan wrote. Again, the mere expression of opposing ideas, in the form of a poster, is presented as a threatening act.

The website The Feminist Wire mounted an even more rousing defense of Miller-Young’s behavior. The whole idea that the professor committed a crime by stealing a sign and shoving away its owner turns out to be an ideological construct. “The ease with which privileged white, and particularly young white gender and sexually normative appearing women, make claims to ‘victimhood’ and ‘violation of property,’ is not a neutral move,” its authors argued. It concluded, “We issue a radical call for accountability to questions of history, representation, and the racialized gendering of tropes of ‘culpability’ and ‘innocence’ when considering Dr. Miller-Young’s case.”

These are extreme ideas, but they are neither isolated nor marginal. A widely cited column by a Harvard Crimson editorial writer last year demanded an end to academic freedom if freedom extended to objectionable ideas. “If our university community opposes racism, sexism, and heterosexism,” asked the author, “why should we put up with research that counters our goals simply in the name of ‘academic freedom’?” After the Nation’s Michelle Goldberg denounced a “growing left-wing tendency toward censoriousness and hair-trigger offense,” Rutgers professor Brittney Cooper replied in Salon: “The demand to be reasonable is a disingenuous demand. Black folks have been reasoning with white people forever. Racism is unreasonable, and that means reason has limited currency in the fight against it.”

The most probable cause of death of the first political-correctness movement was the 1992 presidential election. That event mobilized left-of-center politics around national issues like health care and the economy, and away from the introspective suppression of dissent within the academy. Bill Clinton’s campaign frontally attacked left-wing racial politics, famously using inflammatory comments by Sister Souljah to distance him from Jesse Jackson. Barbara Jordan, the first black woman from a southern state elected to the House of Representatives, attacked political correctness in her keynote speech. (“We honor cultural identity. We always have; we always will. But separatism is not allowed. Separatism is not the American way. We must not allow ideas like political correctness to divide us and cause us to reverse hard-won achievements in human rights and civil rights.”)

Yet it is possible to imagine that, as the next Clinton presidential campaign gets under way, p.c. culture may not dissolve so easily. The internet has shrunk the distance between p.c. culture and mainstream liberal politics, and the two are now hopelessly entangled. During the 2008 primary contest between Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama, the modern politics of grievance had already begun to play out, as each side’s supporters patrolled the other for any comment that might indicate gender or racial bias. It dissipated in the general election, but that was partly because Obama’s supporters worried about whether America really was ready to accept its first president who was not a white male. Clinton enters the 2016 race in a much stronger position than any other candidate, and her supporters may find it irresistible to amplify p.c. culture’s habit of interrogating the hidden gender biases in every word and gesture against their side.

Or maybe not. The p.c. style of politics has one serious, possibly fatal drawback: It is exhausting. Claims of victimhood that are useful within the left-wing subculture may alienate much of America. The movement’s dour puritanism can move people to outrage, but it may prove ill suited to the hopeful mood required of mass politics. Nor does it bode well for the movement’s longevity that many of its allies are worn out. “It seems to me now that the public face of social liberalism has ceased to seem positive, joyful, human, and freeing,” confessed the progressive writer Freddie deBoer. “There are so many ways to step on a land mine now, so many terms that have become forbidden, so many attitudes that will get you cast out if you even appear to hold them. I’m far from alone in feeling that it’s typically not worth it to engage, given the risks.” Goldberg wrote recently about people “who feel emotionally savaged by their involvement in [online feminism] — not because of sexist trolls, but because of the slashing righteousness of other feminists.” Former Feministing editor Samhita Mukhopadhyay told her, “Everyone is so scared to speak right now.”

That the new political correctness has bludgeoned even many of its own supporters into despondent silence is a triumph, but one of limited use. Politics in a democracy is still based on getting people to agree with you, not making them afraid to disagree. The historical record of political movements that sought to expand freedom for the oppressed by eliminating it for their enemies is dismal. The historical record of American liberalism, which has extended social freedoms to blacks, Jews, gays, and women, is glorious. And that glory rests in its confidence in the ultimate power of reason, not coercion, to triumph.

Men must prove a woman said 'Yes' under tough new rape rules

New guidance will be issued to all police forces and prosecutors as part of a 'toolkit' to move rape investigations into the 21st century

By Gordon Rayner, and Bill Gardner

Men accused of date rape will need to convince police that a woman consented to sex as part of a major change in the way sex offences are investigated.

The Director of Public Prosecutions said it was time for the legal system to move beyond the concept of “no means no” to recognise situations where women may have been unable to give consent.

Alison Saunders said rape victims should no longer be “blamed” by society if they are too drunk to consent to sex, or if they simply freeze and say nothing because they are terrified of their attacker.

Instead, police and prosecutors must now put a greater onus on rape suspects to demonstrate how the complainant had consented “with full capacity and freedom to do so”.

Campaigners described the move as “a huge step forward” in ensuring fewer rapists escape justice.

New guidance will be issued to all police forces and prosecutors as part of a “toolkit” to move rape investigations into the 21st century.

Mrs Saunders said: “For too long society has blamed rape victims for confusing the issue of consent - by drinking or dressing provocatively for example - but it is not they who are confused, it is society itself and we must challenge that.

“Consent to sexual activity is not a grey area - in law it is clearly defined and must be given fully and freely.

“It is not a crime to drink, but it is a crime for a rapist to target someone who is no longer capable of consenting to sex though drink.

“These tools take us well beyond the old saying 'no means no' - it is now well established that many rape victims freeze rather than fight as a protective and coping mechanism.

“We want police and prosecutors to make sure they ask in every case where consent is the issue - how did the suspect know the complainant was saying yes and doing so freely and knowingly?”

Mrs Saunders, who was speaking at the first National Crown Prosecution Service/Police Conference on Rape Investigations and Prosecutions in London, said the guidance should not only cover situations where someone is incapacitated through drink or drugs, but also where “a suspect held a position of power over the potential victim - as a teacher, an employer, a doctor or a fellow gang member”.

The ability to consent to sex should also be questioned where the complainant has mental health problems, learning difficulties or was asleep or unconscious at the time of the alleged attack, she said.

The new guidance also covers domestic violence situations and those where “the complainant may be financially or otherwise dependent on their alleged rapist”.

Around 85,000 women per year are victims of rape in the UK, of whom 90 per cent know the perpetrator.

The most recent figures showed that just 15,670 women reported rapes to the police, often because they thought it would be impossible to prove the offence, or because they did not have any confidence in the police’s ability to help them, with only 1,070 convictions resulting from the 2,910 cases that got to court.

The rape conference was designed partly to address the long-standing gulf between rape allegations and convictions, as well as a variation between different forces in the way they deal with rape allegations.

Metropolitan Police Assistant Commissioner Martin Hewitt, the Association of Chief Police Officers lead on adult sex offences, said: “As report after report has shown, there is still far too much variation in the way that forces move a complaint of rape through the system.

“Reporting of sexual offences is up 22 per cent in the latest statistics because of increased confidence in our service and recording but we have further to go.

“We need to tackle the iconic issues of 'no further action' and, particularly, 'no crimes' head on and reduce inconsistencies in our processes so that we can send a clear and unequivocal message to victims about how they will be treated.”

Sarah Green, director of the End Violence Against Women Coalition, said: “Although we have a long way to go in securing justice for all survivors of rape, the new guidance is a huge step forward in that it will help ensure that juries are asked to look in detail at the behaviour of defendants as well as at that of the complainant.

“It makes clear that consent must be sought as well as given, and it spells out issues around power and vulnerability of some victims which police, prosecutors and ultimately juries should take into account.

“We believe that broader social attitudes are slowly changing as, for example, we better recognise that girls who are sexually exploited by older men do not ‘consent’ to their abuse, and that men in positions of power target and abuse vulnerable victims.”

“Better recognition of and more justice for these crimes will ultimately help increase the deterrent to commit them.”

U.S. Manga Obscenity Conviction Roils Comics World

By David Kravets

In an obscenity first, a U.S. comic book collector has pleaded guilty to importing and possessing Japanese manga books depicting illustrations of child sex abuse and bestiality.

Christopher Handley, described by his lawyer as a “prolific collector” of manga, pleaded guilty last week to mailing obscene matter, and to “possession of obscene visual representations of the sexual abuse of children.” Three other counts were dropped in a plea deal with prosecutors.

The 39-year-old office worker was charged under the 2003 Protect Act, which outlaws cartoons, drawings, sculptures or paintings depicting minors engaging in sexually explicit conduct, and which lack “serious literary, artistic, political, or scientific value.” Handley’s guilty plea makes him the first to be convicted under that law for possessing cartoon art, without any evidence that he also collected or viewed genuine child pornography. He faces a maximum sentence of 15 years in prison.

Comics fans are alarmed by the case, (.pdf), saying that jailing someone over manga does nothing to protect children from sexual abuse.

“This art that this man possessed as part of a larger collection of manga … is now the basis for [a sentence] designed to protect children from abuse,” says Charles Brownstein, executive director of the Comic Book Legal Defense Fund. “The drawings are not obscene and are not tantamount to pornography. They are lines on paper.”

Congress passed the Protect Act after the Supreme Court struck down a broader law prohibiting any visual depictions of minors engaged in sexual activity, including computer-generated imagery and other fakes. The high court ruled that the ban was overbroad, and could cover legitimate speech, including Hollywood productions.

In response, the Protect Act narrows the prohibition to cover only depictions that the defendant’s community would consider “obscene.”

“It’s probably the only law I’m aware of, if a client shows me a book or magazine or movie, and asks me if this image is illegal, I can’t tell them,” says Eric Chase, Handley’s attorney.

Chase says he recommended the plea agreement (.pdf) to his client because he didn’t think he could convince a jury to acquit him once they’d seen the images in question. The lawyer declined to describe the details. “If they can imagine it, they drew it,” he says. “Use your imagination. It was there.”

The case began in 2006, when customs officials intercepted and opened a package from Japan addressed to Handley. Seven books of manga inside contained cartoon drawings of minors engaged in sexually explicit acts. One book included depictions of bestiality, according to stipulations in Handley’s plea deal.

Frenchy Lunning, a manga expert at the Minneapolis College of Art and Design, was a consultant in the case. She says the books were from the widely available Lolicon variety — a Japanese word play on “Lolita.”

“This stuff is huge in Japan, in all of Asia,” Lunning says. Handley, she adds, “is not a pedophile. He had no photographs of child pornography.”

Handley remains free pending a yet-to-be scheduled sentencing date. Mike Bladel, a spokesman for the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Southern District of Iowa, declined to state what kind of sentence the government would seek, but claimed there were hundreds of obscene panels in the seized manga.

Chase says he’s hoping the judge will take into account the circumstances.

“He was a prolific collector,” says the lawyer. “He did not focus on this type of manga. He collected everything that was out there that he could get his hands on. I think this makes a huge difference.”

America dumbs down

The U.S. is being overrun by a wave of anti-science, anti-intellectual thinking. Has the most powerful nation on Earth lost its mind?

Jonathon Gatehouse

South Carolina’s state beverage is milk. Its insect is the praying mantis. There’s a designated dance—the shag—as well a sanctioned tartan, game bird, dog, flower, gem and snack food (boiled peanuts). But what Olivia McConnell noticed was missing from among her home’s 50 official symbols was a fossil. So last year, the eight-year-old science enthusiast wrote to the governor and her representatives to nominate the Columbian mammoth. Teeth from the woolly proboscidean, dug up by slaves on a local plantation in 1725, were among the first remains of an ancient species ever discovered in North America. Forty-three other states had already laid claim to various dinosaurs, trilobites, primitive whales and even petrified wood. It seemed like a no-brainer. “Fossils tell us about our past,” the Grade 2 student wrote.

And, as it turns out, the present, too. The bill that Olivia inspired has become the subject of considerable angst at the legislature in the state capital of Columbia. First, an objecting state senator attached three verses from Genesis to the act, outlining God’s creation of all living creatures. Then, after other lawmakers spiked the amendment as out of order for its introduction of the divinity, he took another crack, specifying that the Columbian mammoth “was created on the sixth day with the other beasts of the field.” That version passed in the senate in early April. But now the bill is back in committee as the lower house squabbles over the new language, and it’s seemingly destined for the same fate as its honouree—extinction.

What has doomed Olivia’s dream is a raging battle in South Carolina over the teaching of evolution in schools. Last week, the state’s education oversight committee approved a new set of science standards that, if adopted, would see students learn both the case for, and against, natural selection.

Related: Does America really care about Boko Haram?

Charles Darwin’s signature discovery—first published 155 years ago and validated a million different ways since—long ago ceased to be a matter for serious debate in most of the world. But in the United States, reconciling science and religious belief remains oddly difficult. A national poll, conducted in March for the Associated Press, found that 42 per cent of Americans are “not too” or “not at all” confident that all life on Earth is the product of evolution. Similarly, 51 per cent of people expressed skepticism that the universe started with a “big bang” 13.8 billion years ago, and 36 per cent doubted the Earth has been around for 4.5 billion years.

The American public’s bias against established science doesn’t stop where the Bible leaves off, however. The same poll found that just 53 per cent of respondents were “extremely” or “very confident” that childhood vaccines are safe and effective. (Worldwide, the measles killed 120,000 people in 2012. In the United States, where a vaccine has been available since 1963, the last recorded measles death was in 2003.) When it comes to global warming, only 33 per cent expressed a high degree of confidence that it is “man made,” something the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change has declared is all but certain. (The good news, such as it was in the AP poll, was that 69 per cent actually believe in DNA, and 82 per cent now agree that smoking causes cancer.)

If the rise in uninformed opinion was limited to impenetrable subjects that would be one thing, but the scourge seems to be spreading. Everywhere you look these days, America is in a rush to embrace the stupid. Hell-bent on a path that’s not just irrational, but often self-destructive. Common-sense solutions to pressing problems are eschewed in favour of bumper-sticker simplicities and blind faith.

In a country bedevilled by mass shootings—Aurora, Colo.; Fort Hood, Texas; Virginia Tech—efforts at gun control have given way to ever-laxer standards. Georgia recently passed a law allowing people to pack weapons in state and local buildings, airports, churches and bars. Florida is debating legislation that will waive all firearm restrictions during state emergencies like riots or hurricanes. (One opponent has moved to rename it “an Act Relating to the Zombie Apocalypse.”) And since the December 2012 massacre of 20 children and six staff at Sandy Hook Elementary School, in Newtown, Conn., 12 states have passed laws allowing guns to be carried in schools, and 20 more are considering such measures.

The cost of a simple appendectomy in the United States averages $33,000 and it’s not uncommon for such bills to top six figures. More than 15 per cent of the population has no health insurance whatsoever. Yet efforts to fill that gaping hole via the Affordable Health Care Act—a.k.a. Obamacare—remain distinctly unpopular. Nonsensical myths about the government’s “real” intentions have found so much traction that 30 per cent still believe that there will be official “death panels” to make decisions on end-of-life care.

Since 2001, the U.S. government has been engaged in an ever-widening program of spying on its own—and foreign—citizens, tapping phones, intercepting emails and texts, and monitoring social media to track the movements, activities and connections of millions. Still, many Americans seem less concerned with the massive violations of their privacy in the name of the War on Terror, than imposing Taliban-like standards on the lives of others. Last month, the school board in Meridian, Idaho voted to remove The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian by Sherman Alexie from its Grade 10 supplemental reading list following parental complaints about its uncouth language and depictions of sex and drug use. When 17-year-old student Brady Kissel teamed up with staff from a local store to give away copies at a park as a protest, a concerned citizen called police. It was the evening of April 23, which was also World Book Night, an event dedicated to “spreading the love of reading.”

If ignorance is contagious, it’s high time to put the United States in quarantine.

Americans have long worried that their education system is leaving their children behind. With good reason: national exams consistently reveal how little the kids actually know. In the last set, administered in 2010 (more are scheduled for this spring), most fourth graders were unable to explain why Abraham Lincoln was an important figure, and only half were able to order North America, the U.S., California and Los Angeles by size. Results in civics were similarly dismal. While math and reading scores have improved over the years, economics remains the “best” subject, with 42 per cent of high school seniors deemed “proficient.”

They don’t appear to be getting much smarter as they age. A 2013 survey of 166,000 adults across 20 countries that tested math, reading and technological problem-solving found Americans to be below the international average in every category. (Japan, Finland, Canada, South Korea and Slovakia were among the 11 nations that scored significantly higher.)

The trends are not encouraging. In 1978, 42 per cent of Americans reported that they had read 11 or more books in the past year. In 2014, just 28 per cent can say the same, while 23 per cent proudly admit to not having read even one, up from eight per cent in 1978. Newspaper and magazine circulation continues to decline sharply, as does viewership for cable news. The three big network supper-hour shows drew a combined average audience of 22.6 million in 2013, down from 52 million in 1980. While 82 per cent of Americans now say they seek out news digitally, the quality of the information they’re getting is suspect. Among current affairs websites, Buzzfeed logs almost as many monthly hits as the Washington Post.

The advance of ignorance and irrationalism in the U.S. has hardly gone unnoticed. The late Columbia University historian Richard Hofstadter won the Pulitzer prize back in 1964 for his book Anti-Intellectualism in American Life, which cast the nation’s tendency to embrace stupidity as a periodic by-product of its founding urge to democratize everything. By 2008, journalist Susan Jacoby was warning that the denseness—“a virulent mixture of anti-rationalism and low expectations”—was more of a permanent state. In her book, The Age of American Unreason, she posited that it trickled down from the top, fuelled by faux-populist politicians striving to make themselves sound approachable rather than smart. Their creeping tendency to refer to everyone—voters, experts, government officials—as “folks” is “symptomatic of a debasement of public speech inseparable from a more general erosion of American cultural standards,” she wrote. “Casual, colloquial language also conveys an implicit denial of the seriousness of whatever issue is being debated: talking about folks going off to war is the equivalent of describing rape victims as girls.”

That inarticulate legacy didn’t end with George W. Bush and Sarah Palin. Barack Obama, the most cerebral and eloquent American leader in a generation, regularly plays the same card, droppin’ his Gs and dialling down his vocabulary to Hee Haw standards. His ability to convincingly play a hayseed was instrumental in his 2012 campaign against the patrician Mitt Romney; in one of their televised debates the President referenced “folks” 17 times.

An aversion to complexity—at least when communicating with the public—can also be seen in the types of answers politicians now provide the media. The average length of a sound bite by a presidential candidate in 1968 was 42.3 seconds. Two decades later, it was 9.8 seconds. Today, it’s just a touch over seven seconds and well on its way to being supplanted by 140-character Twitter bursts.

Little wonder then that distrust—of leaders, institutions, experts, and those who report on them—is rampant. A YouGov poll conducted last December found that three-quarters of Americans agreed that science is a force for good in the world. Yet when asked if they truly believe what scientists tell them, only 36 per cent of respondents said yes. Just 12 per cent expressed strong confidence in the press to accurately report scientific findings. (Although according to a 2012 paper by Gordon Gauchat, a University of North Carolina sociologist, the erosion of trust in science over the past 40 years has been almost exclusively confined to two groups: conservatives and regular churchgoers. Counterintuitively, it is the most highly educated among them—with post-secondary education—who harbour the strongest doubts.)

The term “elitist” has become one of the most used, and feared, insults in American life. Even in the country’s halls of higher learning, there is now an ingrained bias that favours the accessible over the exacting.

“There’s a pervasive suspicion of rights, privileges, knowledge and specialization,” says Catherine Liu, the author of American Idyll: Academic Antielitism as Cultural Critique and a film and media studies professor at University of California at Irvine. Both ends of the political spectrum have come to reject the conspicuously clever, she says, if for very different reasons; the left because of worries about inclusiveness, the right because they equate objections with obstruction. As a result, the very mission of universities has changed, argues Liu. “We don’t educate people anymore. We train them to get jobs.” (Boomers, she says, deserve most of the blame. “They were so triumphalist in promoting pop culture and demoting the canon.”)

The digital revolution, which has brought boundless access to information and entertainment choices, has somehow only enhanced the lowest common denominators—LOL cat videos and the Kardashians. Instead of educating themselves via the Internet, most people simply use it to validate what they already suspect, wish or believe to be true. It creates an online environment where Jenny McCarthy, a former Playboy model with a high school education, can become a worldwide leader of the anti-vaccination movement, naysaying the advice of medical professionals.

Most perplexing, however, is where the stupid is flowing from. As conservative pundit David Frum recently noted, where it was once the least informed who were most vulnerable to inaccuracies, it now seems to be the exact opposite. “More sophisticated news consumers turn out to use this sophistication to do a better job of filtering out what they don’t want to hear,” he blogged.

But are things actually getting worse? There’s a long and not-so-proud history of American electors lashing out irrationally, or voting against their own interests. Political scientists have been tracking, since the early 1950s, just how poorly those who cast ballots seem to comprehend the policies of the parties and people they are endorsing. A wealth of research now suggests that at the most optimistic, only 70 per cent actually select the party that accurately represents their views—and there are only two choices.

Larry Bartels, the co-director of the Center for the Study of Democratic Institutions at Vanderbilt University, says he doubts that the spreading ignorance is a uniquely American phenomenon. Facing complex choices, uncertain about the consequences of the alternatives, and tasked with balancing the demands of jobs, family and the things that truly interest them with boring policy debates, people either cast their ballots reflexively, or not at all. The larger question might be whether engagement really matters. “If your vision of democracy is one in which elections provide solemn opportunities for voters to set the course of public policy and hold leaders accountable, yes,” Bartels wrote in an email to Maclean’s. “If you take the less ambitious view that elections provide a convenient, non-violent way for a society to agree on who is in charge at any given time, perhaps not.”

A study by two Princeton University researchers, Martin Gilens and Benjamin Page, released last month, tracked 1,800 U.S. policy changes between 1981 and 2002, and compared the outcome with the expressed preferences of median-income Americans, the affluent, business interests and powerful lobbies. They concluded that average citizens “have little or no independent influence” on policy in the U.S., while the rich and their hired mouthpieces routinely get their way. “The majority does not rule,” they wrote.

Smart money versus dumb voters is hardly a fair fight. But it does offer compelling evidence that the survival of the fittest remains an unshakable truth even in American life. A sad sort of proof of evolution.

Town threatens jail time to citizens who feed stray cats

When no real problems exist, create new laws.



ALBION, MI — A city with evidently nothing better to do has passed an ordinance criminalizing the feeding of stray cats.

“Feral cats are a very big issue, and we needed to do something about it,” said Albion City Councilman Maurice Barnes, according to MLive.com.

The new ordinance goes into effect May 22nd, and will punish violators with $100-$500 in fines and up to 90 days in jail — depending on the “severity” of the offense.

The city government can now target retirees and widows and nail them for their affection towards animals. An 81- year old Alzheimer’s sufferer from Tampa named Mary Musselman has been locked away for nearly 3 months for feeding animals in her yard.

Every law, no matter well-meaning its creators, is ultimately enforced by men with guns ready to throw people into steel cages. Citizens should test themselves to see whether they believe a law is worthwhile enough to imprison their own mother or grandmother for breaking it.

Albion Michigan City Council

Mayor: Joe Domingo | (517) 629-8481 | mayor@ci.albion.mi.us
Precinct 1: Maurice Barnes | (517) 629-5535, ext. 3114 | precinct1@ci.albion.mi.us
Precinct 2: Lenn Reid | (517) 629-2283 | precinct2@ci.albion.mi.us
Precinct 3: Garrett Brown | (517) 648-7090 | precinct3@ci.albion.mi.us
Precinct 4: William Wheaton | (517) 629-2005 | precinct4@ci.albion.mi.us
Precinct 5: Cheryl Krause | (517) 629-5535 Ext. 3114 | precinct5@ci.albion.mi.us
Precinct 6: Andrew French | (517) 629-5405 | precinct6@ci.albion.mi.us

Man Wins Lawsuit Against Airport Security, Forces Them to Learn Fourth Amendment

Man dubbed the 'Fourth Amendment Flasher' settles with TSA, airport security

by Dain Fitzgerald

Aaron Tobey at the time of his arrest on December 30th, 2010 •

A man who stripped nearly naked to make a point about his constitutional rights scored a victory today after forcing airport personnel to study up on the First and Fourth Amendments, reports The Wall Street Journal. Aaron Tobey, known as the "4th Amendment Flasher," was arrested in 2010 by the Transportation Security Administration and Richmond International Airport security after stripping down to his underwear - much beyond the point mandated by protocol - with a portion of the Fourth Amendment written on his chest in black marker: "The right of the people to be secure...against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated." Though charges were ultimately dropped, Tobey sued the TSA and the airport, and following a year and a half of legal proceedings the respective organizations involved have now settled. The details of the settlement read like an civili libertarian fantasy realized, and involve Richmond's airport security personnel being forced to brush up on American Government 101: "Richmond International Airport officials announced this week that their security officers underwent a special two-hour training course on the First and Fourth Amendment rights of passengers as a part of a settlement with Mr. Tobey," writes WSJ's Jacob Gershman. The TSA, as part of a separate settlement that likewise involved no monetary payout as originally sought by Tobey, appears somewhat less humbling. The TSA has "agreed not to appeal the ruling or further prosecute Mr. Tobey for interfering with TSA procedures," Gershman informs.

Judge rules anti-child-porn statute doesn’t infringe on sexting adults

Opponents couldn't prove current enforcement, breadth of legally "explicit" images.

by Asher Hawkins

Today, a Philadelphia-based federal judge issued an order (PDF) rejecting a First Amendment challenge to the constitutionality of a pair of laws that require creators of sexually explicit media to maintain records certifying that those depicted in their works are 18 or older.

These regulations were originally passed by Congress to combat child pornography. Among the arguments raised by the challengers—who included both porn producers and sex educators—was that the plain language of these statutory recordkeeping requirements unfairly exposes ordinary consenting adults to criminal liability if they fail to maintain meticulous records. The challengers alleged that risk occurs every time adults use a cell phone to send a sexually explicit image or share homemade sexual images via a date-facilitating website or social network.

These opponents reasoned that because the recordkeeping statutes could theoretically apply to innocent sexters and hookup-hungry social networkers, the laws were “facially overbroad.” In non-legalese, they viewed these laws (as currently written) to be unconstitutional because they criminalize harmless conduct that the laws were not supposed to target. In support of these arguments, the challengers relied on the expert testimony of two psychology academics who testified during an eight-day bench trial last month about the prevalence of sexting among responsible, mentally stable adults.

But in his decision today, US District Judge Michael Baylson of the Eastern District of Pennsylvania noted that the academics’ research did not give a sense of how raunchy Americans’ sexts tend to be.

That degree of informational nuance is important, Baylson found, because the challenged laws are concerned with “sexually explicit content.” The federal criminal code defines this as actual or simulated depictions of intercourse, masturbation, bestiality, sadistic or masochistic abuse, or “lascivious exhibitions” of the genital area.

“[Neither] expert could determine how many sext messages being exchanged between private persons actually fall within the Statutes’ scope,” Baylson wrote. “The frequency of sext messaging is irrelevant for Plaintiffs’ overbreadth challenge, however, if every sext message were to contain images of breasts, cleavage, and nudity that fell short of ‘lascivious’ exhibitions of genitals. Plaintiffs’ additional evidence about technologies through which adult couples exchange sexually explicit content—e.g., ‘instaporn’ and ‘snapchat’—similarly suffers from this shortcoming.”

Baylson also noted that opponents failed to prove “any realistic probability of enforcement” of the challenged recordkeeping provisions against consenting adults who sext or use sex-minded social networks.

Baylson’s ruling today also rejected the plaintiffs’ claims that forcing them to engage in the recordkeeping at issue violated their First Amendment rights. The case has been kicking around Philadelphia’s federal court system for a few years: in July 2010, Baylson threw out the challengers’ suit without conducting a trial. The challengers appealed, and the US Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit ruled that Baylson should have heard the challengers’ evidence before rejecting the claims. (The straitlaced appellate panel’s decision included no mention of the words “sext” or “instaporn.")

To Fall in Love With Anyone, Do This

By MANDY LEN CATRON

More than 20 years ago, the psychologist Arthur Aron succeeded in making two strangers fall in love in his laboratory. Last summer, I applied his technique in my own life, which is how I found myself standing on a bridge at midnight, staring into a man’s eyes for exactly four minutes.

Let me explain. Earlier in the evening, that man had said: “I suspect, given a few commonalities, you could fall in love with anyone. If so, how do you choose someone?”

He was a university acquaintance I occasionally ran into at the climbing gym and had thought, “What if?” I had gotten a glimpse into his days on Instagram. But this was the first time we had hung out one-on-one.

“Actually, psychologists have tried making people fall in love,” I said, remembering Dr. Aron’s study. “It’s fascinating. I’ve always wanted to try it.”

I first read about the study when I was in the midst of a breakup. Each time I thought of leaving, my heart overruled my brain. I felt stuck. So, like a good academic, I turned to science, hoping there was a way to love smarter.

I explained the study to my university acquaintance. A heterosexual man and woman enter the lab through separate doors. They sit face to face and answer a series of increasingly personal questions. Then they stare silently into each other’s eyes for four minutes. The most tantalizing detail: Six months later, two participants were married. They invited the entire lab to the ceremony.

“Let’s try it,” he said.

Let me acknowledge the ways our experiment already fails to line up with the study. First, we were in a bar, not a lab. Second, we weren’t strangers. Not only that, but I see now that one neither suggests nor agrees to try an experiment designed to create romantic love if one isn’t open to this happening.

I Googled Dr. Aron’s questions; there are 36. We spent the next two hours passing my iPhone across the table, alternately posing each question.

They began innocuously: “Would you like to be famous? In what way?” And “When did you last sing to yourself? To someone else?”

But they quickly became probing.

In response to the prompt, “Name three things you and your partner appear to have in common,” he looked at me and said, “I think we’re both interested in each other.”

I grinned and gulped my beer as he listed two more commonalities I then promptly forgot. We exchanged stories about the last time we each cried, and confessed the one thing we’d like to ask a fortuneteller. We explained our relationships with our mothers.

The questions reminded me of the infamous boiling frog experiment in which the frog doesn’t feel the water getting hotter until it’s too late. With us, because the level of vulnerability increased gradually, I didn’t notice we had entered intimate territory until we were already there, a process that can typically take weeks or months.

I liked learning about myself through my answers, but I liked learning things about him even more. The bar, which was empty when we arrived, had filled up by the time we paused for a bathroom break.

I sat alone at our table, aware of my surroundings for the first time in an hour, and wondered if anyone had been listening to our conversation. If they had, I hadn’t noticed. And I didn’t notice as the crowd thinned and the night got late.

We all have a narrative of ourselves that we offer up to strangers and acquaintances, but Dr. Aron’s questions make it impossible to rely on that narrative. Ours was the kind of accelerated intimacy I remembered from summer camp, staying up all night with a new friend, exchanging the details of our short lives. At 13, away from home for the first time, it felt natural to get to know someone quickly. But rarely does adult life present us with such circumstances.

The moments I found most uncomfortable were not when I had to make confessions about myself, but had to venture opinions about my partner. For example: “Alternate sharing something you consider a positive characteristic of your partner, a total of five items” (Question 22), and “Tell your partner what you like about them; be very honest this time saying things you might not say to someone you’ve just met” (Question 28).

Much of Dr. Aron’s research focuses on creating interpersonal closeness. In particular, several studies investigate the ways we incorporate others into our sense of self. It’s easy to see how the questions encourage what they call “self-expansion.” Saying things like, “I like your voice, your taste in beer, the way all your friends seem to admire you,” makes certain positive qualities belonging to one person explicitly valuable to the other.

It’s astounding, really, to hear what someone admires in you. I don’t know why we don’t go around thoughtfully complimenting one another all the time.

We finished at midnight, taking far longer than the 90 minutes for the original study. Looking around the bar, I felt as if I had just woken up. “That wasn’t so bad,” I said. “Definitely less uncomfortable than the staring into each other’s eyes part would be.”

He hesitated and asked. “Do you think we should do that, too?”

“Here?” I looked around the bar. It seemed too weird, too public.

“We could stand on the bridge,” he said, turning toward the window.

The night was warm and I was wide-awake. We walked to the highest point, then turned to face each other. I fumbled with my phone as I set the timer.

“O.K.,” I said, inhaling sharply.

“O.K.,” he said, smiling.

I’ve skied steep slopes and hung from a rock face by a short length of rope, but staring into someone’s eyes for four silent minutes was one of the more thrilling and terrifying experiences of my life. I spent the first couple of minutes just trying to breathe properly. There was a lot of nervous smiling until, eventually, we settled in.

I know the eyes are the windows to the soul or whatever, but the real crux of the moment was not just that I was really seeing someone, but that I was seeing someone really seeing me. Once I embraced the terror of this realization and gave it time to subside, I arrived somewhere unexpected.

I felt brave, and in a state of wonder. Part of that wonder was at my own vulnerability and part was the weird kind of wonder you get from saying a word over and over until it loses its meaning and becomes what it actually is: an assemblage of sounds.

So it was with the eye, which is not a window to anything but rather a clump of very useful cells. The sentiment associated with the eye fell away and I was struck by its astounding biological reality: the spherical nature of the eyeball, the visible musculature of the iris and the smooth wet glass of the cornea. It was strange and exquisite.

When the timer buzzed, I was surprised — and a little relieved. But I also felt a sense of loss. Already I was beginning to see our evening through the surreal and unreliable lens of retrospect.

Most of us think about love as something that happens to us. We fall. We get crushed.

But what I like about this study is how it assumes that love is an action. It assumes that what matters to my partner matters to me because we have at least three things in common, because we have close relationships with our mothers, and because he let me look at him.

I wondered what would come of our interaction. If nothing else, I thought it would make a good story. But I see now that the story isn’t about us; it’s about what it means to bother to know someone, which is really a story about what it means to be known.

It’s true you can’t choose who loves you, although I’ve spent years hoping otherwise, and you can’t create romantic feelings based on convenience alone. Science tells us biology matters; our pheromones and hormones do a lot of work behind the scenes.

But despite all this, I’ve begun to think love is a more pliable thing than we make it out to be. Arthur Aron’s study taught me that it’s possible — simple, even — to generate trust and intimacy, the feelings love needs to thrive.

You’re probably wondering if he and I fell in love. Well, we did. Although it’s hard to credit the study entirely (it may have happened anyway), the study did give us a way into a relationship that feels deliberate. We spent weeks in the intimate space we created that night, waiting to see what it could become.

Love didn’t happen to us. We’re in love because we each made the choice to be.

Hotwheels: Why I Support Eugenics

Fredrick Brennan
Hotwheels

I am a disabled supporter of eugenics, and I’m not the only one.

Allowing more cripples like myself to be born when society at large knows how it can be stopped is a great crime.

Osteogenesis imperfecta is a genetic disease that normally appears as a de novo mutation. However, once it manifests itself, it is the dominant gene. People affected with the condition have a 50% chance of spreading it to their offspring. It is one of the few severely crippling conditions that does not kill the afflicted person by the age of 18, while also not causing infertility.

However, it is one of the most painful conditions in the world. Drug treatment does little to stop it, and the conventional rodding surgeries do almost nothing to strengthen bones, they just make them straighter. By all accounts, broken bones are just as painful as in healthy children — and most kids only break one bone in their entire childhood, much less over one hundred.

Yet, multigenerational families exist. How can this be? I can only tell my personal history.

My mother has the same condition I do and gave birth to me via Caesarian section at the age of 38. She gave birth to my brother, who has the same condition, at the age of 40.

And the father? One Mr. David Brennan of Craryville, New York. A complete dead beat. A man so desperate for pussy he is currently fucking my former aide provided by the state, one Bibi Ougrah, despite the fact that she is post-menopausal, her hair is falling out and she is probably close to 300 pounds.

I don’t blame my parents for what happened, I instead blame the society that taught them that their actions were ethical.

My parents divorced when I was five, and in a case unusual for the court system in the feminist state of New York, due to my mother’s disability my father got sole custody. Thanks to state-sponsored welfare, he hardly had to do anything and got $1200 per month for the privilege of having crippled kids, plus a state sponsored nanny that he would later start sleeping with. He also cheated the IRS on top of this and did off the books mechanic work.

Upon seeing that his crippled children would never take out the garbage or even play a game of catch without breaking a bone, he promptly checked his children into the state foster care system when I was 14.


Conventional rodding surgery for fractures caused by osteogenesis imperfecta.

Now, six years later, I own a somewhat influential website called 8chan and have a decent life in the Philippines. Yet, I still hold fast to the belief that eugenics should never have been abandoned.

People who would use my relative success to argue against eugenics are very short-sighted. Other programmers who are provably much better than I were not born cripples, so preventing the birth of cripples will not cause there to be less programmers.

Others would simply dismiss this piece as the product of self-hate. However, those people are simply uneducated and do not know the meaning of the word “eugenics” and falsely equate it to German death camps. These uneducated people think that eugenics is a call to exterminate the disabled, but that is completely false and would not fix matters because of recessive genes and evasion by families.

Genetics used to be a lottery, but we know exactly how to stop a large amount of suffering in the world by preventing children with inheritable genetic conditions from being born using completely humane methods.

As a society, most of us seem to agree that people deserve medical care, and we are willing to pay tens of thousands of dollars directly to the parents of disabled children who knew for a fact that their children would be crippled. We are also willing to pay hundreds of thousands of dollars, and in some cases millions of dollars indirectly in medical costs.

Simply offering people with debilitating, genetically dominant genetic diseases $100,000 cash each to undergo voluntary sterilization would be a libertarian, humane way to encourage genetic purity. Couples who both carry a recessive gene could be offered a smaller sum, like say $10,000, by genetic counselors.

To keep it legal, and prevent the system from becoming racist, the specific gene mutations that qualify could be enumerated now that we have the knowledge and technology to do so. I suggest we start with the ones that cause osteogenesis imperfecta: COL1A1 and COL1A2.

I hope you will not dismiss this article as the ravings of a neo-Nazi given the site it’s on. I could find no other publication which would publish this article, and I am far from a neo-Nazi. Sweden had a eugenics program until 1975, long after the defeat of the Nazis. Eugenics is a humanitarian idea, not a national socialist one.

I am simply asking for compassion from an ignorant society that falsely believes it is unethical to give genetically defective people incentives not to reproduce. I am simply arguing for a world full of healthy, happy children who can play outside with their friends without breaking their legs.

Inequality, Automation and the Political Class

The president focused on income inequality in his State of the Union address to Congress. And it is a safe bet that income inequality will be a major Democratic campaign theme headed into the midterm elections, as Democrats struggle to increase base Democratic turnout in a non-presidential election cycle.

Economic inequality strikes a chord in contemporary America. A recent NBC News/Wall Street Journal poll found that 45 percent of American adults believe that "reducing income inequality between the rich and poor" is an "absolute priority for this year." And, more importantly, Hollywood has clearly latched on to this trend with films such the science fiction action film Elysium highlighting the issue with a futuristic movie critiquing the gulf between a cognitive, off-world elite and a poor and crowded earth below. In this cinematic dystopia the elite living on Elysium need very little from the writhing masses back on earth. Capital, replete with robots and advanced technology has decoupled from labor.

The angst is palpable. As just one example, a CBS News survey from January found that 53 percent of Americans believe the next generation will be worse off.

A Democratic focus on inequality in the midterm elections is clearly a defensive political maneuver in a difficult political year and likely good politics for them. Is it politically expedient to attempt another pivot away from voter angst over the Affordable Care Act? Yes. Democratic campaigns need to change the subject and boost turnout in order to hold on to control of the Senate.

But, from a policy perspective, focusing on the end state of income inequality misses the wider context of exponential technological progress, of robots and algorithms automating away many of the jobs Americans hold today. It is as though our political discourse is frozen in the past while our technology races forward.

This is not surprising. Both political parties are essentially backward looking as they defend constituencies that have grown up over time within their respective political ecosystems.

But, robotics and software companies are not incentivized to preserve mid-20th century political constituencies. And this is the problem with nearly all of the political rhetoric we hear today. Leaders in both parties were socialized in America's industrial era and are comfortable with a 20th century paradigm for America. The 20th century is familiar and safe intellectual terrain for them. America's political class would prefer to keep the discourse safely symbolic, put the vote buying on the federal credit card and retire into a comfortable lobbying or association post. In sterile business-speak, our time horizons are misaligned.

But reality intrudes.

American manufacturing is racing ahead, but American manufacturing jobs are not. In 1953, 32 percent of American workers were employed in manufacturing. Only 9 percent work in manufacturing today.

Within the context of public opinion, it helps to go back to the 1980s. In January 1981 the Roper Organization asked 2,000 Americans if they had "read or heard anything about factories using robots instead of people on assembly lines." Forty-three percent of Americans had already heard about automation. By November 1989 Gallup asked 1234 American adults if "most assembly line workers will be replaced by robots." Fifty-two percent of Americans expected robots to replace most assembly line workers by the year 2000. Although US manufacturing jobs appear to have peaked in the late 1970s, automation has not yet eliminated "most assembly line" jobs. But, significant investments in robotics continue on a global scale. In 2011, for example, the Chinese tech manufacturing titan, Foxconn, announced plans to purchase and embed one million robots across its operations. And, as Liu Kun, a Foxconn spokesperson told China Daily "We have canceled hiring entry-level workers, a decision that is partly associated with our efforts in production automation."

Closer to home we may see a renaissance in American manufacturing due to advantageous energy costs, automation and lower transportation costs. The good news is that American manufacturing may come back. The bad news is that the jobs won't. As Nicholas Negroponte, founder of the MIT Media Lab and One Laptop per Child told an annual conference of futurists last summer, "whatever the future of jobs may be, the future is unequivocally not in manufacturing." This is all summed up in a wonderful textile country joke you're likely to hear much more often. The joke states that a 21st century textile mill requires only a man and a dog. The man is there to feed the dog. The dog is there to keep the man away from the robots.

At some point both Republican and Democratic leaders will need to address the changing nature of the economy in an honest fashion. And, this is not limited to manufacturing. Many rote, white-collar jobs are threatened by software automation. Unfortunately for America's political class, the facts are not friendly.

Three books define the automation challenge clearly:

• Race Against the Machine
• Second Machine Age
• Average Is Over

Each explains how automation is driving 21st century "technological unemployment," where blue collar labor is replaced by robotics and any white collar labor that relies on repeated, linear tasks is replaced by algorithms.

Analyzing how software eats 20th century jobs is instructive. For example, a startup in Evanston, Ill., called Narrative Science has found a way for machine intelligence to write basic sports reporting. This is not a fantastical science fiction plot. The New York Times reported on Narrative Science's work in 2011. ElaCarte, a Silicon Valley company, has created a tablet computer for restaurants, called the Presto, which allows patrons to order food from a device, taking the waiter out of the equation. Applebee's will deploy 100,000 of these devices this year. Most large retail establishments will use RFID or touch screens to eliminate cashiers over the next decade. All of this has been well-documented and should surprise no one.

Truck drivers and taxi drivers are clearly headed for the history books when self-driving vehicles begin to dominate short and long hauls. In a telling example, one of my 2010 classmates at the University of Houston's Strategic Foresight program was a trial lawyer specialized in representing the victims of truck-car accidents. He was ahead of his time. Nevada didn't make autonomous driving legal until 2012. But, he realized that automated trucking would complicate future lawsuits. Who would be held liable with no driver at the wheel? That may not be clear, but the fate of truckers, Teamsters and taxi drivers appears much clearer.

While the automation of blue-collar, manufacturing work has been well documented, the automation of white collar and service sector work has not been as well covered. But, at least some opinion data exists. A 2008 NORC, University of Chicago survey found that 16 percent of American workers had "heard of persons in your firm having their jobs replaced by computers, computerized equipment or other forms of automation in the past three years." More troubling is a recent Oxford University study paper titled "The Future of Employment: How Susceptible Are Jobs to Computerisation?" This report, published in September 2013, will not be heavily referenced by America's current political class. After analyzing 702 occupations, the authors estimate that "about 47 percent of total US employment is at risk." The report even lists the probability of "computerization" for each occupation. The occupations most at risk are: telemarketers, title examiners, hand sewers, mathematical technicians, insurance underwriters, watch repairers, cargo and freight agents, and tax preparers.

But, just as telling is the list of least at-risk occupations. These are: recreational therapist, mechanic supervisors, emergency management directors, mental health and substance abuse social workers, audiologists, occupational therapists, orthotists and prosthetists, healthcare social workers, oral and maxillofacial surgeons, fire fighter supervisors, dietitians, lodging managers, choreographers, sales engineers, physicians and surgeons, instructional coordinators, psychologists, police supervisors, dentists and elementary school teachers. Ten of the 20 least automatable careers are in health care, largely serving retiring baby boomers. All are jobs requiring human interaction and strong EQ (emotional quotient).

Of course, this is a list of relatively safe jobs that exist today. The more interesting line of inquiry is around the jobs that will exist tomorrow and the economy that will support them. In this regard Robin Hanson and Tyler Cowen, both in George Mason University's Economics Department, are well out in front. Generally speaking, technology eliminates some jobs and creates the growth platform for many others. But the transition, when abrupt, can be difficult. And, at present, best estimates of future jobs fall in several categories that we could define as either jobs that work with machines or jobs that machines simply cannot do. Unfortunately, the former appear to require very high IQ and the latter appear to require very high EQ.

Simply put, in order to prosper in the 21st century workers will need to either become very adept at working with machines and computer code or find niches in which robots and algorithms cannot replace "the human touch." Unfortunately for many workers, this requires a significant hard skill upgrade or an enhanced EQ.

And, the blunt truth is that the economy of the future, much like the movie Elysium, may not need many low-skill Americans. The best writing on this is from James H. Irvine and Sandra Schwarzbach at the Naval Air Warfare Center in China Lake. Their article, titled "New Technologies and the World Ahead: The Top 20 Plus 5" takes a serious look at emerging technology and social stratification. As they note:

"This introduction of robotic labor will replace one-third to one-half of 'pick-and-place operation' human labor in some categories of the industrial and service sectors. Human language interface automation may cut service sector labor requirements by between one-fourth and one-third in some categories. This precipitous fall in low-end labor will probably occur in about a five to seven year period."

This is not the happy talk you'll hear on the campaign trail. Instead, it is rapid, disruptive economic change. A technological and organizational jump is made. Those that can make the jump enjoy massive, first mover advantage. Those that cannot, are left playing catch up. In evolutionary terms we might think of this as "punctuated equilibrium." In the defense community the term is "revolution in military affairs" and describes how those able to master the jump to a new level (like chariots, iron, gunpowder, rifling, blitzkrieg, air power, atomic weapons, precision munitions, cyber, etc.) enjoy strategic advantage over their adversaries. This is all well and good for the winners, but in a society where many will struggle with economic disruption, the question quickly becomes how we help our country through what could be a very rough transition.

Most business leaders know this abrupt transition is coming. According to PwC's annual CEO survey, 56 percent of American CEOs and 47 percent of CEOs globally are somewhat or very concerned about "the speed of technological change" as a threat to their growth prospects.

A more entertaining analysis of the economic dislocation brought on by rapid technological progress is Cory Doctorow's book Makers. The story, set in the near future, follows the lives of a small group of highly creative, everyman entrepreneurs. But the backdrop is a world in which manufacturing jobs have vanished, many white collar jobs have been algorithmed away and America is littered with abandoned shopping plazas that could not adjust to e-commerce and 3D printing. The American people may instinctively sense this. When asked in December 2013 if they were optimistic or pessimistic about "the opportunity for most people to achieve the American dream," a majority (54 percent) told a National Opinion Research Center poll that they were pessimistic.

Obviously, this kind of wrenching change presents a significant challenge to America and every other society.

But, unfortunately, the challenge is much greater than upskilling the young and the working, because most western countries (and many in the Pacific Rim) are aging rapidly and will need to spend scarce government resources on elder care. This is made all the more difficult by their generally high national debt levels. Taken together it means that at the exact time that nation states should be heavily investing in training and upskilling citizens, they can't because elder care and debt service have constrained their options.

So, what do we do? Looking forward in time, nation states like America have three basic response options to the challenge of automation and exponential technology.

In option one, resource constrained and with an aging population, nation states play at the margins and hope that the market, society and individuals quickly adjust, upskill and (to paraphrase Erik Brynjolsson and Andrew McAfee) "race with the machine." This is a classic "muddle through" scenario.

Free market enthusiasts will rightly point to Sal Khan's Khan Academy, initiatives like Code Academy and technologies like MOOCs (massive open online courses) as bottom up, entrepreneurial responses to the challenge. And they may be right that resources will be better deployed and innovation more quickly dispersed if the market is left unfettered. A free market response would likely build an alternative learning and credentialing system with skills certifications built alongside the formal education system. A parallel, commercial education sector focusing on applied skills is already under progress. Mozilla Open Badges are just one example of this.

But, free market enthusiasts miss the fact that American policy has always supported the country as it moved from one economy to another. This explains our history of expansionist land policies, support for the railroads, protective tariffs during our industrial revolution, the GI Bill and government R&D spending.

In option two, nation states focus on redistributing downstream wealth either through piecemeal support programs or through a guaranteed basic income. Proponents reason that so much wealth will be thrown off from advances in automation and the GRINTechs (Genetics, Robotics, Internet and Nanotech) that society will be able to afford to guarantee citizens a basic income. A group called Generation Basic Income is pushing for this in Switzerland today with a plan to guarantee every citizen a yearly income of 30,000 Swiss francs (around $33,000 USD). The Swiss system allows for direct democracy through referendum and Generation Basic Income has gained the signatures needed to put their idea on the ballot. This is a very old idea we can expect to see more of, despite the moral hazards and siphoning of resources away from business creation and investment.

We may be seeing a de facto version of this now in the United States, as poorer Americans piece together food stamps, the earned income tax credit and social security disability. For example, in December 2001 18,746,286 Americans used food stamps. In November 2103 that number was 47,033,135, a little more than the 2013 population estimate for Spain. The US is also experiencing similar surges in disability payments.

In option three, nation states meet this great challenge with a logical and disciplined plan to help their citizens leap ahead with the advances in technology. Here the United States should analyze the strategies of other nations, and study the United Kingdom's response. This is because England, under Education Secretary Michael Gove is mandating that computer programming be taught to all children beginning with their entry into elementary school and continuing through what we call high school in four stages. This bold, clear-eyed thinking is an approach that America should emulate. We can expect smaller, more agile and tech savvy nations like Singapore and the Nordic countries to follow suit. But, will America? Within the American context, we should look to Silicon Valley, where our best and brightest have clustered, for inspiration. We need to give students today the skills that they need to compete in the 21st Century. But, we also need to reskill and upskill today's workers. And only information technology can provide the scale for us to do this.

As a large country the United States has many power centers, but three have outsized influence -- Washington, New York City and Silicon Valley. As my colleague Jamaal Mobley is fond of saying, so much of contemporary business, innovation, policy and politics are driven by the interplay between The Hill, The Street and The Valley. Given our extreme challenge in preparing America for the next great wave of technological and economic change, The Hill and The Valley should spend far more time together.

Blasphemy Is at the Front Lines of Free Speech Today

By Walter Olson

If you defend freedom of speech today, realize that “blasphemy” is its front line, in Paris and the world.

There is no middle ground, no soft compromise available to keep everyone happy–not after the murders at the satirical newspaper Charlie Hebdo. Either we resolve to defend the liberty of all who write, draw, type, and think–not just even when they deny the truth of a religion or poke fun at it, but especially then–or that liberty will endure only at the sufferance of fanatical Islamists in our midst. And this dark moment for the cause of intellectual freedom will be followed by many more.

Can anyone who has paid attention truly say they were surprised by the Paris attack? The French satirical magazine had long been high on a list of presumed Islamist targets. In 2011—to world outrage that was transient, at best—fanatics firebombed its offices over its printing of cartoons. Nor was that anything new. In 2006, the Danish cartoonists of Jyllands-Posten had to go into hiding for the same category of offense, as had author Salman Rushdie before them.

In a new book entitled The Tyranny of Silence: How One Cartoon Ignited a Global Debate on the Future of Free Speech, journalist Flemming Rose, who was at the center of the Danish cartoon controversy, traces its grim aftermath in the self-silencing of Western opinion. Most of the prestige Western press dodged the running of the cartoons, and beneath the talk of sensitivity was often simple fear. As journalist Josh Barro noted today on Twitter, “Islamists have by and large succeeded in intimidating western media out of publishing images of Muhammad.”

That fear has been felt in the United States as well. Yale’s university press, in publishing a book on the Muhammad cartoons controversy, chose to omit printing the cartoons themselves, on the grounds that doing so “ran a serious risk of instigating violence.” (The late Christopher Hitchens brilliantly assailed the press for its lack of courage.)

As for elected leaders, they were hardly better. The French government repeatedly pressured Charlie Hebdo not to go so far in giving offense. The government of Jacques Chirac stood by at, or by some accounts even encouraged, a court action aimed at fining the magazine for having offended some Muslims. Then-British foreign minister Jack Straw, representing the nation that gave the world John Milton and John Stuart Mill, blasted re-publication of the cartoons as “insensitive” and “disrespectful.” And if you imagine the leaders of the United States did much better, here’s another Christopher Hitchens column on how mealy-mouthed they were at the time in the cause of the intellectual liberty that is supposed to be among America’s proudest guarantees.

The danger is not that there will be too little outpouring of solidarity, grief, and outrage in coming days. Of course there will be that. Demonstrations are already underway across France. The danger comes afterward, once the story passes and intellectuals and those who discuss and distribute their work decide how and whether to adjust themselves to a more intense climate of fear. At media outlets, among conference planners, at universities, there will be certain lawyers and risk managers and compliance experts and insurance buyers ready to advise the safer course, the course of silence.

And then there are the lawmakers. After years in which blasphemy laws were assumed to be a relic of the past, laws accomplishing much of the same effect are once again on the march in Europe, banning “defamation of religion,” insult to religious beliefs, or overly vigorous criticism of other people’s religions when defined as “hate speech.” This must go no further. One way we can honor Charb, Cabu, Wolinski, Tignous, and the others who were killed Wednesday is by lifting legal constraints on what their successors tomorrow can draw and write.