Tagged: New York Times
Who still uses a pay phone?
The New York Times checked out a sidewalk booth outside the Fast & Fresh Supermarket Deli & Grocery on Queens Boulevard in Kew Gardens, NY.
Benjamin Patir called his son because he was lonely and, perhaps more important, because he had a quarter. Robert J. Covelli called his son, too, to find out if, at some point during the more than 24 hours he spent in custody, he had become, for the first time, a grandfather. Frank Federico, fresh from a courthouse jail cell, called his mother, who spared him any lectures and asked him if he needed a ride home.
The three men used the same curbside pay phone on a busy block of Queens Boulevard last week. So did Carlos Luciano, who lent his cellphone to his wife. And Alex Santana, who bought a banana to get change. And Marvin McCain, a subway conductor trying to call in sick, and two men uninterested in giving their names or explaining why, at midnight on a neon-lit stretch of Kew Gardens, Queens, they had to make a call.
Give it away … or make them pay?
O’Reilly, the world’s largest publisher of tech books, decided in 2008 to remove digital rights management — copy prevention software — from its ebooks. The result? In the 18 months since, ebook sales are up 103%.
Long Island’s Newsday, the 11th-largest-circulation newspaper in the US, is one of the first non-business newspapers to put its website behind a pay wall — a step The New York Times and all of Rupert Murdoch’s papers are said to be considering. The result? In three months, Newsday’s $5-a-week website has attracted 35 paying subscribers.
Hat tip: SP.
Haiti
I was struck by the portentously antiquarian wording of the New York Times’ lead headline the morning after the calamity in Port-au-Prince:
Haiti Lies in Ruins; Grim Search for Untold Dead
I may eventually have something to say about this ghastly, stultifying event, but for the moment, I am speechless.
NY Times picks up our Down syndrome thread
Motherlode, a New York Times blog on parenting, has picked up on Contrarian’s discussion about potential treatments for the intellectual impairment associated with Down syndrome — and touched off quite a debate of it its own.
Our own discussion began with L’Arche Cape Breton Community Leader Jenn Power’s disquiet at the assumption that Down syndrome constitutes a disease in need of curing. Jenn, who is both the adopted mother of identical twins with Down Syndrome and — disclosure — my daughter-in-law, spoke eloquently of Down traits that don’t need fixing:
[I]ncredible smiles, overflowing affection, stubbornness, great sense of humour, cute toes, love for orange pop and Rita MacNeil, endless capacity to forgive… the list goes on and on. I am not sure I can articulate why, but I find this article both upsetting (lump in my throat and eyes welled with tears right now) and disturbing. Why does everything need a “cure?”
The Times quoted at length from Jenn’s subsequent, more detailed Contrarian post, and from Stanford University researcher Dr. Ahmad Salehi’s thoughtful response here as well. Motherlode’s thread on the subject has now attracted more than 100 comments. Several are thoughtful and constructive, but a shocking number come from people quick to condemn Jenn as “selfish” or “patronizing” for not jumping at the chance to chemically enhance her sons’ cognitive skills.
Many Contrarian readers are familiar enough with Jenn to know her life is the antithesis of selfishness. As I wrote in my own comment on Motherlode:
As the leader of this extraordinary [L'Arche] community, Jenn manages an incredible range of human emotions, trials, joys, and tribulations, along with the myriad practical details required to manage any large group of diverse people. She does this with enormous tact, kindness, generosity, wisdom, humor, firmness, practicality, and love. And immense hard work.
From this I conclude that, despite decades of progress integrating developmentally challenged citizens into society, we have a long way to go in overcoming the kneejerk tendency to view people like my grandsons as less good and less valuable than the rest of us. That’s our loss as much as it is theirs.
In a separate post aimed at New York Times readers, I will include links to all our Down syndrome posts, and to several short videos featuring the extraordinary folks at L’Arche Cape Breton, including my esteemed two grandsons, Josh and Jacob.
Thoughts on the thwarted Christmas Day airplane bombing
A week after the attempted Christmas Day bombing of a Northwest Airlines fight, two polar-opposite American columnists — one left, one right — have come to nearly identical conclusions about the essential danger posed by airline security restrictions.
From the right, a New Year’s Day column by the New York Times’s David Brooks decried a citizenry that “expect[s] perfection from government and then throw[s] temper tantrums when it is not achieved.”
[T]he Transportation Security Administration has to be seen doing something, so it added another layer to its stage play, “Security Theater” — more baggage regulations, more in-flight restrictions.
At some point, it’s worth pointing out that it wasn’t the centralized system that stopped terrorism in this instance. As with the shoe bomber, as with the plane that went down in Shanksville, Pa., it was decentralized citizen action. The plot was foiled by nonexpert civilians who had the advantage of the concrete information right in front of them — and the spirit to take the initiative.
For better or worse, over the past 50 years we have concentrated authority in centralized agencies and reduced the role of decentralized citizen action. We’ve done this in many spheres of life. Maybe that’s wise, maybe it’s not. But we shouldn’t imagine that these centralized institutions are going to work perfectly or even well most of the time. It would be nice if we reacted to their inevitable failures not with rabid denunciation and cynicism, but with a little resiliency, an awareness that human systems fail and bad things will happen and we don’t have to lose our heads every time they do.
From the left, Salon’s Glenn Greenwald applauds Brooks and carries the point further:
Fear is the foundation of most governments; but it is so sordid and brutal a passion, and renders men in whose breasts it predominates so stupid and miserable, that Americans will not be likely to approve of any political institution which is founded on it. The 5-year-old laying awake in bed, frightened by monsters in the closet, who then crawls into his parents’ bed to feel Protected and Safe, is the same as a citizenry planted in front of the television, petrified by endless imagery of scary Muslim monsters, who then collectively crawl to Government and demand that they take more power and control in order to keep them Protected and Safe
[D]emands that political leaders ensure that we can live in womb-like Absolute Safety are delusional and destructive. Yet this is what the citizenry screams out every time something threatening happens: please, take more of our privacy away; monitor more of our communications; ban more of us from flying; engage in rituals to create the illusion of Strength; imprison more people without charges; take more and more control and power so you can Keep Us Safe…
A citizenry drowning in fear and fixated on Safety to the exclusion of other competing values can only be degraded and depraved.
Ironically, as Greenwald points out, the American Revolution was founded on precisely the opposite mindset. He quotes John Adams’s 1776 essay, Thoughts on Government:
Fear is the foundation of most governments; but it is so sordid and brutal a passion, and renders men in whose breasts it predominates so stupid and miserable, that Americans will not be likely to approve of any political institution which is founded on it.
Greenwald goes on to describe in detail the news media’s fear-mongering role in all this. Well worth a read.
Predictably, America’s bloated security apparatus responded to the latest bombing attempt (which was thwarted not by security precautions but by quick-witted passengers) by adding yet more bloat in the form of bans carry-on bags and a requirement that passengers stay in their seats with nothing in their laps for the last hour of every inbound US flight. Thus travelers fall victim to a false syllogism Conservative Bryan Caplan once described this way:
- Something must be done.
- This is something.
- Therefore, this must be done.
All this comes as vindication to the sharpest critics of security precautions imposed after 9/11. Bruce Schneier has long argued that “only two things have made flying safer: the reinforcement of cockpit doors, and the fact that passengers know now to resist hijackers.”
I’ve started to call the bizarre new TSA rules “magical thinking”: if we somehow protect against the specific tactic of the previous terrorist, we make ourselves safe from the next terrorist….
And what sort of magical thinking is behind the rumored TSA rule about keeping passengers seated during the last hour of flight? Do we really think the terrorist won’t think of blowing up their improvised explosive devices during the first hour of flight?….
Only one carry on? No electronics for the first hour of flight? I wish that, just once, some terrorist would try something that you can only foil by upgrading the passengers to first class and giving them free drinks.
To those who think the solution lies in the Israelification of American airport security, Schneier responds:
I don’t think it’s possible. The Israelis rely on a system of individual attention — interviews, background checks, and so on — that simply can’t be replicated on the scale required for America. If anything, we’re moving in the opposite direction: layers of annoying, time consuming, ineffectual, static — but automatic and scalable — security systems. Although it seems that we’re finally hitting the limit as to what the American business travel will put up with, and no security measure will survive wholesale rejection by the airlines’ most profitable customers.
In the best of many post-failed-bombing interviews with Schneier, the Atlantic’s Jeffrey Goldberg asked whether another airplane will inevitably be blown up.
The fact that we even ask this question illustrates something fundamentally wrong with how our society deals with risk. Of course 100% security is impossible; it has always been impossible and always will be. We’ll never get the murder, burglary, or terrorism rate down to zero; 42,000 people will die each year in car crashes in the U.S. for the foreseeable future; life itself will always include risk. But that’s okay. Despite fearful rhetoric to the contrary, terrorism is not a transcendent threat. A terrorist attack cannot possibly destroy our country’s way of life; it’s only our reaction to that attack that can do that kind of damage.
I want President Obama to get on national television and project indomitability. I want him to dial back the hyperbole, and remind us that our society can’t be terrorized. I want him to roll back all the fear-based post-9/11 security measures. We’d do much better by leveraging the inherent strengths of our modern democracies and the natural advantages we have over the terrorists: our adaptability and survivability, our international network of laws and law enforcement, and the freedoms and liberties that make our society so enviable. The way we live is open enough to make terrorists rare; we are observant enough to prevent most of the terrorist plots that exist, and indomitable enough to survive the even fewer terrorist plots that actually succeed. We don’t need to pretend otherwise.
“Not my department,” says Harper
Prime Minister Stephen Harper’s insistence that the torture of prisoners Canada hands over to Afghan authorities is a problem for Afghanistan, not Canada, calls to mind Tom Leher’s lyric about rocket scientist Wernher von Braun’s apparent indifference to the consequences of his work on Germany’s World War II V2 rocket:
Once the rockets are up, who cares where they come down?
‘That’s not my department’, says Wernher von Braun.
In fact, as Bob Rae points out in the same Globe and Mail article, transferring prisoners with the expectation they may be tortured is a violation of the Geneva Conventions – a war crime, in other words.
The blithe indifference to torture shown by both the Harper and Martin governments is a marked departure from the international standards Canadians are accustomed to upholding. But it pales by comparison with the US approach. Salon’s Glenn Greenwald (here) and the New York Times (here) have chilling recapitulations of the US torture and subsequent seven-year imprisonment at Guantanamo, without charge, of Al Jazeera cameraman Sami al-Hajj, during which he was interrogated not about terrorism but about Al Jazeera’s operations.
Says Greenwald:
The due-process-free imprisonment of this journalist by the U.S. government was ignored almost completely by the American media (other than Nicholas Kristof), even as it righteously obsessed on the far shorter imprisonment of journalists by countries such as Iran and North Korea (hey, look over there at those tyrannical countries – they imprison our journalists!!!!!). Aside from al-Hajj, we’ve imprisoned numerous other journalists without charges in Iraq — and continue to this day to do so — including ones who work for Reuters and the Associated Press.


