“Punting the Pundits” is an Open Thread. It is a selection of editorials and opinions from around the news medium and the internet blogs. The intent is to provide a forum for your reactions and opinions, not just to the opinions presented, but to what ever you find important.
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Katrina vanden Heuvel: Our Intelligence Apparatus, Operating in the Dark
Forty years ago, Frederick A.O. Schwarz Jr. played a crucial role in exposing decades of appalling secret conduct by U.S. intelligence agencies. Today, he is publishing “Democracy in the Dark: The Seduction of Government Secrecy,” a timely and provocative book exploring the origins of the national security state and the urgent challenge of reining it in. [..]
In response to the findings, Congress passed the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) and established permanent select committees to oversee intelligence operations. Indeed, it was the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence that produced the bombshell report on the CIA’s torture program released in December – though not the unredacted report the nation deserves to see. In the post-Sept. 11 era, however, these intended safeguards against excessive secrecy have undeniably and disastrously failed. As I have written before, it’s long past time to form a modern Church Committee to investigate fully secret U.S. intelligence activities in the 21st century.
Jess Zimmerman: How do we tell when helpful interventions online are just creepy surveillance?
If you’ve never done it before, go to Tumblr and search “thigh gap.” I will wait.
In the event that you are an old person like me, you might not have realized that Tumblr is watching your searches. Well, not your searches, exactly – you are, as we’ve established, an old person, whereas more than half of Tumblr users are under 35 and 15% are under 18. But, likely because of these demographics, the blogging site has starting noting when users search certain keywords – “anorexia”, “self-harm”, “suicide” among them – and inserts a message asking you “is everything okay?” You can still click through to your search results, but first you’re offered resources for support. [..]
But even being watched solely by a sophisticated algorithm feels uncanny. In 2012, Charles Duhigg revealed in the New York Times Magazine that, if you stock up on lotion and supplements at Target, the company’s purchase-analyzing algorithm will guess that you’re pregnant and start sending you coupons for baby gear. “Willies” is too weak a word for how people responded to that one – especially once Duhigg told the story of a Minneapolis father who found out that his teen daughter was pregnant only because Target figured it out first. If you’re searching for vitamins and end up getting served discounts on Diaper Genies, it may feel like you have a fairy godmother – but it also feels like you’re being spied on. And you are.
You may have heard that the government is forcing businesses not to discriminate. It isn’t. If you chose to run a business, you have to follow the laws. If you don’t, that’s a choice-and you choose to suffer the consequences.
Still, in the wake of the controversy surrounding Indiana’s law, conservatives don’t see it that way. Even potential Republican presidential candidates are getting in on the assertions. Rick Santorum recently said:
If you’re a print shop and you are a gay man, should you be forced to print ‘God Hates Fags’ for the Westboro Baptist Church because they hold those signs up? Should the government-and this is really the case here – should the government force you to do that? This is about the government coming in and saying, “No, we’re going to make you do this.” And this is where I think we just need some space to say let’s have some tolerance, be a two-way street.
There are two problems with Santorum’s reasoning. The first is that a printer doesn’t have to make such signs, under any law, because refusing to do so is not discrimination in any legally prohibited sense. A print shop can also refuse to print a poster that says, for instance, “F*ck Rick Santorum,” either because it disagrees with the language or the sentiment. Both are entirely legally permissible decisions any business can rightfully make.
Jessica Valenti: We can’t end rape stigma by forcing all victims to identify themselves
In a perfect world, there would be no stigma to being a victim of sexual violence. Sexual assault survivors could come forward and talk about their stories without fear of retribution, shaming or harassment. Reporters could print the names of those assaulted, knowing that the victims’ safety would remain intact.
But we do not live in a perfect – or even near-perfect – world. And if we want rape victims to be able to tell their stories in the media, we must protect their anonymity. [..]
But one misguided suggestion to come out of the discussion about rape, reporting and responsibility is that journalists should only publish stories in which the rape survivor agrees to be named. Sonali Kohli at Quartz, for instance, argued that “there is something patriarchal and counterproductive to the idea that sexual assault is presumed to be shameful for the survivor.”
Maria Margaronis: Syriza Can Still Succeed-Even Though EU Officials Are Set On Its Demise
Greek Prime Minister Alexis Tsipras is in Moscow today to discuss gas prices, trade and investment with Vladimir Putin; Finance Minister Yanis Varoufakis recently left Washington, where he assured the IMF’s Christine Lagarde that Greece will make a loan repayment due tomorrow and discussed with her the Syriza government’s proposed reforms. A symmetrical shuttling, you could say, beyond the EU’s borders; a reasonable hedging of bets at a critical moment for Greece; an assertion of agency. But reading the Anglophone press, you might think the Greek government was about to default on its IMF loan, print drachmas, call snap elections, thumb its nose at Europe, and sell its soul to Putin for a fistful of roubles.
A fog of disinformation surrounds Greece’s ongoing negotiations with its creditors to unblock 7.2 billion euros of loan funds, without which the government is likely to run out of money in weeks (or months-this too is unclear). An April 5 piece in Financial Times, based almost entirely on blind quotes from “senior official[s]” and eurozone finance ministers, suggested that an agreement will only be possible if Syriza ditches its elected left-wing MPs and forms a coalition with two center-left parties, the discredited Pasok and newly created Potami. In The Daily Telegraph three days earlier, Euroskeptic journalist Ambrose Evans-Pritchard cited unnamed sources “close to the ruling Syriza party” to claim that Greece was about to nationalize the banking system and introduce a parallel currency. This fog is swallowed and recycled by Greece’s private TV channels, bought hacks and politicians. The effect is to spread confusion and mistrust, threatening the already tremulous negotiations, the Syriza government and what’s left of European cohesion.
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