What Are You Currently Reading? 2014

[ganulv]

I can typically see the seams when writers whose subject matter expertise is the profession of writing tackle a topic, but Michael Greenberg’s essay “‘Broken Windows’ and the New York Police” in the latest New York Review of Books doesn’t have a shreds and patches feel to it. The prose is fluid and informative, and the essay comes off to me as fair to all involved. Those involved may feel differently, obviously.

From the essay:

Currently, in New York, possession of less than twenty-five grams is not a crime unless you are caught lighting up in public or, in the language of the law, the drug is “open to public view.” A beat cop on foot patrol, instructed to enact the policy, may approach a person he deems to be suspicious. He orders the suspect to empty the contents of his pockets, which may contain a couple of grams of pot. The suspect has now publicly displayed the drug and is arrested according to the letter of the law. Black and Hispanic men make up 86 percent of these busts.

[…]

I saw for myself some of the effects of these low-level arrests during an unplanned visit I made, in July 2013, to the “Tombs”—the windowless holding pens in the basement of the 100 Centre Street courthouse in Manhattan. I counted four white men out of hundreds of prisoners who were waiting to be arraigned. One was there for allegedly slugging his girlfriend, another for buying cocaine in an upscale night club. The other two were accused of driving while intoxicated. (I was one of the latter; the charges against me were eventually dismissed.)

This was a large summer weekend crowd, men tightly crammed in the cells, agitating for a few inches of bench space. A neatly dressed seventeen-year-old boy had staked out a spot on the floor, where he sat with his head between his knees in what appeared to be a state of silent despair. The single overflowing toilet that served the thirty or forty men in the cell seemed to bring him close to tears.

The boy had made the mistake of asking a rider who was exiting a subway station to swipe him through with her MetroCard. “I was thirty-three cents short for a single fare,” he told me. He neither jumped the turnstile nor harassed the woman, who obligingly swiped him through. A policeman witnessed the exchange, arrested the boy, and let the woman off with a stern warning, though what law she had broken is unclear. The policeman now had cause to search the kid and found the remnants of a joint in his pocket—crumbs of pot. Though he had no prior arrests, he was now facing two charges: marijuana possession and theft of services, a class A misdemeanor punishable by up to a year in jail. He wouldn’t do time, most likely, beyond his current incarceration, but he feared, with good reason, that the financial aid a college in Pennsylvania had granted him for his freshman year would be rescinded.

And:

Sometimes, police will use the pretext of minor infractions, such as truancy or riding a bicycle on the sidewalk, to lock up crew members on the day of a planned shoot-out—a selective employment of the broken windows tactic that may actually save kids’ lives. Many of these cops are trained in community relations. “I need help, and if the cops are the ones giving it, that’s fine by me,” a mother in the Albany Houses in Brooklyn told me.

It isn’t rare for parents to plead with police to take their children into custody, in order to protect them. In households with domestic abuse, a crime that has not decreased in recent years, police repeatedly check in, paying follow-up visits after an arrest or a complaint, to see how the family is getting on.

Ray Kelly, who started the Crew Cut initiative toward the end of his tenure as commissioner, said, “If I had to point to one reason why the murders and shootings are down, it is this program. And I can tell you that there is a lot of positive feedback from cops.” The remark is as close as he has come, to my knowledge, to questioning the relative effectiveness of stop and frisk, whose main purpose was to confiscate guns; it’s also an indirect acknowledgment of the widespread dissatisfaction among the NYPD’s rank and file during the Bloomberg and Kelly years. Beat cops particularly disliked stop and frisk, and sometimes would write up “ghost 250s”—fake stop-and-frisk reports with no names—in order to meet quotas.

The digital version is free for all at http://www.nybooks.com/articles/arch...w-york-police/.

[mirhond]

Mars Trilogy, by Kim Stanley Robinson. The hardest SF I've ever read.

[Backwards Observer]

Pure War by Paul Virilio


War Is Not Over When It's Over: Women Speak Out from the Ruins of War by Ann Jones

[Firn]

The Viaz'ma Catastrophe, 1941: The Red Army's Disastrous Stand against Operation Typhoon, even if 'reading' is a bit much. After the introduction, some chapters and maps I decided to go to 'The Dimensions of the Defeat' as in this month and the next one I won't have time to go through the operations. Still already lots of food for thought.

He, like other Russian authors, seems rather upset that a vast quantity of very important is still practially hidden away and that the official positions are seemingly rather often in conflict with researched facts from other soures. In his words the supporters of 'Mama and borsch' patriotism 'are in agreement that a patriot can only be someone who refuses in principle to to see any flaws in his or her country'. In short the author makes a detailed and very convincing argument, partly based on not offically published work of the TsAMO and other sources that the total irrevocable losses (of the Soviet forces) were 'to the most conservative calculations no less then 14,500,000 people, which is a approximately half of the total number of 29,500,000 who were mobilized throughout the war.' A deeply shocking loss of life, indeed, and impossible to truly comprehend.

I could not resist to look at what the other side lost. The irrevocable losses by the German forces, which obviously had by far the highest share of men and material of the Axis forces are coverd by here by Ruediger Overmans, who published key research in this area. According to his work 'Overall probably 3,5 to 4 million German members of the Wehrmacht* lost their live on the Ostfront or died as Soviet prisoners of war. To this one has to add the casualities of the other Axis forces and those of non-German Soviet origin. According to the Italian Wikipedia, citing quite old research roughly 75,000 Italians lost their lives in the East, the great majority presumably in captivity, a large number which of course pales after the others. Others, like 'Greater Hungary', Finland and the Romania had high absolute losses, roughly 500,000 in all, if Wikipedia is to be believed.

My post took a turn I didn't anticipate and I have to stop. Maybe I will follow it up later.

*of course including Waffen SS, Luftwaffe and Marine

[Backwards Observer]

Stories of Your Life and Others by Ted Chiang


The Apocalypse Door by James D. MacDonald


"The invention of the ship was also the invention of the shipwreck." - Paul Virilio

...

David St. Hubbins: "It's such a fine line between stupid, and uh..."

Derek Smalls: "...and clever." - Spinal Tap

[ganulv]

In short the author makes a detailed and very convincing argument, partly based on not offically published work of the TsAMO and other sources that the total irrevocable losses (of the Soviet forces) were 'to the most conservative calculations no less then 14,500,000 people, which is a approximately half of the total number of 29,500,000 who were mobilized throughout the war.' A deeply shocking loss of life, indeed, and impossible to truly comprehend.

Am I right to assume that some of the (indeed, deeply shocking) loss of life was of a piece with pre-War Stalinist political purging, economic reorganization, and social engineering?

Which is to say, being a Soviet citizen meant you had been dealt a bad hand, a situation that Operation Typhoon only exacerbated?

OTOH, it seems difficult to imagine a counterfactual Tsarist Russian economy turning back the Third Reich as did the centralized Leninist/Stalinist USSR’s.

[davidbfpo]

In part:

Am I right to assume that some of the (indeed, deeply shocking) loss of life was of a piece with pre-War Stalinist political purging, economic reorganization, and social engineering?

The scale of the purges is incredible:

The purge of the .... removed three of five marshals (then equivalent to five-star generals), 13 of 15 army commanders (then equivalent to three- and four-star generals), eight of nine admirals (the purge fell heavily on the Navy, who were suspected of exploiting their opportunities for foreign contacts),50 of 57 army corps commanders, 154 out of 186 division commanders, 16 of 16 army commissars, and 25 of 28 army corps commissars.


At first it was thought 25-50% of Red Army officers were purged, it is now known to be 3.7-7.7%. Previously, the size of the Red Army officer corps was underestimated, and it was overlooked that most of those purged were merely expelled from the Party. Thirty percent of officers purged in 1937-9 were allowed to return to service

From:http://http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Purge

My recollection is that the German military closely followed the Stalin era purges of the Red Army, which reduced its effectiveness, but as the Japanese learnt @ Khalkhin Gol they could still fight. See:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battles_of_Khalkhin_Gol

After a disasterous start in the 1939 war with Finland, the Red Army gathered up its might and defeated the Finns. I assume the Germans altered their assessments.

[Firn]

What the book makes perhaps clearer is the impact of the purges and the executions of high ranking officers during Barbarossa. The flow of informations up ranks to Stavka seemed to work worse the worse the massage was. It seems that a relative strict hierachic system was put in place which meant that an urgent alarm had often to be checked and re-checked practically at every level with many along the command ladder understandably clearly not being happy to report bad news. Given a false one could result in being at best accused for spreading panic if not something worse.

If one takes into account the 'blitz'* speed of some German armored thrusts in the more then usual chaos and friction of war this slow and erratic process with little mutal trust resulted in one particular instance described in the book, in which the Stavka was unaware of a German advance to the depth of a 100-120 km...

In simplistic terms in some cases thousends of lives were thrown away because it was far safer to not achieve success by following strict (and outdated) orders from far away instead of risking success and one's life by fitting them to the specific (often completely changed) circumstances. Auftragstaktik it wasn't.

P.S: It should have been 600,000 dead among the Finns, Romanians and Hungarians fighting against the Soviets during WWII. What surprised me was the quite strong reversed relationship of the Italians, Romanians and Hungarians compared to German when it came to KIA and MIA and deaths in Soviet hands. Of course MIA is a 'grey field' between KIA and deaths as POW and in the Italian case most were captured early in the war during that Winter offensive in an often sorry state by exhausted, often badly supplied troops sometimes unwilling to 'burden themselves'. Both sides are known to have shot, more often then not, prisoners unable to walk. All that greatly reduced the chances of many an Italian Alpini mentioned in 'Il sergente nella neve' to come home alive.

P.P.S: It is of course important to keep in mind that a far larger part of the German (and German occupied) war ressources, especially capital and 'high-tech', was directed towards the Western allies then the manpower employed in the East might suggest. Wages of Destruction is an essential read.


*I know, I know...

[AmericanPride]

ganulv,

Am I right to assume that some of the (indeed, deeply shocking) loss of life was of a piece with pre-War Stalinist political purging, economic reorganization, and social engineering?

Which is to say, being a Soviet citizen meant you had been dealt a bad hand, a situation that Operation Typhoon only exacerbated?

Why qualify it as 'pre-war'? Even with the start of the war, the purges and repression did not slow down. The targets only shifted from kulaks and class enemies to 'traitors' and 'cowards'. Unfortunately from a historiography point of view, the periodization of the 20th century with the start of WWII disguises the continuation of Soviet democide (and genocide) among the exigencies of invasion.

OTOH, it seems difficult to imagine a counterfactual Tsarist Russian economy turning back the Third Reich as did the centralized Leninist/Stalinist USSR’s.

I suppose that depends on what we attribute to eventual Soviet victory or German defeat.

[mirhond]

OTOH, it seems difficult to imagine a counterfactual Tsarist Russian economy turning back the Third Reich as did the centralized Leninist/Stalinist USSR’s.

From The Cambridge Economic History of Europe, v.2, p. 147 (I'am currently reading it)

More than a decade earlier, Stalin and his associates had drawn the appropriate lesson
from Russia’s defeat in the First World War: small-scale peasant farming was
Russia’s Achilles heel in wartime (Simonov 1996). Stalin had launched a drive
to secure state control over the peasant farmers and their food surpluses by
collectivizing the farms.The campaign was carried through at huge cost in lives,and the farming system that resulted was hated and inefficient (Davies and Wheatcroft 2004). But it achieved its goal in the sense that,when war broken out again, the peasant farmers no longer had the freedom to withdraw from the market.When food was critically short, when there was absolutely not enough food in the country to keep everyone alive and millions starved, the soldiers and war workers had enough to eat (Barber and Harrison 1991; Harrison 1996).

[BushrangerCZ]

"Journals of ROBERT ROGERS of the Rangers"