> Everyone has already forgotten Pfc. Manning rotting away for 35 years.
Please represent the facts accurately. Manning is eligible for release in 7-8 years. I'm willing to make a long bet (http://longbets.org) for $300.00 that Manning does not serve 35 years, or "rot away for 35 years" as you put it. Are you up for it?
I hate that this nitpicking has become the standard response whenever someone is facing a prison sentence. It utterly belittles the hardship that people like Pfc. Manning actually face, even if it is for 7-8 years in the end.
Additionally, the parole or probation that she faces even after release are still punishment. It's not as though the troubles are suddenly over.
Treating the issue in this way makes it sound like the judge announced the 35 year sentence, slammed a gavel, then looked over to Manning with a wink and a whimsical smile. That's not what happened. 35 years was the sentence, and that is what you should expect to hear in relation to the case, even if it can be reduced with work on the part of the defendant.
Eligible for parole means nothing too. They won't ever let manning out early because they must 'set an example' to deter future whistleblowers, and don't want manning on the talkshow circuit talking about war crimes
What they get out in, is just as relevant as what they were sentenced to. Otherwise, why do we get so mad when a murderer is sentenced to 20 years and out in 2?
I agree that it is a fairly large difference in number, but I still think that trumpeting on about it distracts from the primary discussion.
At best, this is all speculation. 7-8 years is the time before Chelsea Manning becomes eligible for parole. Whether or not she is actually released will depend on a number of factors, including the political climate at the time. We'll only really find out around 2021.
Finally, and this is something I touched on in my first comment, even 7 years in a federal prison is nothing to sneeze at. A non-trivial amount of time spent on federal probation after release isn't exactly going to be a cakewalk, either. And this is all on top of the time already spent in the military justice system, including almost a year of solitary confinement. Basically, I'm just asking that we don't downplay what must be an awful experience simply because our justice system has wiggle room.
After the aggressiveness of the current administration, you think there is a chance the next administration might come along and say "nope, they need to serve the full 35 years".
The sentence is 35 years. They could legally be forced to serve the full 35 for any reason. As far as I am concerned that is the weight being hung around their neck, not the imaginary eight.
And eight years in prison is an insanely long time, don't forget the terrible health care and dangers from other inmates. You can lose all your teeth and die from infections very easily if someone decides to just let you rot.
First I have heard about that. I had to look it up on wikipedia. I have a resentment of gendered pronouns but I don't think there is any realistic hope for change.
I'd bet on released at first parole hearing as long as Manning is willing to be "quiet" and just goes on to enjoy life. Which would probably be a desirable outcome, given age. It's pretty easy to make an argument for leniency based on age, irresponsibility-when-committed, and complete life changes (I mean, sex change, the Snowden revelations, by then no troops in Iraq/Afghanistan (hopefully!), stepping down from perpetual war (if for no other reason than economics), and at least one change of President.
I'd take the bet if you'd be willing to take the position that he'll be released in 7 years. Betting hat he'll be paroled somewhere between 7 and 35 years is silly.
I'm not sure if either of them deserve the Nobel Peace Prize, but I believe Manning's sentence is reasonable. I'd like to shake his hand, buy him a beer, thank him personally, but it's a decision he made that has severe consequences for a reason. And while I don't like Snowden at all, I think his actions are much more justifiable from an ethical point of view. It's not like terrorists were unaware the NSA was spying before they had proof—the only people being blindfolded were citizens. Manning's actions were more complex and the ramifications were less straightforwardly positive.
So by your standard, Martin Luther King Jr. should be getting out of prison just about now?
Manning was a whistlerblower, just like Snowden, with less power and ability for flight to defend themselves.
There was no personal gain ever intended or achieved, yet great personal loss even in the best outcome. They saw something very wrong happening and had little to no way to say "hey there are some incredibly powerful forces in this country doing some very evil things".
The problem is we only treat whistleblowers like traitors legally and Manning's "trial" was a complete scam, zero media coverage allowed on purpose by the government so they could be railroaded.
I don't purport to be an expert on either of these cases, but my impression as a casual observer was that Mannings leak was just a massive dump of classified documents without any attempt to be selective about which information needed to come to light.
Any sizable dump of classified documents is likely to have some damning pieces in there but that doesn't necessarily justify blindly leaking massive amounts of documents. I think Manning would have gotten a more favorable response by more people if he had been just a bit selective in what he leaked.
Again, I don't have deep knowledge on either of these cases compared to some around here so I'll concede that maybe I'm wrong on some of my facts...?
It's not even clear Manning is a whistleblower—what the hell did he blow a whistle on? It's not like any widespread scandal, corruption, or conspiracy was revealed.
Yeah, I was under the impression that he leaked information on the slaughter of civilians in the Middle East by soldiers/mercenaries. My familiarity is clearly cursory.
Along with a ton of other stuff that wasn't germane to that incident. Manning's big issue was that they released a bunch of classified material without much regard for what it said. It was very broad in scope. Had it been a narrow subset of the data, Manning would have had a better chance of being considered a whistleblower.
"I'd like to shake his [sic] hand, buy him [sic] a beer, thank him [sic] personally", "but I believe Manning's sentence [of 35 years in prison] is reasonable".
My jaw dropped to the floor. Assuming that you want to thank her for doing that thing that landed her in prison, there is nothing you can say that can reconcile those two statements for me.
You miss the point. Pfc. Manning now identifies as Chelsea Manning. She is transgendered, and since her military career is toast she has come out of the closet on the subject.
I'm going to be generous and assume that duaneb poster was not closely following the story and is unaware of the above.
Transpersons are always the subject of massive flamewars online, so some folks get really strong kneejerk reactions to misgendering.
I think efbee was responding to "I think what they did was right but also they deserve a 35 year sentence" as the two irreconcilable statements. Misgendering is an important point as well, but it's not what makes the statements contradictory.
I was not aware of Manning's being transgendered, and I don't mean any disrespect—consider it an editorial he given my assumption of gender from sex (I can't edit).
I doubt it was malicious. I read about it right when she made her choice public, and I still forget regularly. I'm just not used to people changing gender, so my mental constructs treat it as kind of a read-only value...
So you're saying you like Manning personally, but not for her 'criminal' actions? What about her makes you want to 'shake [her] hand' and 'buy [her] a beer' then?
You approve of an action that happens to be illegal, and think people who take that action deserve prison time? I don't follow. If a person's actions are noble in my estimation, I wouldn't wish punishment upon them for their actions.
There are thousands of people in government and the military who broke the law and defended their actions because they believed them to be morally justifiable. Surely those people should have a similar sentence to Manning?
A lot of the civil unrest that happened in the world in the years following the State Department cable releases is suspected to have been loosely caused by revelations in the cables themselves that often had candid descriptions of corruption and other misdeeds by governments.
This is clearly something that we as a society are going to have to wrestle with.
It seems reasonable to me that this person, having XY chromosomes and all the hardware that go with them, may be correctly referred to using masculine pronouns.
There's something to be said for respecting the wishes of the individual in how they'd like to be addressed. But there's definitely a point at which that drifts off into absurdity. Just because I can claim descent from Henry VIII doesn't mean that I can reasonably expect people to address me as "lord".
So I'm interested in respecting people, but think we need to let this percolate through society first, and determine where to draw reasonable lines, before you accuse someone of disrespect for failing to honor someone's alternate world view.
There's a time and a place to be pedantic, and this really isn't it.
Transgendered people go through a heap of terrible, terrible crap and the least we can all do is give them the dignity of using their identified pronoun. If anybody has earned that respect, it's ms. Manning.
I mean really, how the heck does it hurt anybody to say "She" instead of "He" after you've been informed that's not how she identifies? Does it really matter that much? Obviously the extreme SJW flamewar reaction you usually see on misgendering is excessive, but after being politely informed that's not how she identifies, how are you harmed by going along with it?
Will the ghost of Plato arise and smite you down for failing to properly class something?
My personal value system (and perhaps milord grandparent's) rates the accurate use of words (aka, truth-telling) rather high on the scale of values. Clear thought is impossible without it.
When we, as a society, take words such as "war" and "gender" that previously referred to physical realities and make them highly metaphorical or even completely arbitrary, we dilute our vocabulary. We make it harder to think and communicate clearly.
I find it especially objectionable when the only argument in favor of blurring the definition of a word is "because someone wants me to" or "someone would be offended if I didn't". Our mere preferences don't change reality; why should they change words, which are meant to convey an accurate representation of reality?
> Transgendered people go through a heap of terrible, terrible crap and the least we can all do is give them the dignity of using their identified pronoun.
I think we'd do better to make sure they don't go through a heap of terrible crap (no bullying/abuse for personal choices) and leave people some personal freedom to have different views on pronouns.
> Will the ghost of Plato arise and smite you down for failing to properly class something?
It seems totally unreasonable to me to intentionally misgender anyone against their wishes even after such intention was communicated. What possible purposes such action can serve?
I think it's more comparable to calling someone by their old name even after someone went through a trouble of changing one's official name because they hated the name given by their parents. You'd agree that's a bad manner.
> It seems reasonable to me that this person, having XY chromosomes and all the hardware that go with them, may be correctly referred to using masculine pronouns.
Gender != your chromosomes and gender != your "hardware" or any other body part for that matter. Gender is about social identity and structure.
> There's something to be said for respecting the wishes of the individual in how they'd like to be addressed. But there's definitely a point at which that drifts off into absurdity. Just because I can claim descent from Henry VIII doesn't mean that I can reasonably expect people to address me as "lord".
Laying claim to a royal lineage is not the same as having a gender. Also, lord is a title and we are talking about pronouns, things used when talking about anyone.
> So I'm interested in respecting people, but think we need to let this percolate through society first, and determine where to draw reasonable lines, before you accuse someone of disrespect for failing to honor someone's alternate world view.
We already know where to draw reasonable lines: Manning has already publicly stated her gender. You have disrespected this person by misgendering them. Manning's world view is not an "alternate" world view and you are being incredibly transphobic.
While I really do tend to lean in the direction you suggest, I don't think it's quite a cut-and-dry as you claim. Here are a few things to consider.
First, we're only talking about language. We get those gendered pronouns not because of a need to distinguish between how a person views his gender (or how the world views it), but because of stupid linguistic convention going back to English's Indo-European roots. You'll see that in many languages in the same family, nouns all have gender, even absurd ones like "airplane" or "shoe". These genders have absolutely nothing to do with sexual identity, they're essentially randomly assigned, conferring no additional meaning (but providing a parity check in communication, helping ensure clear transmission). Coming from this history, we shouldn't be too concerned with the way pronouns correspond to individual humans.
Second, I don't think it's hard to imagine socially-undesirable consequences of honoring anyone's own claimed gender. I'm thinking of a biological-male claiming to self-identify as female, so that he can use the women's locker room at the gym. So under what circumstances do we want to honor their self-image (or, for that matter, to believe their claimed self-image)?
Third, with identity politics still having legal bearing in our system, it seems that self-identification of gender may derail efforts to ensure gender equality. Given that there are legal structures in place to protect females, may I (as a biological male) claim to self-identify as female, and achieve those same protections? May I at least self-identify on official forms (thereby making enforcement of workplace protections unenforceable)?
Not that these things are insoluble, but I think that we need to give thought to the repercussions should we choose to take any person's claims of gender at face value.
It seems pretty simple to me. If you ask me to describe my best friend, I might say he's smart, studied this or that in school, speaks such-and-such languages, likes such-and-such music, and so on. His height and weight would be pretty far down the list of things I find important.
Similarly, we think of our mind as being our "self" in a much more fundamental way than our toes.
If a person is female in their mind but has a male body, it seems very clear that we should consider the former to be their "real" gender. Why should the body matter more or be more fundamental?
I would say the the catch phrase in your argument is "best friend". If the person you were describing wasn't your best friend, you might automatically focus more on the physical aspects, since you wouldn't know the intimate details of their mind.
That said, I am not advocating deliberate misuse of pronouns; I am just saying the topic may not be as simple as it seems.
In polite society we respect the ways that others wish to be addressed, as long as the request isn't unreasonable (I want you to call me 'Doctor wavefunction' yet I lack the credentials).
It is not absurd to refer to someone by the gender they prefer.
This posts reeks of cisgender privilege [0]. Gender is a social construct, not a biological inevitability, and it is disrespectful to refer to someone as a gender that they have explicitly stated they do not identify with.
I'll let you fill in the comparisons to widespread sexism, racism, and homophobia for yourself. Go back to the leaders of the American civil rights movement and tell them to let things "percolate through society" so they can know "where to draw reasonable lines".
> Go back to the leaders of the American civil rights movement and tell them to let things "percolate through society" so they can know "where to draw reasonable lines".
Better, read the Letter from a Birmingham Jail, which deals sharply and directly with exactly those sort of suggestions from white people. It's quite wonderful.
> We know through painful experience that freedom is never voluntarily given by the oppressor; it must be demanded by the oppressed. Frankly, I have yet to engage in a direct action campaign that was "well timed" in the view of those who have not suffered unduly from the disease of segregation. For years now I have heard the word "Wait!" It rings in the ear of every Negro with piercing familiarity. This "Wait" has almost always meant "Never."
I have no problem if someone wants to identity with a different gender but it can get confusing for others as some people don't limit their pronoun choices to "he" or "she" to identify themselves.
How about this for an idea... Pvt. Manning? Easy and no disrespect.
Shooting people? Yeah. I didn't know the helicopter crew felt so bad about it though. I thought they had better psychological support, but they sounded traumatized.
Please represent the facts accurately. Manning is eligible for release in 7-8 years. I'm willing to make a long bet (http://longbets.org) for $300.00 that Manning does not serve 35 years, or "rot away for 35 years" as you put it. Are you up for it?