Shared posts

23 Mar 01:30

Wireless Bluetooth keyboard for $17

by Mark Frauenfelder

keyboardMy 11-year-old has been using an old keyboard on her hand-me-down computer setup. Some of the keys are worn down to the point of being blank. Read the rest

20 Feb 22:02

100 years of Iranian women's fashion in one minute

by Mark Frauenfelder

Here's the third episode in the 100 Years of Beauty videos. (more…)

15 Feb 15:48

Why you do your most creative thinking in the shower, car, or bed

by Colin Marshall

"I guess the nice thing about driving a car is that the physical act of driving itself occupies a good chunk of brain cells that otherwise would be giving you trouble overloading your thinking," writes Douglas Coupland in Life After God.

Read the rest
18 Dec 01:49

America’s Pro-Torture Cult

by Dish Staff
by Dish Staff

Ambinder bets that “Cheney would still have us torturing innocents, even today”:

I can only think of Cheney now as the personification of the Cult of Terror, that September 11th, 2001 political construct that gave Americans license to act outside the stream of history instead of at its headwaters, and to suppress dissent in the name of state security. What makes this scarier, even, and why I feel justified in calling it a cult, is that it also suppresses, denigrates, and stigmatizes the moral and political foundations that it seeks to protect. It’s an American cult, because it plays to our own biases about what makes us special. It is not unique or exceptional.

Chait also examines the pro-torture mindset. He contends that “admiration for the methods used by totalitarian states is … embedded in the torture program created by the Bush administration”:

Three decades ago, right-wing French intellectual Jean-François Revel published a call to arms entitled How Democracies Perish, which quickly became a key text of the neoconservative movement and an ideological blueprint for the Reagan administration. Revel argued that the Soviet Union’s brutality and immunity from internal criticism gave it an inherent advantage over the democratic West — the United States and Europe were too liberal, too open, too humane, too soft to defeat the resolute men of the Iron Curtain.

“Unlike the Western leadership, which is tormented by remorse and a sense of guilt,” wrote Revel, “Soviet leaders’ consciences are perfectly clear, which allows them to use brute force with utter serenity both to preserve their power at home and to extend it abroad.” Even though Revel’s prediction that the Soviet Union would outlast the West was falsified within a few years, conservatives continue to tout its wisdom. And even as Revel’s name has faded further into the backdrop, recent events have revealed the continuing influence of his ideas.


06 Aug 13:56

Map Of The Day

by Andrew Sullivan

twitter-media-israeli-palestine-map

Gideon Lichfield captions the above image, which “depicts Twitter accounts that tweeted about the Israeli shelling of a UN school in Beit Hanoun on July 24th”:

The Twitter accounts are arranged according to how many connections they share; the closer two accounts are, the more accounts they both follow. The bigger the circle, the more followers that account has. What emerges from this is distinct groupings: “pro-Palestinian” in green on the right; “pro-Israel” in blue on the left. Lotan has colored most of the international journalists and media outlets in gray; they clearly have more followers among the pro-Palestinian side. The dark blue group in the upper left are American conservatives and Tea-Party types, while the lighter blue are Israeli media outlets and blogs, and American Zionist figures.

The standout here is Ha’aretz, the left-wing Israeli newspaper. While closer to the pro-Israel side, it clearly has a lot of pro-Palestinian followers. It’s fair to say that readers of Ha’aretz’s English edition include the only groups of people from the two sides who are reading the same news.

26 Jul 23:46

No Country For Young Women

by Andrew Sullivan

U.S. Agents Take Undocumented Immigrants Into Custody Near Tex-Mex Border

Among the many horrors that the Central American refugee children are fleeing, Mónica Ramírez and Anne Ream focus on the epidemic of sexual violence, which is often ignored, or even committed, by the police:

One key factor driving this crisis is the well-documented and widespread sexual and gender-related violence in Latin America. In a 2014 report conducted by the UN High Commissioner for Refugees, 70 percent of children interviewed cited domestic violence as well as violence at the hands of gangs, cartels, or “state actors” (such as police), as reasons for fleeing homes in Mexico and Central America. Sexual violence has become so widespread in Guatemala in recent years that in 2009 Doctors Without Borders launched its first Latin American mission dedicated to treating rape and abuse victims. And gender-based violence is now the second highest cause of death for women of reproductive age in Honduras. …

Anti-violence advocates on the ground say that two factors drive the high incidence of sexual and gender-related violence in the region: a lack of awareness about the nature of gender-based violence, which has historically been downplayed or normalized, and the absence of official efforts and channels that might encourage reporting of such crimes. The fact that law enforcement and judicial systems are most often dominated by men who are disinclined to pursue sexual violence or trafficking cases, and may in fact be implicated in such violence themselves, further exacerbates the crisis.

Previous Dish on the chaos in Central America here and the child migrant crisis here.

(Photo: An undocumented immigrant sits after being detained by U.S. Border Patrol agents some 60 miles north of the U.S. Mexico border on July 23, 2014 near Falfurrias, Texas. She said she was from Guatemala, one of a group of immigrants Customs and Border Protection agents caught moving north through dense brushland in Brooks County. By John Moore/Getty Images)

26 Jul 23:43

Taxing Our Way To Equality

by Andrew Sullivan

inequality-800x656

Zachary Goldfarb presents the findings of a Tax Policy Center analysis showing that by one measure, income inequality has declined appreciably in the Obama era:

Today, the average after-tax income of a member of the top 1 percent of earners is $1.12 million. The average after-tax income of someone in the bottom 20 percent is $13,300. That means the average person at the top takes home 84 times the income that the average person in the bottom takes home. Now, consider what it would be like if none of President Obama’s tax policy changes had happened: not the upper-income tax hikes negotiated at the beginning of last year, not the upper-income tax increases imposed by the Affordable Care Act, not the low-income tax credits enacted in the 2009 stimulus and later renewed.

In this alternative universe, the average member of the top 1 percent would take home $1.2 million, or 6.5 percent more in income, according to a new analysis. The average member of the bottom 20 percent would bring home $13,100, or 1.2 percent less in income. As a result, the average member of the 1 percent would take home 91 times what the average person in the bottom would bring home. If you’ve wondered whether Obama has made any headway at reducing income inequality, here’s evidence that he has.

For Jordan Weissmann, this finding illustrates the importance of measuring inequality both before and after taxes and transfers:

Between the tax changes and health reform, Council of Economic Advisers Chairman Jason Furman argues that the administration has undone “more than a decade” of growing inequality. And he has a point. Liberals prefer talking about pre-tax inequality in large part because it’s a raw reading of how egalitarian our economy is—it tells us how bad the income gap would be were it not for Washington’s intervention. But looking at post-tax-and-transfer inequality tells us how much more work needs to be done to even outcomes—and whether the government’s interventions are having an effect. Both sets of numbers tell us important stories. One says the rich are still pulling away from the rest of us. The other says that the administration has managed, ever so slightly, to pull them back.

25 Jul 12:24

“The Worst Quarter Since The Last Recession Ended”

by Andrew Sullivan

GDP

That’s how Neil Irwin reads the new GDP numbers:

The Commerce Department revised its estimates of first-quarter gross domestic product Wednesday to show that the economy contracted at a 2.9 percent annual rate. A combination of shrinking business inventories, terrible winter weather and a surprise contraction in health care spending drove the first-quarter decline, which is the worst since the first quarter of 2009, when the economy shrank at a 5.4 percent rate.

And that contraction is worse than expected; forecasters had predicted only negative 1.8 percent. Ben Casselman has more:

Last month, I noted that negative quarters are rare outside of recessions. Quarters this bad are even rarer. There have been only two other non-recessionary quarters since World War II when the economy shrank at a rate over 2 percent. Both times, the economy entered a recession the following quarter.

That doesn’t mean we’re about to fall back into a recession. On several other occasions, negative quarters were followed by a strong rebound. Just a few years ago, for example, U.S. GDP fell 1.3 percent in the first quarter of 2011, then bounced back to post a 3.2 percent growth rate in the second quarter.

Then again, it’s worth remembering that we’re notoriously bad at predicting recessions. In fact, we aren’t even very good at knowing when we’re in one. The semi-official arbiters at the National Bureau of Economic Research didn’t identify the most recent recession until December 2008, by which point it had been underway for a year; they didn’t pick up on the 2001 recession until it was over. If we were in a recession now, we might not know it.

But Danielle Kurtzleben isn’t too worried:

Weather accounted for somewhere between 50 and 100 percent of the GDP pullback, says PNC senior economist Gus Faucher. When polar vortexes and multiple feet of snow keep people stuck at home, they just can’t get out to buy groceries or see the doctor. That’s only a temporary hit to the economy — everyone has to go to the doctor and buy food again at some point. …

Broadly speaking, the job market isn’t growing as fast as we’d like it, but it didn’t seem to pull back in the first quarter. And though healthcare helped pull GDP downward in the first quarter, even employment in that industry didn’t appear to take a hit:

Screen_Shot_2014-06-25_at_11.58.51_AM

Danny Vinik details the dip in healthcare spending:

[The new GDP data] may be a case of bad news that’s not so bad – and maybe even good.

The reason why consumer spending fell is that health care spending decreased by 1.4 percent in the first quarter. In fact, in the BEA’s second estimate, health care spending contributed 1.01 percent to the growth rate. Under the third estimate, it subtracted 0.16 percent. In other words, health care spending went from a strong contributor to GDP growth to a detractor from it – all in a quarter when millions of Americans gained health insurance.

Daniel Gross wonders what caused that 0.16 revision:

It could be that people were hoarding medicines and avoiding going to the doctor during the cold weather. Or it could be that many newly insured people delayed going to see the doctor, buying medicine, or having procedures done in January, February, or March until their health-care premiums were fully processed by the state and federal exchanges in April. (Remember, April 1 was the deadline for signups under the Affordable Care Act). It could be that doctors are rationing health care—refusing to schedule appointments. Or it could be that many people are actually paying less for health care because they have insurance—i.e., seeing doctors with a $25 co-pay instead of going to the emergency room.

Clearly, the implementation of Obamacare is disrupting and disturbing the way that health-care services are being priced and consumed. In the first quarter, that led to lower spending—either through lower utilization, or lower prices, or some combination thereof.

Matt O’Brien calls that decline in healthcare spending “good news for our long-term budget, but bad news for our short-term growth”:

Still, this is something of the soft bigotry of a slow recovery’s expectations. The economy should be able to withstand some bad weather and bad inventories without falling back into negative territory. And it should be growing faster now to make up for that slower growth before, if the first quarter really was a blip.

Suderman gets snarky:

At the end of April, when the monthly GDP report found a sluggish, barely growing economy that had expanded by just 0.1 percent in the first quarter of the year, former White House Press Secretary Jay Carney found the good news. Health care spending was up, way up, thanks to Obamacare. The Bureau of Economic Analysis (BEA) had found that health spending had grown by 9.9 percent, the fastest growth of any quarter since 1980. The health law was working—and had saved the economy! … This was a bit rich coming from the same White House that had argued for years that the health law would hold health spending in check.

But now there’s another problem: Health spending appears not to have grown at a record rate during the first quarter of the year. It didn’t grow at all. In fact, it shrank by 1.4 percent, according to a revision released today by the BEA. … Perhaps, however, the White House, in its boundless optimism, will find the upside: The administration can now go back to arguing that Obamacare is working because it’s causing health care spending to shrink.

Matt Phillips looks ahead:

We’ll have to wait until the Census Bureau’s next services survey report in September to see whether medical care usage actually does pick up. That would stand to reason. Government estimates of increased healthcare spending were “probably more early than wrong,” wrote Morgan Stanley economic analysts in research notes. “Coverage has, in fact, expanded significantly this year, and that should support higher healthcare spending.”

Drum isn’t too optimistic:

Everyone is brushing off [the GDP decline] because other economic signals suggest it was a one-off event. And maybe so. But even if it is, it probably knocks about 1 percent off the full-year figure compared to a more normal growth rate of, say, at least 2 percent. The only way it turns out to be a nothingburger is if this number really is an anomaly and the economy makes up for it with supercharged growth for the rest of the year.

I have my doubts about that. I just don’t buy the tired excuse that the Q1 number was weather related. Something happened.

(Chart from Benen)

19 Jul 18:36

A GIFted Artist

by Andrew Sullivan

dish_oamulflowersgif2

MessyNessy profiles the GIF artist Oamul, particularly praising his On the Road series:

Oamul is a talented young illustrator and animator from China who brings his hand-drawn illustrations to life in these enchanting GIFs. His subject matter ranges from things he sees, hears and experiences on his travels and in his daily life to his favourite movie scenes….

In an interview last year, Oamul talked about how he became an illustrator:

When did you first discover you liked illustration? What were your influences?

When I was a kid, I saw my sister had drawn a picture about Sailor Moon. At that time, I wanted to draw things that I enjoyed and liked, so I began to use a pen to sketch everyday.

How was your design education? Were you formally educated in design, or was it just a hobby?

After my parents discovered I was gifted at drawing, they decided to send me to formally learn art. When I went to university though, I chose Interior Design. Although interior design is very different from what I create now, it still has a big influence in my work. After I graduated, I learnt 3D animation in a computer game company. Those experiences were crucial in influencing my work today.

What do you think of Design and illustration in China? Do you think it has its own style, or do you think that it is still influenced by the West?

I think today, China’s illustration is becoming more and more diverse, all designers having their own style. But we are still learning all the time from many influences all over the world.

See more of his work here.

19 Jul 17:00

Teaching To The Text

by Andrew Sullivan

Meredith Broussard argues that standardized tests measure “specific knowledge contained in specific sets of books: the textbooks created by the test makers”:

All of this has to do with the economics of testing. Across the nation, standardized tests come from one of three companies: CTB McGraw Hill, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, or Pearson. These corporations write the tests, grade the tests, and publish the books that students use to prepare for the tests. Houghton Mifflin has a 38 percent market share, according to its press materials. In 2013, the company brought in $1.38 billion in revenue.

Put simply, any teacher who wants his or her students to pass the tests has to give out books from the Big Three publishers. If you look at a textbook from one of these companies and look at the standardized tests written by the same company, even a third grader can see that many of the questions on the test are similar to the questions in the book. In fact, Pearson came under fire last year for using a passage on a standardized test that was taken verbatim from a Pearson textbook.

Jarvis DeBerry adds:

If standardized tests are going to be based on textbooks that school systems can’t afford, [Broussard] writes, then you can guarantee that poor school districts are going to fail. She points out that in the 2012-13 school year, a school in Southwest Philadelphia used a reading curriculum by Houghton Mifflin called the Elements of Literature. The textbook paired with that curriculum costs $114.75. The school’s entire textbook budget per child? $30.30.

Update from a reader:

So we’ve gone from “teaching to the test” to “teaching to the text?” What’s the difference? None, actually! And what’s wrong with either of them? Why would you NOT want to test for the success of what you’ve taught or trained students to do? It’s absurd that this would even be a question.

Would you give a test in physics for a class in English? Well, maybe if you wanted to test the student on the reading of physics, but in order to do that you have to be able to understand physics. Reading is for one of two things – pleasure or gaining knowledge – and in order to comprehend one of the key elements is background knowledge.

Background knowledge, or rather the lack of it, is the root of the reading problem. If a child from an impoverished area has never heard of let alone seen about painting a fence, how can they even understand the concept?

Standardized testing is a problem. Personally, I believe it should never be used in measurement for evaluating. It should be a tool to decide what is missing and what needs to be the next step. Politicians and corporations are responsible for the evaluating turn. The tests are written for recall and regurgitation. They do not show what a student is capable of accomplishing.

The Common Core has been assailed for many different reasons. The #1 we’ve seen is parents not understanding the questions. Louis C.K. made a big deal because of a math problem his daughter had that he couldn’t understand. He said there was no answer. There was an answer, but he was looking for 2+2=4 and the question asked why the student had solved the question incorrectly. No one tried to even identify the multiple problem solving steps that had to be in play. Well, at least the adults didn’t; all they did was bitch because they actually felt stupid – well, ignorant actually. A 4th grader would be trained to answer the problem; the first step they have to take is to solve the stated question correctly; they then work back to see what the other student did incorrectly. This, in itself, is invaluable.

Education has this problem of reinventing the wheel. It usually comes from the insistence of outside influences. Influences that have no idea of what they speak. Something interesting has been quietly happening in schools around the country. Teachers & principals are re-finding John Dewey’s Progressive Education. They are also being incredibly successful, not only with the kids but also doing better & better on the standardized tests.

Oh, if you look closely at Common Core, you can discover that most of it is based on John Dewey. Here is a link to Wiki. If you just look at the bullet points at the beginning, you can get an idea of what it’s about - Progressive Education.

10 Jul 17:03

Viva La Resistance

by Andrew Sullivan

NSFW, because George Carlin:

The “hygiene hypothesis” posits that “for many children in the wealthy world, a lack of exposure to bacteria, viruses, and allergens prevents the normal development of the immune system, ultimately increasing the chance of disorders within this system down the road”:

“A child’s immune system needs education, just like any other growing organ in the human body,” says Erika von Mutius, a pediatric allergist at the University of Munich and one of the first doctors to research the idea. “The hygiene hypothesis suggests that early life exposure to microbes helps in the education of an infant’s developing immune system.” Without this education, your immune system may be more prone to attacking the wrong target — in the case of autoimmune diseases, yourself.

It’s still a matter of active debate among scientists, but evidence for the idea has been slowly accumulating over time, both in humans and animal subjects. Most recently, a new study published earlier this month found that babies who grow up in houses with higher levels of certain bacteria — carried on cockroach, mouse, and cat dander — are less likely to develop wheezing and asthma by the age of three.

24 Jun 00:21

Engaging The G

by Andrew Sullivan

Readers shift the discussion away from trans folk:

I’m writing in regards to your post about the gay guy who thinks of himself as a regular guy who happens to be gay. I feel the same. After coming out later in life (I was 26), I shifted in a way so that most of my friends were gay. I suppose it was a way to surround myself with people who I knew wouldn’t judge me. But then I realized that I couldn’t relate to most of the gays around me. I met my (now) husband and we slowly drifted away from virtually everyone we know who is gay. I found, more and more, that gay men seemed to use being gay as an excuse for being adults who refused to grow up. They continued to be bitchy, like in high school, and do nothing but talk about being gay.

I’m a regular guy who happens to be gay. I like beer, scotch on the rocks, shooting things, heavy metal (and classical music too), and watching Star Wars. I find that I don’t relate to the gays who conform to the stereotype. Heck, my entire bachelor party was with straight guys – and we had a blast. Where are all the “normal” gay men??

Another:

I related a whole lot to the reader. Unlike him, I’m perfectly happy identifying myself as gay, and in some ways I’m not 100% traditionally masculine, least of all in my affinity for Glee (lol), but I’ve never been comfortable with the word “queer”, don’t really have the “gay voice” that you discussed in another recent thread, and my clothes and hairstyle are pretty traditionally masculine, so people I meet for the first time often don’t recognize my being gay without my telling them so.

Since the sexuality of other masculine gay guys is as inconspicuous to me as mine is to them, it can make it pretty difficult for me to pick up guys, especially since masculine guys tend to be the only kind of guys that I’m attracted to (a fact which I can no more help than my being gay in the first place, but which nonetheless often elicits disapproval from the activist-types). It was nice to hear that an older gay man in a similar boat has been able to find venues to meet other gender-conforming masculine gay guys. I need to find some outlets like that myself. I’m not uncomfortable in gay bars or gay-rights campus groups and have made plenty of friends at both, but neither one has been great for me in terms of meeting guys who I’m romantically attracted to and compatible with.

These sentiments came in for a pounding from the in-tray. Some extracts:

Your reader’s issue isn’t with gay men; it’s with effeminate gay men, which he conflates with all gay men. The cognitive dissonance is astounding. He first says there’s nowhere in the gay community for guys like him, then proceeds to list an incredible array of sub-communities and support groups that totally invalidate his point. The gay community is a big, diverse, mess of a community. No one type of person “owns” gay.

But it was the MSM ["Men who have Sex with Men"] comment that killed me.

The reason that label exists is because the people who employ it see their orientation as purely sexual. It isn’t about love, it’s about SEX with men. The idea that any gay man would think that label should be applied to themselves is a sure sign that they have not yet come to terms with their orientation. If you think sex trumps love, then you don’t really understand masculinity at all. You’re chasing a caricature.

Another response:

There is no totalitarian “gay establishment” that tells you, or me, or your reader that we must tow a gender-neutral line or be other than who we are. That may have been somewhat more the case 25 years ago, when your reader came out, but it is not the case today.

I think that somewhat exaggerates the change – but the change surely has occurred, in part because my original reader might well have stayed in the closet, or married a woman, in the past. To reiterate my own position: I think there is plenty of space within the gay population for every single way of being homosexual. And that includes the participants in RuPaul’s Drag Race and my more traditionally masculine emailers. The trick is to make everyone feel at home, and sometimes we don’t always do that, and not with malice. Another reader adds:

And those “DL” athletes and celebrities who “haven’t been offered anything worth coming out to?” Yeah, they’re just chickenshit closet cases. It’s 2014, not 1974. We have openly-gay pro athletes and soldiers. Gay identity is what you make of it. You can be out in a traditionally-masculine field without committing career suicide. If you’re not in immediate danger of homophobic violence or financially dependent on bigoted assholes, staying in the closet is simple cowardice.

21 Jun 13:25

Who Is Obamacare Covering?

by Andrew Sullivan

Uninsured Numbers

Sarah Kliff passes along the finding, from a new Kaiser survey, that a “slim majority of Obamacare’s private insurance enrollees were uninsured when they signed up for coverage.” But other organizations have produced strikingly different results:

Here’s the thing that’s so frustrating in trying to sort out this question about who was uninsured: the variation between different groups’ estimates is just massive. When you dig into the methodology, as health wonks are wont to do, you start to notice that the surveys happened at different times, with different people who were asked different questions. …

The new Kaiser Family Foundation survey is the most up-to-date, randomized study that specifically asks people to identify what coverage source they had prior to signing up on the exchange. This separates it from RAND (whose survey data misses the end of open enrollment), McKinsey (which asks a slightly different question) and the Obama administration estimate (it leaves out anyone buying through a state exchange).

Drum examines the surveys’ methodologies:

The basic problem is that the pool of uninsured has a lot of churn: people are covered for a while, then lose their jobs, then get another job, etc. So if you had insurance last August, but lost your job and signed up for Obamacare in November, do you count as previously uninsured? According to McKinsey, no. According to Kaiser, yes.

My own guess is that the Kaiser methodology is probably the closest of the four to what we’d normally think of as “uninsured,” and its sample size is big enough to be reliable.

Cohn focuses on another aspect of the survey – premium costs:

Strictly among people who had coverage previously, the “winners” (people who say they paying less for insurance now) outnumber the “losers” (people who say they are paying more for insurance now). Specifically, 46 percent of respondents who had insurance before Obamacare said they were spending less on their new monthly premiums, while 39 percent said they were spending more. That’s not much of a difference, given the survey’s margin of error. But it certainly doesn’t suggest, as the law’s opponents frequently claim, that most people are worse off. And when you consider that many people who were buying insurance on their own previously are now getting Medicaid, which is basically free, it would appear that there are clearly more winners than losers, at least when it comes to what people are paying up front for coverage.

Adrianna McIntyre expects premiums will go up next year but at a lower rate than before:

The people who enroll in health insurance in future years are expected to be healthier than the people enrolled today. The penalty for not carrying insurance is modest this year: $95 or 1 percent of income for an individual, whichever’s higher. That gets scaled up over the next few years, compelling more people to purchase insurance.

The people who declined to sign up for insurance — and pay the penalty instead — are probably healthy; had they been uninsured and sick, they would have taken advantage of new coverage options under Obamacare. As these healthier people enroll in coverage, the average health of the insured population gets better, and insurance gets cheaper.

Recent Dish on Obamacare’s costs here.

18 Jun 20:58

The Neocons’ Very Own Reality

by Andrew Sullivan

Simon Jenkins is aghast at the neocons’ push – even now – for more intervention:

It beggars belief that further military intervention by the west in Iraq is now being considered. Yet the yearning to intervene, to bomb someone even if just to “send a message”, shows how thin is the veneer of sanity cloaking great power aggression. War still has the best tunes. How glorious it must seem to certain politicians to somehow turn 10 years of disaster in Iraq into a final victory.

That is why the causes and effects of 2003 must be nailed to the wall, time and again. Trillions of dollars were spent and tens of thousands of people died, for no good reason then and no good reason now. It was a total disgrace.

Torture champion Marc Thiessen’s latest nonsense is a text-book case of creating a reality that can simply erase the record of catastrophe:

First, [Obama] withdrew all U.S. forces from Iraq — allowing the defeated terrorists to regroup and reconstitute themselves.

Second, he failed to support the moderate, pro-Western opposition in neighboring Syria — creating room for ISIS to fill the security vacuum. ISIS took over large swaths of Syrian territory, established a safe haven, used it to recruit and train thousands of jihadists, and prepared their current offensive in Iraq.

The result: When Obama took office, the terrorists had been driven from their safe havens; now they are on threatening to take control of a nation. Iraq is on the cusp of turning into what Afghanistan was in the 1990s — a safe haven from which to plan attacks on America and its allies.

To respond: first, Bush decided that 2011 was the drop-dead date for ending the occupation, Obama refused to keep any troops there without any immunity from prosecution, and the Iraqi government insisted we leave entirely. Second, there was no way to separate out the “moderate” Sunni elements in Syria without possibly empowering far more extreme groups, like ISIS. Look at how easily ISIS has been able to arm itself with US vehicles and weapons from the surrendering Iraqi army. How much easier if we had just given them to their confreres in Syria instead. Third, while there is a danger of a Islamist haven, ISIS is not al Qaeda, has its hands extremely full, and is focused primarily on its own region, not the US. Ezra points his finger at the real culprits behind the continuing disintegration of the country the neocons broke:

The totality of the Bush administration’s failure in Iraq is stunning. It is not simply that they failed to build the liberal democracy they wanted. It’s that they ended up strengthening theocracies they feared.

And it’s not simply that they failed to find the weapons of mass destruction that they worried could one day be passed onto terrorists. It’s that a terrorist organization now controls a territory about the size of Belgium, raising the possibility that America’s invasion and occupation inadvertently trained the fighters and created the vacuum that will lead to al Qaeda’s successor organization.

And all this cost us trillions of dollars and thousands of American lives.

Meanwhile, Saletan compares GOP rhetoric on welfare and foreign policy. He posits that “the principle of self-reliance extends far beyond welfare”:

Republicans say ISIS is filling the “vacuum” left by Obama’s withdrawal. But the vacuum—which is really just another name for how the world works when we’re not there—affects other parties, too. As ISIS advances on Baghdad, Shiite militias are assembling. Iran is stepping in. Turkey may be next. The conflict could explode into sectarian civil war, though some Shiite leaders are trying to avoid that. But what’s striking is how quickly, in our absence, the threatened elements of Iraqi society and the region are mobilizing to stop ISIS. They’re doing it because they have to. If they don’t, nobody else will.

Yes, ISIS is a threat to us. We’ll be safer if it’s crippled. But are we really the best people to do the job? For nearly a decade, we tried to manage Iraq. What we got was dysfunction. Maybe it’s time to let Iraq learn to manage itself.

Surely this is a contribution the Tea Party could make to the national security debate, if they weren’t consumed with Obama-hatred. Isn’t plying a sectarian government with aid and training a way of making them dependent on us, of encouraging them not to take full responsibility for their own country and their own future? When will the Tea Party right begin to see their incoherence on the question of welfare dependency at home and abroad? I guess we’ll see if Rand Paul can gain traction from this moment against the torturers, invaders and micro-managers of the neocon clique. Or if he’s a lot of talk and very few cattle.

16 Jun 23:17

Happy Bloomsday!

by Andrew Sullivan

Mr Bloom walked unheeded along his grove by saddened angels, crosses, broken pillars, family vaults #UlyssesPic http://t.co/xBE6sbCOo4
James Joyce (@UlyssesLives) June 16, 2014

Every June 16, fans of James Joyce celebrate his famously demanding Ulysses, which takes place on this day in 1904. Jonathan Goldman assures revelers that the point of celebrating Bloomsday “is to recognize the stature of a book without necessarily comprehending it. All you need to understand is its un-understandability.” Dan Chiasson explains why the date particulary appealed to Joyce:

By setting the novel on the day his first inklings of it formed, Joyce ensured that the book would always be, whatever else it would be, a book about its own conception and growth. He had dreamed of writing “Ulysses” since at least 1904, the year two things happened:

a Dublin Jew named Alfred Hunter dusted him off after a brawl and walked him all the way home; and a beautiful barmaid, Nora Barnacle, on their first date—the first Bloomsday—slid her hand “down down inside my trousers,” as Joyce reminded her, later, in a letter, “and pulled my shirt softly aside … and touched my prick with your long tickling fingers and frigged me slowly till I came off through your fingers.”

Each of these courtesies was performed by a stranger for a stranger, though Nora would become Joyce’s lifelong companion and eventual wife. Neither one was an act of specific personal connection or love. Kindness, sexual willingness, patience, forbearance, and especially “equanimity”—that beautiful word that so comforts [character Leopold] Bloom in the end, and perhaps the most important word in the novel—all exist quite independent of personal bonds and the private economies of friendship, family, and marriage. That these lovely traits exist outside of the exchange market of human frailties—that they exist at all, in fact—would have been news to Henry James or, for that matter, to Jane Austen; it is almost hard to conceive of the novel as a genre without the idea that human virtues are always tactical, and spent with the expectation of handsome returns. It may sound sappy, but for me “Ulysses” is chiefly valuable as the most moving tribute in literature to kindness.

Jason Diamond offers tips on how to celebrate the occasion “without totally embarrassing yourself”:

The first, and most important thing, of course, is drinking. If you’re an American, then congratulations — this is one of those rare instances when you can accept a pint of beer in an Irish pub with a hearty “Cheers,” and not have it sound touristy and amateurish.

What do you order? Obviously, there’s always Guinness, but consider this delicious act of sacrilege: change things up this year and drink something like Left Hand’s wonderful Milk Stout. Your beer, of course, should also be accompanied by a whiskey, and this is where you can’t accept any substitutes. No Kentucky bourbon, no scotch from Scotland: Irish whiskey only. So if somebody says they’re getting a Jameson on the rocks, you had better order the same damn thing. To be honest, you could, in theory, get away with drinking anything today — but we’d suggest is you stay away from cider, since that stuff made Bloom gassy. The most important thing is to get at least a solid two drinks in your belly before you’ll be ready for a reading from the book itself.

But James S. Murphy considers such celebrations a “travesty”:

It would be nice to think that swelling readership of Ulysses drives the Bloomsday boom, but it’s more likely that Bloomsday provides an opportunity for cultural validation that’s about as substantial as sharing an author quote on Instagram. Reading Ulysses is a slow, immersive, and ultimately private experience; Bloomsday is a social-media-ready event, where like-minded people convene to celebrate their own taste.

And yet, the silliness might not have bothered Joyce so much. If anything, the aspect of Bloomsday that would have bothered him is its holiness.  Bloomsday celebrations treat Joyce too much like a saint and his book too much like a gospel to be revered first and read later, if at all. By placing Ulysses on a pedestal, we lose sight of both its vulgar origins and its power to tell us deep truths about our world and ourselves precisely by keeping the earthy and obscene aspects of ourselves in view.

Listen to Joyce fans around the world read from the book here. Recent Dish on the author here, here, and here.

12 Jun 19:00

Our Cold Civil War Intensifies, Ctd

by Andrew Sullivan

In 2007, I gamely hoped that Obama’s liberal pragmatism could somehow overcome the deep cultural and political split in the country that had opened up in the Vietnam era and had defined the entire boomer generation. I remain of the view that Obama’s policies have remained moderate – on healthcare, immigration, the deficit, and foreign policy. But the cultural churn of polarization has only intensified in the country at large. In fact, the polarization seems to have intensified in the Obama years, rather than moderating, as a fascinating Pew survey 856551367of 10,000 subjects reveals. The GIF at the right can mesmerize after a while, but watch it a few times.

The late 1990s sees a shift by both parties to the relative left, and in the early Bush years, there’s a shift by the GOP to the left as well. Since this is a measure of consistently liberal or conservative positions, it may be scrambled by the response to 9/11. The only three years in which the parties showed signs of moving toward each other were 2000 – 2003. From 2004 on, the GOP moves relentlessly rightward, while the Democrats move to the left more firmly from 2010 onward. Yes the two seem to reinforce each other in their mutual alienation.

But what’s truly depressing is how ideology now trumps virtually everything else in American politics. Geography matters less and less in sustaining mixed and moderate electoral districts; gerrymandering has intensified the process; but deeper cultural shifts help explain a lot of the rest. The urban/rural divide is a chasm; as is the racial one. And ideology seeps deep into everyday life. So inter-marriage between the Union and the Confederacy the consistent Democrats and the consistent Republicans is becoming rarer:

Three-out-of-ten (30%) consistent conservatives say they would be unhappy if an immediate family member married a Democrat and about a quarter (23%) of across-the-board liberals say the same about the prospect of a Republican in-law.

The reason that I don’t think a cold civil war is too hyperbolic is the following chart. It doesn’t just show increased differences between the two parties; it reveals profound and growing antipathy, with each of the respective partisans believing the other is a threat to the country as a whole:

PP-2014-06-12-polarization-0-02

The GOP is more hostile to the Dems today than in the Gingrich revolution year of 1994. What that tells me is that polarization and radicalism can simply create their own mutually reinforcing vortexes of intensity. There’s one kinda bright side to this picture of two nations somehow entangled with one another. And that’s that there is a middle of the country that is not so extreme:

The majority do not have uniformly conservative or liberal views. Most do not see either party as a threat to the nation. And more believe their representatives in government should meet halfway to resolve contentious disputes rather than hold out for more of what they want.

The trouble is: this group is the least likely to vote or participate in the political process:

PP-2014-06-12-polarization-0-03

Christopher Ingraham puts it succinctly:

Because of their sheer numbers this group of mixed-preference voters could – should! – be the core of a centrist coalition. But because of their disengagement, their influence on the political process is diminished relative to the more partisan voices in the mix. This tells me that polarization may be driven as much by apathy at the middle of the political spectrum as it is by energy at the more raucous ideological ends. Instead of a silent majority we have a silent plurality – and as Washington goes to war with itself, it’s not paying attention.

And you wonder why cable news is now so shrill. It’s not just the fault of Roger Ailes. It’s also us.

31 May 17:04

Chart Of The Day

by Andrew Sullivan

Spending Support

Larry Bartels highlights the fact “that rich and poor Americans disagree about government spending to an extent virtually unmatched elsewhere in the world.”:

In 2006, just before the onset of the Great Recession, the International Social Survey Programme (ISSP) asked people in 33 countries about “some things the government might do for the economy.” In the United States, 63 percent of the respondents favored (or strongly favored) “cuts in government spending” to boost the economy, while only 13 percent opposed (or strongly opposed) such cuts. But that was not so unusual; in 15 other affluent democracies, an average of 57 percent of the respondents favored cuts in government spending.

What is much more remarkable about the pattern of opinion in the United States is the extent to which it was polarized along class lines.

28 May 00:48

The War Over The Core, Ctd

by Andrew Sullivan

Jennifer Rubin sighs over growing right-wing distrust of the Common Core:

The rationale for Common Core is that state standards, even the best of them, are far too low, leaving our kids in the dust behind international competition. (“A 2009 study by the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) found no state had reading proficiency standards as rigorous as those on the highly respected and internationally benchmarked NAEP 4th grade exam. Only one state, Massachusetts, had an 8th grade test as rigorous as the NAEP exam. Worse still, a large number of states had reading proficiency standards that would qualify their students as functionally illiterate on NAEP.”)

At a dinner with a group of journalists a year or so ago, [Jeb] Bush explained to us that while middle-class families in good school districts may think they are getting a good education, a significant percentage of their kids are not college ready and, in any case, match up poorly against foreign competition.

Jamelle Bouie, who doesn’t agree with Rubin very often, describes the opposition from conservatives as “near-senseless”:

Common Core was a bipartisan initiative, with support from the vast majority of governors, including Louisiana’s Bobby Jindal, who has since reversed course as he preps for a potential 2016 presidential run. What happened to make Common Core an object of hate for conservative activists? The answer is easy: “The Republican revolt against the Common Core,” noted the New York Times on Saturday, “can be traced to President Obama’s embrace of it.” This near-senseless Republican reaction is just one part of a growing tribalism that’s consumed the whole of conservative politics.

Steve Benen points out:

It’s become so bad that in January, Common Core supporters practically begged the White House not to mention the standards in the State of the Union address, fearing it would necessarily push Republicans further away.

“It’s imperative that the president not say anything about the Common Core State Standards,” Michael Petrilli, executive vice president of the Thomas B. Fordham Institute, said at the time, adding, “If he cares more about the success of this initiative than credit-taking, he will skip over it.”

Obama obliged, but it didn’t help.

But as Catherine Gewertz observes, the Common Core is a fait accompli in most states, “all but a handful” of which are set to administer exams based on those standards for the first time next year:

The two state consortia designing new tests for the standards – with the help of $360 million in federal aid – have sought to fundamentally reshape the way learning is assessed. And yet, over time they have scaled back some of their original testing plans in the face of political, economic, and technical constraints. Those realities have led consortium officials – who once made lofty promises about the revolutionary nature of their forthcoming tests—to represent them more humbly as “version 1.0” of assessments that are a vast improvement over what most states currently use, and will keep getting better in the coming years.

Meanwhile, Stephen Sawchuck reports that college education programs are not all on the same page when it comes to integrating the Core standards into their teacher training:

Teacher education has been under many pressures of late, including calls to improve student-teachingclassroom-management courseworkinstruction, and program outcomes. The addition of the Common Core into that mix promises to be especially volatile, because it stands to reshape teacher education curricula to a greater degree than the other efforts. And that fuels concerns about academic freedom, as well as long-standing debates about whether programs’ main duty is to prepare teachers capable of carrying out specific, state-approved courses of study – or, as others argue, to prepare teachers to be knowledgeable about competing theories and to be critical actors in education policy.

Update from a reader:

Not only right-wing people are opposing Common Core. I am a former public school teacher and as liberal as they come.  I put my kids into school this year, after home schooling them for many years. I have to say that the Common Core math instruction is truly insane.  Parents can’t even help their child with homework half the time because getting the right answer is not enough.  You have to do it the “right way”. And the right way is often crazy and filled with multiple steps well beyond anything needed to get to the answer. I have friends who are teachers or just parents and vote Democrat or even Green that feel the same way. I am waiting to see if it gets better or improvements are made, but we might be going back to home schooling in the future.

Previous Dish on the Common Core here and here.

20 May 17:49

Lazy, Happy Americans

by Jonah Shepp
by Jonah Shepp

exceptionalism-02

Perusing the latest World Values Survey, Christopher Ingraham highlights some of the findings about how Americans compare to the rest of the world. One shocker:

While we have a reputation for being a country of workaholics, we actually rank the importance of work quite low (36 percent) compared to other countries. Ghanians, Filipinos and Ecuadorians are the biggest workaholics, while again the Dutch are at the bottom of the list. The most important thing, according to Americans? Family. Sure, we may not fully trust that one sketchy uncle, but we love him anyway.

Charles Kenny points to another somewhat surprising finding: most Americans say they are happy:

Americans still report themselves happy, if not quite as much as in the past. The proportion reporting that they are either very happy or rather happy was 91 percent in 1981, climbed to 93 percent in 1999, and fell back to 89 percent in 2011.  In some ways, this suggests remarkable resilience in the face of stagnant incomes and an unemployment rate that almost doubled between the second and third surveys. Unemployment and the related uncertainty has a strong relationship with lower reported wellbeing across the rich world.

On the whole, the global average for people living in surveyed countries has risen. Among the global sample whose data goes back to the early 1980s, the proportion saying they are rather happy or very happy climbed from 71 percent to 84 percent. In the larger sample using data from the early 2000s, the global average reporting happiness climbed from 75 percent to 83 percent.

Zach Beauchamp notices that Germany, Japan, Ukraine, and Taiwan stand out for their citizens’ relative lack of pride, with fewer than 70 percent saying they were proud of their country and fewer than 30 percent saying they were very proud:

Each of those four countries where pride was unusually low has something interesting to it. For Germany and Japan, it suggests that the post-World War II hangups about nationalism may have not quite gone away. Since their defeats, both countries have developed a much more complicated relationship with national pride — in some ways, German and Japanese nationalism run amok were responsible for the whole thing. This sense of national guilt, or at least a wariness of too much national pride, might be making it harder for German and Japanese folk to feel immense amounts of national pride.

In Ukraine, the issue may be the country’s ethno-linguistic divides. … Then there’s Taiwan, whose results are almost certainly about tension with mainland China. 20 percent of Taiwanese outright favor reunification with China, and 43.5 percent of Taiwanese also identify as Chinese (“Zhongguo ren,” which could mean Taiwanese, mainland Chinese, or both). This complicated relationship with the People’s Republic probably explains why Taiwanese people aren’t quite as proud of their country as other peoples are.

19 May 00:07

Is Anyone Beyond Empathy?

by Andrew Sullivan

In an interview about her new book The Empathy ExamsLeslie Jamison addresses whether it’s wrong to empathize with those who’ve made others suffer:

I think that trying to understand someone’s state of being or feeling doesn’t necessitate condoning or agreeing with their point of view. Getting inside someone’s mind doesn’t mean thinking what they think; it only means realizing what they’re thinking. This gets to another question or distinction that has come up in various conversations I’ve had—with psychologists, neuroscientists, anthropologists—about empathy: should we empathize with sociopaths? With evil? And I think we should try precisely because empathy doesn’t have to catalyze complete agreement or convergence—only an entry and a reckoning. Andrew Solomon’s recent New Yorker profile of Peter Lanza—father of Newtown shooter Adam Lanza—is a perfect illustration of this distinction: he offers his readers the chance to empathize fully with this father and yet—also, improbably—with the figure of this boy, whose actions might seem to place him outside the realm of empathy entirely.

On a related note, Joanna Bourke contemplates how pain fosters connection:

Talking about pain is a way of cementing interpersonal bonds: when people ‘suffer with’ their loved ones, they are bearing testimony to their closeness to that person. Witnesses to pain often find the experience agonising themselves, which can lead them to further intimacy with sufferers. This is what Claire Tisdall alluded to in her memoir based on the First World War. Tisdall, a nurse, admitted she’d been ‘burning with the agony of losing a dearly loved brother at Ypres’ and so her ‘feelings towards them [Germans] were less than Christian’. Nevertheless, one day she was given the job of looking after some German prisoners on their way to the hospital. One ‘very young, ashen-faced boy’ with a leg-wound looked up at her and murmured ‘Pain, pain’, an episode about which Tisdall wrote: ‘a bit of the cold ice of hatred in my heart… softened and melted when that white-faced German boy looked up at me and said his one English word – “Pain”.’

More than half a century earlier, the physician Samuel Henry Dickson in his Essays on Life, Sleep, Pain, Etc (1852) put the case more strongly: ‘Without suffering there could be no sympathies,’ he concluded, ‘and all the finer and more sacred of human ties would cease to exist.’ At the very least, pain exposes our fragile connection to other people and serves as a reminder of our need for those around us.

Meanwhile, in a profile of James Doty – who helped form the Center for Compassion and Altruism Research and Education, or CCARE – Bonnie Tsui describes the science behind “helper’s high”:

When we help someone else or give something valuable away, the pleasure centers of the brain, or mesolimbic reward system, activated by stimuli such as sex, food, or money, provides emotional reinforcement. Functional magnetic resonance imaging studies by the National Institutes of Health have shown that the reward centers are equally active when we watch someone give money to charity and when we receive it ourselves; in addition, giving something valuable away activates the subgenual area, a part of the brain that is key in establishing trust and social attachment in humans and other animals, as well as the anterior prefrontal cortex, which is thought to be highly involved in the complexities of altruistic decision-making. What researchers call the “helper’s high” may be aided by the release of endorphins. By virtually every measure of health we know—reducing blood pressure, anxiety, stress, inflammation, and boosting mood—compassion has been shown to help us. These are some of the ways we are encouraged to establish trust and community, which have long been necessary to human survival.

Previous Dish on Jamison here, here, and here.

17 Mar 14:49

Quote For The Day

by Chris Bodenner
by Chris Bodenner

“The honest system of advertising should be but a simple announcement of the offer of goods for the information of those who desire to purchase, in such a manner that they may by seeking find. But in advertising as it now exists, exaggeration is piled on exaggeration, and falsehood is added to falsehood. The world is filled with monstrous lies, and they are thrust upon attention by every possible means. When a man opens his mail in the morning the letter of his friend is buried among these advertising monstrosities. They are thrust under street-doors, and they are offered as you walk the streets. When you read the morning and evening papers, they are spread before you with typographic display; they are placed among the items you desire to read, and they are given false headings, and they begin with decoy paragraphs. … [T]he whole civilized world is placarded with lies, and the moral atmosphere of the world reeks with the foul breath of this monster of antagonistic competition,” - John Wesley Powell, “Competition as a Factor in Human Evolution,” American Anthropologist 1, no. 4 (October 1, 1888): 297–323. Italics mine. Thanks to a reader for flagging. Previous Dish on the early history of sponsored content here.

12 Mar 22:40

Mental Health Break

by Andrew Sullivan

Animal GIFs get an glorious soundtrack:

06 Jan 17:21

The Pentagon Wins The Budget War

by Andrew Sullivan

Defense Budget

Dave Gilson looks at how the budget deal will impact defense spending:

[T]he Pentagon has once more gotten a reprieve from the budget ax: Under Murray and Ryan’s congressional budget deal, the Pentagon will get an additional $32 billion, or 4.4 percent, in 2014, leaving its base budget at a higher level than in 2005 and 2006. (The Department of Defense expects its total 2014 budget, including supplemental war funding, to be more than $600 billion.)

Before the budget deal, some critics of defense spending had been ready to accept sequestration as the blunt, imperfect tool that might force the military to shed some of the bulk it acquired while fighting two of the longest and most expensive wars in our history. Even with the sequester in place, the Pentagon’s base budget was set to remain well above pre-9/11 levels for the next decade, and the military would have taken a far smaller haircut than it did after Vietnam and the Cold War wound down.

Drum chimes in:

In past wars, we usually got a peace dividend afterward as spending returned to its old level. It happened after Vietnam and it happened after the Cold War. But this time it’s stalled. Spending is down a bit from its Bush-era peak, but only a bit. The war on terror, apparently, really is a forever war.

31 Dec 14:16

Mangling A Myth

by Andrew Sullivan

Jordan Jeffers considers how J.R.R. Tolkien approached fiction in The Hobbit:

Tolkien is a storyteller, a myth maker, for he believed that myths demonstrated truth, that truth cannot actually be understood apart from myth. We can have no true vision of the stars unless we can first see them as “songs of living silver,” no true understanding of the earth until we can first understand it as our mother. Our myths matter a good deal, and how we think of elves is of vital importance to how we think of ourselves.

He goes on to argue that such an understanding of Tolkien’s work is what Peter Jackson fails to grasp:

Jackson is neither a communicator nor a mythmaker. He is a spectacle maker, a ringmaster, a showman. And he is very, very good at this. The Hobbit: The Desolation of Smaug manages to be both overwhelmingly big and manageably entertaining, balancing the actions of all the important characters quite deftly, allowing each of them just enough heroic moments to justify their presence in the movie. Basically, Jackson made The Avengers: Middle-Earth, and it is this very bigness that breaks the movie so forcefully from the books.

Tolkien’s book is not a story about superheroes. It’s a story about a hobbit named Bilbo Baggins, one of the smallest of folk, shorter even than the dwarves—a fat, ordinary person who does a lot of brave, ordinary things.

Ethan Gilsdorf unreservedly pans the movie:

As a fan of Tolkien and a fan of Jackson’s first trilogy, it’s difficult to distance myself from my desire for the movie that I’d hoped The Hobbit would deliver. This Hobbit Peter Jackson is less impressive than the Peter Jackson I came to know, respect and love in Lord of the Rings. This is an undisciplined director on display, showing no restraint. To me, The Hobbit: The Desolation of Smaug is too too loud, too fast, too much focused on action and distracting plot threads. I prefer the relative simplicity of Tolkien’s first Hobbit to the over-inflated, overblown, over-the-top epic Jackson aims his bow at here.

Larison also has brutal review, writing that “the second installment in this trilogy is a mockery of Tolkien’s story and insult to the audience”:

It is well-known that Peter Jackson has added a large amount of material to the story of The Hobbit in his quest to expand a short adventure story into a bloated would-be epic, but it is hard to appreciate just how silly and unnecessary these additions are until you see them. Thus we are treated to quite a few characters that never appear in the book, plotlines that have no relevance to the main story, villains that serve no purpose except to remind us of The Lord of the Rings, one pointless love story that functions at most as a lazy plot device, needless rewriting and mangling of key scenes, and frequent additions of battles that exist solely to fill up time in a movie that should never have been made.

But Cromercrox defends the director:

Jackson couldn’t possibly have made a film of The Hobbit that was ‘true’ to the original text – whatever that means, and leaving out the significant alterations Tolkien himself made to it. For, unlike The Hobbit‘s original readership, and unlike Tolkien himself when he wrote it, we can only come to The Hobbit backwards, as it were, through The Lord Of The Rings. There are those for whom nothing but a word-for-word treatment will do. I am not one of them. For one thing, I see no artistic merit in such faithful transliterations. What would be the point? For another, I think that to do have done a vanilla treatment of The Hobbit would be to have done Tolkien and his audience a grave disservice. Jackson’s treatment has its flaws, of course it does. But it’s much deeper, more honest and more Tolkienian in its spirit and execution than many people appreciate.

27 Nov 02:57

Face Of The Day

by Andrew Sullivan

Evacuation Zone Expanded As Mount Sinabung Continues To Erupt

A boy wearing a mask is carried through an area covered by ash after Mount Sinabung erupted spewing volcanic materials at Berastagi village in Karo district, North Sumatra, Indonesia. Mount Sinabung, which has been intermittently erupting since September, erupted eight times in just a few hours on Sunday. Officials have reported of rocks raining down over a large area, forcing thousands to flee their homes. The Indonesian government has called for people living within five kilometres (3.1 miles) of the volcano, on the northern tip of Sumatra Island, to evacuate their homes as the volcanology agency raised the alert level for the volcano to the highest point on a four-stage scale. By Ulet Ifansasti/Getty Images.

17 Nov 15:24

The Economic Disaster In The Wake Of Natural Disaster

by Andrew Sullivan
acowells

classroom

Humanitarian Efforts Continue Following Devastating Super Typhoon

A paper from earlier this year suggests that the economic fallout of a typhoon is often deadlier than the storm itself. Joshua Keating parses it:

In the areas studied, typhoons reduced household incomes by an average of 6.6 percent. Household expenditure decrease 7.1 percent for the average household in the average year. “In general, households reduce their spending the most on expenditures that most closely resemble human capital investments, such as medicine, education and high nutrient foods that include meat, dairy, eggs and fruit,” the authors write. They also argue that for infant mortality, the impact of the economic deprivations caused by the typhoon is far worse than exposure to the storm itself. “11,300 female infants suffer post-typhoon ‘economic deaths’ in the Philippines every year, constituting roughly 13% of the overall infant mortality rate in the Philippines,” they write. This is roughly 15 times higher than the mortality caused by the storm.

Earlier Dish here on whether First World countries should compensate Third World countries for the damage done by hurricanes and typhoons fueled by global warming.

(Photo: Zosimo Moabando sits with his young grandson Kyle on the roof of their damaged house in the devastated town of Tanuan, south of Tacloban, on November 15, 2013 in Philippines. By Kevin Frayer/Getty Images)

30 Aug 00:46

Obama’s March On Washington Speech: Reax

by Tracy R. Walsh
by Tracy R. Walsh

Watch the whole thing here or read the transcript here. Waldman thinks the speech was directed to future generations, not the present:

This seemed to me to be a speech written in the hope it would be read 50 years hence. He’ll get some criticism for not talking about any specific policy issues, but that’s what happens when you swing for the rhetorical fences; you can’t get too bogged down in the mundane arguments of the moment. And what struck me most about it was how little he talked about Martin Luther King. He mentioned him only a few times, but spent much more time talking about ordinary people. This was the running theme of the speech and perhaps what was most important about it.

Brentin Mock agrees that history will be the judge:

Obama’s speech wasn’t, as rapper Keith Murray would say, the most beautifulest thing in the world, but it accomplished what Obama has been setting out to accomplish from the beginning: staying the middle-road course in effort to appeal to the liberals and conservatives among all races in the spirit of perfecting the union. Whether his legacy will reflect a victory on this as an honorable effort or flat failure won’t be determined for decades.

But Jamelle Bouie argues that now is no time for bromides:

What Obama didn’t say, but what the civil rights movement recognized, is that the specific experience of African-Americans requires – and required – a specific response. It’s what motivated the Freedman’s Bureau of Reconstruction, and Martin Luther King Jr.’s call for an inner city “Marshall Plan” during the Second Reconstruction of the 1960s. … [T]he economic legacy of white supremacy is still with us, and—outside of half-measures and rhetoric—we’ve shown little appetite for dealing with it. Simply put, 350 years of bondage and oppression can’t be ameliorated with 50 years of citizenship rights, tepid liberal programs, and “colorblindness.” That includes the president, who works hard to avoid race and its role in shaping our problems.

Jelani Cobb agrees:

That Obama could not – or would not – elucidate his plans to address the intractable realities of race and the economic consequences of those realities, even as he acknowledged that “black unemployment has remained almost twice as high as white unemployment, Latino unemployment close behind,” calls into question the logic of a black Presidency in itself. There was something despair-inducing about the way he said “change doesn’t come from Washington, it comes to Washington,” an oratorical turn that cloaked the fact that something vital was being reneged upon.  …

Obama’s tic for rhetorical evenhandedness meant that even in his discussion of racial inequality, he had to nod to black failings by pointing to “self-defeating riots” and “criminal excuse-making.” And his tendency to chide black America in public appears all the more cynical when compared with his refusal to point to his own responsibilities to that community as Commander-in-Chief.

Peniel E. Joseph is similarly disappointed by Obama’s vagueness:

[W]here were the specifics that would have truly honored the March on Washington? The 250,000 people who gathered 50 years ago were looking for specific solutions, not just soaring rhetoric. Where was the president’s promise to sign a series of executive orders that would focus on anti-poverty efforts or increase access to higher education? Or governmental action that perhaps could ease the transition of ex-offenders back into communities or promote jobs programs, especially in economically devastated urban and rural communities?

Meanwhile, Ed Kilgore detects a hint of despair from the commander-in-chief:

What struck me most about it was that it seemed a wistful tribute by a politician hemmed in by politics to a social movement that alone has the power to overcome the resistance to change. “Change does not come from Washington but to Washington,” Obama said, and while some may view that as an abdication of responsibility, it’s more a plain fact of the long struggle for justice and equality. This passage in particular seemed a recognition that Obama – once thought to be the Joshua who would bring the civil rights movement into the promised land its “Moses generation” could not reach—was passing the torch to the next generation: There’s a reason why so many who marched that day and in the days to come were young, for the young are unconstrained by habits of fear, unconstrained by the conventions of what is. They dared to dream different and to imagine something better. And I am convinced that same imagination, the same hunger of purpose serves in this generation.

And Jeff Shesol believes Obama was holding himself back:

When Obama permits himself to speak about [race and equality] — as he did in his 2004 debut at the Democratic National Convention, in his “race speech” of 2008, in his unscripted remarks about the Trayvon Martin shooting — he conveys an understanding that enriches our own. On each of those occasions it was said, rightly, that only Obama could have given that speech. But one of the disappointments of yesterday’s speech was that it could have been given — credibly, if less movingly — by any one of a number of Democrats. It was largely devoid not only of first-person pronouns, but first-person perspective.

Meanwhile, TNC hears echoes of W.E.B. du Bois:

Like du Bois, Barack Obama has taken the stage at a moment when it is popular to assert that black people are the agents of their own doom. There has never been any other such moment in American history. The response to Trayvon Martin, indeed the response to Barack Obama himself, has been to attack black morality, to highlight black criminality and thus change the conversation from what the American state has done to black people, to what black people have done to themselves. Like Du Bois, Barack Obama believes that this these people have a point. His biographer, David Levering Lewis, says that Du Bois came to look back back on that speech with some embarrassment. I don’t know that Barack Obama will ever reach such a conclusion.

Indeed, if we are – as the president asks us to be – honest with ourselves, we will see that we have elected a president who claims to oppose racial profiling one minute, and then flirts with inaugurating the country’s greatest racial profiler the next. If we are honest with ourselves we will see that we have a president who can condemn the riots as “self-defeating,” but can’t see his way clear to enforce the fair housing law that came out of them. If we are honest with ourselves we will see a president who believes in particular black morality, but eschews particular black policy. It is heart-breaking to see this. But it is also clarifying.


30 Aug 00:41

The Space Between Black And White

by Brendan James
by Brendan James

Michael A. Fletcher bemoans the state of racial inequality 50 years after the March on Washington:

In 1963, blacks families earned 55 cents for every dollar earned by whites. In 2011, blacks earned 66 cents for every dollar earned by whites. The black unemployment rate averaged 11.6 percent between 1963 and 2012, more than double the white jobless rate over that time. The black poverty rate of 55.1 percent was just over three times the white rate in 1959. It dropped to 32.2 percent in 1972. But since then, progress has been slow. In 2011, 27.6 percent of black households were in poverty — nearly triple the 9.8 percent white rate, according to the Census Bureau.

Plumer lays out an array of charts tracking the largely unchanged disparity across the board:

“The wealth gap between minorities and whites has not improved over the past three decades,” reports the Urban Institute. “From 1983 to 2010, average family wealth for whites has been about six times that of blacks and Hispanics — the gap in actual dollars growing as average wealth increased for both groups.” And the Great Recession exacerbated that gap, as blacks and Hispanics were hit especially hard.

wealth-urban

Joseph Ritter examines the role of discrimination:

Black workers seem to earn less because of differences in education or upbringing, while black workers’ employment shortfall appears to be more a factor of employer discrimination. In other words, black workers that manage to get a job appear to earn at comparable rates, controlling for education levels—but regardless of education, they appear to have a harder time getting a job, due to their race.

Derek Thompson homes in on the point about education:

“Today, white adults 25 and older are significantly more likely than blacks to have completed at least a bachelor’s degree,” Pew tells us. On the one hand, the black completion rate as a percentage of the white completion rate has increased from 42% then to 62% now. On the other hand, whites are still far more likely to graduate from a bachelor’s program by 25. This college advantage — reinforced through dual-earner households — translates into higher family incomes, higher home-ownership, and (as a result) higher wealth for whites. There is a reason why so many discussions of social mobility begin and conclude with education.


25 Aug 19:15

Ranking Languages By Weirdness

by Tracy R. Walsh
by Tracy R. Walsh

English is full of maddening irregularities, but by global standards it’s far from the most unusual language:

A recent study by a language-processing company called Idibon tried to establish not which languages are “hard,” but which are “weird.” It used a resource called the World Atlas of Linguistic Structures (WALS). WALS indexes hundreds of languages across hundreds of different features (from whether verbs precede objects to whether the language uses click-sounds as consonants). The Idibon study tried to find which languages use the greatest number of unusual features—i.e., those features shared with few other languages. But for tricky methodological reasons, the study had to limit itself 21 features. The languages that have the least “normal” values of these 21 features are the “weirdest.”

Does English rank high? Not especially. Many non-European languages dominate the top of the list. Of those languages in the Indo-European family with English, German, Swedish, Danish, Dutch, Norwegian, Czech, Spanish, Kurdish and Kashmiri all rank as “weirder.” English is at place number 33 of 239 languages in the “weirdness index.”

However, the study’s authors note that 33 out of 239 is still “highly unusual.” The weirdest tongue is Chalcatongo Mixtec, a tonal language spoken by 6,000 in southern Mexico, while the most conventional language is Hindi.


18 Aug 20:52

“How Would You Kill The N-Word?”

by Andrew Sullivan

Gene Demby explores the question:

Neal Lester, who teaches a course at Arizona State University about the word’s history, says it spread into wider usage during Reconstruction through the early 20th century, when it dotted children’s rhymes and even the names of consumer products. But, he says, “there are ways that the radioactive part was always there.” … Lester makes a common argument: If the word can still be used as a vile epithet, it can’t be considered neutral or harmless in any context.

The black-people-use-it-all-the-time-so-why-can’t-I argument is a popular rejoinder; Dr. Laura Schlessinger made the argument after she was chided for using it on her radio show. But these arguments rest on the idea that the word mutated only recently into its “friend/brother” iteration. But [linguist John] McWhorter says that the reappropriative usage — that is, among blacks to other blacks as a term of endearment — is hardly new, and predates hip-hop by quite a bit. “We’re romanticizing the way the N-word was used in the past,” he says. “You can see 100 years ago that people were using the N-word in the same affectionate way. You can see it in Zora Neale Hurston’s [writing] and not just once.”

In other words, the racially pejorative usage of nigger and the in-group usage of nigger have long existed side by side; the word and our racial dynamics are messy enough for it to simultaneously represent different, disparate ideas.

As to Demby’s question:

“Like other strong slurs, the N-word inherits its toxicity from the larger culture,” [professor Geoffrey] Nunberg says. “So long as there are virulent forms of racism around, they’ll continue to infect the word. It will be weakened only when those attitudes are attenuated, in the same way that social acceptance of Irish-Americans has softened the contempt that was implicit in ‘mick’ in the 19th century.”

He pauses a second. “That could take a while,” Nunberg says.