Andrew Sullivan's Blog, page 117

Patient Four?

[Re-posted and updated from earlier today, at 6.02 pm]

Still a big question mark surrounding a possible case of Ebola in New York is confirmed:

Healthcare Worker Taken To NYC Hospital To Be Tested For Ebola @TPM http://t.co/3fRs0kSVMl

— Josh Marshall (@joshtpm) October 23, 2014

But Mali joins the dreadful club of countries:

First case of Ebola confirmed in Mali: health minister

— Reuters Top News (@Reuters) October 23, 2014

New tweets posted below:

Doctor w.Ebola took subway & taxi to and from bowling alley last night: nytimes.com/2014/10/24/nyr…

—
Tom Jolly (@TomJolly) October 24, 2014

Photo of Dr. Craig Spencer, just tested positive for #Ebola. Photo: Craig Allen Spencer/LinkedIn pic.twitter.com/TP77QEYEHY

— Mike Milhaven (@mike_milhaven) October 24, 2014

Friendly reminder that Ebola is extremely difficult to contract from someone else http://t.co/L5Jv54dPfA

— Anthony De Rosa (@AntDeRosa) October 24, 2014

From one of NYC Ebola patient's neighbors: "I'm not concerned. I've had no fluid exchange with my neighbors." http://t.co/0lmUrs736d

— Chris Geidner (@chrisgeidner) October 24, 2014

No, you didn't catch Ebola on the subway. http://t.co/eS0FAyTRg3

— Nate Silver (@NateSilver538) October 24, 2014

A week ago, NY state health officials said they were planning to train MTA workers on Ebola handling: http://t.co/3iwF0G8UM4

— laura (@nahmias) October 24, 2014

Don't just read Twitter for Ebola info. Instead, read this detailed piece on disease from NewYorker this week: http://t.co/XHufyh2PeW

— laura (@nahmias) October 24, 2014

Cuomo and de Blasio to hold press conference at 9 p.m. at Bellevue

— laura (@nahmias) October 24, 2014

City officials brace for possible Ebola case http://t.co/gaA1I40TqC via @capitalnewyork

— laura (@nahmias) October 23, 2014

Fox News headquarters after hearing there's a new Ebola case. pic.twitter.com/8P3EV0wnP2

— LOLGOP (@LOLGOP) October 24, 2014

Democracy Is Too Good For You Plebs

After a two-hour meeting between Hong Kong officials and protest leaders made no real progress toward resolving the standoff, the demonstrations continued yesterday, including some 200 protesters marching to the home of the territory’s Chief Executive Leung Chun-ying. Many are reportedly outraged over comments Leung made to the foreign press on Monday insisting that open elections were unacceptable because they could give the poor too much of a voice:

In an interview with a small group of journalists from American and European news media organizations, [Leung's] first with foreign media since the city erupted in demonstrations, he acknowledged that many of the protesters are angry over the lack of social mobility and affordable housing in the city. But he argued that containing populist pressures was an important reason for resisting the protesters’ demands for fully open elections. Instead, he backed Beijing’s position that all candidates to succeed him as chief executive, the top post in the city, must be screened by a “broadly representative” nominating committee appointed by Beijing. That screening, he said, would insulate candidates from popular pressure to create a welfare state, and would allow the city government to follow more business-friendly policies to address economic inequality instead.

Beinart ties this in with the debate over voter ID laws and early voting in the US, arguing that “Leung’s views about the proper relationship between democracy and economic policy represent a more extreme version of the views supported by many in today’s GOP”:

In 2010, Tea Party Nation President Judson Phillips observed that “The Founding Fathers … put certain restrictions on who gets the right to vote … one of those was you had to be a property owner. And that makes a lot of sense, because if you’re a property owner you actually have a vested stake in the community.”

In 2011, Iowa Representative Steve King made a similar observation, noting approvingly, “There was a time in American history when you had to be a male property owner in order to vote. The reason for that was, because [the Founding Fathers] wanted the people who voted—that set the public policy, that decided on the taxes and the spending—to have some skin in the game. Now we have data out there that shows that 47 percent of American households don’t pay taxes … But many of them are voting. And when they vote, they vote for more government benefits.”

In 2012, Florida House candidate Ted Yoho remarked, “I’ve had some radical ideas about voting and it’s probably not a good time to tell them, but you used to have to be a property owner to vote.” Yoho went on to win the election.

Philips, King, and Yoho are outliers. Most prominent Republicans would never propose that poor people be denied the franchise. But they support policies that do just that.

Can You Be Agnostic And Catholic?

Concluding a series of conversations with philosophers of religion – many of which we’ve featured on the Dish – Gary Gutting conducts a self-interview, posing and answering the question:

G.G.: How can you be an agnostic and still claim to be a Catholic?

g.g.: Because, despite my agnosticism, I still think it’s worth pursuing the question of whether God exists, and for me the Catholic intellectual and cultural tradition has great value in that pursuit.

G.G.: Still, I don’t see how you can find a place in a church that claims to be the custodian of a divine revelation, when you don’t believe in that revelation.

g.g.: The fundamental revelation is the moral ideal expressed in the biblical account of Christ’s life.

Whether or not that account is historically accurate, the New Testament Christ remains an exemplar of an impressive ideal. Engagement with the practices (ethical and liturgical) inspired by that ideal is the only requirement for being a Catholic. Beyond that, historical narratives and theological doctrines can at least function as useful means of understanding, even for those who aren’t prepared to say that they are true in any literal sense. Some believers may have experiences (or even arguments) that have convinced them that these doctrines are true. But religions — even Catholicism — should have room for those who don’t see it that way.

G.G.: So it seems that you agree with most of your interviewees — believer and nonbelievers — that practice is more important than doctrine.

g.g.: Yes, and I agree with Kitcher that the greatest obstacle facing atheism is its lack of the strong communal practices that characterize religions. People need to believe something that provides a satisfying a way of living their lives, and most people need to find this in a community. So far atheism has produced nothing like the extensive and deep-rooted communities of belief that religion has.

(Image: Christ and the Rich Young Ruler by Heinrich Hofmann, 1889, via Wikimedia Commons)

Amoral Allies In Afghanistan

British MP Rory Stewart reviews Anand Gopal’s No Good Men Among the Living: America, the Taliban, and the War Through Afghan Eyes, which “demonstrates that the failures of the intervention were worse than even the most cynical believed”. In particular, Stewart praises the insight Gopal brings to just how ethically compromised our alliances with Afghan warlords really were:

His long interviews with warlords, his sympathetic accounts of their youth and sufferings, make their crimes only more convincing and more shocking.

Thus he interviews Jan Muhammed at length, tracing his rise from school janitor to major resistance commander in the fight against the Soviet Union. He describes his being imprisoned, the tortures he suffered, and his being marched out to face a Taliban firing squad. He describes how Jan Muhammed saved President Karzai from an ambush in the 1990s and then became his friend and adviser. All this, however, is the introduction to Jan Muhammed ordering death squads to shoot unarmed grandfathers in front of their families, to electrocute and maim, and to steal people’s last possessions, in pursuit of an ever more psychopathic crusade to eliminate anyone associated with the Taliban or indeed with a rival tribe. No one reading Gopal would be tempted to joke about these men again, or present them simply as “traditional power-brokers” and “necessary evils.”

Peter Tomsen compares Gopal’s work to two other recent books on Afghanistan by Carter Malkasian and Carlotta Gall, which focus more on how Pakistan—”the true enemy”, in Gall’s words—was playing a double game all along:

Unlike Malkasian and Gall, Gopal does not depict Pakistan as the primary spoiler in Afghanistan. And he rejects the conventional wisdom that the Afghan war went astray only because Washington took its eye off the ball by shifting its attention to Iraq. He puts forward a different hypothesis: “Following the Taliban’s collapse, al-Qaeda had fled the country. . . . By April 2002, the group could no longer be found in Kandahar — or anywhere else in Afghanistan. The Taliban, meanwhile, had ceased to exist. . . . The terrorists had all decamped or abandoned the cause, yet U.S. special forces were on Afghan soil with a clear political mandate: defeat terrorism.” This, Gopal claims, presented Washington with a puzzle: “How do you fight a war without an adversary?” The answer, he writes, was supplied by Afghan warlords who saw an opportunity to consolidate their power with the unwitting assistance of the Americans — and to get rich in the process.

But Tomsen finds Gopal’s conclusion only halfway convincing:

There is merit to Gopal’s thesis that the U.S. partnership with unpopular warlords helped open the way for the Taliban’s return. But Gopal errs in concluding that the Taliban had “ceased to exist” in Afghanistan after the group’s leaders fled back to their former Pakistani sanctuaries following the U.S.-led invasion. Thousands of Taliban foot soldiers, along with scores of midlevel leaders and commanders, had merely gravitated back to the protection of clans and tribes in Afghan villages and mountains, ready to fight another day. And although Washington’s embrace of warlords helped the Taliban win public support after regrouping, the militants would not have been able to return to Afghanistan in force without Pakistan’s assistance.

Chart Of The Day

Pew finds that men and women experience different sorts of online harassment:

Jake Swearingen sees how “men, on the whole, report higher rates of less severe types of harassment (with the exception of physical threats), while women are more likely to be the focus of the two most frightening forms of it: sexual harassment and stalking.” Elise Hu connects the Pew survey to Gamergate:

The Pew research supports the notion that women are less welcome in the world of online gaming. Survey respondents, who were both men and women, were asked about a series of online platforms — social networks and online commenting forums, for example — and whether they thought those platforms were more welcoming to women, equally welcome to both sexes or more welcoming toward men. The findings show that while most online environments are viewed as equally welcoming, gaming is not. “The starkest results were for online gaming,” the researchers write, where 44 percent of respondents said the platform was more welcoming to men.

But Amanda Hess the limits of Pew’s survey:

Pew asked respondents to elaborate on their experiences with harassment, and the resulting collection of anonymous accounts speaks to the difficulty of arriving at a shared definition of what “harassment” even is.

One respondent said that they were “told that someone should rape me which was horrific since it’s one of the things I fear most”; another “was called a racist on a blog for criticizing administration lies.” One said that a “man I went to high school with was sending me inappropriate photos and comments of a sexual nature”; another experienced “Chiding … for their likes and dislikes in things such as sports, cars, athletes, colleges football teams, things of that nature.” One was “told that if I stopped communicating with this man he would find me and rape me”; another reported that “any feminist who doesn’t already know me has been quick to characterize me as a privileged, misogynistic rape apologist.”

Is being called a rape apologist the same as being threated with rape? No, but it’s all harassment here. Whatever it is, it affects women and men differently; the study found that 38 percent of harassed women said their most recent experience with harassment was “extremely or very upsetting,” compared with 17 percent of harassed men. …

This is not to say that we know that women have it worse on the Internet. It’s to say that, so far, we just don’t know. What the Pew study does show is that the Internet is producing a lot of garbage, and men and women are served different flavors. Understanding exactly how that works will require better definitions and more dedicated study.

Timothy B. Lee recently interviewed legal scholar Danielle Citron, who suggests that things have gotten better:

TBL: You’ve been writing about this issue [of online harassment] since 2009. How do you see public attitudes shifting on this issue since you started?

DC: It’s been amazing, I have to say. I’m still not totally sold on the idea that we all agree this stuff is bad. But social attitudes have really shifted in the last two years. I gave a presentation at Yale in early 2008 about the problem of cybermobs and online harassment, and at the time the pushback to do anything about this was so profound. It was like “look, don’t touch the internet, you’re going to break it. Regulating it is going to cause more problems than good.” In the last couple of years, this phenomenon of revenge porn has brought alive the harm — maybe just because people can envision people they care about experiencing it.

Will The UK Stay In The EU?

Iain Martin nods:

Ipsos Mori shows that support for the EU at its highest level since 1991. YouGov’s EU referendum tracker also gives the status quo a narrow lead by 40 per cent to 39 per cent this month. How can this be when Ukip is running rampant? The truth is that for all the cocky Ukip rhetoric about a people’s army, the party appeals to nothing like a majority.

Alex Massie suspects that “that UKIP, paradoxically, tarnish and hamper their own cause”:

UKIP may help kill the thing they love the most. Without realising it, they may actually limit support for leaving the EU. UKIP may put a ceiling on euro-scepticism not a floor. And the more attention and publicity UKIP enjoy the lower that ceiling may become.

Larison chimes in:

UKIP has been gaining support because it presents itself as an anti-establishment political movement, because it taps into dissatisfaction with the country’s immigration policies, and because it has used populist rhetoric to appeal to working-class voters. It also serves generally as a vehicle for protesting the political class as a whole. Many others have observed with some amusement that this makes UKIP very much like nationalist protest parties all across Europe. It doesn’t follow from this that its new supporters find its main goal of leaving the EU appealing.

The Odd Lies Of Bristol Palin

Well, she couldn’t help herself, could she? Maybe Charles Cooke will ask Bristol Palin why she is spilling so much ink on the topic. But today she brings us her deliciously hathetic view of the past couple of months, including her account of the brawl she was in. She might have given just her side of the story. But, of course, she also had to go there didn’t she, with the usual Palinite victimology and press-bashing. So let’s fisk it a little, shall we?

First, the media said Trig was not really my mom’s kid.

Untrue. No mainstream outlet touched the question of her mother’s bizarre account of her last pregnancy, let alone stated that Trig was not her son. And the few of us who merely asked for a simple verification of the alleged improbable facts – including me and the Anchorage Daily News – were vilified by the rest of the press, treated as pariahs, and told to jump off a cliff by the Palins. There must be a mountain of medical records that could easily have verified Palin’s own bizarre “I was only pregnant a month” account of her last pregnancy – including a wild plane ride from Texas to Alaska, with one stop-over, while in labor with a child with Down Syndrome – but none was forthcoming. I begged her to make a fool out of me for merely asking. Instead, she released a reclusive doctor’s letter about her medical history just hours before the polls opened.

I don’t know the truth about this and never claimed I did. But the only reason why any doubt exists at all is because of Palin’s refusal to dispel it (even after the campaign to a news source offering to debunk the conspiracy tales). That’s not on me; it’s on her. And still is.

After a month and a half of hearing rumors about myself and family, I’ve finally decided to comment about the situation. Instead of listening to all the people who weren’t there — people who claim they heard this from their cousin/brother/sister-in-law/step-daughter/long lost little brother – let me tell you what actually happened.

“People who weren’t there?” “Rumors”? We’re talking about a public police report detailing the views of the people, on both sides, in the middle of the melee. Then Bristol gives an account of the incident in which she simply dismisses the eye-witness accounts of all the non-Palins there that she confronted the owner of the house and repeatedly punched him in the face until he finally stopped her. The incident has now become a very disturbing and unprovoked – “scary and awful” – assault on a vulnerable woman whose only crime was acting in self-defense. Which raises the obvious question: if this is true, why on earth did she not press charges? If it’s that serious, she surely should have. Which is why CNN anchors should not be intimidated by the rightwing noise machine.

Then this:

I have mostly stayed out of the public eye for the past few years.

Oookaaay: two appearances on Dancing With The Stars in 2010 and 2012, one of the highest-rated shows in network TV; appearing on the ABC show, My Secret Life As A Teenager, in 2010; appearing on Sarah Palin’s Alaska reality TV show; her own reality-show, Life’s A Tripp, in 2012; and a memoir, Not Afraid of Life: My Journey So Far, in 2011. Apart from that, she was a fucking recluse.

I’ll ignore her assertion that she is just another middle-class mother – because it’s such self-serving bullshit one doesn’t know where to start. And give me a break on reporting about Palin’s children. Bristol Palin is an adult and a public figure, making charges about the media. Of course we have the right to push back. And if you still harbor any faint sympathy for her, at this point, she should dispel that with the following classy questions:

In the meantime, did you even hear about Vice President Joe Biden’s adult son who kicked out of the Navy for cocaine? … Did you know Chelsea Clinton’s father-in-law and Clinton family pal Edward Mezvinsky is a convicted felon because of committing bank, wire, and mail fraud?

Talk about apples and trees. Here’s one classic nugget from the brawl:

Sarah says to the police at one point about Klingenmeyer, ‘Didn’t he like beat up his girlfriend or his wife?’

That’s the true Palin, right there. And this sad little blog post is really that, writ large.

“The Death Of Klinghoffer” Lived

John Adams and Alice Goodman’s 1991 opera explores the murder of Leon Klinghoffer, a wheelchair-bound American Jew who was killed during the 1985 hijacking of the cruise ship Achille Lauro by members of the Palestine Liberation Front. The Metropolitan Opera’ new staging of the play opened on Monday night, but long before the curtain was drawn, the drama had already begun, as the Anti-Defamation League and other Jewish organizations (and some guy named Rudy Giuliani) protested the Met’s decision to stage a show that they claim has anti-Semitic overtones and tries to justify an act of terrorism:

Angry protesters gathered across from the Met on the opening night of the opera season last month; a pair of public talks with members of the “Klinghoffer” creative team were quietly called off; and Peter Gelb, the Met’s general manager, said that he had received threats related to the production. He recently sent an email to the opera’s cast expressing regret that they had been subject to “Internet harassment” and defending the work from its critics, according to a copy obtained by The New York Times. Many Jewish leaders, including liberals and conservatives, are finding themselves drawn into the debate. The Met’s attempts to calm things by canceling a planned transmission of the opera to movie theaters around the world this fall accomplished little — and may have fueled more criticism. Now “Klinghoffer” threatens to become the Met’s most controversial company premiere since 1907, when Strauss’s “Salome” was deemed outrageous and banned for decades.

Alex Ross, vitally, reveals the hateful illiberalism of the opera’s prime critic:

The most aggressive rhetoric came from Jeffrey Wiesenfeld, a money manager who has also worked as a political operative. A few years ago, Wiesenfeld won notoriety for seeking, unsuccessfully, to deny the playwright Tony Kushner an honorary degree, on account of Kushner’s criticisms of Israel. Wiesenfeld led the “Klinghoffer” rally, and he had much to say. “This is not art,” he thundered. “This is crap. This is detritus. This is garbage.” He declared, as he did at an anti-“Klinghoffer” event last month, that the set should be burned. He made a cryptic joke to the effect that, if something were to happen to Gelb that night, the board of the Met would be the first suspects.

Burning the set?

In his review of the opera, Paul Berman gets why it’s so controversial, but he doesn’t quite agree with the protesters:

I can see why, in gazing on what they have wrought, Adams and his librettist must feel that, all in all, they have been badly misunderstood by their detractors, and that, in fact, they have presented a subtle and nuanced picture, not romantic, not apologetic, but intent on showing why, at times, decent people do sometimes sink into degraded hatreds and gratuitous violence.

And yet, in regard to seeking out everyone’s humanity, The Death of Klinghoffer seems to me to run aground on a philosophical shoal. Everything in the opera hangs on the validity of the “root cause” explanation—on the assumption that Palestinian terrorism and violence result from the dispossession of 1948, which means that reasonable or “human” traits attach to even the ugliest aspects. But something in that assumption ought to be questioned. Many millions of people and entire ethnic and religious groups were displaced and exiled in the course of the turmoil that accompanied the end of World War II, and not all of those millions responded by forming terrorist movements, and this reality may suggest that something else, apart from suffering and dispossession, is required for terrorist crazies to emerge.

But Frank Rich rolls his eyes at the scandal, noting that the opera’s loudest critics haven’t even seen it:

Klinghoffer has zero anti-Semitism. It does have what Justin Davidson of New York has accurately described as a “clumsy libretto” — dramaturgically diffuse, often lyrically banal — though it is far more lucid in this gripping, beautifully sung Tom Morris production than it was in Peter Sellars’s original at BAM. Not for a second does the opera present the terrorists as anything other than cold-blooded killers — in Adams’s score and the staging as well as in words — and not for a second does your heart fail to go out to their victims, led by Leon Klinghoffer. The performance ends with a wrenching solo by the widowed Marilyn Klinghoffer — “They should have killed me / I wanted to die” — and, as Alex Ross of The New Yorker tweeted Monday night, “In the end, the protest failed completely. Marilyn Klinghoffer had the final word, and John Adams received a huge ovation.”

Moustafa Bayoumi argues that the opera is problematic, but not for the reasons the ADL asserts:

Palestinian history in Klinghoffer is staged as Muslim only – and only as fundamentalist Muslim, which is wrong and dangerous. The group that carried out the Achille Lauro operation, the Palestinian Liberation Front, was a Marxist-Leninist faction, an offshoot (twice removed) of the Marxist-Leninist Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, which was led by the Christian Palestinian George Habash. But if you watched Klinghoffer, you’d have no idea Marxist Palestinians even existed, or that Christian Palestinians were at the forefront of much of the Palestinian national movement. … Klinghoffer wants to collapse the complexities of the conflict between Israel and the Palestinians into a timeless religious battle between Muslims and Jews.

Adam Shatz is on the same page:

[Y]ou could make the case that if The Death of Klinghoffer caricatures anyone, it’s Palestinians, not Jews. The ‘Chorus of Exiled Palestinians’ that opens the opera features a group in Afghan-style clothes, evoking the vanished paradise of pre-1948 Palestine and the Nakba that robbed them of their land and future. Dressed in black and virtually indistinguishable, they’re designated mourners of Palestine, an undifferentiated mass united in suffering and thirsty for revenge. The women are all covered in full abayas, which is unusual among Palestinian women today, and was even more unusual in 1985.

Mental Health Break

Whom does an atheist thank after making a game-winning play?

Can Obama Seal The Iran Deal Without Congress?

Earlier this week, David Sanger reported that the administration is looking at ways to avoid a Congressional vote on a nuclear agreement with Iran, including ways to suspend sanctions via executive fiat. Jack Goldsmith takes issue with that approach, arguing that it would make any eventual deal very tenuous:

The fact that the President does not think he can get Congress on board for any deal with Iran signals to Iran that any deal would be with the President alone, and would last only as long as his waiver authority – i.e. two more years. The deal could last longer, as it did with the last major unilateral presidential deal with Iran, the 1981 Algiers Accords that effectuated the release of the hostages. In the transition between the Carter and Reagan administrations in January 1981 some in Congress and the press questioned whether President Reagan should honor the deal that Carter struck with Iran through Algerian intermediaries. President Reagan did honor it, of course, and the courts upheld his and Carter’s actions. But the situation with Iran today is different than 1981. … The bottom line, then, is that any deal struck by President Obama with Iran will probably appear to the Iranians to be, at best, short-term and tenuous. And so we can probably expect, at best, only a short-term and tenuous commitment from Iran in return.

William Tobey is on the same page:

For good or for ill, he will own any agreement completely. If a deal is reached, 35 years of American foreign policy designed to isolate Iran, will inevitably be reversed, with no enabling legislation by Congress and no supporting consensus required or expected in the foreign policy community. While the American president has broad Constitutional discretion to make foreign policy, the most effective and enduring decisions have enjoyed bi-partisan support. American politics can be unpredictable, but we know that in 27 months Barack Obama will no longer be president. His successor will then be responsible for implementing any agreement with Iran. Unbound by treaty, or even any implementing legislation, his or her discretion will be nearly absolute. This is a fragile foundation for an enduring agreement.

Paul Pillar, on the other hand, argues that “for anyone who realizes the advantages of having a deal to restrict Iran’s nuclear program versus not having a deal, the less Congressional involvement right now the better”:

The agreement would impose no new costs on the nation; in fact, it would involve reducing the cost that sanctions inflict on the United States. It does not create, as warfare does, any new exceptions to normal peacetime relations with other states; instead, it would be a move toward restoring normality. It does not, as do some other matters that are appropriately codified in treaties subject to Senate confirmation, impose any new legal obligations on U.S. persons; instead it is a step toward reducing the costly and cumbersome restrictions on U.S. business that the sanctions involve. It does not mark a departure in national goals and objectives, because it is an almost unanimously shared objective that Iran not acquire a nuclear weapon. The issue instead is what is the best way of executing policy to achieve that objective; that is part of what the executive branch is supposed to do.

Drezner’s contribution to the conversation:

Iran appears to recognize that it won’t be able to get all of the sanctions lifted in this round of negotiations. This means that there’s less bypassing of Congress anyway.

More importantly, it seems increasingly clear that the negotiation process itself is less than half the game when it comes to this particular interaction. Any deal between Iran and the United States will also require a long, drawn-out process of trust-building on both sides. Even if it appears thatIran is complying with the interim nuclear deal, members of Congress will need to be persuaded that this represents a genuine shift in Iranian policy. So it’s premature for Congress to permanently revoke sanctions anyway. My hunch is that it would take a less hawkish Prime Minister of Israel years of observed and verified Iranian compliance before Congress could be persuaded to authorize a permanent lifting of sanctions.