Andrew Sullivan's Blog, page 120

The Best Of The Dish Today

A new twist on the metaphor of what it sometimes feels like to blog every day:

Meanwhile, a reality check on whether Muslim apostates can really live free lives across the world. It’s in the form of the hashtag #AnApostatesExperience. I found it a sobering reminder of the trouble with Islam today. You may too. A sampler:

Having a younger brother tell you he should beat you b/c you've left Islam & as a woman you're his 'responsibility' #AnApostatesExperience

— Kiran (@KiranOpal) October 13, 2014

Getting messages daily from terrified apostates in Pak, Saudi, Iran & not being able to help. #AnApostatesExperience

— Ali A. Rizvi (@aliamjadrizvi) October 14, 2014

#AnApostatesExperience Showing up to my own law school grad. w/ no family. Getting sworn-in as the first lawyer in the family w/o family.

— Maha (@Mookers) October 13, 2014

When you're family tells you that they could kill you and it would be justified by god. #AnApostatesExperience in Canada….

— Kheir Ahmed (@schwanncells) October 13, 2014

For some unaccountable reason, these victims of brutal intolerance want to get Reza Aslan’s attention. Maybe Ben Affleck could chime in about the racism of these people as well.

Today, we reported tentative good news from the ongoing victims of Islamist terror and unspeakable brutality in Kobani against ISIS and in Nigeria against Boko Haram. And some other tentatively good news about Ebola in the US. Plus: gains in the fight for legal cannabis in DC and now in Mexico. And more good news: inflation is clearly whipped – not that any of those predicting a second Weimar a few years ago will ever apologize or recant.

Now for the bad news: I found my stomach lurching when hearing of a debate within the Obama administration on whether to ban torture and abuse anywhere under US control in the world. Yes: a debate. Presidents come and go. The CIA endures – and does whatever the fuck it wants. Always in secret and with total impunity.

Many of today’s posts were updated with your emails – read them all here. You can always leave your unfiltered comments at our Facebook page and @sullydish. 22 more readers became subscribers today. You can join them here – and get access to all the readons and Deep Dish – for a little as $1.99 month. Gift subscriptions are available here. Dish t-shirts are for sale here, including the new “Know Dope” shirts, which are detailed here. A final email for the day:

Every day your readers email you about the content of your posts, but today I just want to thank you and the Dish team for your consistency. I started reading the blog back in 2006, recommended to me by a political science teacher at a haughty East Coast university. Since then I’ve studied and taught at six universities in five countries. No matter where I went or what I was going through, your posts and words comforted and challenged me. Whether I am in the arcane confines of a British university master’s program or freelancing articles in a dusty desert suburb of Los Angeles, your blog acts as a tether to a constantly changing conversation. I just sent away my passport in preparation for another move and felt the urge to write these words. Thanks again.

See you in the morning.

The Limits Of Meritocracy

Matt O’Brien discusses a new paper showing how even “poor kids who do everything right don’t do much better than rich kids who do everything wrong”:

You can see that in the above chart, based on a new paper from Richard Reeves and Isabel Sawhill, presented at the Federal Reserve Bank of Boston’s annual conference, which is underway. Specifically, rich high school dropouts remain in the top about as much as poor college grads stay stuck in the bottom — 14 versus 16 percent, respectively. Not only that, but these low-income strivers are just as likely to end up in the bottom as these wealthy ne’er-do-wells. Some meritocracy.

What’s going on?

Well, it’s all about glass floors and glass ceilings. Rich kids who can go work for the family business — and, in Canada at least, 70 percent of the sons of the top 1 percent do just that — or inherit the family estate don’t need a high school diploma to get ahead. It’s an extreme example of what economists call “opportunity hoarding.” That includes everything from legacy college admissions to unpaid internships that let affluent parents rig the game a little more in their children’s favor.

Noting the abundance of other studies that point to this same class disparity, Freddie stresses that the notion of America as a pure meritocracy has been thoroughly debunked, even if many people still believe in it:

The question of how much control the average individual has over his or her own economic outcomes is not a theoretical or ideological question. What to do about the odds, that’s philosophical and political. But the power of chance and received advantage — those things can be measured, and have to be. And what we are finding, more and more, is that the outcomes of individuals are buffeted constantly by the forces of economic inequality. Education has been proffered as a tool to counteract these forces, but that claim, too, cannot withstand scrutiny. Redistributive efforts are required to address these differences in opportunity. In the meantime, it falls on us to chip away, bit by bit, on the lie of American meritocracy.

Email Of The Day

A reader writes:

I choose to believe that Obama will not adopt Bush administration interpretation of torture treaty obligations, will not adopt a West African travel ban, and will not go deep into Syrian quagmire.

Maybe “hope” is a better word.

I’m hoping too. And doing what little I can to help make it so.

Marriage Makes All Relationships More Stable

Ronald Bailey digs through recent research:

In a September study in the Journal of Marriage and Family, [Stanford sociologist Michael Rosenfeld] uses time series data from the How Couples Meet and Stay Together survey (HCMST) to probe the longevity and breakup rates of America’s marriages. The HCMST, which began in 2009, is a nationally representative survey of 3,009 couples, of which 471 are same-sex. Rosenfeld’s paper reports the breakup rate of the couples surveyed annually through 2012.

What he discovered:

Not too surprisingly, there are big differences in relationship stability between married and unmarried heterosexual couples. The annual breakup rate among married different-sex couples was 1.5 percent. The relationships of unmarried different-sex couples dissolved at annual rate of 21.7 percent.

Married same-sex couples broke up at a rate of 2.6 percent per year, while 12.8 percent of unmarried same-sex couples went their separate ways annually. Interestingly, Rosenfeld notes that “lesbian couples have a significantly higher rate of break-up compared to heterosexual couples, while gay male couples have a break-up rate that is not distinguishable from the break-up rate of heterosexual couples.” It is also noteworthy that unmarried same-sex couples broke up at about half the rate of unmarried different-sex couples. It is likely that part of the reason for this disparity is that unmarried same-sex couples had already been together almost twice as long their different-sex counterparts at beginning of the survey.

Rosenfeld also found that “marriage is not just associated with stability but causes it.”

The State Of The Race In Texas

One of our midterm correspondents from the in-tray directs our attention to a “very important underreported story” in the Lone Star State:

It’s not getting the attention it deserves here because of the sad state of both the news media and the Texas Democratic Party. You are probably aware that Texas is voting on all of its statewide offices in next month’s general election because of the Greg Abbott-Wendy Davis match-up for governor. That is the only statewide election that has received any significant press coverage. This is likely due to Rick Perry’s retirement and Abbott and Davis becoming national celebrities in the last couple of years because of Abbott’s lawsuits against the Obama administration and Davis’s filibuster of HB-2 (the abortion law). Sadly, the other campaigns are receiving almost no press coverage, which will probably result in another Republican sweep of all statewide offices. This disinterest is probably what helped the Republican Party nominate three people for statewide offices who have no business being on the ballot.

The most egregious of these candidates is Ken Paxton, the Republican nominee for attorney general.

Paxton admitted to violating state securities laws back in the spring and paid a fine to the state securities board. Shortly thereafter, the Travis County District Attorney’s office brought a criminal complaint against him but will not proceed with the case until after the election. Paxton has admitted to breaking the law yet will probably become the the most powerful legal officer in the state because of disinterested voters and straight-GOP-ticket voters. (The Democratic nominee is named Sam Houston. How can someone named Sam Houston lose an election in Texas?!)

The Republicans have nominated for comptroller (aka the person in charge of the state’s finances) Glen Hegar. He is a long-time state representative who is also a farmer with a history degree. He has no professional accounting or finance experience at all but will probably win anyway.

Finally, there is the lieutenant governor’s race. This should actually be the most important and most covered race in the state because of how powerful the lieutenant governor is in Texas. It has received slightly more coverage than the other non-governor statewide elections, but not much. The Republican candidate is Dan Patrick (no, not the guy from ESPN). He was a radio personality and Houston’s equivalent of Rush Limbaugh for many years (though more conservative) before he became a state senator, representing Houston’s northwest suburbs (by far the most politically and culturally conservative part of the Houston area, a city that is generally pretty moderate). Patrick’s views are extreme even by today’s Republican Party standards – supporting laws that would ban all abortions without exception and advocating mass deportations of illegal immigrants, among other things. Patrick was able to win the nomination because the Republican primary is always dominated by the most extreme voters and because David Dewhurst, the sitting lieutenant governor, looked ineffectual after Wendy Davis’s successful filibuster. Patrick and some of the other Republican candidates for statewide office are not really campaigning because they are so confident they will win.

It feels like the Texas Republican Party is trolling us simply because it can. There is no effective check on its power right now. I hope the 2014 election is a wake-up call to the Texas Democratic Party and local media outlets throughout the state. They cannot allow these utterly unqualified people to continue to hold these important public offices.

Today is the first day of early voting in Texas, so these stories are on my mind. This seemed like an issue that would be dear to the Dish’s heart – the decline of the news media and the continued rightward lurch of the Republican Party – so I hope you don’t mind my rant. Thanks for listening.

Black Holes Under A Microscope

Ron Cowen relays the news that scientists “have come closer than ever before to creating a laboratory-scale imitation of a black hole.” Why it’s important:

The black hole analogue, reported in Nature Physics, was created by trapping sound waves using an ultra-cold fluid. Such objects could one day help resolve the so-called black hole ‘information paradox’ – the question of whether information that falls into a black hole disappears forever.

The physicist Stephen Hawking stunned cosmologists 40 years ago when he announced that black holes are not totally black, calculating that a tiny amount of radiation would be able to escape the pull of a black hole. This raised the tantalizing question of whether information might escape too, encoded within the radiation.

Hawking radiation relies on a basic tenet of quantum theory – large fluctuations in energy can occur for brief moments of time. That means the vacuum of space is not empty but seethes with particles and their antimatter equivalents. Particle-antiparticle pairs continually pop into existence only to then annihilate each other. But something special occurs when pairs of particles emerge near the event horizon – the boundary between a black hole, whose gravity is so strong that it warps space-time, and the rest of the Universe. The particle-antiparticle pair separates, and the member of the pair closest to the event horizon falls into the black hole while the other one escapes.

Hawking radiation, the result of attempts to combine quantum theory with general relativity, comprises these escaping particles, but physicists have yet to detect it being emitted from an astrophysical black hole. Another way to test Hawking’s theory would be to simulate an event horizon in the laboratory.

Vengeance Of The Nerds, Ctd

RT @Sargon_of_Akkad: @SabrinaLianne Here’s that montage of the ladies of #GamerGate and #NotYourShield pic.twitter.com/t1n2Nr2kwh

— NotYourShieldProject (@NotYourShield) October 16, 2014

A few readers provide key counterpoints to the controversy:

Your latest post presents only one side of a very complex, many-sided argument and unfortunately perpetuates the narrative that #GamerGate is mostly a reactionary, misogynistic movement. Please understand that the vast majority of GamerGate is not misogynist. The vast majority of GamerGate does not think death threats are trivial. GamerGate is a movement that has embraced women, gays, trans-gender people of all political stripes and nationalities, worldwide.

GamerGate is many things, but it is largely a reaction against the huge amount of abuse that gamers have suffered over the years, culminating in a coordinated campaign by a dozen or so articles that appeared on numerous gaming news sites nearly simultaneously on August 28-29, proclaiming that gamers were dead, spear-headed by a piece on Gamasutra by Leigh Alexander, who called gamers:

These obtuse shitslingers, these wailing hyper-consumers, these childish internet-arguers – they are not my audience. They don’t have to be yours. There is no ‘side’ to be on, there is no ‘debate’ to be had.

Now is that any way to speak to a large number of your target audience? Most of the other articles weren’t quite as strident, but the mass coordinated nature of this campaign was not lost on many gamers. Understandably, being called “shitslingers” and “childish internet-arguer” upset many people. Hence GamerGate really took off.

It’s a horrible thing that Zoe Quinn, Anita Sarkeesian and Brianna Wu have received death threats. However, there is very little evidence that at least the threats against Sarkeesian and Wu have had anything to do with GamerGate. And yet, instead fingers were immediately pointed to GamerGate, in an appalling example of guilt-by-association. It is grossly unfair that a movement comprised of thousands of people worldwide is being tarred for the actions of the very few destructive people who just want to watch the world burn. That’s like blaming all Muslims for ISIS!

GamerGaters have been quite vigilant, often being the first and most vocal in calling out harassment as soon as they discover it online. This is a totally open movement. Anyone can do anything and claim that they did it on behalf of GamerGate. Even then, it’s abundantly clear to anyone who has actually talked to GamerGaters, that nearly all of us condemn harassment and welcome women into our movement. In order to counter this misrepresentation, the hashtag #NotYourShield was created in order to demonstrate just how diverse and inclusive the movement is.

Despite all this, GamerGate are being constantly insulted by others as “misogynerds,” “pissbabies,” “worse than ISIS” and god knows what else. Supporters of GamerGate have been given death threats, doxxed, lost their jobs and God knows what else. Yet none of that has gotten any exposure in the mainstream media.

The abuse received by people for the mere mention that they support GamerGate has been so bad that it has caused more than a few people who initially positioned themselves as anti-GG to realize that GamerGaters are on the whole good people who condemn harassment and just want to be able to enjoy video games without being constantly told by self-appointed social activists that their hobby is awful, degenerate, and they should be shamed. It’s part of a larger movement that has been touched upon by you in the past. Just listen to the voices of women here and here who received far more harassment from those opposed to GamerGate than from GamerGate itself.

There’s much much more that I can get into. But I’m just a nobody. GamerGate has been covered more fairly by conscientious, articulate people like these, both supporting and neutral to GG:

https://twitter.com/oliverbcampbell

https://twitter.com/erikkain

https://twitter.com/Totalbiscuit

https://twitter.com/Boogie2988

https://twitter.com/georgieonthego

https://twitter.com/mundanematt

There are many more. Please contact them and listen to their voices. Fairness is important.

Another reader details another major part of the story:

I was surprised to see that your take on #Gamergate ignored its central issue, chiefly because it’s one of your own pet issues – corruption in the media. And by “corruption,” I mean the press acting as a form of PR and not as a source for news. Gamers are upset because it seems, and has seemed for a while now, that the press is no longer interested in talking to them. Leigh Alexander’s piece declaring gamers to be “dead” (alongside a slew of other insults) was just the purest expression of that trend.

But make no mistake: these accusations of misogyny are deflections meant to shift focus (successfully, so far) from their own wrongdoing.

Take, for instance, Jeff Gerstmann, who was fired from GameSpot in 2007 after rating a game as “fair.” The game publisher, Eidos Interactive, pressured the GameSpot to fire Gerstmann, and GameSpot complied. Take also the review of Aliens: Colonial Marines, produced by Gearbox Software, which the press lavished with praise after being shown a “demo” that, in truth, represented nothing contained in the actual game. Or take the latest scandal, wherein WB Games offered review copies of Shadow of Mordor under the condition that the resultant review praise and advertise the product.

The gaming press is too busy begging for the developers’ scraps to care whether or not their readership gets taken for a ride. And in a $93 billion industry, that ride can be quite expensive.

Which leads us to #Gamergate, a scandal that sprang to life after evidence emerged that Zoe Quinn, an indie developer, had leveraged her inappropriate relationship with the press to boost her profile, including shutting down a rival feminist charity (one #Gamergate would later help get back on its feet). Rather than report on these relationships (as they had Brad Wardell and Max Temkin), the press went silent. This, naturally, prompted further digging, which revealed the gaming industry’s very own Journolist, wherein certain members of this press pushed predefined narratives.

Outraged at having been lied to, silenced and manipulated, gamers revolted. #Gamergate. This revolt won’t end by calling gamers misogynists. They’re not. No, this will only end when the press debrides itself of the notion that it reports to anyone other than its consumers. It’s time they stopped lecturing gamers, and started helping them find a fun game on which to spend their hard-earned money.

Another zooms out:

I think the actual point is completely missed by everyone there. It would not have been missed if people didn’t stereotype and objectify nerds as much as they accuse them of stereotyping and objectifying women.

The point is, nerds never wanted to “win”. The ascendancy of their subculture is a horrifying development for most of them. They grew up being marginalized by the in-crowd. They found interests and a common ground with the rest of the persecuted non-alpha class and they were relieved to never again have to be bullied around and to find a social subculture in which they could express themselves freely and, shockingly, even become admired by their peers. Like, really admired. Socially admired, not just admired by their parents and upstanding grown-ups in their community after receiving another scholarship or citizenship award.

And now here come the alphas to take this from them, as well as their eighth grade lunch money. They aren’t undermining themselves; they are sabotaging the movement. I see so many people throwing their hands up and wondering why these guys are behaving so beastly, and if you take five minutes and realize how they got where they are, then you could see where they’re going.

The nerds want the women to go away, because when the women go away, so will the alpha males. High school never ends, not really. Alpha males hate everything new or different, but they learn to feign interest in things that women are drawn to. And so now you have these massive audiences for comic book movies and video games, because women started liking these subjects and the alphas are following along. The producers of this content know that to keep those big audiences spending, they need to lower the sophistication to a level that the casual, obtuse consumer will like. The women will still prefer the alphas to the nerds, no matter what the nerds do, and the nerds know this. They don’t have the tools for the game the way that the alphas do.

Now here is the perfect storm. Everything they like is overrun by women who don’t really want to engage with them and want to see the subculture change to be more appealing to them (and this is where things like feminist critiques of video games drive them even more bonkers). The women are followed by alpha males, who the nerds revile and who will try to seize control everywhere they can, like alphas do. The quiet living room of the nerd has become the scene of a giant house party hosted by the cast of Jersey Shore. Oh, and that’s about to be the level of sophistication coming across in comic books and movies now that there’s billions of dollars to be made by appealing to the lowest common denominator.

Now I don’t sympathize with anyone who engages in death threats or who expresses anti-feminist ideals, or who essentially falls under the sway of their worst fears rather than their highest hopes. But I also gotta say, just because you’re paranoid, doesn’t mean they’re not after you.

So I’m not saying you need to sympathize with these people or ally with them or approve of the obscene ends that some of them go to. But you will never, ever, understand nerd behavior if you think that they are exultant at the new attention on their subculture, and that all this misogyny and anti-social behavior is just exactly what your objectifying, stereotypical model of them says that it is. They are not struggling to express themselves and grappling with zero-IQ social intelligence. They aren’t fumbling their way through their moment in the spotlight because they don’t know how to behave. I know that’s what everyone has been raised to believe about them, and it sure looks like it’s what they’re doing. But the fact is, all this acting out and hostility isn’t awkwardness and it isn’t a dominance play. It’s a simple message to the newcomers: get. the. fuck. out.

Another touches on something we were suggesting with the choice of tweet-image above:

Wow. That third reader doesn’t so much zoom out as much as he spaces out. Apparently there are no female nerds, and the only defining characteristic of nerd-dom is being a social outcast. Really? I thought it was liking scifi and being socially inept was an unfortunate side effect of spending so much time reading as a kid (maybe that was just me?).

And the whole idea that the “sophistication” of some monolithic nerd culture is going to suffer is ridiculous. You know what is happening? They are making more geeky, nerdy things – from movies to comic books to novels. Sure, some will be less sophisticated. Some will be more. Some will not appeal to your tastes and so what, go read or watch something that does, there’s a ton of it. I personally find the idea of Depression Quest ridiculous; it seems more like a psych class than a game to me, but if enough people want to play it to make that kind of genre popular, it’s not like it’s hurting me.

I’m a female gamer, though I admit I haven’t been following the GamerGate nonsense closely. Mostly because yes, there is as much misogyny in gaming as in the rest of life, and yes, video-game review sites have been useless for a long time now. It would be nice if neither of these things were true, but you know what? I play video games to relax, and stressing about that shit isn’t relaxing at all. If sexism in a game bothers me, I stop playing it. If I’m looking for a new game to play, I’ll look at one or two blog reviews and then download it and try it (if the game doesn’t have a trial version, there are plenty of others that do, so, move on to the next one).

The whole death threats thing is ridiculous and people need to realize that’s not ok, but I feel like summing this all up as a message to get the fuck out is unhelpful. Not just from a putting the genie back in the bottle perspective, but the vast majority of nerds aren’t issuing death threats. Only a handful of whack-jobs are.

Apprenticeships: Lost In Translation?

Reacting to news that “the Obama administration is about to announce $100 million worth of apprenticeship grants – and wants to spend another $6 billion over the next four years,” Tamar Jacoby considers whether German-style apprenticeships would work in the US:

The first thing you notice about German apprenticeships: The employer and the employee still respect practical work. German firms don’t view dual training as something for struggling students or at-risk youth. “This has nothing to do with corporate social responsibility,” an HR manager at Deutsche Bank told the group I was with, organized by an offshoot of the Goethe Institute. “I do this because I need talent.” So too at Bosch. …

The second thing you notice:

Both employers and employees want more from an apprenticeship than short-term training. Our group heard the same thing in plant after plant: We’re teaching more than skills. “In the future, there will be robots to turn the screws,” one educator told us. “We don’t need workers for that. What we need are people who can solve problems”—skilled, thoughtful, self-reliant employees who understand the company’s goals and methods and can improvise when things go wrong or when they see an opportunity to make something work better.

But there’s a catch:

Why is it likely to be hard for Americans to transplant the German model? It starts with cost. Each German company has a different way of calculating the bill, but the figures range from $25,000 per apprentice to more than $80,000. It’s likely to be more expensive still in the U.S., where firms will have to build programs from scratch, pay school tuition (in Germany, the state pays), and in many cases funnel money into local high schools and community colleges to transform them into effective training partners.

Update from a reader:

Actually, I think we are evolving something akin to German apprenticeships in the US, at least for some fields. We just don’t call them that. Mostly, we call them “interns.” But the function can be very similar:

take someone who doesn’t know much about the work that your organization does but is interested in learning.
bring them on board (probably for very little money) and start teaching them what you do.
get them to the point where they can be a productive member of the team.

Granted, there are organizations that use “interns” as simply no-cost low-skill temporary labor. But there are also some (I work for one) that are using the position to create people who can do things that we have difficulty hiring skilled staff to do. Done right, it’s a win for the individual – she learns skills that she didn’t have before, and which are in demand in the job market. And it is a win for the company as well – we get someone who has skills we need and have difficulty finding, and who knows how our corporate culture works as well. With a little luck, we get to keep them for several years after they become fully trained.

Would we be delighted to have the state pay for the training, on the German model? Of course. But it is still worth our while to do it at our own expense.

The Sharing Economy In The Big City

Airbnb is having some troubles in New York:

While it’s technically illegal for New York City residents to rent their entire place for fewer than 30 days at a time — room-shares and extended sublets are allowed — the city and attorney general’s office have insisted they’re not interested in small-time Airbnb-ers, but those using the share economy to become mini hospitality moguls. Their first targets: brothers Hamid Kermanshah and Abdolmajid Kermanshah, who own and operate a four-story building on Fifth Avenue and a ten-story building on West 31st Street.

Alison Griswold has more:

Airbnb, according to the AG’s [Attorney General's] analysis of 497,322 transactions for stays between January 2010 and June 2014, is largely illegal, hugely profitable, and quickly consuming lower Manhattan. Rather than helping the average New Yorker make ends meet, much of Airbnb in New York City is making money for a small number of commercial hosts running large, multimillion-dollar operations.

J.J.C. weighs the pros and cons of the service:

For business travellers there are obvious benefits. Booking may be less convenient than for hotels and prices are not always lower, but travellers benefit from more choice and, usually, space. For more seasoned road warriors, Airbnb’s varied portfolio makes a refreshing change from the depressing homogeneity of hotel interiors.

But even as Airbnb claims victory in its home city the honeymoon period may be coming to an end. … Part of the problem is the gold rush Airbnb has prompted. What began as a platform for homeowners with spare rooms to make a bit of pocket money on the side, is becoming overrun with property entrepreneurs looking for lucrative short term gains. The market is also getting more crowded with competition coming from upstarts such as Roomoramaand HomeAway. Meanwhile success breeds exploitation. From trashed properties and wild parties to a multitude of scams, there are plenty of Airbnb horror stories circulating to put off prospective tenants (and landlords).

Megan McArdle considers the implications:

I love the sharing economy — what’s not to love about taking underutilized assets and making them more productive? But Airbnb has an almost uniquely difficult task in converting rooms to a permanent revenue stream. Most people are more sensitive about what happens with their homes than they are about what happens with their cars, bikes, or designer handbags. That may be particularly true in the dense, expensive areas where Airbnb is most in demand — though to be sure, I’ve also heard people in single-family home neighborhoods complaining about the potential for rowdy house parties.

Whenever a new market opens, there’s a sort of wild west period when gaps in the law allow people to make a bunch of money. Over time, however, legislators and regulators wake up, and start laying down the law. Entrenched competitors are protected, numerous interest groups are given concessions, fees are tacked on. The end result is greater certainty, but lower profits and innovation.

During his interview with Marc Andreessen, Kevin Roose brings up the politics of the sharing economy:

[Q] Politicians like Rand Paul are seizing on young people’s embrace of companies like Uber and Lyft and Airbnb that are disrupting heavily regulated industries and saying, “You know, if you’re frustrated about Uber, let me tell you about these other regulations that are terrible.” Are these companies breeding a new generation of libertarians?

[A] I guess I would say the following: If you have been in an Uber car and gotten pulled over and had the car seized out from under the driver when you were like in the middle of a trip that you were otherwise having a good time on, you might be a little bit radicalized. You might all of a sudden think, Wait a minute, what just happened, and why did it happen? And then you might discover what the taxi companies did over the last 50 years to wire up city governments and all the corruption that’s taken place. And you might say, “Wait a minute.” There’s this myth that government regulation is well intentioned and benign, and implemented properly. That’s the myth. And then when people actually run into this in the real world, they’re, “Oh, fuck, I didn’t realize.”

Previous Dish on Airbnb here and here.

Centers For Damage Control

After its fumbling of the Ebola outbreak, the public has rightly soured on the CDC:

A new CBS News poll shows just 37 percent of American rate the CDC as either excellent or good, while 60 percent rate it as fair or poor — a virtual mirror image of 17 months ago. The worst part: The agency now ranks below the Secret Service, which has dealt with a series of scandals in recent weeks and years. But the CDC is still slightly more popular than the IRS.

Morrissey isn’t surprised:

Back when I worked for a defense contractor in its technical publications department, one worker had a sign in her cubicle which accurately diagnoses the phenomenon in play here: “One aws**t cancels out a thousand attaboys.” It isn’t what the CDC did for the past ten years, but what they’re doing when the spotlight is on them that counts. In fact, the CDC’s performance over the past few weeks will have people questioning just how well they’ve done their job all along, and perhaps they should.

On the other hand, it’s possible that the public perception might be a little too harsh. One amazing aspect of this poll is that the CDC is only seven points up on the VA (30%) and only six over the IRS (31%). Both of those agencies have been embroiled in scandals that involve outright corruption, not just incompetence, and yet they’re almost within the margin of error with the CDC, which to this point is only considered to be well-meaning but failing.

Harold Pollack defends the agency:

Despite the CDC’s budget problems and its recent stumbles, it is a more effective, better-led organization than it was during the Bush years, when five out of six former agency directors publicly criticized the CDC’s managerial hijinks, low morale and lapses from scientific integrity. At that time, the CDC ranked 189th out of 222 federal agencies in workforce morale. It now ranks 49th out of 300 federal agencies on such measures. That’s a striking improvement.

“When the public health enterprise loses political standing,” he adds, “it may not be listened to when it most needs to be heard”:

Almost 40 years ago, the CDC suffered public humiliation when it was perceived as having bungled a massive vaccination campaign for a Swine Flu epidemic that didn’t materialize. Only a few years later, CDC officials tried to sound warnings about a mysterious new pathogen. They were shoved aside, often by government and medical officials who specifically cited the Swine Flu debacle. One unfortunate 1983 Red Cross memo, opposing aggressive measures to protect America’s blood supply, expressed the general mood: “CDC is likely to continue to play up AIDS,” because “CDC increasingly needs a major epidemic to justify its existence.”