Andrew Sullivan's Blog, page 128

Is North Korea Getting Any Better?

After more than a month out of public view, the country’s state media report that the young dictator has reappeared:

Last seen on Sept. 3, Kim [Jong Un]‘s lack of public appearances marked his longest span of time away from the public, and while Tuesday’s Korean Central News Agency report may put to rest rumors that Kim had been deposed, he is now walking with a cane. Kim has been dogged by persistent rumors about his ill-health, including reports of gout, diabetes, and an ankle injury. The report contains no mention of Kim’s alleged health problems.

But Mark Stone finds “nothing to prove beyond doubt that the images were taken on Monday.” Zooming out, Andrei Lankov claims that the country, while still “a brutal place,” is a little less of a hellhole than it used to be:

To understand North Korea today, one needs to admit that its economy, while grim, is nowhere near breakdown. In fact, from a nadir in the late 1990s — when state-run industries collapsed and a famine killed an estimated 600,000 people — the economy has grown slowly but steadily. … The world barely noticed a remarkable achievement last year: For the first time in nearly three decades, North Korean farmers managed to produce enough food to meet the population’s basic survival needs. In spite of a drought this spring, preliminary reports indicate that this year’s harvest is likely to be good, too.

Lankov also marshals evidence that North Korea’s gulags are housing fewer prisoners:

This has much to do with the regime’s abandonment of the so-called family responsibility principle. Previously, all immediate family members of a convicted political criminal (so long as they shared his or, far less frequently, her household registration) were deemed to be political criminals as well, and thus were also dispatched to the gulag.

After the death of Kim Il Sung in 1994, his son and successor Kim Jong Il ordered that this approach be applied selectively. A few years later, the authorities were instructed to punish relatives only in cases of especially hideous crimes — such as writing anti-government graffiti. By North Korean standards, this represented a substantial improvement.

Tweeting Faith

Kimberly Winston flags a of study of 92 million American Twitter users of varying religious backgrounds, noting that “atheists – among the smallest populations in the US – are the most prolific” tweeters. Other findings:

Of the five specifically religious groups studied, Muslims are the most active on Twitter based on the average number of tweets, and Muslims and Jews have the most friends and followers compared with other religions. …
While Pope Francis may have a lot of Twitter followers – 4.54 million – other faith-related celebrities popular among those studied include the Dalai Lama, Rick Warren, Tim Tebow and Richard Dawkins. But the bigger the religious celebrity, the more likely he or she was to have a high number of followers outside his or her own faith group.
The study also found that while self-identified religious Twitter users talk about topics specific to the faith they adhere to (Christians talk about Jesus, atheists talk about science), all the studied faith groups had similar concerns. A tag cloud of the most commonly tweeted words across all the studied groups were “love,” “life,” “work” and “happy.”

(Image: A ‘friend cloud’ showing the top 15 Twitter accounts followed by each group of religious users studied. Via U.S. Religious Landscape on Twitter)

The Grave Risks Of A Travel Ban

The debate over whether to impose a travel ban on Ebola-afflicted countries strikes Rod Dreher as a culture-war battle in the making:

I learned over the weekend that to raise the question of whether or not we should refuse travelers from Ebola-infected countries is to identify oneself as a right-wing nut, and possibly even a racist. Apparently — according to some liberal readers of this blog — Limbaugh and the usual suspects are working Ebola fears into political talking points. It is therefore required of all decent and right-thinking people to take the opposite position. So I’ve learned.

This is crazy, and dangerous. I haven’t checked, but I have no doubt that talk-radio loudmouths are making political hay about this stuff; it’s what they do. They are, in fact, the enemy of clear thinking — but so are those whose thinking is dictated by a compulsion to take the other side of whatever Limbaugh says.

McArdle fails to see why the notion of a travel ban is so controversial:

Ivory Coast cut off all travel from the affected areas in August, and if you look at maps of the outbreak, this actually seems to be controlling it pretty well within their borders. Even if all it did was buy the government time to prepare, that might help them lower their fatality rate.

You can still argue, of course, that such bans are inhumane and costly. But at least from the evidence we have, closing the borders does seem possible, so we should probably stop insisting that it isn’t. And we should stop acting as if this has any relevance to U.S. immigration policy, which takes place in a much different context, and over a different timeframe, from African travel in the time of an epidemic.

But Julia Belluz and Steven Hoffman reiterate that there are sound, practical reasons to oppose a travel ban:

There are three reasons why it’s a crazy idea.

The first is that it just won’t work. In CDC Director Tom Freiden’s words, “Even when governments restrict travel and trade, people in affected countries still find a way to move and it is even harder to track them systematically.” In other words, determined people will find a way to cross borders anyway, but unlike at airports, we can’t track their movements.

The second is that it would actually make stopping the outbreak in West Africa more difficult. Dr. Anthony Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, said, “To completely seal off and don’t let planes in or out of the West African countries involved, then you could paradoxically make things much worse in the sense that you can’t get supplies in, you can’t get help in, you can’t get the kinds of things in there that we need to contain the epidemic.” …

The third reason closing borders is nuts is that it will devastate the economies of West Africa and further destroy the limited health systems there.

Aaron Blake examines how the public feels about it:

A new poll from the Washington Post and ABC News shows 67 percent of people say they would support restricting entry to the United States from countries struggling with Ebola. Another 91 percent would like to see stricter screening procedures at U.S. airports in response to the disease’s spread. …

Concern about Ebola, at this point, is real but not pervasive. About two-thirds (65 percent) say they are concerned about an Ebola outbreak in the United States. But while people are broadly concerned about an outbreak, they are not necessarily worried about that potential outbreak directly affecting them. Just 43 percent of people are worried about themselves or someone in their family becoming infected – including 20 percent who are “very worried.”

(Photo of the Ebola virus via Getty)

Correction Of The Day

The most British newspaper correction I’ve ever seen, in the Guardian via @eleanorokane pic.twitter.com/sdNs5GlK0g

— Matt Pearce (@mattdpearce) October 12, 2014

Is Amazon A Monopoly? Ctd

Many readers join the debate:

I can’t figure out whether Yglesias was being naïve when he says that “suffice it to say that ‘low and often non-existent profits’ and ‘monopoly’ are not really concepts that go together.” That’s exactly what monopolies do. They have enough capital to take a loss for long enough to wipe out the competition, then they take of advantage of being a monopoly.

Another elaborates by making a key distinction:

Amazon is not a retail monopoly. However, it is quickly becoming a wholesale monopsony (a market form in which there is only one buyer for goods) with respect to books, e-books, and likely other product categories.

By driving down prices and operating at a loss for decades, Amazon is driving out all other potential buyers and resellers of these goods. This may sound good on the surface for consumers (low prices, yay!), but the concern is if Amazon becomes the only viable buyer (and therefore the only viable reseller), there will be no one left to step up as an alternative when Bezos decides he is ready to turn a profit and jacks up prices. Not to mention what happens to the suppliers (publishers and authors) when Amazon (as the sole buyer) drives prices down to unsustainable levels, which in turn will result in less choice for consumers. Many have written on this subject, including the NYT.

Another has a favorable view of the mega-company:

Amazon, as a monopsony, is not something the government should be stomping on, as long as it continues to provide good value to consumers. Amazon is losing money in these efforts and that can’t go on forever. Other businesses may struggle, but that’s generally to the benefit of consumers. Tough for business owners, sure, but business ain’t beanbag.

As far as beating up Hachette goes, Amazon is fighting to be able to discount e-books. Hachette wants to keep prices high, and keep paying authors an absurdly low royalty for e-books. Amazon certainly has its flaws (treatment of warehouse employees among them), but in the book market – which I know about as a publisher, author, and reader – Amazon has been a massive force for good. There are thousands of authors now making good money from Amazon who would never have had a chance under the old publishing system.

But another isn’t a fan:

The issue with Amazon (and Walmart) is not that they are monopolies. Depending on the market in question, these two may or may not possess majority marketshare (in small towns, WalMart and Amazon may be your only choices for many things). On the other hand, neither of them are (per the law) predatory monopolies – companies that drive competitors out of business and then raise prices once the competition is extinguished and collect monopoly rents. Instead, Amazon and Walmart keep prices low and generally provide good service, which largely immunizes them from much antitrust scrutiny in the US. The behavior that gets companies in trouble with antitrust authorities in this country is any form of price-fixing or other scheme to charge customers more than they would be charged in a competitive marketplace. Complaints that WalMart harms consumers by “reducing choice” (not carrying a wider range of products that might be carried were the retail market less concentrated) have been generally laughed out of court by federal judges.

Instead, the issue with both companies is that they are ruthless monopsonies that viciously exploit their vendors and their workforce. Both companies demand (and get) price concessions from manufacturers that are arguably responsible for lots of outsourcing and such; both companies are also well-known for mistreating their employees. US antitrust law, which focuses on harm to consumers (in their capacity as consumers) is not well-situated to focus on predatory monopsony behavior (after all, it was Apple and the publishers who were prosecuted for anti-trust behavior in the recent Amazon fight, even though they were aligning themselves against the 800lb gorilla in the retail book market). US antitrust law doesn’t generally give a rip about mom-and-pop stores being run out of business. (European authorities are more able to deal with predatory monospony behavior; whether this is good or bad policy is an interesting question). And labor relations are, with a few exceptions, outside the scope of anti-trust law – unless business cartels attempt to fix wages in the absence of collective bargaining, anti-trust law simply doesn’t apply.

Another, more neutral observer details the company’s vast services:

I’ve been following the discussion about Amazon as a monopoly and it seems that some people miss the power of Amazon as a company that wants to be your only source for everything. The company is not only your first place to look for anything you may like to purchase from electronics, to house items, to even clothing. Amazon seems to have a hand on every slice of the consumer experience. With Amazon you have prime to get anything in two days without worrying about shipping, but in addition you get a service “prime instant video” that is a competitor of Netflix, Hulu, and regular TV. You also can get your Amazon phone (competing against Apple, Samsung, Google) and your Kindle fire (Nexus, Samsung and iPad tablet rival). Your Kindle also serves as your ebook reader (vs B&N Nook, now a Samsung tablet). On top of that Amazon has also its own app store (vs Google play and iTunes), and now I understand you can also have your music stored in the cloud by Amazon.

But Amazon is also your source for all the back-end computing cloud needs. You can have your files on AmazonCloud Drive, but if you are a company wanting a solution for your IT needs you can use Amazon Web Services and have everything you need from basic website setup to sophisticated data mining applications. AWS even has scientific clients as you can run sophisticated modeling software to do advanced drug search and any other complex data processing and searches. In fact Amazon is looking for academic clients for their AWS system.

If you need to search for anything you want to buy, you don’t even need Google to do the search. Unlike Facebook, Amazon doesn’t nag me to their website every day to waste my time with the latest viral news or inane discussions. They have never asked for anything too personal but they have everything they need to know about my personal interests if they just look at my purchases and regular browsing habits in their website.

They seem to have a knack to pick businesses and services that are going to be necessary as long as humans want to be consumers, and in principle you can have pretty much every need covered in their ecosystem.

(Full disclose: the Dish gets about 3 percent of its annual revenue from Amazon’s affiliate program, detailed here.)

Following In The Footsteps To Freedom

Photographer Jeanine Michna-Bales retraced the steps of fleeing slaves along the Underground Railroad for her project Through Darkness to Light:

Finding that there were few visual records of the secret stations along the escape route, she herself traced the steps taken by many of the 100,000 slaves between the Southern plantations of Louisiana to the border of Canada, where slavery was prohibited. Along the way, she creates an archive of historical sites both famous and obscure, discovered through academic inquiry at historical societies and oral histories passed down through generations. …

Michna-Bales shoots after dark, capturing the ambiguous nature of the shadowed land, which becomes shrouded both in terror and in hope. After examining each station during the day, she sometimes had to score the spot with a plastic bag lest she lose her way in the dark. Some safe houses had not been well documented; after reading accounts, she would work from a general area, searching and asking around for old houses. Many homeowners confirmed her hunches and led her other buildings along the railroad. Once, police showed up after her presence had been called in by neighbors, only to offer her more insight into the history of the railroad.

See more of her work here.

On “Getting” Kafka

Recently, we considered how the author’s sense of injustice makes him well-suited for the Internet era. Now, in an essay that explores the many misuses of “Kafka-esque,” Sam Jordison looks back to a David Foster Wallace essay (pdf) on what makes the writer so funny:

It’s not that students don’t ‘get’ Kafka’s humour but that we’ve taught them to see humour as something you get – the same way we’ve taught them that a self is something you just have. No wonder they cannot appreciate the really central Kafka joke – that the horrific struggle to establish a human self results in a self whose humanity is inseparable from that horrific struggle. That our endless and impossible journey toward home is in fact our home. It’s hard to put into words up at the blackboard, believe me. You can tell them that maybe it’s good they don’t ‘get’ Kafka. You can ask them to imagine his art as a kind of door. To envision us readers coming up and pounding on this door, pounding and pounding, not just wanting admission but needing it, we don’t know what it is but we can feel it, this total desperation to enter, pounding and pushing and kicking, etc. That, finally, the door opens … and it opens outward: we’ve been inside what we wanted all along.

A Stand-Up Gal

Linda Holmes calls Cameron Esposito’s new comedy album, Same Sex Symbol, “raunchy and sharp, insightful and very funny”:

What comes through in the record throughout is a particular point of view in which people who believe lesbian pornography represents actual lesbians, or people who believe that they’re looking for threesomes, or people who otherwise fail to understand the basics of her life, are sort of amusing and clueless weirdos she can finally see clearly because, as she explains: “I am so happy with where I am in my life. Just finally, my look sorted out, you know, my gender reflected to you accurately — my gender being ‘fighter pilot.'” And even though “fighter pilot” is a punch line, there’s no punch line to the underlying idea that she is happy. That part is true. It’s not all that common for comedy to come from a place of settled satisfaction with where you’ve ended up, and from the clash between that feeling and the constant expectation of others that you are somehow unsettled by their disapproving or just ignorant gaze.

In an interview, Esposito shares how she got comfortable incorporating more of her personal life into her routines:

When I was starting I was really just figuring how to be out as a person and how to be in the world and be gay because I came from a really conservative, Catholic background. So when I first starting doing standup, part of it was because I wanted to be onstage talking about the person I am. I couldn’t do that yet, so my jokes were more surreal, they were more superficial in some ways, and now I feel like, through standup, I’ve figured out how to talk about myself in a way that makes me more comfortable.

And now I’m just totally chill and it’s a lot easier, and sometimes people are like “Do you always talk about your sexuality onstage?” And I’m like, “No, I just always talk about myself the same way that any comic does.” So the natural evolution of that is that I’m just trying to get closer and closer to what I really am. That’s what people are interested in. The more specific you can be, the more universal it is. If you speak in broad strokes you miss everybody but if you’re like “Are you ever terrified of this thing?” even if they’re not terrified of that thing they still know terror. That’s what makes us people.

An Otherworldly Metaphor

In an interview, Swamplandia! author Karen Russell discusses why she taught Ray Bradbury’s The Martian Chronicles at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop. “The book feels subversive to me as an adult reader,” she explains:

[Stephanie Palumbo]: How does Bradbury use human activity on Mars as a metaphor?

KR: He’s writing against patriotism during the Cold War. Humans land on Mars and then destroy it. Not much time elapses between landfall on Mars and the annihilation of all Martians.

SP: There’s a haunting image in one story, where a little boy is playing with a white xylophone that turns out to be a Martian ribcage.

KR: The planet is basically wiped clean of its indigenous people. I was shocked by the descriptions of these ancient, bone-white cities on Mars, and it took me an embarrassing length of time to recollect that people can visit ruins anywhere on our planet, too. It’s a case where sci-fi holds up a funhouse mirror to our own history. In case we have amnesia about the horror of the frontier, here we see another frontier and xenophobia, paranoia, aggression, madness. But we see people be really good to each other too. Bradbury seemed to be such a humanist at the same time that he is calling us out on our most despicable qualities.

Aural Sex, Ctd

A reader relates to this post about autonomous sensory meridian response:

I probably won’t be the only Dish-head to write you about this, but ASMR is most definitely a physical sensation. It’s not a matter of belief. (Although it tends to attract people who believe in all manner of woo, like Reiki and chakras and so on.) It’s similar to a frisson, or the chills you experience when you hear a particularly moving piece of music. Or a piss shiver. They are all of a piece. I’ve experienced it my whole life, and yes, Bob Ross was the first trigger. For me, it’s a tingling sensation that starts at the nape of the neck and spreads to the scalp.

While it’s very pleasant, it’s not sexual. Many people who experience it, including myself, have some degree of anxiety and related insomnia. Listening to ASMR videos is very helpful for getting my mind to slow down so I can relax and go to sleep.

There is a very good (short) This American Life segment about ASMR here.

Another reader with ASMR grumbles:

Oh god, you did another post about ASMR and yet again managed to insert a non-existent sexual connotation (with the post title “Aural Sex”).

As someone with ASMR for 40 years, who like many others, only learned it was a “thing” that others had from a This American Life episode a few years ago, I cannot overemphasize how annoying and damaging it is to have ASMR related to sexual experiences. I’ve heard it referenced as a “brain orgasm” (what does that even mean?) among other attempts to describe what it is.

But it has nothing to do with sex. It’s a weird, unbelievably pleasant feeling that you get when experience certain things that trigger it, often watching videos of someone doing a monotonous task in a deliberate matter. I describe the feeling as like a rush of endorphins that start in the top-back part of my head and cascade down my spine like a warm waterfall.

So why is it so bad to connect it to sex? What’s the harm? Well consider this: ASMR is weird. It’s something that singularly hard to explain to people that don’t have it. You’re stuck with metaphors. And the easiest one for people who don’t have ASMR to jump to is basically that it’s just like porn. In fact consider this description:

A person loves going to their home office in the evening, locking the door, firing up the computer and searches for videos. He knows what he’s looking for; he has very specific tastes. He can only really get what he needs from certain videos; certain performers. He has them bookmarked. If he has time, he might spend 30 minutes or an hour watching… and the ultimate pleasure he gets is divine.

Am I talking about ASMR there? Or porn?

In many ways, having ASMR a much bigger challenge to admit to others than admitting you watch porn. With porn, you pretty much know that essentially every guy, and most women, watch it. Even if the people you are talking to doesn’t watch it; they get it , they understand it. But with ASMR, it’s much weirder and foreign to them. Is it any surprise they jump to the parallel to porn and assume it’s related to sex?

But it isn’t; and every time I see someone blithely making that connector or offering up a “lightly humorous headline like “Aural Sex” I just want to scream. Especially today… “NOT MY BELOVED DISH!”

But another loved the post:

Thank you! I have experienced ASMR for much of my adult life but never before knew what it was. Now I have a name for the pleasurable tingly feeling in the back of my head I experience from time to time, often in very casual and one might say inappropriate settings.

In fact I first noticed it in my freshman algebra class in high school. I was usually a little drowsy since it was just after lunch. The guy who sat behind me couldn’t keep his mouth shut, but he whispered since we were in class. His deep voice set me off nearly every day. At the time it freaked me out a little. Forgive me, but as a 14 year old in the rural Midwest I was not raised to believe homosexuality was normal or natural, and it worried me that I was getting such a kick out of this guy’s endless monologue.

Fast forward twenty years, and I’m both comfortably heterosexual and comfortable with homosexuals. Yet to this day men, or at least male voices, tend to set off my ASMR more than female voices, though both can do it. I figure it has something to do with the deeper tone, as lower female voices trigger it more often as well. I wouldn’t say it’s sexual necessarily, or at least not exclusively. It’s just an intensely physical pleasure. I’m sorry to learn not everyone experiences it.

Another reader who’s experienced ASMR:

When I was a student a (decidedly unsexy) philosophy prof used to trigger it. So did a young Chinese woman who worked in the youth hostel in Miami Beach in the late ’80s. I would sit listening to her ramble about China for hours, never feeling any sexual attraction to her. But she was fascinating both for platonic reasons and for the physical effects she had on me. It is these people’s detached, disinterested nature that makes me drop all my defences, which seems to be a necessary condition for ASMR in my case.

Sadly, I haven’t experienced it in a long time. Not sure if it’s because I’ve physically changed or because I don’t get out enough (I work from home) or because when you get older you confront fewer people like that.

PS: Had no idea there was a name for this thing. I’ve never known anyone else with it. Thanks so much for posting it. Guess I should subscribe now :)

One more reader:

Just by way of further illustration of the effect Bob Ross had on countless thousands (including many like me who had no intention of even trying to learn to paint). Back in Bob’s heyday, my best friend and I used to toke up, turn on PBS to Ross’ show, and listen – with the brightness control turned to complete darkness so that we could only hear, not see, what he was describing. Now THAT was a trip.