Andrew Sullivan's Blog, page 142

Is John Oliver A Journalist? Ctd

Several readers comment on our praise of Last Week Tonight:

My brother and I have fallen into something of a Monday-morning ritual where we rave about how great John Oliver‘s expose-of-the-week had been the night before. Not because the extra 8 minutes have afforded him the equivalent of brutally delivered “long-form comedy-news journalism”, but because Oliver routinely taps into the collective influence of his audience’s Internet fluency toward a sort of “social media civic engagement” we haven’t seen before.

Seemingly without exception, he always gives the audience an opportunity to participate in his issue-of-the-week in surprisingly meaningful ways: send comments to the FCC about net neutrality, donate to other scholarship funds made available to women to supplant Miss America’s status at the top, copy a satirical letter to APSCU lampooning the abuse of student loan subsidies by for-profit colleges.

Where Jon Stewart tends to end his rants with pithy statements that leave us feeling angry but hopeless, John Oliver seems to be going out of his way to channeling that outrage into non-trivial calls for action. Even if his goal is only to dominate the next day’s cable news cycle in replays, it makes the endeavor seem much more traditionally journalistic than The Daily Show or The Colbert Report.

Another sends the above video:

I know how you feel about Michael Moore, but he did much the same thing with his show TV Nation.

The most telling was how he hired a lobbyist to get Congress to declare a “TV Nation Day”, with clips of actual congressmen giving speeches about a show they had clearly never seen based on what the lobbyist told them, or rather, the money they got from them.

Another dissents:

Unlike you, Andrew, I am very disappointed with John Oliver‘s HBO program. While I think it serves a useful public service when it gets the word out on under-reported issues like Net Neutrality, I find it lazy and often insulting. The piece he did on for-profit colleges simply took its talking points and best clips from a superb Frontline documentary, “College, Inc.“, which aired four years ago. The show’s segment on Payday loans included a fake PSA from Sarah Silverman in which she encouraged the poor who use their services to make money by debasing themselves (“People will pay you to pee on them”). I spent many Saturday mornings driving my severely disabled mother to Payday loan stores (people were “so nice there.”). I stood by the door to keep her from getting mugged and paid back her interest for her. To even jokingly suggest that people like her should get the money they need through shitting on strangers (which Silverman also does) reveals how callow and insincere the show toward some of the issues it covers. (Don’t even get me started on the cute gerbil eating a burrito as a reward for hearing about death penalty abuses).

When you single out Jon Stewart’s failings for comparison, you miss the point. For me, the Daily Show’s genius is its investigative pieces, at which John Oliver once excelled. For an understanding of Russian political culture and how it might be capable of state-sponsored homophobia and invasions of its neighbors, look no further than Jason Jones’ Winter Olympics interviews in Moscow with a leadership delighted to spew their hate and aggression on camera to an American audience. Nothing else in the media comes close to getting at their “epistemic closure.” John Oliver needs to use his long-form platform to get back on the road and do what he does best.

The State Of The Secret Service, Ctd

It turns out White House fence-jumper Omar Gonzalez made it far past the mansion’s front door. Adam Baumgartner created the above animated GIF of Gonzalez’s route based on the following description from Carol Leonnig:

After barreling past the guard immediately inside the door, Gonzalez, who was carrying a knife, dashed past the stairway leading a half-flight up to the first family’s living quarters. He then ran into the 80-foot-long East Room, an ornate space often used for receptions or presidential addresses. Gonzalez was tackled by a counter-assault agent at the far southern end of the East Room. The intruder reached the doorway to the Green Room, a parlor overlooking the South Lawn with artwork and antique furniture, according to three people familiar with the incident.

According to Leonnig, an alarm box meant to alert the Secret Service to intruders had been “muted” at the request of the White House usher staff. Joe Coscarelli adds:

That wasn’t the only failure. Gonzalez seems to have made it past the following lines of defense, according to the Post:

1. “a plainclothes surveillance team … on duty that night outside the fence, meant to spot jumpers and give early warning”

2. “an officer in a guard booth on the North Lawn”

3. attack dogs, which were never released

4. a “specialized” SWAT team

5. the front-door guard

Amy Davidson notes, “The head of the Secret Service, Julia Pierson, will testify before Congress on Tuesday, and will be asked to account for this failure; she should be thankful that she’s not explaining a far worse one”:

She and others in the White House should also be asked why there wasn’t a straightforward account of the intrusion. The story was that, although Gonzalez wasn’t stopped when he climbed over the fence, or by the officers who were supposed to tackle him on the lawn, or by the dogs that were supposed to be released, or by the door that was supposed to be locked, he “was physically apprehended after entering the White House North Portico doors,” as the Secret Service said, in a statement at the time. This was taken to mean that he was pounced on the moment his toes touched the White House floor, and, as the Times noted on Monday, “Secret Service officials said nothing in their public comments after the incident to suggest otherwise.”

House Oversight Committee members Jason Chaffetz and Elijah Cummings are already murmuring about changes in leadership. It will be interesting to see how the Pierson’s testimony, which is in progress, will play out. Ed Krayewski listened in:

[W]hile the Secret Service’s recent history of mishaps was brought up throughout the hearing, several members of Congress, both Democrat and Republican, appeared more interested in demanding the Secret Service use more force in situations like last week’s fence jumper. This even though the president and his family weren’t at the White House that day, something the Secret Service knew when responding but Gonzales probably didn’t.

Josh Marshall thinks excessive force would be a mistake:

The White House lawn is pretty big. And the place is crawling with Secret Service. It should be possible to apprehend someone on the lawn. It should definitely be possible to incapacitate and stop them at the building perimeter or just inside it. If the intruder is armed, obviously the entire calculus changes. But until you know that or can reasonably assume they shouldn’t be just shooting to kill every time someone hops the fence.

Doubling Down On Afghanistan

Historic signing of Bilateral Security Agreement in Kabul today–underscores our enduring commitment to #Afghanistan. pic.twitter.com/z73ojIM3Ym

— John Kerry (@JohnKerry) September 30, 2014

Today, Afghanistan and the US signed an agreement allowing nearly 10,000 American soldiers to remain there past the end of this year, fulfilling a campaign pledge from the new president, Ashraf Ghani:

Under the agreement, 12,000 foreign military personnel are expected to stay after 2014, when the combat mission of Afghanistan’s U.S.-led NATO force ends. The force is expected to be made up of 9,800 U.S. troops with the rest from other NATO members. They will train and assist Afghan security forces in the war against the Taliban and its radical Islamist allies. The U.S. has the right to keep bases in Afghanistan as long as the security pact is in force, and in return it promises to raise funds to train and equip the Afghan security forces, which now number 350,000.

Ghani was inaugurated on Monday and called on the Taliban to join peace talks. He formed a unity government with election rival Abdullah Abdullah after a prolonged standoff over vote results that ended in a deal to make Ghani president and Abdullah a chief executive in the government with broad powers.

“Like it or not,” Ioannis Koskinas argues, “Afghanistan remains a key battlefront in the fight against extremists, terrorists, and fanatics hiding behind the veil of religious fundamentalism”:

The uncertainty that surrounded the prolonged election process, in many ways, emboldened the insurgents and strengthened their narrative. Additionally, while the U.S. combat mission in Afghanistan is due to end at the end of this year, al Qaeda fighters, while diminished in number, remain strong in Afghanistan and Pakistan.

Although unsavory in Washington political circles, al Qaeda’s presence and the introduction of groups who pledge allegiance to the Islamic State make an enduring U.S. counter-terrorism task force in Afghanistan long past 2015 necessary. Complicated by the Taliban’s significant gains in parts of Afghanistan in past months, at times aided by foreign fighters, Obama would be smart to reconsider his earlier arbitrary timeline to withdraw all troops from Afghanistan in 2015. It is imperative that Ghani and Abdullah have the necessary time to combat the insurgency physically, but also counter their narrative through reform initiatives.

The Obama administration since May had been pushing for the troop extension, and the main obstacle to the BSA was former Afghan president Hamid Karzai’s implacable opposition. But Morrissey spins the agreement as a policy shift by Obama, inspired by the disaster that befell Iraq after the US withdrawal:

Of course, the war isn’t coming to an end in Afghanistan any more than it came to an end in Iraq. The Taliban have picked up their efforts as the US prepared to leave, and will no doubt continue to pressure Kabul politically as well as militarily for years to come. The best that the US can do in Afghanistan is attempt to keep the Afghan security forces from collapsing while all sides tire of the fight and find a way to settle the tribal wars that have been ongoing since the Soviet withdrawal. … The residual-force arrangement may not prove successful in keeping Afghanistan from collapse, but at least they show that someone’s learned a lesson from the American withdrawal from Iraq.

Drawing on an interview with Ghani from last month, Sune Engel Rasmussen underscores the challenges faced by the new Afghan president, especially given the roundabout (and possibly fraudulent) way he came into office:

Corruption is only one of the ills plaguing the Afghan economy.Dependent on foreign imports and with little domestic industry to speak of, the economy was left close to comatose as financial activity stopped during the recent election impasse. According to the country’s finance minister, the stuck ballot cost Afghanistan $5 billion in lost revenue and investment, and threatened to leave the government unable to pay salaries for civil servants.

Making Afghanistan self-sufficient is at the top of Ghani’s agenda. “We want to generate one of the biggest construction industries in the region,” he said. “We have enough marble to last the region for 100 years, but we are importing marble from neighboring countries.” Many of Afghanistan’s problems come down to poor infrastructure. “Urban and rural Afghanistan are totally disconnected. Go to the market. 70 percent of the food is foreign imported, while 40-60 percent of our food rots between the field and the market because we don’t have the system,” Ghani noted.

The American Realm vs The British Republic

My old friend, Jesse Norman, is an MP in the British parliament and noted something odd in the recent war debate in the Commons:

During the past decade or two, a convention has started to develop that, except in an emergency, major foreign policy interventions must be pre-approved by a vote in Parliament. The idea springs from honourable motives and it is understandable given the present climate of distrust in politics, but in my judgment it is nevertheless a serious mistake … It is a basic purpose of Parliament —above all, of this Chamber—to hold the Government to account for their actions. It is for the Government, with all their advantages of preparation, information, advice and timeliness, to act, and it is then for this Chamber to scrutinise that action.

If Parliament itself authorises such action in advance, what then? It gives up part of its power of scrutiny; it binds Members in their own minds, rather than allowing them the opportunity to assess each Government decision on its own merits and circumstances; and instead of being forced to explain and justify their actions, Ministers can always take final refuge in saying, “Well, you authorised it.” Thus, far from strengthening Parliament, it weakens it and the Government: it weakens the dynamic tension between the two sides from which proper accountability and effective policy must derive.

In the British constitutional system, Jesse is surely right. He reminds us that when Margaret Thatcher recalled Parliament for an emergency session before the launch of the Falklands war, the motion before the House was simply: “That this House do now adjourn.” But what makes this so striking is how the American republic, meanwhile, has turned into the British one. It was long understood as a vital part of the American constitution that declarations of war had to come from the Congress and not the president – precisely to avoid the dangers of a pseudo-monarch using war to bolster his own standing, to project strength or to act as some kind of protector of the realm. None of that really applies any more, the president launches war after war (while calling them counter-terror operations), and the Congress’s only remaining role is to provide the funds. This is precisely what the Founders feared; and it is precisely what is now routine. In a stark review of a new book on presidentialism by F H Buckley, The Once And Future King: The Rise Of Crown Government In America, Gene Healy sees how far the rot has gone:

We’re hardly “the freest country in the world.” As Buckley points out, his native Canada beats the United States handily on most cross-country comparisons of political and economic liberty. In the latest edition of the Cato Institute’s Economic Freedom of the World rankings, for example, we’re an unexceptional 17th. Meanwhile, as Buckley points out, the Economist Intelligence Unit’s “Democracy Index” ranks us as the 19th healthiest democracy in the world, “behind a group of mostly parliamentary countries, and not very far ahead of the ‘flawed democracies.’”

There’s a lesson there. While “an American is apt to think that his Constitution uniquely protects liberty,” the truth “is almost exactly the reverse.” In a series of regressions using Freedom House’s international rankings, Buckley finds that “presidentialism is significantly and strongly correlated with less political freedom.”

In this, Buckley builds on the work of the late political scientist Juan Linz, who in a pioneering 1990 article, “The Perils of Presidentialism,” argued that presidential systems encourage cults of personality, foster instability, and are especially bad for developing countries.

Subsequent studies have bolstered Linz’s insights, showing that presidential systems are more prone to corruption than parliamentary systems, more likely to suffer catastrophic breakdowns, and more likely to degenerate into autocracies. The Once and Future King puts it succinctly: “there are a good many more presidents-for-life than prime-ministers-for-life.” Maybe what’s exceptional about the United States is that for more than 200 years we’ve “remained free while yet presidential.”

Relatively free, that is. The American presidency, with its vast regulatory and national security powers, is, Buckley argues, rapidly degenerating into the “elective monarchy” that George Mason warned about at the Philadelphia Convention. Despite their parliamentary systems, our cousins in the Anglosphere also suffer from creeping “Crown Government”-“political power has been centralized in the executive branch of government in America, Britain, and Canada, like a virus that attacks different people, with different constitutions, in different countries at the same time,” he writes.

But we’ve got it worse, thanks in large part to a system that makes us particularly susceptible to one-man rule. As Buckley sees it, “presidentialism fosters the rise of Crown government” in several distinct ways. Among them: It encourages executive messianism by making the head of government the head of state; it insulates the head of government from legislative accountability; and it makes him far harder to remove. On each of these points, The Once and Future King makes a compelling-and compellingly readable-case.

The View From Your Window Contest: Winner #224

A reader is aghast:

YOU PEOPLE ARE MONSTERS.

Another wonders, “Are you sure you didn’t mix up the daily VFYW and contest photo?” Another gave up in about 20 minutes:

Clearly you decided to put up an easy one this week. What with the Ents in the distance, I know I won’t be the only one to pin this down to the Fangorn Forest in Middle Earth. I think I see the mist of the river Earwash ahead, putting us at or close to the site where Gandalf the White met the hunters. Heck, it’s as good a guess as any other. A tree in the middle of the forest?????

Another goes for a “shot in the dark”:

Looks like deciduous trees, the coastal range, and a fog bank. That sounds like Walnut Creek, CA to me.

Or South America?

Ariau Towes, an eco-lodge outside Manaus, Brazil:

Another looks for clues:

There are a bunch of deciduous trees. That’s less than helpful. We seem to be on a mountain. I see nothing outside to help me other than that. Given that the paucity of detail outside, I chose to focus on what was inside. There’s more to work with but … yeah, not a lot. It looks like some recording equipment (headphones, cabling, something that might possibly be a sound meter), a water bottle, and a floor with interesting swirly markings. I’m sure someone will recognize the logo on the water bottle instantly, but I got nothin. Same with the floor.

Based on the trees and recording equipment, my husband guesses Tennessee. I don’t think you’d stay in North America four weeks in a row, but I don’t have a better alternative. So, we’re going with a recording studio in Tennessee. On a mountain.

It’s not recording equipment. Another reader figures out the key characteristic of this week’s view:

[I]t’s a treetop hotel, built around a tree. No doubt about it. You would think that would narrow it down – I mean, how many of those can there be? Lots, it turns out, but none that I can find with classy inlaid wooden floors. Our best guess is Dad’s: somewhere on the coast of Peru.

Which brings me to another point: this is superficially mind-bogglingly difficult. There are no landscape clues, except the unbroken vista of trees, which does little more than prove that we’re not in downtown Manhattan or Beijing. All clues have to come from the “window” itself and surrounding items. Despite this, because you posted the contest, it follows that it must be solvable in a reasonable amount of time by a reasonably-intelligent Dish reader. Therefore, I propose the View Anthropic Principle: no matter how hard a “view” is, the fact that it is posted at all means that it is solvable with the information on hand.

Maybe so. Just not necessarily by us, this time!

Most of this week’s guesses correctly got on the treehouse track:

This treehouse doesn’t look like the one I stayed in, but the view reminds me of some of the views while we we ziplining around in the Bokeo Reserve for three days is Laos almost four years ago. It was one of the only times I’ve seen a jungle view that just went on and on the way it looks like this view does. I can tell this is definitely a view from a tree house so its worth a shot, right?

Here’s a view of what one of the tree houses looked like as you were sailing towards it on the zipline:

Another reader is thinking Africa:

I just spent my Monday morning at work googling “African treehouse.” I looked at lots of images, but nothing fit, so I’m guessing Botswana, mostly because it’s fun to say.

Another suggested “Youvegoddabephukingkiddingme, Thailand”. But this guess gets pretty close:

Although the foreground view is a little more cluttered than I remember it, I am fairly sure this is taken from the platform of the Canopy Tower, Soberania Park, near Gamboa, Republic of Panama. That appears to be a Cecropia tree on the right (often sloths feed there), and the view is, I think, towards the North West, overlooking Soberania Park from what used to be a U.S. military-intelligence messaging center, that has been converted into a nature observatory / hotel.

A reader nails the right country:

Wow! I can only guess about where this is, but I really want to go. We’re in an octagonal (maybe hexagonal) observation platform-like structure that appears to be built around a tree overlooking a rain forest. Apart from the forest itself, there are no telling geographic features, and apart from the structure we are in, no architectural clues. So, we need to know something about the building we are in, rather than what we are looking out at.

The structure seems well-built and well-maintained. That, the bag on the floor to the left, the pile of rope (zip lining?) and the bottled water suggest “tourist destination”. That doesn’t narrow it down a great deal, but I’m going to go with Costa Rica. And since satellite views seem a lost cause here, I looked for treehouses in Costa Rica and found the Finca Bellavista community, which seems like the sort of place (some) Dishheads might find themselves on vacation. Plus they have a couple of structures that, while not being a dead-on match for the one here, share an awful lot of features. So even if we aren’t in Finca Bellavista, I bet we are someplace close by.

Another pinpoints the location:

Ok, so I was a bit glib last week. I promise I’ll rein in disparaging comments about the difficulty of the contest because, damn, this one is pure evil. Trees. All we can see are trees. And floorboards. But wait, we’re IN a tree. And those floorboards are pretty unique with their painted viney patterns. Just fire up the Google machine. Somebody else has stayed in this treehouse and put a picture of it on the internet. An hour of searches along the lines of “jungle treehouse resort” later, and then, there it is. These guys stayed there. One click later and I’m on the web page of Nature Observatorio, located in Manzanillo, Costa Rica. Not too shabby for a picture of some trees.

Not shabby at all. Here’s how all the entries broke down:

Image searching was by far the most popular method for the dozens of correct guessers this week:

At first glance this appeared to be one of those impossible views that only the champ and one or two others would solve. When I realized it was a treehouse however, I at least had some search terms. After a few searches I was amazed at the sheer number of awesome treehouses that are out there. My fourth try on Google Images I used the terms “treehouse rainforest ocean” and found [the composite image to the right]. That led to this website that offers neat “glamping” places. Glamping is “glamorous camping” apparently (something I didn’t know – thanks VFYWC!).

The VFYW is the upper level of a two level treehouse in the Gandoca-Manzanillo Rain Forest of Costa Rica. You can stay there for $320.00 a night, and “all meals are hosted in the tree house and hoisted up by staff. Guests are supplied with harnesses, helmets, and gloves.”

Here’s a wonderfully specific entry:

The picture is taken from the Nature Observatorio (aka Amazing Treehouse), located in the Gandoca-Manzanillo wildlife refuge in Costa Rica (which is called the Refugio Nacional Gandoca-Manzanillo, 36, Costa Rica by Google Maps):

The closest town is Manzanillo, which is not visible, but would be on the right side, or northeast, out of frame of the picture roughly 3km to the city center. It is taken from a hammock on the first floor (observation level) of the treehouse, facing the Caribbean Sea to its (approximate) north. The deck is 79 feet (or 25 meters) above ground, and is reachable by rope or rope elevator. There aren’t exact GPS coordinates for the Observatorio — even the owner doesn’t have them — and the only ones I found were actually for the road and beach roughly 2 km to the north.

Visible on the left of the picture (west) is the “host” tree, which is amazingly supporting the treehouse without a single screw or nail driven into it. I hope your readers will research and watch the available interviews with the owner, Peter Garcar, and read up on the location itself. His efforts and passion are truly inspiring, and the treehouse is a wonder of both engineering and natural education. I only wish I could visit and climb to appreciate its views and all it offers. To whomever made the trip and took the picture, I am envious beyond description!!!!!

This reader only needed the floor:

Okay, I was searching in Australia before, but then an image search on Google for rainforest treehouses found me the distinctive floor of this treehouse in The Gandoca-Manzanillo wildlife refuge in Manzanillo, Costa Rica. Here is the floor:

Another key clue:

It was an Instafind, and shows up in first couple pages of Google image search for “treehouse winch remote”.

A regular player takes a shot at circling this week’s “window”:

A breakdown of the exact view:

I consider the window to be the space between the exterior vertical supports that, along with the major floor beams, create the octagonal framing of the structure. The contest photograph looks across the two sets of floor boards that are lifted to provide rope access to the tree house. These were identified by comparing the vine tendril pattern in the contest photograph with those next to people about to descend or just arrive through the open floor boards:

Photographs taken from beneath the tree house show which floor boards are opened. The contest window is that adjacent to the more westerly of the two openings.

A previous winner makes a connection:

A few weeks ago, we were in Manzanillo, Mexico and now we are high up in the trees of the Gandoca-Manzanillo National Wildlife Refuge south of Manzanillo, Costa Rica.

Probably the best entry we got this week:

“Haven’t they broken the rules?” asked my wife when I showed up at her elbow, having found the window this past Saturday in minutes and wanting to proclaim my triumph. She’d noted the absence of any distinguishing features in the landscape and it seemed wrong to her that I’d had to depend solely upon objects within the room to pinpoint the location.

“Rules? In a knife fight? No rules!” I might have said, evoking Ted Cassidy’s assertion to Paul Newman’s Butch Cassidy just prior to his being kicked in the crotch. I knew that, apart from the one rule that requires at least part of the window frame to appear in the photo (to prove that it really is a view from a window), then nearly anything else is fair. And this week there was really nothing in view but a vast verdure framed by a distant sea. Great view but lacking in specificity.

So inside, then. We see climbing ropes and a winch controller, bamboo rails, a loopy painted design all over a wooden floor, a framework of cable and wire that surrounds a hole in that floor, a hole which itself appears to center on a TREE TRUNK. So we’re high up in a tree house gazing out over a jungle view.

The design on the floor proved to be the most valuable clue, because it appeared around 150 images deep in a simple google image search using the terms “tropical” and “treehouse.” It’s called Nature Observatorio and it’s in the Gandoca-Manzanillo Refuge in Costa Rica, suspended 25 meters up a tree in primary rainforest. The photo was taken looking north from the lower of its two floors. We’re told by the proprietors that guests fall asleep lulled by the exotic chatter of parrots (along with the Caribbean breezes), that they awaken in the morning to the roar of howler monkeys.

Wonderfully, its Airbnb listing says that, along with internet and breakfast, its amenities include “elevator in building,” which unavoidably raises a string of philosophical questions: what parts of an elevator can be stripped away and have it remain an elevator? If it lacks walls and floor, but consists rather of a harness, ropes, and a winch? If it dangles BELOW the building, suspended from it, is it indeed IN the building?

I’m picking at nits there, but the Observatorio comes equipped with mosquito netting, so that’s ok. Honestly, I’m ready to sign up. It look’s wonderful!

It’s hard to resist the charming enthusiasm of this happy guest, as he shows us around:

Chini felt challenged:

Well one thing’s for certain, we’re, uh, hell and gone from the Arctic. And we’re like totally in a tree-house. Now all we need to do is find the right one. Easy, no? No. Turns out, tree-houses are the new orange, and that made this hunt one of the wilder ones. India, Thailand, Brazil, Borneo, you name it, they all got in on the act. By the time I landed in the right spot, I knew more about tree-house construction than I’ll ever need to know. But that’s the VFYW contest for you; the obscure begetting the even more obscure.

This week’s view comes from the best damn hotel room any contest viewer’s ever stayed at, i.e. the Nature Observatorio in Manzanillo, Costa Rica. The picture was taken on the lowest, main platform of a multi-platform, non invasive tree house/observatory/hotel room built in 2012 and looks east-north-east on a heading of 62 degrees towards the Gulf of Mexico in the distance:

This reader has traveled in the area:

We spent a month in Costa Rica and thought the Atlantic coast was much better than the Pacific side. Less touristic and a bit more raw country, with much friendlier Ticos – it’s got that rasta-Caribbean vibe. Manzanillo is perfectly ramshackle and laid-back, with some great small beaches, waterfalls, and mellow roads for bike riding. And there is still plenty of tourist infrastructure. We ate most lunches at a great French bakery / deli (Bread and Chocolate Cafe) and stayed in a couple of mid-range places on the beaches (Banana Azul and Cabinas Yemanya). A week looking for turtles and sloths, building sand castles with the kids, or swimming in the turquoise ocean was too short – we wish we had stayed on the Atlantic side the whole month. I’ve included a picture from the tidepools and beach near Punta Cocles, about five miles toward Puerto Viejo from the Tree House. A great place to reread Paul Theroux’s Mosquito Coast (a favorite book of mine – made into a decent but not quite as good movie too).

Our winner this week describes himself as a “long-time correct guesser, long-time suffering loser”:

An interesting clue this week. My initial thought was that it was impossible: a nondescript view of a forest with not much else. Seeing as how it was a beautiful day, I was thisclose to abandoning my search this week for more productive endeavors. Before I did, I lightened the picture to bring out some of the features in the foreground. This is what I got:

A tree trunk to the left, a climbing rope, swirly designs on the floor, a backpack on a chair and what looks like the ocean on the horizon. Typing those elements into the google machine, I had to scroll through about a page of results until I spied this:

Large tree trunk, swirly floor, climbing rope, similar chair. I found the answer before my morning cup of coffee had gotten cold.

This week’s contest view actually came from the Dish’s own Chas Danner. He writes:

My wife and I took a belated honeymoon to Costa Rica over the winter, and our stay at the Observatorio was absolutely one of the highlights of our trip. It was an unforgettable night alone in the canopy of a lush primary rainforest.

And yes, you do wake up to the howler monkeys, a pack of which rolled by like a thunderstorm around 5:30am. Our only regret was that we didn’t spend more than one night. Also, Peter, the Czech engineer who dreamed up and built the treehouse, was a delightful guide and host as well as one of the coolest people I’ve ever met in any country. Here he is holding the rope as I ascended in my tree climbing harness:

Is The HIV Divide Now Over?

What are your options today as a gay man with a sex life in America? You live in a community where a deadly virus has killed hundreds of thousands and is still resilient in the gay male world as a whole. It has no external or visible symptoms most of the time. Many people have no idea they have it. But the virus can be permanently suppressed to a point where it cannot be measured in your bloodstream and to a point where an HIV-positive man cannot transmit the virus to another person. And someone who is HIV-negative can also have access to a daily pill that, if taken conscientiously, all but wipes out the chance of getting infected.

Here are your options: the blue pill or the red pill. Take the one-pill-a-day Truvada (below right) and never get HIV; take the often one-pill anti-retroviral pill (like atripla, below left), and you will never give someone HIV. To make doubly sure, you can always use a condom. Except almost every man who ever had sex hates condoms – and, unlike a pill you take every day, wearing a condom means making a decision in the middle of sexual desire and passion when your rational self is at its weakest.

For me, this seems obvious – partly because I have been through the HIV mill for my entire adult life. I was dumped by an HIV-positive man when I was HIV-negative; I was dumped by countless HIV-negative men because I was positive; I have had an undetectable viral load for nearly two decades; and I am open about my HIV status – even to the point of risking deportation; I’ve been publicly shamed by HIV-negative gay men for seeking sex only with other HIV-positive men. I have navigated relationships with men on both sides of the divide – and yet the divide remained. These trials-by-fire are mercifully not always the norm any more – but that means that the young generation has fewer psychological resources or experiences with HIV to grapple with the whole issue of getting infected, or avoiding infection, or navigating sex with the issue of HIV menacingly in the way. Which may be partly why the younger generation remains the one most at risk. The trauma of the distant past still echoes in the collective psyche; this is still a disease people feel ashamed of; it is still a disease which other gay men will stigmatize and ostracize you for; it is still a disease that your friends and family regard as terrifying – even though it is no more rationally terrifying at this point than diabetes. It still compels you into denial; or fear; or blame; or ostracism.

And so our psyches are lagging behind the science – and behind the epidemic. And one of the most powerful aspects of that traumatized psyche is the division between HIV-positive men and HIV-negative ones. It’s been there from the very beginning – this segregation of fear. But surely, at this point, there is no reason to continue the segregation. What matters is not whether you are HIV-positive or HIV-negative. What matters is whether you know your status and are on one medication or the other. Once that is true, sex can cross the bridge once more. The pills can erase the stigma and the divide – if we really want them to.

There’s a terrific new piece in Poz magazine that explores much of this territory. It weighs some of the risks of the Truvada revolution, but it also illuminates the liberation of it as well, the amazing promise that the viral Jim Crow can be dismantled at last:

Out of the dozens (nearly all of them gay men) who shared their stories about being on PrEP for this article, many described life-altering sexual and personal renaissances as, for the first time ever, they discovered what it was like to have sex without fear.

“PrEP makes me feel good about being gay,” says Evan (some of those interviewed preferred to use their first names only), a 22-year-old full-time sex worker living in Washington, DC. “Growing up gay is still really hard. The first things that we learn about our sexuality are that some people aren’t going to like us, and that we are probably going to get HIV. Taking PrEP has allowed me to step into my sexuality and feel empowered.” PrEP, he adds, “has led me to accept all gay men as a potential friend, sex partner or life partner regardless of their HIV status.”

Another man, dogged by the threat of HIV his whole life, expresses how he feels about taking Truvada this way: “I felt free, finally. For the first time since I was a kid, I know my sexuality is not going to be the cause of my death.”

The discourse around this new breakthrough has long been about risks and expense and compliance and how to make sure men don’t get too promiscuous again. And all that has its place. But we fail to understand this moment if we do not understand the liberation that comes with ridding gay sex of the terror and stink of death, the liberation that comes with leaving a world where another man – before he can be anything to you – has to be put in a “positive” or “negative” box. Or to put it another way:

If life is worth living

it’s got to be run

as a means of giving

not as a race to be won

Many roads will run through many lives

but somehow we’ll arrive

Many roads will run through many lives

but somewhere we’ll survive

Sex is about intimacy; it is about love; it is about relief. And for the first time since the early 1980s, we have a chance to rid it of fear. Why are we not rushing to embrace this? What is still preventing us from becoming collectively a force for love and friendship that is no longer limned with terror?

The Best Of The Dish Today

Ted Cruz, some supporters are arguing, is dead-set on a presidential campaign for 2016 and determined to make foreign policy his focus. It does not appear, it would seem, that this comes from a long mulling over the state of the world today, but instead as a response to the current very Republican-friendly re-animation of the post 9/11 hysteria about Jihadist terror that Josh has now noted. And his position is not neoconservative. He has no illusions about the ability of developing countries, especially in the Middle East, to find a way forward to democratic stability with American help. And so he would be as skeptical as I am that Obama’s new war in Iraq will somehow prod the sects there to overcome their differences and construct a functioning broad-based government. Instead he just wants to bomb the crap out of places from the air – or engage in massive military efforts to quell enemies – and then run away. Or, in his words:

“If and when military action is called for, it should be A) with a clearly defined military objective, B) executed with overwhelming force, and C) when we’re done we should get the heck out. I don’t think it’s the job of our military to engage in nation-building. It is the job of our military to protect America and to hunt down and kill those who would threaten to murder Americans. It is not the job of our military to occupy countries across the globe and try to turn them into democratic utopias.”

Well, I’m with him on that last p0int. But I’m not sure that the “rubble makes no trouble” paradigm really works in practice. If you’re dealing with Islamist terror, brutal bombing raids, which would inevitably involve civilian casualties, could very well provoke more resistance, more anti-Americanism and more terrorism. Even an occupation designed to quell an insurgency, as in Iraq from 2004 – 2010, failed to do that. And such a policy would be very hard to sell to allies – as even the current containment policy toward ISIS suggests. Then there’s his softer belligerence: much tougher sanctions against Russia and Iran. As if sanctions against the one government policy supported by the Iranian people – a peaceful nuclear program – would somehow resolve the problem. Or as if Obama hasn’t done both those things already.

But I expect Cruz to run, and I would not be surprised if he won. In the current mood – with the right returning to outright panic over Islamism, despite no terror attacks from any of the putative deadliest foes – the atavistic strain is tumescent. The GOP base wants revenge and bombs and bombast – preferably against Muslims. And the symbol of all this will be Greater Israel – the state that bombs its enemies with ruthless abandon, and with no apology. Just as Obama has adopted the Likudnik policy of “mowing the lawn” in the Middle East, Cruz will take that even further. The world will be our Gaza!

Today, I wondered whether the administration cared any more about whether a terror threat was imminent or non-existent before going to war against it; I tried to makes sense of the president’s apparent conviction that the Shi’a, Sunnis and Kurds will at some point decide they love Iraq more than they hate each other; I outed John Oliver as a journalist; and Jake Weisberg penned a tart review of Rick Perlstein’s history of the right. Man, I miss Jake’s writing.

The most popular post of the day remained this Chart Of The Day on how successive recoveries have benefited the rich more and more; followed by this reflection on how envy kills mid-life friendships.

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. 24 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 and polos are for sale here. A new subscriber writes:

Just wanted to let you know, I’ve been wanting to subscribe to The Dish for what seems like ages now, but promised myself I wouldn’t until I found a job (internships notwithstanding). Well, I finally found one! So, after getting my first paycheck and a credit card, it seemed about time to ante up. There was only one last hurdle: being told I was “part of the smartest, most diverse and open-minded community on the web,” without throwing up. You might as well put up a sign, “You must be this pretentious to enter.”

But subscribing to The Dish is a big deal to me. I’ve wanted to do it for so long. Because of the deal I made myself, it’s come to signify that I’m actually going somewhere in my life, that I finally have some income I can dispose of. So I was thrilled for this to be the first purchase made on my new card.

We’re all as thrilled as our slightly nauseated reader.

See you in the morning.

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Dunham, Reviewed

Reviews are in for Lena Dunham’s new essay collection. Helen Lewis focuses on Dunham herself, and her advantaged upbringing:

[image error]Dunham’s first appearance in print came in 1998, when a Vogue story on New York tweens quoted her thoughts about big-name fashion designers—“I really like Jil Sander, but it’s so expensive”— and her attempts to re-create them on a $5-a-week allowance. She was 11.

Within five years, she was already on her second appearance in the New York Times, after a reporter was despatched to a vegan dinner party she gave for her private-school friends. “A crunchy menu for a youthful crowd”, records the headline. The 16-year-old Lena found that “meat was easy to give up, cheese, almost impossible.” But: “One year into a totally vegan diet, she has become a soy connoisseur.”

Not exactly the kind of up-bringing I had. I was munching on liver and bacon and mash and gravy at that point – and loving it. Lewis does eventually get to the book itself:

This book is emphatically not a feminist polemic. There is one chapter where she imagines the memoir she’ll write at 80, in which she will name the names of all the creepy male directors who have propositioned her, and one letter (in a collection of “emails I would send if I were one ounce crazier/angrier/braver”) that smacks of real, rather than posturing anger, at having her feminism derided. But everywhere else, perhaps from a desire to separate art from activism, the focus is relentlessly inward. (Her sister, Grace, is arranging for representatives of Planned Parenthood to campaign at events on Lena’s book tour; the book does not mention abortion.)

She writes in the book: “When I am playing a character, I am never allowed to explicitly state the takeaway message of the scenes I’m performing—after all, part of the dramatic conflict is that the person I’m portraying doesn’t really know it yet.” The same applies to most of the book: Her whole life is a performance art piece where she plays a noxious brat with great skill, and poses herself, either eerily like one of her mother’s dolls, or sexually, like her father’s nudes. And as the carapace of fame around her has expanded, she has shrunk within it, leaving only gnomic statements about granola and blowjobs. Reading this book, you realize that Lena Dunham has been playing “Lena Dunham” for a long time. She is not real.

Michiko Kakutani, for her part, refuses to conflate Dunham with her “Girls” protagonist:

In fact, the differences between Ms. Dunham and Hannah help fuel this book. A young woman in search of a comic road map to love and sex and work and “having it all” would hardly benefit from consulting the self-sabotaging Hannah (or, for that matter, Marnie, Jessa or Shoshanna) for advice. But the author of this memoir — that’s another matter. Ms. Dunham doesn’t presume to be “the voice of my generation” or even “a voice of a generation,” as Hannah does in the show. Instead, by simply telling her own story in all its specificity and sometimes embarrassing detail, she has written a book that’s as acute and heartfelt as it is funny.

Jessica Kasmer-Jacobs agrees that Dunham isn’t Hannah, but not about the quality of the book:

What surprised me most about Ms. Dunham’s memoir is that one of the funniest voices of my generation has written a book that isn’t very funny. …

One suspects that Ms. Dunham did not quite know what she wanted this book to be. It reads like a memoir, divided by sections titled “Love and Sex,” “Body,” “Friendship,” “Work” and “Big Picture,” but it is packaged like a self-help book, something of a nostalgic tribute to Helen Gurley Brown’s “Having It All” (1982), the Cosmopolitan editor’s “passionate program” for “women who won’t settle for less than the best.” Ms. Dunham harbors a respect for Gurley Brown, she reports, despite what she calls the latter’s “demented theories” on attracting men, family planning and crash dieting, “which jibe not even a little bit with my distinctly feminist upbringing.” Herself “a girl with a keen interest in having it all,” Ms. Dunham says she feels obliged to pitch in with “hopeful dispatches from the frontlines of that struggle.”

Laura Miller shares her views:

“Not That Kind of Girl” is a book in which stories peter out. The advice theme wanders off and gets lost in the long grass. There is a strong chapter on Dunham’s relationship to her younger sister, followed by a pointless and predictable list of things she likes about New York. Some passages are general when they need to be specific and others are close-ups when they need to pan out to take in a bigger picture.

Contrary to what some critics might assert, self-absorption per se isn’t a deal-breaker in a writer. It has worked for everyone from Saint Augustine to Anne Sexton. But it requires a particular form of discipline, an ability to distinguish signal from noise that Dunham has yet to achieve on her own. I’m not sure I want her to, at least not yet, because while she lacks Allen’s precision, she exceeds him in courage and vulnerability by miles. The most fascinating bits of “Not That Kind of Girl” are the handful that describe Dunham’s approach to her work, the revolutionary, liberating way she has used her own naked body (not to mention her naked psyche) as “simply a tool to tell the story.” What she doesmatters more to her than anything she can merely be, which is millennia of traditional femininity turned on its head, granny panties showing, right there.

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The Enduring Appeal Of Bullshit

Brendan Nyhan considers why absurd claims spread so quickly on the Internet:

[T]ake the bizarre but instructive example of the woman who claimed to have had an implant to add a third breast – clearly an example of an implausible story that was too good to check. Initial reports circulated widely on social networks, totaling over 188,000 shares according to Emergent’s data. The story was quickly discredited after it was reported that a three-breast prosthesis had been previously found in the woman’s luggage, but the articles reporting that it was false never attracted even one-third as many shares as the initial false reports.

That hoax may seem silly, but it’s instructive about the problem with rumors – they’re often much more interesting than the truth. The challenge for fact-checkers, it seems, is to make the facts as fun to share as the myths they seek to replace.

(Screenshot from the New York Post)

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Not Minding The Gap

Alice Robb discourages excessive gender-gap-awareness:

The “bike gap” is the latest in a small spate of “gender gaps” that don’t seem worth our concern. At New York’s “The Cut,” Ann Friedman says women don’t feel “at home in the world of weed.” It’s not entirely clear that Tracie Egan Morrissey, writing for Jezebel, is joking when she urges women to “close the gender gap on being potheads.” She cites research suggesting that nearly twice as many men smoke weed (or at least admit to it). The only possible explanation, according to Morrissey, is sexism. “When it comes to cultural representations, it’s generally accepted that the world of weed is a guy thing,” she writes. …

“No one bemoans the gender gap in female dominated activities,” points out journalist Jessica Grose in an email. “Where are the men in knitting or flower arranging?” Or, for that matter, where are the men in Soul Cycle? Marcotte admits that indoor cycling is dominated by women; she estimates that women make up “80 to 100 percent” of most spin classes. Yet she sees no problem.

Friedman dissents:

Closing a gender gap for the sake of closing the gap is going about it all backwards. Usually gaps are symptomatic of other problems. It is important to interrogate why a gap exists, and address that problem. I don’t think you can argue that women are naturally less interested in cycling or video games or weed than men are—our choices are shaped by the culture and society we live in. That society is pretty sexist!

Instead of looking at the world with all its many group differences and appreciating that, one kind of liberal sees it all as a problem to be fixed. Let me just reiterate my own view: vive la différence! Amanda Marcotte agrees with Friedman:

I don’t think the fact that men smoke more pot than women is a problem, in and of itself, that needs fixing. But the fact that men don’t feel guilty about firing up a joint and playing Call of Duty while women think they should be spending that time on “worthwhile” activities perhaps bears a little more interrogation.

Michael Barone inserts evolutionary theory into the debate:

There are salient differences between men and women, on average, as the natural result of the evolutionary process, and those differences are reflected in different behavior and different career choices, again on average. We want a society where people can make the choices they want, but we fool ourselves if we think that in such a society men’s and women’s choices would be statistically indistinguishable.

Ya think?

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