Andrew Sullivan's Blog, page 148

“A Clown Made Of Mummified Foreskin And Cotton Candy”

An epic takedown of Trump and, more importantly, the Miss America scholarship sham:

John Oliver and his team are really kicking ass with this new show. Previous Dish on Last Week Tonight segments here, here and here. He’s proof that ad-free long-form journalism can work, and be highly engaging and entertaining, if supported long and steadily enough.

Is Diet Soda Making Us Fat? Ctd

The latest in artificial sweetener scares:

Artificial sweeteners might be triggering higher blood-sugar levels in some people and contributing to the problems they were designed to combat, such as diabetes and obesity, according to new findings published Wednesday in the journal Nature. Although the precise reasons behind the blood-sugar changes remain uncertain, researchers suspect that artificial sweeteners could be disrupting the microbiome, a vast and enigmatic ecosystem of bacteria in our guts.

Svati Kirsten Naruta reminds us that the “news” isn’t really new at all:

There have been a lot of major news stories about the science behind artificially sweetened products. But I didn’t see a single one this week that acknowledged the ones written earlier this year, or in 2008, or 2005. More often than not, each individual story gives the impression that the latest science is either totally new or surprisingly compelling.

“It seems to amplify every time,” Purdue University’s Susan Swithers told Quartz. “Things don’t have to be shocking and new to get this shocking and new treatment.” Swithers herself has been featured in news stories about artificial sweeteners and diabetes, including an NPR one asking “Do diet drinks mess up metabolisms?” in 2013.

Not many news outlets have the space, time or resources to contextualize, at length, each meaningful scientific study. But there’s something wrong with a cycle in which reporters constantly react to press releases from academic institutions or scientific journals by generating uniquely attention-grabbing stories based on each one.

Daniel Engber looks at the historical pattern:

The supposed risks of saccharin, like those of other sweeteners, have a way of glomming on to whatever other fears happen to be in the public mind. In Roosevelt’s day, we worried over fraud in manufacturing – flour cut with sawdust, coffee mixed with powdered acorns—and saccharin was decried as a cheapo surrogate for sugar. By the time Richard Nixon declared a war on cancer, the sweeteners were seen as dangerous carcinogens. These days we’re more concerned with diabetes and obesity, and so the putative effects of drinking diet soda have shifted once again. Now they’re blamed for bringing on the very thing they’re meant to counter: a growing scientific literature hints that artificial sweeteners could make us fat.

And evidently the first sweetener gave the Romans lead poisoning. Previous Dish on sweetener research here. And Aaron Carroll has made the case that however bad artificial sweeteners might be, sugar is worse.

A 19th Century Frenchman Explains the 21st Century Middle East

Drawing on his recent book, Tocqueville in Arabia: Dilemmas in a Democratic Age, Joshua Mitchell applies the French thinker’s insights about the emergence of democracy to today’s Middle East:

Alexis de Tocqueville long ago wrote that the democratic age is upon us. By this he meant that the “links” to family and tribe that held us fast in the aristocratic age were breaking apart before our eyes. The political consequence of this social de-linkage, however, was not necessarily benign democratic governance. Indeed, he worried that attempts would be made to refortify the old links, to reaffirm roles at the moment when delinked persons were emerging. What we today often identify as “Islamic Fundamentalism” is just such an attempt to re-fortify the old links, to re-enchant the world. Herein lays the dilemma of the Middle East. Caught in the matrix of the political and social arrangements of the twentieth century that defy credulity, drawn and at the same time repulsed by the fugitive freedom they see on Western shores but only dimly understand, nascent citizens more than occasionally dream of returning to an enchanted world for which an imagined Islam provides a ready guide.

Under these wildly unstable conditions, U.S. foreign policy-makers should take the long view. Democratic governance will not arrive soon in the Middle East. If it does at all, it will emerge only when families and tribes become much less important than they now are. Citizens and entrepreneurs―the building blocks of democratic governance and of market commerce―do not spring up spontaneously out of societies where families and tribes still retain their hold on the imagination. The slow process by which that changes, moreover, cannot easily be accelerated by U.S. foreign policy.

In the meantime, in the interludes of peace, diplomatic and cultural outreach and, above all, higher education initiatives intended to help the younger generation understand and thrive in the disenchanted world it will inherit offer perhaps the most constructive ways to engage the region.

Update from a reader:

Let’s face it. Nothing explains the Middle East.

(Image of Tocqueville by Théodore Chassériau via Wikimedia Commons)

Face Of The Day

This fucking cat:

The Los Angeles Feline Film Festival at the Memorial Coliseum takes place on September 21, 2014. The annual event featuring celebrity cats and feline films raises money for local cat sanctuaries and rescue organizations. By Mark Ralston/AFP/Getty Images.

A Classic Conundrum

What makes a piece of literature a classic? For Saket Suryesh, the work must be introspective:

We, as readers, are able to find our own feelings in such words despite the distances between us and the time and space they were originally composed in because those emotions are universal. The world which surrounds these feelings may change, but the emotions themselves do not. Consider, from Heart of Darkness, the lines: “She carried her sorrowful head as though she were proud of that sorrow, as though she would say, I — I alone know how to mourn for him as he deserves.” Simple words but an ache rises from the heart of even the modern reader, for who wouldn’t want to be loved thus?

Eric Williams, though, refuses to accept that a classic work can exist outside of time and space. He argues, “‘The Classics’ are a fluid and dynamic category, changing with times and tastes and history, and not something transmitted to us across the aesthetic ether”:

The danger of the numinous label of “The Classics” is that it kills texts. It becomes holy writ, studied for its intrinsic rightness, ahistorical and timeless. Nothing is more dangerous. Books are discrete historical objects, written by specific individuals at specific times, and their subsequent histories reflect how people envisioned literature, artistic merit and important ideas in the larger context of their times and culture. By all means, read them for their beautiful language and interesting imagery, and interpret them based on your own private and individual history and perspectives. But at the same time, read them as historical documents, fully aware of the baggage that comes with them and fully cognizant that someone somewhere decided that the book in your hands had more value than other books. Echoing Suryesh, read the classics voraciously — but, I would add, always thoughtfully, critically and historically.

Paul’s Foreign Policy Predicament

Doves prefer Clinton to Paul:

Larison analyzes the survey:

Doves clearly prefer Clinton despite the fact that a few more respondents (correctly) perceive her to be a hawk. However, Clinton also seems to benefit from the fact that 30% of respondents inexplicably perceive her as a dove, and only 27% perceive Paul that way. For all of the attention paid to Paul’s foreign policy views in political media over the last few years, his position is not very well-known or clear to the public at large, since 24% identify him as a hawk and 49% aren’t sure what to call him. Oddly enough, that might be just what Paul wants, since it gives him room to move back and forth between hawkish and dovish stances.

Michael Brendan Dougherty worries about Paul’s management of “the conflict between his own convictions and good politics”:

If public opinion or his conscience are guiding him toward military confrontation with ISIS, and if his better judgment guides him away from the available alliances on the ground, he is rapidly backing himself into the trap of Clintonian foreign policy. That means airstrikes and harassment, carried out indefinitely.

An airstrikes-only approach provides all the satisfaction of conflict, and little risk of major casualties for U.S. forces, which quickly swing public opinion against a president and his party. But in recent times, this policy has always had one of two endings. When President Obama and Hillary Clinton did it in Libya, this “smart power” strategy resulted in a stateless region of chaos; the Libyan government can hardly meet safely in the territory it claims to rule. When Bill Clinton did it with his no-fly zone in Iraq, it settled into a kind of stalemate. It was a relatively light drain on U.S. budgets, but it was also vaguely humiliating. A domestic uprising against Saddam never materialized to justify our policy. And American hawks could put pressure on the president for a more robust policy of regime change. What’s the point of military engagement, they’d ask, if victory isn’t on the table?

But Weigel finds that Paul’s anti-war supporters trust him:

The crisis in Iraq, which has caused a surge in the numbers of Republicans ready to send ground troops back into the Middle East, has not really rattled Paul’s people. He has what very few political figures still have; his supporters assume that he simply must agree with them, no matter what he says.

Carrion Comfort

The ancestors of flesh-eating carrion beetles like the one above offer, according to new research, the “earliest evidence of parental care,” dating back to 125 million years ago. The beetles were not only “exceptional parents, but they also represent the oldest known example of active parenting on the planet”:

Finding traces of exceptional parenting in the fossil record is exceedingly difficult. In this case, the team managed it by studying fossils from China and Myanmar. The fossils showed that ancient beetles from the Early Cretaceous possessed special bodily structures close to those modern beetles possess that allow them to communicate with their young. Additionally, an amber fossil they uncovered caught the beetle parents in action, showing “elaborate biparental care and defense of small vertebrate carcasses for their larvae.”

The researchers also note that several types of modern carrion beetles are endangered:

The American burying beetle, for example, is down to fewer than 1,000 individuals that live east of the Mississippi River. Even the most experienced parents in the world can’t shield their babies from the ill-effects of human-driven habitat fragmentation, it seems.

(Photo of hairy burying beetle by Laszlo Ilyes)

Left Cold By Coffee?

A new study suggests heavy coffee-drinkers “find it more difficult to identify and describe their own emotions”:

“Alexithymia” – Greek for “no words for feelings” – is the psychological terminology for an inability to put ones emotions into words. [Researcher Michael] Lyvers et al did a survey study of 106 university students and found that alexithymia was correlated with the amount of caffeine consumed per day…. Lyvers et al say that

Alexithymics reported consuming nearly twice as much caffeine per day on average compared to non-alexithymic controls or those with borderline alexithymia.

As to why this is the case, the authors speculate that

Perhaps those with alexithymia consume caffeine more heavily than non-alexithymics in an attempt to optimize inherently low arousal levels.

Reviewing the results, Neuroskeptic stays true to his nom de plume:

My concern here is that because this is a self-report questionnaire, the [Toronto Alexithymia Scale] is measuring worries over alexithymia as opposed to alexithymia per se. Moreover, I notice that in Lyver’s dataset, the TAS was quite strongly correlated with self-reported anxiety, apathy, dis-inhibition and executive dysfunction. So I’d say that it’s plausible that all of these self-report scores are reflecting some basic ‘tendency to give negative answers on questionnaires’ which might reflect neuroticism, low self-esteem or (if you prefer) just realism.

Chaos In Motion

Synchronized drivers steer clear of accidents in Rush Hour, an impeccably edited short film from Fernando Livschitz:

An Actual War On Women, Ctd

Ariel Ahram goes deep in exploring ISIS’s use of sexual violence, arguing that it represents “as much an undertaking in state-making as in war-making”:

The power to control or manipulate sexual and ethnic identity is a key component of all state power. In the Middle East, the regulation of sexual relations is often used as a means to create or reinforce ethno-sectarian boundaries.

In the 19th century the Ottoman authorities prohibited marriage between Shi’i men and Sunni women in the provinces of Iraq for fear that Shi’i Iranians were gaining a demographic foothold in the region. Since Islamic law privileges male prerogative over children, the move was meant to block the propagation of Shi’ism within the Ottoman domain. Marriage of Shi’i women to Sunni men was still permitted, since the children of such a union were deemed Sunni. Saddam Hussein took similar measures in the 1970s and 1980s. In late 1970s, in the immediate wake of the Islamic Revolution in Iran, the government moved to deport some 40,000 people deemed to be of “Iranian” (i.e., Shi’i) origins. Thousands of families were interned in prison or prison camps for months, where they were subject to rape and torture, before being transported to the border. …

ISIS’s violence is a heinous crime of war, but also represents a particular form of statecraft. At first glance, it might appear that these practices, though justified by selective interpretations of Islamic law, serve only to satisfy prurient sexual urges. Much like its manipulation of water and oil resources, though, ISIS’s use of sexual and ethnic violence has both ancient and modern antecedents. By selectively reinforcing, creating, and severing ties of kinship, these violent practices can affect bonds of loyalty and obedience far more substantially than the simple distribution of resource rents.