Andrew Sullivan's Blog, page 157

Hathos Red Alert

And the lede of the day:

This story has it all. Stretch Hummers. Booze. A right hook. And a former vice presidential candidate screaming, “Do you know who I am?”

Continued here, including the age-old question, “Is this real life or a scene from a Real Housewives show?”

Mental Health Break

A hypnotic lesson in physics:

An Unhealthy Work Environment

Frakt and Carroll make the case against employer wellness programs:

More rigorous studies tend to find that wellness programs don’t save money and, with few exceptions, do not appreciably improve health. This is often because additional health screenings built into the programs encourage overuse of unnecessary care, pushing spending higher without improving health.

However, this doesn’t mean that employers aren’t right, in a way. Wellness programs can achieve cost savings — for employers — by shifting higher costs of care onto workers. In particular, workers who don’t meet the demands and goals of wellness programs (whether by not participating at all, or by failing to meet benchmarks like a reduction in body mass index) end up paying more. Financial incentives to get healthier sometimes simply become financial penalties on workers who resist participation or who aren’t as fit. Some believe this can be a form of discrimination.

Drum suspected as much:

For the most part, wellness programs are a means to reduce pay for employees who don’t participate, and there are always going to be a fair number of curmudgeons who refuse to participate. Voila! Lower payroll expenses! And the best part is that employers can engage in this cynical behavior while retaining a smug public conviction that they’re just acting for the common good. Bah.

How Apple Plugs Itself Into Our Lives

Nick Carr is uncomfortable with QuickType – a “predictive type” feature being rolled out with iOS 8:

It seems more than a little weird that Apple’s developers would get excited about an algorithm that will converse with your spouse on your behalf, channeling the “laid back” tone you deploy for conjugal chitchat. The programmers seem to assume that romantic partners are desperate to trade intimacy for efficiency. I suppose the next step is to get Frederick Winslow Taylor to stand beside the marriage bed with a stopwatch and a clipboard. “Three caresses would have been sufficient, ma’am.”

In The Glass Cage, I argue that we’ve embraced a wrong-headed and ultimately destructive approach to automating human activities, and in Apple’s let-the-software-do-the-talking feature we see a particularly disquieting manifestation of the reigning design ethic. Technical qualities are given precedence over human qualities, and human qualities come to be seen as dispensable.

Looking on the bright side of Apple’s announcements, Jonathan Cohn imagines that the Apple Watch could “make medical care more efficient and let us all stay a lot healthier”:

One of the biggest problems with health care today is the lack of ongoing, continuous care, particularly for people with chronic conditions. It means that doctors, nurses, and the rest of health care system spend a lot of time treating people with serious, sometimes urgent problems, rather than keeping them healthy in the first place.

Mobile devices that monitor and then transmit vital signs can help fix that, so that patients and their medical professionals would know when problems were starting.

Julia Belluz is skeptical of such claims:

This gadget and the new software will certainly make analyzing data easier, and it may even be more precise than other wearable technologies. But the claims to an Apple-shaped health revolution deserve some scrutiny: the evidence on existing wearables suggests that — like all other silver-bullet solutions for health — they haven’t yet figured out how to make habit change stick.

Neil Irwin, meanwhile, casts doubt on Apple’s new mobile payments service:

The core challenge Apple faces is that buying things with a credit card isn’t nearly as onerous a process as they make it out to be.

Drum is on the same page:

There really are issues with credit cards as payment devices. They’re fairly easily stolen and they’re pretty insecure. Still, these things are relative. As long as you use a credit card instead of a debit card, you’re not responsible for most losses, and various forms of modern technology have made credit cards much more secure than in the past. And as Irwin points out, they’re pretty easy to use. It’s just possible that the Steve Jobs reality distortion field could have convinced everyone otherwise, but I’m not sure Tim Cook is up to the task.

Leonid Bershidsky also deflates Apple Pay a bit:

The company’s partners, banks and credit-card companies, played along with Apple’s hype, because they support every player that puts effort into popularizing a technology whose use they are struggling to expand. Essentially, however, Apple is just a middleman and will have a role only so long as existing payments industry players need help spurring consumers to adopt contactless payment.

And Cass Sunstein raises a potential drawback to Apple’s mobile payments:

When payment becomes easier, and when people don’t see the money they’re handing over, they tend to spend a lot more. And as payment becomes more automatic, people become less sensitive to what they’re losing. Apple Pay users might find that their thinner phones are making their bank accounts thinner as well.

A little social science: People who use credit cards tend to give bigger tips at restaurants and spend more at department stores. They are also more likely to forget, or to underestimate, the amounts of their recent purchases.

Earlier Dish on this week’s Apple news here.

Dick Cheney Was Right About Iraq All Along

Really, he was! That is, if we point to 1991, when he said this:

What kind of government? Should it be a Sunni government or Shi’i government or a Kurdish government or Ba’athist regime? Or maybe we want to bring in some of the Islamic fundamentalists? How long would we have had to stay in Baghdad to keep that government in place? What would happen to the government once U.S. forces withdrew? How many casualties should the United States accept in that effort to try to create clarity and stability in a situation that is inherently unstable? I think it is vitally important for a President to know when to use military force. I think it is also very important for him to know when not to commit U.S. military force. And it’s my view that the President got it right both times, that it would have been a mistake for us to get bogged down in the quagmire inside Iraq.

But the new narrative emerging as Cheney pursues his “told you so” comeback tour is that he was right all along about how he had won the Iraq war and then Obama lost it. Weigel plumbs the depths of the derpitude:

Boy, the phrase “all along” is asked to do some heavy from-the-knees lifting there. All along? The timer starts four years after the start of the Iraq war, and two years after Cheney insisted, pre-surge, that Iraqi insurgent groups were in their “last throes”? Yes, that’s the new rule.

We are to analyze the situation of 2014 by crediting the Bush administration not for the Iraq war, but for post-surge Iraq. This has been the argument since 2011, when the Obama administration failed to extend the three-year status of forces agreement that (to the satisfaction of hawks) Bush had handed to him. The theme at the time, as Charles Krauthammer put it, was that Obama was“handed a war that was won,” and he blew it.

Dreher has no time for such nonsense:

Three out of four Americans in 2011 wanted the president to withdraw all US troops from Iraq. Read the Gallup poll; how soon, and how conveniently, we forget. You cannot keep US soldiers in a hopeless war with 75 percent of the country against that policy. Gallup’s poll numbers show that even though the percentage of Americans in 2014 who believe total withdrawal was the right thing is down to 61 percent, that’s still a strong majority. President Obama did what the Iraqis would allow him to do — it’s their country, after all — and what the American people wanted him to do.

This Bush prophecy business is b.s. through and through. It’s important to say that now, because Dick Cheney, one of the principal architects of one of the worst disasters in US foreign policy and military history, is now making an “I Told You So” tour, back in Washington (a standing ovation at AEI!) spreading his wisdom to appreciative conservative audiences. It’s like they let Bernie Madoff work on Wall Street again, or returned the FEMA portfolio to Brownie.

Beard Of The Week

A Gibraltarian with the beard with the colors of the Gibraltar flag is seen during during Gibraltar National Day celebrations on September 10, 2014. The day commemorates Gibraltar’s first sovereignty referendum of 1967, in which Gibraltarian voters were asked whether they wished to either pass under Spanish sovereignty, or remain under British sovereignty, with institutions of self-government. By Sergio Camacho/Getty Images.

Teaching Ferguson

Rebecca Schuman explores the ways colleges have brought “living history” into the classroom:

The desire among professors and students to explore the context of the Brown shooting has resulted in an informal nationwide movement, in fact, loosely gathered under the hashtag #FergusonSyllabus (begun by Georgetown professor Marcia Chatelain). Participants from a variety of disciplines have offered articles, books, blog posts, videos, and more to help teachers help their students understand what is happening here.

This “syllabus” is certainly far removed from the esoteric fare your average freshman encounters—sure, The Epic of Gilgamesh and drosophila flies are important, but their immediate relevance to 18-year-olds is often a bit of a stretch. The events of Ferguson—and, more broadly, the workings of the U.S. criminal justice system, and the racial and economic segregation of our cities—are, on the other hand, palpable around them now. To transform the needless death of a young man to a “teachable moment” may feel heartless, but that doesn’t mean our students shouldn’t learn from it. In fact, they’re eager to.

(Photo: Police forces in Ferguson, Missouri, a suburb of St. Louis, on August 17, 2014. By Bilgin Sasmaz/Anadolu Agency/Getty Images)

The Red Tape Around Abortion

Elizabeth Nolan Brown discusses the significance of a 72-hour waiting period for abortion:

In effect, waiting-period rules like the one Missouri Republicans are pushing just make it logistically harder for women to exercise their right to an abortion. Yesterday I wrote about a Pennsylvania woman who ordered the abortion pill illegally online because the nearest clinic was more than 70 miles away. Some on social media scoffed at the idea that 70 miles was too far to travel—but because of mandatory waiting periods and other bureaucratic nonsense, what could be a one- or two-visit procedure actually requires three or four separate visits.

This is why it’s such bullshit when anti-abortion types talk about how it’s just an extra day or two wait; it’s just a requirement that only a physician can physically hand a woman the abortion pill; it’s just one or two clinics that will close down due to hospitals refusing admitting-privileges to abortion doctors… Taken individually, none of the restrictions may seem that nefarious. But these restrictions don’t exist in a vacuum. And the cumulative effect is absolutely to create a climate where the time and capital required to terminate a pregnancy becomes prohibitive for large numbers of women.

Emily Shire, meanwhile, is uncomfortable with differentiating between “good” and “bad” abortions:

When female politicians like Davis describe their abortions, they generally fit this narrative: a tortured, loving mother acting out of almost pure medical necessity. After Rep. Jackie Speier (D-CA) revealed on the House floor that she’d had an abortion, she made it abundantly clear that it was due to the fact the fetus “could not survive.” Her candor was a purposeful rebuke to Republican accusations that abortion is “a procedure that is either welcomed or done cavalierly, or done without any thought,” she said. Her speech was powerful—and it also conveyed the attitude that abortion wasn’t a real choice for her. In fact, following her speech, Speier released a press statement to dispel any accusations that she wanted to have an abortion: “Today some news reports are implying that I wanted my pregnancy to end, but that is simply not true. I lost my baby.”

It is this kind of abortion narrative that is easiest for people to digest, and there are many cases like this. They are as emotionally-wrought and heartbreaking as Davis describes. But there are also many reasons for having abortions that generate far more judgment and stigma.

Recent Dish on Wendy Davis’ abortion revelation here.

Face Of The Day

US Secretary of State John Kerry waits in a helicopter in Baghdad on September 10, 2014. Kerry flew into Iraq today for talks with its new leaders on their role in a long-awaited new strategy against Islamic State jihadists to be unveiled by President Barack Obama tonight. By Brendan Smialowski/AFP/Getty Images.

Only Thinking About Their Bottom Lines

The NYT recently reported that several think tanks have “received tens of millions of dollars from foreign governments in recent years while pushing United States government officials to adopt policies that often reflect the donors’ priorities”:

The money is increasingly transforming the once-staid think-tank world into a muscular arm of foreign governments’ lobbying in Washington. And it has set off troubling questions about intellectual freedom: Some scholars say they have been pressured to reach conclusions friendly to the government financing the research.

Tom Medvetz asks, “How can journalists report on think tanks without becoming complicit in this system?”

First, they could approach the commonsense distinction between “policy advice” and lobbying with a bit less credulity. Why should any tax-exempt organization that doesn’t voluntarily disclose its own financial records be described as a source of “independent policy advice”? Reporters could also stop lending credence to the dubious metaphor that portrays think tanks as founts of “academic scholarship.” (Again, the Times article is a case in point: Even as the authors paint a vivid picture of a constitutively impure system, they insist on calling think tanks’ staff members “scholars.”) I don’t mean to suggest that actually existing scholars are somehow immune to market or political forces. They are not, and they should be subject to the same kinds of scrutiny as think tanks. But we should remember that scholarship refers in principle to a system marked by relative transparency and self-regulation through peer review, and that its results are not meant to be for sale.

John B. Judis remembers the good ol’ days:

Some history is in order for those who think it has always been that way. The first policy groups, which originated early in the last century and only later became called “think tanks,” included the Brookings Institution (which was formed out of three other policy groups), the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, and the Twentieth Century Fund (now the Century Foundation). They were products of the Progressive Era idea of using social science to produce policy research that, in the words of Robert Brookings, would be “free from any political or pecuniary interest.”

Andrew Carnegie gave his think tank an endowment of $10 million in order to free it from having to raise money. Brookings, who had retired from business to devote himself to philanthropy, generously funded his. The scholars at these groups had definite ideas, but the groups resisted attempts by outside group to shape their conclusions.