Andrew Sullivan's Blog, page 163

The Beauty In Our Melting World

by Dish Staff

An introduction to the wonderful work of Zaria Forman, who does stunning pastel drawings of icebergs and oceans:

(Hat tip: Christopher Jobson)

The Anti-ISIS Coalition And Obama’s Strategy

by Jonah Shepp

At the NATO summit in Newport, Wales today, US officials announced that they had formed an international coalition to wage war on ISIS:

President Barack Obama sought to use a NATO summit in Wales to enlist allied support in a campaign to destroy the Islamist militants but as the summit drew to a close it remained unclear how many nations might join Washington in air strikes. Secretary of State John Kerry and Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel told foreign and defense ministers from 10 nations at a hastily arranged meeting that there were many ways they could help, including training and equipping the Iraqis. … Hagel told ministers from Britain, France, Germany, Canada, Australia, Turkey, Italy, Poland and Denmark that they, with the United States, formed the core group for tackling the Sunni militant group.

In his press conference, Obama stressed that the coalition-building effort isn’t over and that John Kerry would continue to seek partnerships with other countries in combating the ISIS threat. He also stressed the importance of engaging Arab states, particularly those with Sunni majorities, in countering ISIS not only militarily, but also—or even primarily—politically. He rightly pointed out that any international effort will only succeed in the long term with the support of local actors in Iraq and Syria, and compared the coming effort to “degrade and ultimately destroy” ISIS to the fight against al-Qaeda.

That fight looked very different under Bush and under Obama, so what that means is unclear. If I had to guess, I would say that he is signaling a plan to fight ISIS as he has fought other jihadist militant groups: i.e., primarily through targeted killings of its leadership from on high (cf. today’s announcement that Ahmed Abdi Godane, the leader of Somalia’s al-Shabaab, was killed in a US airstrike on Monday) and by degrading their capabilities until they are weak enough for local partners to finish them off. We could surely do this all by ourselves, but having an international coalition behind the effort enhances its legitimacy and reinforces the principle of multilateral responsibility for global security to which Obama clearly adheres.

Hayes Brown compares this coalition (which, again, won’t necessarily be limited to these ten countries) to the Multinational Force Bush formed to participate in the 2003 invasion of Iraq:

Conservatives have already begun to pan the announcement of the core coalition, drawing unfavorable comparisons to 2003. … While there are clearly some overlaps between the two groups, including the United Kingdom, Australia, Italy, Denmark and Poland, the “core” group lined up against ISIS has a few advantages over those assembled in 2003. In 2003, Germany and France were both strongly opposed to action in Iraq, depriving the U.S. of key support in Europe. Adding in those countries gives the group the support of two of the most militarily powerful states in Europe. Canada’s support adds to the cohesion among the most capable members of NATO and Ottawa’s support will also translate over into the G-7. Most strikingly, the group announced on Friday includes Turkey, which not only neighbors Iraq but serves as a Muslim-majority country that can be put forward as a defense against claims that the campaign against ISIS isn’t yet another Western invasion of a Muslim country.

But Juan Cole doubts our NATO allies are very enthusiastic about this mission:

My reading of the reporting from Wales is that most NATO states have little intention of intervening directly in Iraq and most of them have no intention to get involved in Syria. The US and Britain (and, far from Europe, Australia) are the most likely to commit to the Iraq front. The NATO country closest to ISIL territory, Turkey, seems reluctant to get involved in directly fighting ISIL (and critics of the religious Right party, AKP, which is in power, suggest that behind the scenes President Tayyip Erdogan is supporting the hard core Muslim rebels in Syria. Despite all the vehement talk, the US likely will have few allies in the air in Iraq as President Obama seems to be stampeded (by the Washington hawks and fear of losing the midterms for looking weak) into a wide-ranging new Iraq war that seems likely to spill over into Syria. The biggest problem the US faces, however, is the lack of effective allies on the ground in Iraq.

The View From Your Window

by Dish Staff

Kumamoto, Japan, 10.30 am

Obamacare Is Beating Expectations

by Dish Staff

Ezra heralds the news:

A new report from the Kaiser Family Foundation finds that in seven major cities that have released data on 2015 premiums, the price of the benchmark Obamacare plan — the second-cheapest silver plan, which the federal government uses to calculate subsidies —  is falling.

Yes, falling.

“Falling” is not a word that people associate with health-insurance premiums. They tend to rise as regularly as the morning sun. And, to be fair, the Kaiser Family Foundation is only looking at 16 cities in 15 states and the District of Columbia, and the drop they record is, on average, a modest 0.8 percent (though this is the same methodology they used in 2014, and to good results). But this data, though preliminary, is the best data we have  —  and it shows that Obamacare is doing a better job holding down costs than anyone seriously predicted, including Kaiser’s researchers.

Cohn weighs in:

To appreciate what that means, consider what the market for buying insurance on your own (rather than through an employer) was like before Obamacare came along. Between 2008 and 2010, premiums went up every year and they did so by at least 10 percent, according to an analysis that MIT economist Jonathan Gruber did for the Commonwealth Fund. And that was for insurance that might be sold only to healthy people or that had benefits far skimpier than the ones required by the Affordable Care Act. “There is variation, but so far, premium increases in year two of the Affordable Care Act are generally modest,” Drew Altman, Kaiser’s President and CEO, said in a press release. “Double digit premium increases in this market were not uncommon in the past.”

But it isn’t all good news. Jason Millman explains:

[I]n 12 of the 16 cities that Kaiser studied, at least one of the insurers that offered a benchmark plan in 2014 no longer has benchmark status for 2015. That means that insurer might have raised rates, or another insurer is offering lower prices in 2015. Either way, if a person remains enrolled in what used to be a benchmark plan, that person (assuming life circumstances haven’t changed) will have to pay more toward their premium.

That’s all to say that shopping around for insurance this year could be really important for the new Obamacare enrollees.

A Second Look At The Giant Garbage Pile That Is Online Media, 2014

by Alex Pareene

WARNING: This is a post, by a media professional, about the media. If you are a normal human being, you will not and definitely should not care, except inasmuch as it’s part of a debate about whether or not we, the media, are failing you, the normal human being. If you are looking for something a little more general-interest, may I recommend, I dunno, a 10,000-word Grantland post about a prestige cable show. Or make some fantasy football trades. Or read a book, I don’t know!

On Wednesday, I wrote about Takes. My piece was a blog post, written on the fly, based on ideas that have been rattling around in my head for a while. If I’d taken the time – say a week, or a month – to organize those thoughts better, and clarify my argument, I would’ve written a very different – and almost certainly better – piece. But I didn’t do that (I am only guesting here at The Dish for one short week, after all), so I now cheerfully admit that, as my (friendly) critics contend, I conflated a few different Internet tropes. Specifically, in the words of Jack Dickey, I conflated “aggregated picayune garbage with the Take.”

So let’s get into this a bit more. Here are the primary types of garbage content that lots of money – money that could be spent on making good things – is currently being spent on producing:

No-value-added news blogging

This is “aggregated picayune garbage,” and it is the primary pollutant in the Great Pacific garbage patch of the Internet. It is just mass-produced debris, utterly valueless, thoughtlessly sent into the world without regard for quality, but solely because it fills the short-term need to have some sort of piece of content on which to sell ads.

This makes up 75 percent* of the content on TIME’s “Newsfeed” (“Chris Pratt Messes Up First Pitch at Cubs Game, Is Completely Charming About It,” “43.5 Socks Removed from Dog’s Stomach During Surgery“), with similar numbers at the Huffington Post, and the newsblogs of AOL and Yahoo and MSN. That’s just the general-interest news media. In other fields, it’s frequently worse, largely because shrinking budgets have decimated everything that isn’t cheap aggregation. Music and pop culture sites in particular are full of semi-identical news nuggets (“Kate Bush’s House in Danger of Falling Into the Sea,” “Kate Bush Is Literally Living Life on the Edge,”, “Kate Bush’s House Might Fall Into the Ocean”), as are sites dedicated to film, comics, and entertainment in general.

*(NB: All percentages and figures in this piece are just made-up, but feel right to me.)

This sort of newsblogging is also, to varying degrees, what makes up much of the Gawker Media* sites’ daily output, even as they’ve strived (successfully) to produce a lot of original material that isn’t aggregation. And to be fair to Gawker Media, they were among the first to do this at all. When they were the only game in town, this sort of newsblogging was an entertaining substitute for reading multiple newspapers, blogs and magazines. Now no one actually reads multiple newspapers, blogs, and magazines, besides the people who aggregate for a living. Everyone else just reads what comes in through their feeds, and all publishers are fighting to post the version of the story that ends up in the most feeds.

*(Disclosure: I worked at Gawker Media for many years. It taught me how to write and post little bits of news, with jokes, very quickly. I’ve spent the last few years learning how to do this more slowly, and at greater length.)

Reddit-chasing

This happens when someone at a website is like, “this is on the second page of Reddit so someone put it up.”

For example: Man Buys Every Pie At Burger King to Spite Shitty Little Brat” (Gawker, also Eater, Consumerist, Break, MSN Living, Gothamist, OC Weekly, Refinery 29, etc.)

These are often, though not always, Takes. In this example, some websites thought that the man was funny and good for doing this, and other websites thought that the man was bad. Others declined to pass judgment and instead asked their readers to simply ponder the implications of the story. “This Reddit Post Sums Up All of Humankind,” one site lied. (NB: There is zero evidence – as in absolutely none – that this story actually happened, beyond the claim made by an anonymous person on a message board who subsequently disappeared from that message board. No one who picked up the story really cared.)

Other examples: “Reddit gives two-year-old cancer patient a nonstop pizza transfusion” and 75 percent of BuzzFeed.

“Jon Stewart eviscerates”

This category also includes: “this celebrity Tweeted,” “this cable news guest or host said,” and “a thing happened at an award show.”

Viral bilge

This is the Upworthy/Viral Nova/Elite Daily nexus of “viral” content packaged with manipulative headlines. The worst part of it is that at some places (though not all), it involves nearly as many man-hours of labor (the creation and comparative testing of dozens of headlines, for example) to produce stupid garbage like “9 Charming Traits Class Clowns All Share That Landed Them In Detention Every Day” and “What These People Found In Their Attic Changed Their Lives Forever” as it would to create something actually edifying and interesting.

–

When these forms of aggregation are ubiquitous – and they’re everywhere, from USA Today to Cosmopolitan to all the Village Voice alt-weeklies to Glenn Beck’s The Blaze to The Bustle to the AV Club to SPIN to Complex – the only means sites have to differentiate themselves are “voice,” speed, and social/SEO juicing. “Voice” leads to the Take; it’s an adaptation to aggregation, designed to help sites differentiate otherwise identical content. The endpoint of Take Culture is “Thought Catalog,” where literally every take, from any person, no matter how stupid or offensive, is presented as just as valid, as every other Take, with the Takes that generate a lot of outraged inbound traffic the most equally valid of all.

This is not to demonize all aggregation and opinion-blogging. The Dish, for example, does both of those things quite well, because at The Dish, the aggregation is wide-ranging, instead of directed purely and cynically at latching onto a currently trending topic or getting some tiny bit of micro-news posted a split second faster than the dozen other sites that will also be posting that tiny bit of micro-news as quickly as possible. As for the opinion-blogging, well, say what you will about the man who has generously allowed me to crash at his place while he’s out of town, but no one can accuse Andrew Sullivan of producing Takes that he doesn’t strongly and sincerely believe in. (At the time he writes them, at least.) Opinion-blogging works when interesting writers have interesting, sincerely-held opinions. “Takes” are attempts to artificially replicate that process with whomever is handy and whatever opinions it seems plausible that someone might hold.

The majority of the shit described in this blog post is useless. The world doesn’t need 5,000 separate-but-barely-distinct versions of every damn story from every damn field of human endeavor. The people getting paid (barely) to produce those slightly differentiated versions of every story ever are wasting their time, unless “able to crop a picture of a celebrity in WordPress without help” becomes, suddenly, a much scarcer and more in-demand skill. The reader, in nearly every case, is getting a less-good version (or several less-good versions) of the story than whatever the original was. The vast majority of this sort of aggregation could be replaced with one curated Twitter feed that every website in existence could run on a siderail, and the media consumer would benefit. And even in that scenario, the bottom-rung producers of content are still effectively screwed. So I don’t know. Maybe it’s time to consider an organized aggregator work slowdown?

Expatriatism, Ctd

by Dish Staff

A reader addresses Jonah’s piece on living abroad for several years in Jordan:

Thank you for sharing your experience. I went to Beirut, Lebanon from my US university as a third-year student in 1974, interested in history and archaeology. During the ten months I spent in Lebanon I was forced to consider all sorts of new experiences: Palestinian dorm-mates, life experiences that were very different from mine; travels to “mysterious” (as it then was) Syria; and finally the outbreak of the Lebanese civil war in spring 1975. All of these experiences forced me to think in new ways about the US, about its role in the world, and about the lives of others who (in the US corporate media) were mostly overlooked or dismissed. And the more I began to dig into the causes of the Lebanese war, the more complex (and hitherto unknown to me) this world became. So began a lifelong quest to try to figure things out. After all these decades I have more questions than answers, but I suppose that is the point of a life’s journey.

Another reader:

I grew up in Beirut … well, sort of. My family moved there when I was 11 and I stayed until I graduated, and my folks stayed another 4 years until July 4, 1976. Yes, as we were watching the Boston Pops and fireworks, they were in a convoy leaving Lebanon because of the civil war. I am definitely a “3rd Culture Kid”. I rarely feel 100% at home with anyone except others who have lived abroad and understand that phenomena.

Another shares some great insights from his time abroad:

My husband and I packed up our cat and moved to Asia in 2008. We lived in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia for five years, then moved to Ulaanbaatar, Mongolia in September 2013. Being an expat means about a million things, but I’ll try to focus on a few. We Americans develop a strange sense of our own importance that life overseas corrects. Americans on both the left and right are wrong when they assume people from other countries automatically don’t like us.

From people on the left, the assumption is based on the Iraq war and the George W. Bush administration, plus various CIA/Central America/Vietnam War activities, depending on their age. From the right, we hear this assumption about Muslims (especially because we lived in Muslim Malaysia) and any/all others presumed to disagree with US foreign policy. But as you described in your post, people focus primarily on their own day-to-day lives. Expat life teaches that people go about their daily lives doing what they do without thinking about the US all the time. And we make individual relationships to move past the stereotypes.

That said, the US is a model for democratic governance, and people outside the US pay attention to how our democracy works. I work in international development and have been in many meetings where civil society leaders reference the Bill of Rights when discussing how to expand civil and human rights in their countries. The US Constitution serves as a very real example, as freedom of press, religion, assembly (or rule of law generally) and the judiciary are still aspirations in many places that are grappling with democracy. Before moving overseas, I had no idea that people in other countries actually talk about the US Constitution.

Which is why it’s so painful when we slip, as in Ferguson. We can be a model on paper, but when police kill unarmed citizens, then dress in combat gear to break up a protest AND arrest journalists, we look like hypocrites. And this is why it gets up people’s noses when we tell them to do what we say. Andrew has pointed out many times how we lose our moral authority when we torture; it’s the same problem when we violate the Constitution in other ways as well.

Another reader:

A great post by Jonah Shepp. In 1987, my husband and I and our two sons, aged 2 and 5, relocated to Melbourne, Australia, from Chicago. We went because my husband got a great job offer, and we had always wanted to live abroad (the job offer to go to Sudan five years prior was not quite the same). At any rate, we lived a privileged life there, and not because we were on expat salary and benefits. We actually became permanent residents of Australia, and now have dual citizenship, something that the US tolerates with countries like Australia (would we ever really go to war with them?), and Australia doesn’t mind at all. Typical of the Aussies.

We loved living in Melbourne and we made friends who are with us forever. At first glance, many think that Australia is a lot like California (my native state), and the point of this piece is that it’s not – not at all. And it’s not like England either. And I would not know this if I had not lived there. So many little things: an Aussie telling me that an Australian politician would be laughed out of office if he dared invoke God, or Jesus, or made any sort of religious comment, in a speech. That their version of peanut butter is a disgusting thing called Vegemite, but they love it with a passion – the ultimate comfort food – because of course, they all grew up with it.

And another: no country wants to be controlled by another country. This seems so obvious to an American, and I’d never given it much thought, until I went to Australia, and learned first-hand about England’s domination of that country, and how England just expected Australian men to fight and die for Mother England, in far off places. This didn’t hit home to me, despite having seen movies like Breaker Morant, until at a dinner party one evening, when another guest bitterly talked about it.

And another:

I spent a couple years in the Peace Corps, so allow me to give a plug to the incredible benefits of the program. Yeah, yeah, sure, it helps others and makes the world a better place, blah blah (and that is all very true, and the program is wonderful). But don’t be fooled by that gloss of altruism. Most Peace Corps volunteers GET a heck of a lot more than they put in. How could it be otherwise? The volunteer offers an individual’s insights and hard work, but receives an entire culture in return. And back home in a United States that offers a large helping of praise to those who serve in the military, may I suggest that Peace Corps volunteers give more and get less recognition for it? (But once again, no sour grapes here, because we volunteers received more than we gave.)

Even for a socially backward nerd like me, fresh out of college, with basically no social skills and a profound reluctance to interact with any people from my host country aside from the students to whom I taught science, it was an eye-opening and amazing experience. The States did not look the same when I returned. I can tell you exactly when brake lights started appearing in the back windshields of cars … they were not there when I left, but when I returned, every car looked to me like a Cylon from Battlestar Galactica (original series, of course). More profoundly, I had a feeling of accomplishment after my service that saw me through some tough bouts of self-doubt. And I had a sense of how lucky I was, because I knew that I was, like most Americans, a child of privilege.

Thanks for the post and the memories.

They Got The Wrong Men

by Dish Staff

Yesterday, two men were freed after spending 30 years behind bars for a rape and murder they didn’t commit. Lauren Galik introduces us to the wrongly convicted:

The men, Henry Lee “Buddy” McCollum and Leon Brown, are stepbrothers. McCollum, 19 at the time of the crime, was sentenced to death and spent 30 years on North Carolina’s death row, making him one of the longest serving death row prisoners in the state. Brown, 15 at the time of the crime, was also sentenced to death but was later retried and sentenced to life in prison. Both men are considered mentally disabled—McCollum’s IQ is between 60 and 69 and Brown’s IQ is 49.

Alice Ollstein describes how the brothers were pressured into giving false confessions:

[C]ivil and legal rights advocates, including Vernetta Alston at the Center for Death Penalty Litigation, have long argued the “process” has not worked at all for Henry Lee McCollum and Leon Brown. “At every juncture, the system failed Henry and Leon,” Alston told ThinkProgress. “They were coerced into giving false confessions. These two boys could hardly read. They were very intellectually disabled. They were manipulated and threatened, and only signed the statements because law enforcement told them they could go home. It’s unacceptable.”

The brothers were interrogated for hours with no attorney present in order to obtain the confessions, which they both later recanted. There was never any physical evidence against them.

Dahlia Lithwick looks at the bigger picture:

This case highlights the same well-known and extensively documented problems that can lead to false arrests and convictions: Police who are incentivized to find any suspect quickly, rather than the right one carefully; false confessions elicited after improper questioning; exculpatory evidence never turned over; the prosecution of vulnerable, mentally ill, or very young suspects in ways that take advantage of their innocence rather than protecting it; prosecutorial zeal that has far more to do with the pursuit of victories than the pursuit of truth; and a death penalty appeals system that treats this entire screwed-up process of investigation and conviction as both conclusive and unreviewable.

Map Of The Day

by Dish Staff

Niraj Chokshi illustrates how the best states for female workers are in the Northeast:

Massachusetts had the highest score [for women's earnings and employment] among states, according to the analysis of four factors conducted by the Institute for Women’s Policy Research. (D.C. scored even higher, though many argue it is better compared to other cities.) All but four of the 10 highest-scoring states – Maryland, Minnesota, Colorado and Virginia – were in the Northeast. Sixteen states earned a B- or higher. West Virginia ranked dead last and, along with Alabama, received an F. The composite scores, excluding D.C., ranged from 68.5 to 90.5, on a hundred-point scale.

The four factors analyzed to develop the composite scores were: median annual earnings (for full-time, year-round women workers); the earnings ratio between men and women (again, for full-time, year-round women workers); the share of women in the workforce; and the share of women in managerial or professional jobs.

Al-Qaeda’s Newest Franchise

by Dish Staff

In a video released today, Al-Qaeda international leader Ayman al-Zawahiri announced that the organization was establishing a branch in South Asia to wage jihad in India, Bangladesh, and Myanmar. Ishaan Tharoor examines the logic behind the decision:

Al-Qaeda’s desire for operational expansion eastward makes sense: There are roughly as many Muslims in South Asia as there are in the Arab world; there are more Muslims outside the Middle East than inside it. The history of the Mughal Empire allows al-Qaeda ideologues to invoke a narrative of lost Muslim preeminence, waiting for redemption, even though some Mughal emperors would have abhorred the terrorist organization’s brand of Islam. … But it’s hard to see how al-Qaeda can capitalize in South Asia if it hasn’t already. For all the tensions and enmities that exist in this diverse, overcrowded region, it’s a part of the world steeped in traditions of pluralism and tolerance. Al-Qaeda’s puritanical zeal, incubated in places such as Saudi Arabia, is wholly alien to the Indian subcontinent. And South Asian governments, particularly in India and Bangladesh, have stepped up cooperation on issues of counterterrorism.

One interpretation is that Zawahiri is trying to recapture al-Qaeda’s relevance as it loses ground in the Islamic heartland to even more radical outfits like ISIS, but Dan Murphy doubts it will work:

Can Zawahiri turn the tide against the upstart jihadis? For now, it seems unlikely. The small percentage of Muslims that support such movements seem elated by Baghdadi’s caliphate declaration, and imagine they’re living in epoch-defining times that will see their dream of converting the whole world at the point of a sword realized. The old Al Qaeda approach – that world domination wasn’t possible until “far enemies” like the US were somehow destroyed – is being upended by the arguably more conventional ISIS approach of seizing territory. For the small group of misfits and loners and true-believers who view the chopping of heads and gunning down captives in their hundreds as heroic, rather than revolting, ISIS is the emerging brand name. When was the last time Joe Biden vowed to chase Al Qaeda to the gates of hell?

Andrew North observes that al-Qaeda has even been losing support in its traditional Af-Pak stronghold. He suggests the decision has something to do with that as well:

Several Pakistani-based militant groups previously allied to al-Qaeda have recently pledged allegiance to IS and its goal of an Islamic caliphate. The group has now reportedly launched a support and recruitment drive in border areas like Peshawar. Booklets in the name of the Dawlat-e-Islamia (Islamic State) have been circulating among the many Afghan refugees living there. Graffiti, or wall-talk, another guide to sentiments, is also going the group’s way, with pro-IS slogans now regularly appearing on Peshawar buildings. And while Zawahiri’s announcement seems primarily aimed at India, the man he named as the new leader of al-Qaeda’s South Asia wing, Asim Umar, is reportedly a Pakistani.

Katherine Zimmerman, on the other hand, argues that the video proves al-Qaeda is still alive and dangerous:

The split between al Qaeda and the Islamic State is very real, as is the contest for the global jihadist movement. The Islamic State’s unprecedented success in Iraq and Syria has energized the movement as a whole, which is why al Qaeda leaders have supported Sunni victories in Iraq. The Islamic State, and then al Qaeda, must both be defeated. Going after one and dismissing the other is short-sighted and leaves American interests vulnerable to attacks. Allying with so-called lesser enemies like Iran, or Syria, as Senator Rand Paul (and others) have suggested, to go after the Sunni threat is just as short-sighted. Just because the Islamic State and al Qaeda want to kill Americans doesn’t mean Assad and Khamenei don’t. Al Qaeda’s newest affiliate is proof of life for those who were questioning. There are still groups seeking to affiliate with al Qaeda, and some of them, such as Mokhtar Belmokhtar’s group in the Sahel, have killed Americans. Al Qaeda is not dead. It is still a threat to the United States, and Ayman al Zawahiri wants us to know it.

Mental Health Break

by Chas Danner

Perhaps the most epic pet POV of all time:

Alternate view of the same run: