Andrew Sullivan's Blog, page 172
August 26, 2014
Parental Whoa-vershare, Ctd
A reader writes:
Bless your heart, Phoebe, for attempting to curb the tide of parental overshare. I am a parent of young children, and I post pictures of them and the occasional adorable quip they make on Facebook. Honestly, I post more than I should of them, but I try very hard to limit it to only the nicest photos of my kids, and not too frequently, for the exact reasons you discussed. I do not want my kids to be searching for jobs and have a potential employer know about their childhood doctors appointments. I appreciate having someone out there pointing out the long term effects if parental oversharing, so thanks for… sharing.
The two genres of parental sharing you mentioned really only account for the high-end posts (I.e., the Times and the Atlantic are the publishers). There is a plethora of other parental overshares on the so-called mommy blogs. So many kids with digestive problems and mothers trying to help their kids understand God and stay-at-home dads trying to be clever and funny. And the larger blogs have sponsored content (albeit often clearly labeled). I once read a post by a woman whose blog received a sponsorship from a razor company, and she talked about the first time her tween daughter shaved. Ugh. And that doesn’t even begin to get to the quick shares on Facebook of potty training successes and failures. Please keep up the good work of reminding people not to start embarrassing their children until they are a little older, like our parents did.
Even with my limited knowledge of colloquial American English from places outside the Northeast, I know that “bless your heart” implies that my cause here is a futile one. Which, alas, it probably is. But this response is reminding me of an important clarification regarding just what that cause, as I see it, involves.
When it comes to parental overshare, two issues get confused. First, there’s the excessive-to-some presence of babies in one’s Facebook feed (a common complaint of many who don’t have kids, whether or not by choice). Second, there’s the question of large-scale privacy violation. “Mommy blog” complaints fall somewhere between the two. Sometimes people are offended by the mere presence online of content that isn’t news, opinion, or mansplanation about the serious issues of the day, and it’s basically part of the standing grievance that exists against all ‘lifestyle’ content. Other times, it’s that some of these blogs are sharing identifiable information about kids, including that which is embarrassing, medical, or both, and are – as this reader notes – doing so for profit.
Anyway, social-media sharing and “mommy blogs” are easier targets than serious publications taking on serious parenting-related issues. But the parental overshare that’s a real concern is precisely the sort that isn’t so readily declared irrelevant. The point here isn’t to dismiss certain types of (largely female-oriented-and-produced) content as boring or frivolous. It’s normal, in an age of online photo-sharing, that family photo albums would be digital, and would include kids. It’s normal to be some mix of bored or annoyed by what long-lost acquaintances put on Facebook, but – as Maureen O’Connor eloquently explained – it’s not unethical to post things others find uninteresting. The issue, as I see it, is not that children are owed a complete digital invisibility of the sort that’s near-unachievable in this day and age. Rather, it’s that parents shouldn’t be profiting from their children’s secrets. There shouldn’t be something to gain, professionally, by breaching that trust.
Another response gets it exactly right:
More parental Whoa-vershare by @tweetertation wp.me/p33JF9-15tB. Can't stop blogs but why does Atlantic publish this? @alexismadrigal—
Zeynep Tufekci (@zeynep) August 26, 2014
Tufekci is correct that change needs to come from editors. As it stands, someone with a toilet-training essay to sell will find an outlet; someone with an essay not about toilet-training will be nudged by the market to include an anecdote along those lines. The business model needs to change. Since the demand for really courageous articles of this nature appears insatiable, this will take an act of courage-in-the-non-sarcastic-sense from the gatekeepers themselves.
A Hobby Lobby Patch For Obamacare, Ctd
Reactions to the Obama administration’s latest move to promote contraceptive accessibility keep coming. Jonathan Cohn elaborates on why free birth control is worth fighting over:
Late last week, lots of people were talking about a story by Sarah Kliff, of Vox, on why teen pregnancy has been declining in just the last few years. It’s a great article, well worth your time, but the part that jumped out at me was the much bigger decline in teen births that occurred many decades ago—in the 1960s, when the teen pregnancy rate fell by about 25 percent. What changed? The big factor, as social scientists (and friends of QED) Harold Pollack and Luke Shaefer reminded me over the weekend, was birth control. The Food and Drug Administration first approved the pill in 1960.
It wasn’t just teenagers on whom the introduction of cheap, highly effective medical contraception had profound effects. It was also older women, including married women, who gained the ability to control the timing of pregnancy and child rearing.
James C. Capretta, meanwhile, says the HHS “non-accomodation” isn’t a real solution:
In a moral sense, the supposed “accommodation” is meaningless. If an employer with religious objections to the HHS mandate offers insurance to its workers, that coverage will, by definition, always include the objectionable services and products. There’s no way around it. The objecting employers therefore know, in advance of making the decision to offer coverage, that if they do offer coverage, the insurance plan they sponsor will provide full coverage for these products and services that they find morally objectionable.
The real solution is of course a full exemption, not this convoluted non-accommodation. Employers with religious objections to the HHS mandate should be allowed to offer insurance in conformance with their consciences. It’s that simple. This would likely affect a very small percentage of the American workforce.
And S.M. the “complicity” of Obamacare objectors:
By sending HHS a letter requesting an exemption from the birth-control mandate, the objecting groups claim they are prompting a process that will implant murderous IUDs in the uteri of their workers.
This claim is a stretch. An employer does not buy a weapon when his employee takes his paycheck to a gun show. Nor does he buy a morning-after pill if a female employee uses a benefit paid for by the federal government but provided through his insurer to secure a prescription for ella. If requesting an exemption from the birth-control mandate can plausibly be thought to represent complicity in the provision of birth control, then anyone can claim to be complicit in just about any act. But (even religious) pacifist taxpayers cannot sue the government for using their tax dollars to send troops to the Middle East. Nor can Catholics opposing the death penalty deduct the share of their tax bill going toward executions in states with capital punishment. Political society cannot operate this way.
Hair–And World–On Fire
This afternoon a draft of the next report from the world’s climate scientists to the world’s political leaders leaked to a few reporters. In the words of Justin Gillis at the NYT, it showed those scientists using even “blunter, more forceful” language than ever before to warn that
Runaway growth in the emission of greenhouse gases is swamping all political efforts to deal with the problem, raising the risk of “severe, pervasive and irreversible impacts” over the coming decades,
and that
Global warming is already cutting grain production by several percentage points, the report found, and that could grow much worse if emissions continue unchecked. Higher seas, devastating heat waves, torrential rain and other climate extremes are also being felt around the world as a result of human emissions…The world may already be nearing a temperature at which the loss of the vast ice sheet covering Greenland would become inevitable, the report said.
Short of actually engaging in self-immolation (with resulting carbon emissions), it’s hard to imagine what more scientists can do at this point to warn us. The report apparently lays out the math of climate in just the terms I described in this morning’s post about the fossil fuel divestment campaign:
The report found that companies and governments had identified reserves of these fuels at least four times larger than could safely be burned if global warming is to be kept to a tolerable level.
That means if society wants to limit the risks to future generations, it must find the discipline to leave the vast majority of these valuable fuels in the ground, the report said.
Did I mention that there is a large-ish march being planned for New York on Sept. 21? There is. In a rational world, a lot of people would show up to demand that political leaders actually pay attention to this kind of warning.
(Photo: Boaters launch their boats hundreds of yards away from designated boat ramps at Folsom Lake on August 19, 2014 in Folsom, California. As the severe drought in California continues for a third straight year, water levels in the State’s lakes and reservoirs is reaching historic lows. Folsom Lake is currently at 40 percent of its total capacity of 977,000 acre feet. By Justin Sullivan/Getty Images)
Every Sex Worker Is Somebody’s Daughter, Ctd
Noah Millman jumps in on Elizabeth’s sex-workers-as-daughters discussion:
You could call [Elizabeth's take] a “moral libertarian” version of Rawls’s veil of ignorance. We don’t know what our daughter might decide to do when she is of age. She might decide to have sex for money. Therefore, we should examine our political (and moral) attitudes with a view to who would be most harmed by them – and the person most harmed by a morally condemnatory attitude is the daughter who decides to have sex for money, and would be condemned for it.
As with Rawls’s own perspective, this makes perfect sense if you take the existing distribution is a given – in Rawls’s case, of wealth; in Nolan Brown’s, of life choices. If you don’t assume that – if you assume instead that redistribution of wealth will lead to less production of wealth overall, or that a permissive moral attitude will lead to an increase in objectively poorer life choices – then you can’t blithely say that the only thing that matters is harm reduction for those who make those choices. You have to weigh the costs on all sides of the equation. This much should be obvious.
But I still think Nolan Brown’s critique has teeth, because she’s drawing a distinction between the daughter as thought experiment and the daughter in reality.
And Elizabeth responds:
I’m guessing not many people take forklift-driving positions because they just adore the work. People take jobs as forklift drivers for the same reason people take jobs in porn—to make a living—and we don’t hear complaints that this situation exploits forklift drivers because they are under economic pressure to accept dangerous work. Yet according to the Occupational Safety and Health Administration, there are about 85 deaths and 34,900 serious injuries related to forklifts each year, with 42 percent of these involving the forklift operator being crushed by a tipping vehicle. How many people are killed each year by porn?
Will The ISIS War Come To A Vote?
If Obama wants to secure the public’s backing for the fight against ISIS, Jack Goldsmith recommends that he bring it to Congress for a vote:
The President must eventually educate the nation about why the United States is going to be deploying significant treasure and possibly some blood in Iraq and probably Syria to defeat IS. As noted above, the case in theory is not hard to make. But a mere speech from the Oval Office will not do the trick if the President wants the nation to understand the stakes and risks, and wants to get the American People truly behind the effort. Only an extended and informed and serous national debate can do that, and such a debate can only occur if the President asks for Congress’s support.
Will Inboden also believes it’s time for a new, ISIS-specific Congressional authorization for the use of force:
Even before the Islamic State’s resurgence, some national security legal scholars were arguing that the Obama administration ‘s campaign against al Qaeda and its proliferating franchises was skating on increasingly thin legal ice. … Substantively, a new AUMF, especially focused on IS and its affiliates, could take into account the evolution and adaptation of militant jihadist groups in the 13 years since the Sept. 11 attacks, as well as the shifts and drawdowns of American ground force deployments in Afghanistan and Iraq. The Islamic State’s nihilistic wickedness may be generating the headlines now, but over time even more danger may be posed by its magnetism towards other al Qaeda franchises and its potential leadership of militant jihadist groups spanning the broader Middle East and points beyond in Africa and South Asia.
Ashley Deeks, meanwhile, explores the various ways in which the administration might kosherize an intervention in Syria under international law:
A UN Security Council Resolution would provide the clearest basis for action. This option was a dead letter back in July 2012, when Russia and China refused even to approve economic sanctions against Assad, let alone the use of military force. One question would be whether the politics on this have changed: there might be some reason to think that Assad is coming under pressure from his own supporters to take on ISIS. It seems unlikely that Assad would affirmatively embrace a UNSCR authorizing a coalition of the willing to target ISIS in Syria, but if Russia senses that Assad might tolerate such action, the Security Council dynamics could change. Then again, the U.S.-Russia relationship is so toxic right now that this option seems remote. …
Second, Assad could secretly give consent to foreign governments (including the United States) to use force against ISIS in Syria. This, too, seems improbable, given the longstanding animosities between Assad and various Western governments. But having one government give secret and reluctant consent to another to conduct strikes in its territory is not without precedent.
Creepy Art Watch
This guy used a 3-D printer to paint a nude self-portrait in his own blood:
(Hat tip: Chris Plante.)
Cutting Hours Cuts Profits
Over-reliance on part-time workers isn’t good for anyone:
Since 2006, the retail and wholesale sector has cut more than a million full-time jobs and added half a million part-time positions.
A study of one large retail chain, conducted by researchers at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, found that scheduling the optimal mix of temporary and part-time workers could increase the profitability of the average store by nearly one-third. But cheaper wasn’t always better. Part-time workers often are not as productive as full-timers, because they tend to be less skilled and less experienced. To maximize sales, the researchers found, the typical store should have four or five part-time employees for every ten full-time employees. “It is possible to have too much of a good thing,” they concluded.
We may already have passed that threshold. Last week, researchers at the Federal Reserve Bank of Chicago reported that a slack job market continues to limit the paychecks of U.S. workers. An important factor, they said, is the number of part-time employees who would rather have full-time work.
August 25, 2014
Gas Attack?
A new study in Nature describes a new possible climate threat. We’ve known for some time that there is lots of methane stored in frozen form in the world’s oceans. The best known of these clathrate formations are in the Arctic, but today’s study finds them across the Atlantic, and by implication around the rest of the seafloor. Methane appears to be bubbling up out of these vents–which is bad news, since methane is a potent greenhouse gas, molecule for molecule much stronger than carbon dioxide:
The seeps were discovered in a stretch of ocean waters from Cape Hatteras, N.C., to Georges Bank, Mass. The majority are located at a depth of about 1,640 feet, which is at the upper level of stability for gas hydrate.
“Warming of the ocean waters could cause this ice to melt and release gas,”Adam Skarke, a geoscientist at Mississippi State University and the study’s lead author, told NBC News. “So there may be some connection here to intermediate ocean warming, though we need to carry out further investigations to confirm if that is the case,” he added.
The theory is, much of the heat from global warming is currently going into the ocean, not the air. In fact, there was a study just yesterday–Justin Worland summarizes :
Temperatures have risen more slowly in the past decade than in the previous 50 years and will continue to rise at a somewhat slower rate in the next decade, according to a new study, even as climate change continues to raise temperatures to unprecedented levels worldwide.
The study, published in the journal Science, explained the temporary slowdown in rising temperatures as a potential consequence of the end of a 30-year current cycle in the Atlantic Ocean that pushes heat into the ocean.
The Economist looks at how the study credits the oceans for the pause:
Dr Chen and Dr Tung have shown where exactly in the sea the missing heat is lurking. … [O]ver the past decade and a bit the ocean depths have been warming faster than the surface. This period corresponds perfectly with the pause, and contrasts with the last two decades of the 20th century, when the surface was warming faster than the deep. The authors calculate that, between 1999 and 2012, 69 zettajoules of heat (that is, 69 x 1021 joules—a huge amount of energy) have been sequestered in the oceans between 300 metres and 1,500 metres down. If it had not been so sequestered, they think, there would have been no pause in warming at the surface.
Some of that heat may well be causing these methane formations to melt, in what would be yet another vicious feedback loop. But even if this turns out to (and oh one hopes) a red herring, the basic news that the oceans are heating quickly is quite bad enough. In part because we don’t notice it as much as we do heating of the air, which slows down our response.
As Jane Lee puts it:
It’s important to note that a pause in rising temperatures doesn’t mean global warming isn’t happening, writes Gerald Meehl, a senior scientist at NCAR, in an email. “Global warming hasn’t stopped, it has temporarily shifted to the subsurface ocean,” says Meehl, who first proposed that the Atlantic Ocean was storing some of the missing heat.
Indeed, it’s just a matter of time before this heat is reflected in atmospheric temperatures, says Tung. If this 30-year cycle holds, we’re starting to climb out of the current pause, he explains.
“The frightening part,” Tung says, is “it’s going to warm just as fast as the last three decades of the 20th century, which was the fastest warming we’ve seen.” Only now, we’ll be starting from a higher average surface temperature than before.
Oh, and by the way, to return to this problem with methane: it’s why scientists increasingly worry that fracking is a bad idea not just for local water supplies, but for the climate. As Naomi Oreskes pointed out recently, if more than a couple of percent of methane leaks, it’s possible that the Obama adminstration’s turn to natural gas hasn’t really cut our greenhouse gas emissions at all:
But how do we know what our emissions actually are? Most people would assume that we measure them, but they would be wrong. Emissions are instead calculated based on energy data — how much coal, oil, and gas was bought and sold in the U.S. that year — multiplied by assumed rates of greenhouse gas production by those fuels. Here’s the rub: the gas calculation depends on the assumed leakage rate. If we’ve been underestimating leakage, then we’ve underestimated the emissions.
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