Andrew Sullivan's Blog, page 180
August 19, 2014
Forced To Bear Her Rapist’s Child
Kitty Holland and Ruadhán Mac Cormaic report on the latest abortion controversy in Ireland:
The young woman who was refused an abortion and later had her pregnancy delivered by Caesarean section, has spoken of her attempt to take her own life when she was 16 weeks pregnant. She says she was a victim of rape before she came to Ireland earlier this year and she found out she was pregnant during a medical check soon after. In an interview with The Irish Times she says she immediately expressed her desire to die rather than bear her rapist’s child, when she was eight weeks and four days pregnant. … The section was performed on her earlier this month. She was discharged a week later and is receiving psychiatric care in the community. The baby, whom she has not had contact with, remains in hospital.
Amanda Marcotte blames anti-abortion legislation:
The situation perfectly encapsulates how abortion bans work in the real world: The most vulnerable women are harmed, while more privileged women find ways to get abortions. In Ireland, women who can afford to travel simply go to England to get abortions, meaning that poor and immigrant women under travel restrictions are out of luck. A young immigrant rape victim has now been put through an entirely unnecessary horror show, but hey, at least Irish politicians can preen about how “pro-life” they are.
Sarah Ditum voices her outrage:
As an onlooker to this case, what strikes me is the constant traffic of foreign objects through this woman’s body, imposing foreign wills. The penis of the rapist who forced himself into her. The nasogastric tube stuck into her nostril and down against her resisting throat. The scalpel of the doctors who cut her open, their hands in her belly, the moving horror of another body within your restrained flesh. The unbelievable awfulness of being compelled to provide life to the child of the man who raped you.
Face Of The Day
Local residents dress a sick Saah Exco, 10, after bathing him in a back alley of the West Point slum on August 19, 2014 in Monrovia, Liberia. According to a community organizer, Saah’s mother died of suspected but untested Ebola in West Point before he was brought to the isolation center on the evening of August 13th with his brother Tamba, 6, aunt Ma Hawa, and cousins. His brother died on August 15th. Saah fled the center that same day with several other patients before it was overrun by a mob of slum residents on August 16th. Once out in the neighborhood, Saah was not sheltered, as he was suspected of having Ebola, so he’s been sleeping outside. Residents reportedly began giving him medication, a drip, and oral rehydration liquids today. The whereabouts and condition of his aunt and cousins, who left the facility when it was overrun by the mob, is still unknown at this time. The Ebola virus has killed more than 1,000 people in four African nations, more in Liberia than any other country. Photo by John Moore/Getty Images.
View Alan Taylor’s heartbreaking gallery of images from the Liberian Ebola crisis here.
Getting Rich Off Debt
In an excerpt of his forthcoming book, Bad Paper: Chasing Debt From Wall Street to the Underworld, Jake Halpern (NYT) explores the morally-dubious consumer debt collection business:
[Aaron] Siegel struck out on his own, investing in distressed consumer debt — basically buying up the right to collect unpaid credit-card bills. When debtors stop paying those bills, the banks regard the balances as assets for 180 days. After that, they are of questionable worth. So banks “charge off” the accounts, taking a loss, and other creditors act similarly. These huge, routine sell-offs have created a vast market for unpaid debts — not just credit-card debts but also auto loans, medical loans, gym fees, payday loans, overdue cellphone tabs, old utility bills, delinquent book-club accounts. The scale is breathtaking. From 2006 to 2009, for example, the nation’s top nine debt buyers purchased almost 90 million consumer accounts with more than $140 billion in “face value.” And they bought at a steep discount. On average, they paid just 4.5 cents on the dollar. These debt buyers collect what they can and then sell the remaining accounts to other buyers, and so on. Those who trade in such debt call it “paper.” That was Aaron Siegel’s business.
It turned out to be a good one. Siegel quickly discovered that when he bought the right kind of paper, the profits were astronomical. He obtained one portfolio for $28,527, collected more than $90,000 on it in just six weeks and then sold the remaining uncollected accounts for $31,000. Siegel bought another portfolio of debt for $33,388, collected more than $147,000 on it in four months and sold the remaining accounts for $33,124. Even to a seasoned Wall Street man, the margins were jaw-dropping.
Responding to Halpern’s piece, McArdle offers some advice to those in debt:
In general, I think it’s a good idea to make good on debts you owe, unless doing so would pose an undue legal hardship. And remember that by the time you’re dealing with an elderly debt, you’re talking to a guy on the other end of the phone who probably bought your account for a few cents on the dollar. Which means that he makes a profit even if you only pay a small fraction of what you owe. Even if you don’t agree with me on the morality of it, it may be worth coming to a settlement just to end the hassle of further calls.
Adi Robertson flags Felix Salmon’s interactive debtor vs debt-collector game:
Journalist Felix Salmon has developed Bad Paper for Fusion, a TV channel and website that he joined earlier this year. It’s what he calls the first of his “post-text” projects, moving into different forms of digital storytelling. More practically, though, it’s a “choose your own adventure” story where you play either a debtor trying to beat the system or a debt collector trying to get paid.
Bad Paper sets up scenarios designed to explain what exactly debt collectors can legally do, what kind of tricks they use, and just how much they’re making when someone pays them thousands of dollars to settle a debt they bought for orders of magnitude less. In some ways, you can think of it as a much more fun and informative version of the PSA quizzes meant to teach you about things like safe driving and moderate alcohol consumption. “Winning” isn’t actually as interesting as changing up your answers and seeing what the game tells you. The flip side is that by its very nature, it feels almost falsely reassuring. There’s one very specific way to beat debt collection, and as far as I can tell from the accompanying article, it’s a pretty solid one. But the inherent limit of multiple-choice storytelling is that there is one story with a limited number of endings. There are no random calamities or special circumstances. Find a way to win once, and you’ll win every time.
Can Double-Blind Peer Review Be Reformed?, Ctd
Lots and lots of great reader responses to my post on peer review. Here’s a sample. Many readers ding me, correctly, for over-generalizing: much of academic peer review is not double-blind.
Interesting post, and thanks for the link to the Rossman piece. I don’t have a great story for you on peer review, but wanted to add that most natural science journals actually use single-blind. This may be changing, for example this article which also provides some support for my assertion.
Another:
I am a senior academic, so I have been on both sides of the peer review process, and I have counseled younger colleagues who have voiced complaints similar to those outlined by deBoer. Although some of the problems mentioned are insoluble, others could be remedied or at least reduced by clearer policies on the part of professional associations within various disciplines and academic journals. These include:
1. The professional associations should establish and publicize standards governing professional conduct in undertaking and completing reviews. There may be no way to enforce these standards directly, but publicizing them might be helpful, in part in helping editors call wayward and/or tardy reviewers to account. The associations could also collect and publicize data on the period from submission to publication for various journals. These data might inform authors of what journals to seek out and which to avoid.
2. Academic journals should set a deadline for the completion of reviews, communicated to the authors and to the reviewers ahead of time. Six weeks seems a reasonable period to me, but I am not wedded to that. If the reviewer cannot guarantee a review within the prescribed period, another reviewer should be selected. Reviewers who fail to meet their obligations should not be asked by the journal to review future articles, and journal editors should be proactive in pressuring tardy reviewers. Those submitting articles should be free, after three months without a response from a journal, to submit his/her work to another journal as well.
3. Using the same reviewers for the “revise and resubmit” review as for the original review, so that new objections/concerns are less likely to be raised. The reviewers should be asked simply as to whether the problems they identified have been adequately addressed or not, and a final determination should be made. Multiple “revise and resubmits” should not occur. If the author’s work doesn’t merit publication after he/she has had a chance to revise it, the author should be told so (and be free to submit to another journal).
Similar thoughts:
Necessary background: I’m a research meteorologist, almost 21 years past my Ph.D. I don’t have as many peer-reviewed papers published as anyone would like me to have but the ones I do have appear in 5 different journals published by the American Meteorological Society (AMS), 2 published by the American Geophysical Union (AGU), and another published by the European Geosciences Union (EGU). Over the years I have served as a reviewer for most of the journals in which I’ve published, and for at least 1 AGU journal in which I have not yet published. The AMS or the AGU are usually the primary professional society with which U.S. based meteorologists who are not forecasters are affiliated. (The National Weather Association (NWA) is often the primary for forecasters.). …
I would take serious issue with your statement that “Peer review, at the vast majority of credible journals, is built on a double blind system.” I have never run into a double-blind review system, either as a writer or a reviewer. I do not think I have ever heard a colleague talk about being part of one, either. So this may be very seriously field-specific. The AMS & AGU journals have, to the best of my knowledge, very high credibility in the meteorology, atmospheric sciences, oceanographic, and related fields. I’ll leave exploration of metrics to you, if you’re interested; all that matters to me is the opinion of my colleagues & “bosses”. I believe that I have heard of trouble with some editors once one starts getting into topics related to climate change, but as it’s well outside my direct experience I’d prefer to leave it at that. I’d refer you to the blogs of Prof. Roger Pielke, Jr. or Prof. Judith Curry if you want to explore that further.
You have my sympathies! I just got a paper published after 4 revisions. Round 1 came back, and we (thought we) revised reasonably based on the comments & concerns; we certainly took them seriously. Round 2 came back; Reviewer 1 felt we’d blown off his comments, so insisted more forcefully and with more detail, while Reviewer 2 was satisfied. We did a lot more work and rewrote. Round 3 came back; Reviewer 1 was satisfied, but Reviewer 2 no longer believed us! We did a lot more work and rewrote. Round 4 came back; Reviewers 1 & 2 were now satisfied, and Reviewer 3 (who had been a supportive but rigorous presence throughout) had a few more suggestions and questions. So we rewrote a little bit more, and finally were done.
Throughout this process we had the same non-anonymous editor, who was patient and understanding and did an awful lot of work IMO. I’ve definitely had other editors go the extra mile, too. (And some who weren’t so diligent, but not everybody can be excellent at everything.) With the AMS journals, you always know who your editor is, and I think editors may even stay with “open” papers after their term as editor ends. That openness makes a big difference, I’m sure. My most recent experiences with an AGU journal also involved anonymous reviewers but a known editor. Furthermore, you *always* know what Reviewer 1 told you to do, what Reviewer 2 told you to do, and what the Editor told you to do.
Another:
I guess the norms of peer review differ somewhat by discipline. I’ve been writing papers for biomedical journals for a little over a decade now, and reviewing regularly for nearly as long, and the norm for me has been single-blind review: the reviewers know the authors, but not the other way around. I can only think of one journal for whom I’ve reviewed that was double blind.
Anyway, this may seem hopelessly idealistic, but the standard to which I hold myself when reviewing is really quite simple: I pretend it isn’t blinded at all. I don’t write anything in a review that I wouldn’t sign my name to and be willing to have published, nor anything I wouldn’t say to the authors in person at a conference, in a lab meeting, or over a beer. More importantly than keeping things civil, professional, and non-petty (though that is all very important!) it forces me to make sure that I have my own facts straight and that I can back whatever I say up.
As to my experience of being reviewed while it has been generally fair and constructive for me, it is very clear that my own standards are not universally applied.
Personally, I think doing away with anonymity in peer review altogether would be preferable.
Still another:
I’m a Ph.D candidate and I read your post, nodding my head along the whole time. In my limited experience, the process of peer-review (the depth of review, critique, and the ultimate decision to approve or project) is highly variable. You’ll get two reviews and one will ask for minor changes and the other reviewer will want the entire paper re-written so as to incorporate a topic you don’t even mention (“how could you not mention NGOs?”) “Well because this paper 1) isn’t about NGOs and 2) NGOs don’t apply here and 3) we don’t have the expertise to study or comment on NGOs”.
But for me, the time factor and the accessibility factor are the much bigger issues. Six months to two years to get something published. An adaptive institution this is not. As I’m writing, Ghostbusters (1984) is on TV and Egon just said “print is dead.” I laugh every time. I’m aware there are alternative outlets to traditional publication, but until we have a movement of young academics willing to challenge the norm, or academic institutions with the foresight to change the rules of the game, what are we supposed to do. I know I’m trying to get my stuff into regular ole high-ranked traditional journals. And what about when you have to settle for a lower-tiered journal. It still counts, but is anybody reading it?
More to come.
August 18, 2014
Fighting Ebola With … Shoes?
Stephen T. Fomba, who grew up poor in Sierra Leone, suggests it:
I didn’t mind growing up this way, for I didn’t mind work and did not know what I did not have. But I hated having to make these walks barefoot because we could not afford shoes. The injuries were too much. I sustained burns from the hot ground and rocks; wounds from sharp stones, thorns, and even broken bottles; infections from unknown bacteria; and various ailments—red skins, open sores that took very long to heal, fevers. Even when hurt or ill, I had to keep walking, often as many as 20 miles a day, usually under a hot sun.
We rarely think about the perils of walking barefoot. But according to one widely cited estimate, some 300 million children on earth don’t have shoes. Many illnesses and infections come from the ground, caused by stepping on sharp objects or touching saliva, blood, or bodily fluids. And it’s not merely those who can’t afford shoes who have to go barefoot; many millions of people around the world own poor quality shoes, but have to be careful not to overuse them to avoid early wear and tear. Shoes are for special occasions.
Blair Glencorse and Brooks Marmon instead focus on the “clear link between this governance failure and the current health crisis”
In places where governments are so rarely willing or able act in the interests of their citizens, we can begin to understand why the disease continues to disseminate. Health services, which barely exist in many places, are shunned because the unsanitary conditions of hospitals and heath centers have made them hubs for the spread of the virus. Many hospital staff — already underpaid and ill-equipped — have become victims themselves. Foreign health workers sent to help are ignored and even chased away by scared locals. A group of Liberians explained to us recently that they think Ebola is a ploy by the government to steal even more money from Western donors.
As a result, the Ebola challenges are now evolving into larger problems of instability in the region. Economic activity has ground to a standstill as borders have closed, movement is restricted, and flights are canceled. This is happening in countries where up to 50 percent of the populationalready earns less than 50 cents a day. Mistrust, misunderstandings, and ill-will are growing as people continue to die.
Laurie Garrett, who “was in the Ebola outbreak in Kikwit, Zaire (now the Democratic Republic of Congo) in 1995,” lends her perspective:
How long will this state of siege last? Recent statements from WHO,MSF, Samaritan’s Purse, and other institutions leading the fight alongside the governments warn the world that it will be at least six months, and quite possibly a year, before Ebola can be defeated. Despite all the brouhaha here in the United States and Canada about application of experimental drugs and vaccines never clinically tested for safety or effectiveness to the African crisis, this siege will end not with magic bullets, but smart, heroic strategies that find infected people swiftly, place them behind cordoned quarantine barriers, and bury the dead rapidly after their demise without families’ contact or viewing. Yes, it is heartless and can seem cruel, but strategic isolations, coupled with vast urban campaigns of capture of the infected constitute the only hopes for ending the state of siege.
We Made Police Misconduct Inevitable
The ongoing protests and civil unrest in Ferguson, MO, is in many ways a long simmering set of problems brought to a boil. Most acutely, there’s the perfectly justifiable anger and resentment from a black population that, 50 years after the Civil Rights Act, still struggles to overcome centuries of entrenched and systemic racism. Black America’s status as a permanent underclass is baked directly into the foundations of our economic and social system, and piecemeal reforms have proven utterly inadequate to the task of fixing the problem. In particular, the criminalization of black young males makes angry conflict with police inevitable. Under such circumstances, the surprise isn’t that protests and civil disobedience have broken out in Ferguson. The surprise is that it doesn’t happen more often.
Beyond the racial dynamics, there’s the growing public realization that the police in America are out of control. It’s a problem that only we, the broad public, can fix. And we are responsible for fixing it because we’re all to blame.
If I sat down to summarize even a year’s worth of police misconduct and brutality, it would take hours and hours. Those of us who follow the news closely know that outrageous behavior by the cops is a daily occurrence. Sites like Gawker and journalists like Radley Balko have spread word of this misconduct regularly, but all it usually takes is a brief visit to Google News. And people, finally, are starting to notice. When even National Review is running a piece like “It’s Time for Conservatives to Stop Defending Police,” you know that the issue is becoming too acute to ignore. What the American poor have been experiencing for decades has become too obvious for affluent America to ignore.
Like so many of our national problems, our deep, perpetual problems with police behaving badly stems in part from 9/11 and the post-9/11 world.
I don’t want to oversell this; certainly, we’ve been living in a culture of deference towards police for far longer. But as we did with the presidency, the military, the intelligence services, and soldiers, we responded to 9/11 by buffeting our police officers with obsequious respect and endless displays of extreme gratitude. We feted them at football games and through parades in their honor. We plastered stickers celebrating them on our cars. We exhorted each other to “thank a first responder today.” We set about to create a culture of unwavering, unquestioning, credulous support for our police, and that has everything to do with today’s problems.
None of this should be surprising. In times of crisis, people often retreat to militarism, nationalism, and extreme respect for authority. This is part of why an aggressive foreign policy is so counterproductive; every time we rattle our saber at Iran, for example, we empower the theocracy and the establishment government and hurt the resistance. Our showy disdain for Russia, the way we layer disrespect on their displays of national pride and celebrations of their history– like we did during Sochi– only causes them to embrace Putin and his narrative more. You might find that foolish, but we did the exact same, affixing flags to our cars and writing our national security state a blank check in the form of the PATRIOT Act and similar legislation. And we told the cops, more or less explicitly: you can do whatever you want. The results are unsurprising.
After all, when you give any group carte blanche to do what they want, and make it clear that you will support them no matter what, how can you be surprised when they abuse that generosity? It’s human nature: people who are subject to little or no review will inevitably behave badly. No group can be expected to police itself; that’s why the foundation of our democracy is the separation of powers, the way in which different parts of government are expected to audit each other. Ultimately, though, the most important form of audit comes from the people themselves. Only the citizenry can ensure that our systems remain under our democratic control, and this function is especially important concerning the conduct of those who have the capacity to legally commit acts of violence– and to define for themselves what acts of violence are legal, whether those definitions are official or merely ad hoc. Well, we have abdicated that responsibility, and in that vacuum, misconduct, brutality, and corruption have rushed in. The problem is endemic. I don’t believe that all cops are bad, or even the majority, but I also don’t believe that this is a “few bad apples” problem. A few bad apples could not cause a problem as widespread and constant as the one we’re witnessing now.
You may not agree completely with the protesters in Ferguson. You may find their tactics unhelpful or misguided. But you should recognize: they are the front lines in a long-overdue process of reversing this problem and slowly dragging the police back under community control. It’s going to be an enormous task, one that has to occur on both the national and the local level. The acrimony and recrimination that will attend this project will be enormous, as the “law and order” brigades deride those working to rein in the police as radical, soft on crime, or worse. But we have to do it. This problem will never fix itself. The police cannot be expected to reform themselves. And since we as a people had a hand in creating these conditions, it’s our responsibility to change them. If you find the size of the task daunting, you need only think of the alternative, an ever-more unaccountable and entitled gang of men with guns and batons. Or think about an 18 year old black body, lying for four hours in a Missouri street.
(Photo: Police forces intervene protesters, who took to the streets to protest the killing of Michael Brown on August 17, 2014. U.S. Missouri State Governor Jay Nixon Saturday declared a curfew and a state of emergency in Ferguson, a suburb of St. Louis. By Bilgin Sasmaz/Anadolu Agency/Getty Images)
Your Other Blogger For The Week
Hey Dish readers – I’m Matt, the Dish’s literary editor and, this week, guest-blogger. Most of my work usually appears on the weekends, especially Sundays, so I tend to be responsible for the posts about religion that readers seem to either love or hate, and my deepest interests lean much more toward theology, poetry, and literature than politics. That means writing more about politics over the next few days will be a bit of an adventure for me. Usually I find politics, and the way we argue about politics, terribly depressing, which provides a lovely excuse to retreat into old books. I hope this lack of immersion in punditry gives me a fresh perspective on the events of the day while guest-blogging, but I suspect Dish readers will let me know if it doesn’t.
Prior to joining the Dish team two years ago, I was a Ph.D. student at Georgetown University studying political theory, but I never finished my doctorate, making me something of an academic refugee. My research interests mainly concerned the relationship between political thought and theology, with a particular focus on the Reformation. I won’t bore you with too much more about that, but the questions that led me to that topic still are what I think about the most. Above all, I’m fascinated by religion’s place in the modern world, and I’m drawn to writers who examine that subject with verve and creativity. To that end, I have an essay, coming out very soon in Deep Dish, on the poet Christian Wiman that explores his approach to Christianity.
I grew up in a small town in rural central Pennsylvania, and neither of my parents and none of my grandparents went to college. This means that I always remind myself what a privilege it is to spend my days reading and writing and thinking about books. I hope my enthusiasm and gratitude for getting to do so is apparent during my week of guest-blogging.
Suicide Breeds Suicide
Earlier this year, Jennifer Michael Hecht, author of Stay: A History of Suicide and the Philosophies Against It, spelled out how killing yourself makes it more likely that others will take their own lives:
In the wake of Robin Williams’ death, Steven Stack reviews research on suicide contagion:
[T]here have been more than 100 empirical investigations of copycat suicide. A from the first 55 investigations showed that only 35.8 per cent documented an increase in suicide after media coverage. Given that most evidence is not consistent with a copycat effect, a search for the conditions under which a story may elicit imitative suicides has been a key theme in this work.
The most important factor distinguishing studies that report a copycat effect from the ones that do not is whether or not a celebrity is involved. In particular, copycat effects are most likely to be reported in work focused on two distinct types of celebrities: those in politics and entertainment. The analysis of those 419 findings found that studies based on either or both of these subtypes were 5.27 times more likely to report an increase in suicides following coverage.
But he theorizes that “Williams’s gender could conceivably prevent a record number of copycat deaths”:
The more Williams’s suicide is discussed, if all else is equal, the greater the odds of a copycat effect. It is, however, doubtful that the impact will be as great as that of Monroe or Choi. They killed themselves at the peaks of their careers and popularity. In addition, the review of 419 findings in 55 studies determined that research that focuses on female suicide rates was 4.89 times more likely to find a copycat effect than other research.
Margot Sanger-Katz explains how to ethically cover suicides:
Few of the experts’ recommendations make much sense in the case of Mr. Williams. Studies suggest avoiding repetitive or prominent coverage; keeping the word suicide out of news headlines; and remaining silent about the means of suicide. “How can it not be prominent?” [professor Madelyn] Gould said.
Experts also say articles should include information about how suicide can be avoided (for instance, noting that the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline is available 24 hours a day at 800-273-8255).
They also recommend avoiding coverage that describes death as an escape for a troubled person.
Bill Gardner adds:
So how should journalists report on suicides? The public interest is best served by simply reporting that a person has died by suicide, with no additional details provided. If that’s too much to ask, then at least such details should not be placed in headlines or featured in a way that calls attention to them. This guidance is found in many ethicalstandards for journalists.
Williams’ suicide has also prompted a lot of constructive journalism about suicide prevention. I am all for that: suicide prevention is one of my research areas. But the most important thing to do is to find more effective treatments for the cause of many suicides: depression. And to find these treatments we need to be conducting more mental health research.
A reader response to Hecht’s video is here. More Dish on suicide contagion here.
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