Andrew Sullivan's Blog, page 202

Stone-Age Skepticism

Elizabeth Kolbert has her doubts about the paleo diet:

There are, of course, lots of ways to resist progress. People take up knitting or quilting or calligraphy. They bake their own bread or brew their own beer or sew their own clothes using felt they have fashioned out of wet wool and dish soap. But, both in the scale of its ambition and in the scope of its anachronism, paleo eating takes things to a whole new level. Our Stone Age ancestors left behind no menus or cookbooks. To figure out what they ate, we have to dig up their bones and study the wear patterns on their teeth. Or comb through their refuse and analyze their prehistoric poop.

And paleo eating is just the tip of the spear, so to speak. There are passionate advocates for paleo fitness, which starts with tossing out your sneakers. There’s a paleo sleep contingent, which recommends blackout curtains, amber-tinted glasses, and getting rid of your mattress; and there are champions of primal parenting, which may or may not include eating your baby’s placenta. There are even signs of a paleo hygiene movement: coat yourself with bacteria and say goodbye to soap and shampoo. …

Three days into my family’s experiment in Stone Age eating, my sons were still happily gorging themselves on sausage and grass-fed steak. My husband was ruminating on the tenuousness of existence, and, probably true to the actual Paleolithic experience, I found that I was spending more and more time preparing the few foods that we could eat.

Kolbert adds, “Paleo may look like a food fad, and yet you could argue that it’s really just the reverse. Anatomically modern humans have, after all, been around for about two hundred thousand years. The genus Homo goes back another two million years or so. On the timescale of evolutionary history, it’s agriculture that’s the fad.” Nathanael Johnson sharpens the knife:

[A]griculture is an unusual sort of fad – a fad our lives depend upon. It’s got its hooks in us. Farming allowed the human population to exceed the earth’s previous carrying capacity. The creation of synthetic fertilizers expanded that carrying capacity again. And now, like it or not, we’re stuck. A new study, just out from the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, reaffirms that meat production has an outsized impact on climate change, and that beef is the worst offender. It suggests that, if we want to reduce our greenhouse gas emissions, it would be more effective to give up red meat than to stop driving cars. This means that, “from an environmental standpoint, paleo’s ‘Let them eat steak’ approach is a disaster,” Kolbert wrote.

Damian Carrington elaborates on the PNAS study:

[Beef] requires 28 times more land to produce than pork or chicken, 11 times more water, and results in five times more climate-warming emissions. When compared to staples like potatoes, wheat, and rice, the impact of beef per calorie is even more extreme, requiring 160 times more land and producing 11 times more greenhouse gases.

(Image by Flickr user Next TwentyEight)

You Can’t Believe Everything You Read About Iraq

A UN official who claimed that ISIS had ordered genital mutilation for all women and girls in Mosul appears to have been the victim of a hoax:

The story quickly began to go viral, racking up hundreds of shares on social media. Soon thereafter, however, journalists with contacts in Iraq began reporting that the story didn’t hold up. “My contacts in #Mosul have NOT heard that ‘Islamic State’ ordered FGM for all females in their city,” Jenan Moussa, a reporter with Al Anan TV tweet out. “Iraqi contacts say #Mosul story is fake,” echoed freelance writer Shaista Aziz, adding: “Iraqi contact on #FGM story: “ISIS are responsible for many horrors, this story is fake and plays to western audience emotions.’”

NPR’s Cairo bureau chief also claimed that the story was false, tweeting “#UN statement that #ISIS issued fatwa calling 4 FGM 4 girls is false residents of Mosul say including a doctor, journalist and tribal leader.” Not long after a version of a document in Arabic, bearing the black logo that ISIS has adopted, began circulating on Twitter. The document, those who shared it said, is a hoax and the basis for the United Nations’ claim.

That wasn’t the only inaccurate story to come out of the Islamic State. David Kenner highlights some others:

Last week — as the jihadist group’s very real campaign to force Christians to pay a tax levied on non-Muslims, convert to Islam, or face death reached fever pitch — multiple news outlets reported that the Islamic State had burned down the St. Ephrem’s Cathedral. There was just one problem:

The pictures published by news outlets and shared on social media of the supposed burning of the Syriac Catholic cathedral were from church burnings in Egypt or Syria. To this day, there has been no confirmation from anyone in Mosul that a cathedral was burned.

But the most spectacular story about the Islamic State relates to what would have been one of history’s most spectacular bank heists. Shortly after the group stormed Mosul, the provincial governor in the region told reporters that it had raided the city’s central bank, making off with more than $400 million, in addition to a “large quantity of gold bullion.” … There’s only one problem: The heist doesn’t appear to have happened.

The news that ISIS militants destroyed the tomb of the prophet Jonah, on the other hand, appears depressingly credible:

Residents said on Thursday that the militants first ordered everyone out of the Mosque of the Prophet Younis, or Jonah, then blew it up. … Several nearby houses were also damaged by the blast, said the residents, speaking on condition of anonymity because they feared for their own safety. The residents told AP that the militants claimed the mosque had become a place for apostasy, not prayer. The extremists also blew up another place of worship nearby on Thursday, the Imam Aoun Bin al-Hassan mosque, they said.

Face Of The Day

A massive marionette known as the “Giant Grandmother” is paraded through the streets of Liverpool in north-west England on July 25, 2014. The parade entitled “Memories of August 1914″ by French theatre company Royal de Luxe features a giant grandmother, a giant little girl and her dog named Xolo, and tells the story of the city’s involvement in World War One. By Lindsey Parnaby/AFP/Getty Images.

When “Me, Me, Me” Means “You, You, You”

Katy Waldman examines one subtle way people inadvertently signal their insecurities:

We know now that the linguistic expression of low confidence plays out in pronouns. Until recently, many experts believed that first-person singular referents were verbal playthings for the powerful and narcissistic, the me-me-me-me-me people who demand attention. But as James Pennebaker, a psychologist from the University of Texas at Austin, has written, the pronoun “I” often signals humility and subservience. A more confident person is more likely to be surveying her domain (and perhaps considering what “you” should be doing), rather than turning inward. …

[Linguist William] Labov’s experiment suggests that punctilious attention to “proper” usage may come from a place of insecurity. The extreme form of this is hypercorrection, in which “a real or imagined grammatical rule is applied in an inappropriate context, so that an attempt to be ‘correct’ leads to an incorrect result.” (Think substituting “you and I” for “you and me” as the object of a sentence, or all the stilted uses of whom.) Labov and his successors found that people hypercorrect most in moments of self-consciousness—when switching into a shaky second language or addressing a crowd. Perhaps their zeal to “get it right” is just another version of the desire for belonging.

America’s Mixed Feelings On Gaza

Larison flags a new Gallup poll suggesting that US public opinion on the Gaza war is more complicated than our government’s response to it:

Gallup finds that Americans are split on the question of whether Israel’s actions in Gaza have been justified or not. Overall, 42% say that they are justified, 39% say they are not, and 20% have no opinion. These results are comparable to a Gallup poll taken during the second intifada twelve years ago, but there are slightly more on the ‘unjustified’ side than there were then. As we have seen in other polls on related matters, there is a significant gap between Republicans and everyone else[.]

It is striking how evenly divided the public is on this question when there is total uniformity among political leaders in the U.S. that Israel is justified in what it has been doing. There is always a significant gap between popular and elite views on foreign policy issues, but it is still fairly unusual for a view held by almost 40% of Americans to have virtually no representation in Congress.

Another poll from YouGov finds that more detailed questions yield more nuanced answers:

Americans are much more likely to hold Hamas responsible for the current crisis than they are to put responsibility on Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. But that doesn’t mean that Netanyahu is totally blameless: 47% of the public says he deserves at least half the blame. But two-thirds say that about Hamas. Three in four Republicans give Hamas at least half the blame. Just 40% of Republicans say that about Netanyahu. Democrats share the responsibility more evenly: 60% give Hamas at least half the responsibility; 54% say that about Netanyahu.

But some are concerned about Israeli actions. One in four believes Israel is using too much force in Gaza, with Democrats and those under 30 especially concerned. But more believe Israel is using the right amount of force; 15% (and nearly one in four Republicans) believe Israel is using too little force.

But as we know, the right wasn’t always reflexively behind Israel. Looking back on the history of American-Israeli relations, Zack Beauchamp susses out the sources of the staunchly pro-Israel foreign policy the US follows today:

For one thing, the US approach to the Middle East didn’t change that much after the Cold War. The US became increasingly involved in managing disputes and problems inside the Middle East during the Cold War, and it maintained that role as the world’s sole super-power in the 90s. Stability in the Middle East continued to be a major American interest, for a number of reasons that included the global oil market, and the US took on the role as guarantor of regional stability.

That meant the US saw it as strategically worthwhile to support states like Egypt, Saudi Arabia, and Israel, which saw themselves as benefitting from an essentially conservative US approach to Middle Eastern regional politics. Unlike, say, Iran, Syria, and Saddam’s Iraq, these countries were basically OK with the status quo in the Middle East. The US also supported the status quo, so it supported them accordingly.

Previous Dish on the partisan divide in American public opinion of Israel here.

The Best Of The Dish Today

A reader highlighted the gallows humor at the Onion, which is on a roll. One story seems particularly pertinent today:

Israel: Palestinians Given Ample Time To Evacuate To Nearby Bombing Sites http://t.co/EBubYDwMBf pic.twitter.com/dH8cl5xRpa

— The Onion (@TheOnion) July 23, 2014

Not enough time was given, it appears, in the case of the UN school, filled with civilian refugees, which was hit today, killing sixteen. The NYT is still saying that the carnage may have been Hamas’ fault. The Guardian reports instead:

The Israeli military first claimed, in a text sent to journalists, that the school could have been hit by Hamas missiles that fell short. Later, a series of tweets from the Israel Defence Forces appeared to confirm the deaths were the result of an Israeli strike. “Today Hamas continued firing from Beit Hanoun. The IDF responded by targeting the source of the fire. Last night, we told Red Cross to evacuate civilians from UNRWA’s shelter in Beit Hanoun btw 10am & 2pm. UNRWA & Red Cross got the message. Hamas prevented civilians from evacuating the area during the window that we gave them.”

An official at the school says they asked for more time to evacuate when the shelling started:

“We spent much of the day trying to negotiate or to coordinate a window so that civilians, including our staff, could leave. That was never granted … and the consequences of that appear to be tragic.” Gunness said the Israeli military were supplied with coordinates of UN schools where those displaced were sheltering. UN sources told the Guardian a call was placed to the Israeli military at 10.55am requesting permission to evacuate but their call was not returned.

Meanwhile, Netanyahu has achieved one of his core aims – to weaken the Palestinian Authority on the West Bank so the project of Greater Israel can proceed with its usual, criminal relentlessness. He’d already done that by rewarding Abbas for his moderation by humiliating him with more and more settlements. Now he has cemented that achievement:

Hamas — which refuses to recognize Israel’s right to exist and is considered a terrorist organization by much of the West — is being hailed in the West Bank as the champion of armed resistance, while Mr. Abbas, who leads the alternative camp advocating a negotiated peace deal with Israel, is being excoriated for having failed to achieve a Palestinian state after 20 years of intermittent and fruitless Israeli-Palestinian talks.

And the mass killing of children – financed by you and me – continues.

Today, we grappled with American “Christian” support for “smashing the skulls” and “breaking the spines” of Hamas; I lamented Hillary Clinton’s constant case of the blah blah blahs; we wondered why denialism of climate change is largely restricted to English-speaking countries; and our cover song contest came up with some new entrants.

The most popular post of the day was The Astonishing Actual History Of The Gay Rights Movement – which is enjoying quite a life in social media; followed by God’s Foreign Policy.

Many of today’s posts were updated with your emails – read them all here. You can always leave your unfiltered comments at our Facebook page and @sullydish. 20 more readers became subscribers today. You can join them here - and get access to all the readons and Deep Dish - for a little as $1.99 month. Gift subscriptions are available here for a friend whose birthday is coming up.

See you in the morning.

Best Cover Song Ever?

This song nominee might win just based on the number of readers who submitted it so far – 84:

I’m writing in to nominate my favorite cover of an already well-known song. I’m sure I’m not the only person to submit this one, but it’s got to be the Jimi Hendrix cover of Bob Dylan’s “All Along the Watchtower“:

Dylan’s poetry is at its best in the song’s lyrics, and it works musically, but you can’t ever go back and listen to the original once you’ve heard Hendrix’s. I don’t think I’ve ever heard a series of guitar solo so perfectly illustrate the drama and stormy environment of a song’s narrative. There are plenty of songs with instrumental sections that manage to paint an even more vivid picture than its lyrics, but this one just blows them all out of the water.

This is a really fun idea for a contest, by the way! Keep up the awesome work!

Another writes, “Hendrix’s version so great that I think people forget it’s actually a cover.” Another adds:

The Jimi Hendrix Experience’s cover of “All Along the Watchtower” is a classic (and easy) choice, but c’mon, even Dylan was impressed by this version. Per Wikipedia, Dylan described his reaction in an interview:

It overwhelmed me, really. He had such talent, he could find things inside a song and vigorously develop them. He found things that other people wouldn’t think of finding in there. He probably improved upon it by the spaces he was using. I took license with the song from his version, actually, and continue to do it to this day.

Live version here. Another points to the “story behind the song“. One more:

And on the subject of Hendrix/Dylan covers, Jimi’s version of Like a Rolling Stone isn’t half bad either. He did a few others, too. But nothing comes close to “All Along the Watchtower”. Play it loud.

Face Of The Day

Fire-breather and sword-swallower ‘The Lizard Man’ poses for a photograph in the ‘London Wonderground’ at the Southbank Centre on July 24, 2014 in London, England. The temporary ‘London Wonderground’ venue, located adjacent to the London Eye and the Royal Festival Hall, offers a program of live entertainment, fairground rides and outdoor bars and runs until September 28, 2014. By Oli Scarff/Getty Images.

Nostalgic For Nietzsche, Ctd

Michael Robbins, whose review essay on the intellectual shallowness of the New Atheists sparked a number of reader dissents, writes in responding to his would-be critics:

It’s a good idea to at least try to get an argument straight before you attack it, but I’ve found that the people most likely to leave a comment or shoot off a huffy email are the least likely to do so. This is unsurprising – thoughtful people take time to consider different views and to consider how they challenge what they think. The huffy responders already know it all – they’ve got their preconceptions and assumptions armed for bear. For example, one of your readers writes:

If Michael Robbins wants us to worry that the decline of organized religion implies some loss of certainty about the foundations of our ethics, we will need some data showing that religiosity correlates with ethical behavior.

Well, I guess it’s a good thing I don’t want anyone to worry about that. I didn’t say a word about “organized religion.” I specifically denied that I was arguing that a coherent morality requires theism. And does this reader really suppose that Nietzsche believed that religiosity correlates with ethical behavior – or, I should say, does he not understand Nietzsche’s argument in On the Genealogy of Morality about what “ethical behavior” really is and where it comes from?

The point is simply that a morality predicated on Enlightenment rationalism retains its Christian foundations, at the expense of coherence. Therefore the moral codes we retain after the death of God are grounded in nothing, a point the Neo-Darwinians underscore every time they trumpet that article of faith, the “morality gene.” It is not enough to argue that we can simply ground our morals in ourselves, in our conceptions of the good (for one thing, it is self-evident that we don’t agree about what these conceptions should consist in).

That religious people of the past were often quite as murderous and duplicitous as we is beside the point, properly understood. We are talking about the loss of a coherent worldview, about grounds, not about practices. Anyone interested in the history of the shaping power of mental conceptions should understand why such a loss is a problem.

Alasdair MacIntyre’s After Virtue is still the best book to address this.

MacIntyre shows that Kant, Hume, Smith, and Diderot failed to provide justifications for their moral philosophy, because of their historical backgrounds, grounded in Christian morality. Morals unfold in time – their social and historical contexts matter. You can give a Rortyan shrug and say that it doesn’t make any difference whether we retain Christian conceptions of the good without Christian metaphysics – that we can simply consider them abstracted from their contexts -but you’re left in the shaky position of defending a concept of virtue without a first principle to prop it up. There is a real question of why anyone should agree with you.

Again, this has nothing to do with arguing for the retrievement of Christian metaphysics. MacIntyre himself, though a Catholic, calls for a revival of Aristotelian moral philosophy. These are the sorts of confusions that could be avoided by doing what I suggested – reading.

Which brings me to the readers who write in to inform me of the most obvious fact in the world, that some religious people believe crazy shit. (Although I have to laugh at the trend of quoting the extraordinarily metaphor-rich Jonathan Edwards to prove this.) One of your readers comments:

When Robbins writes: “Of course the dead in Christ don’t intervene with God to help you find your car keys, and of course the Bible is inconsistent and muddled (no matter what the Southern Baptists claim to believe), and of course I find it extremely unlikely that Mohammed flew to heaven on a winged horse”, that’s when he gets to criticize atheist focus.

I guess I get to criticize atheist focus, then, since I’ve explicitly written that such beliefs are superstitious nonsense, often, in Slate, the Chicago Tribune, and Commonweal. (The same reader has failed to note that “austere abdication of metaphysical premises” is a quote from David Bentley Hart in which he is praising science for its abdication.) I had assumed it was obvious that Origen and Augustine would hardly have taken the trouble to deny literalist readings of the Bible if such readings did not exist. And some of the more idiotic beliefs held by American Christians (such as young-earth creationism), are, of course, based on no readings of the Bible at all.

But as I have written elsewhere, religious fundamentalism is a soft target. You’ve figured out that Mohammed did not fly to heaven on a winged horse and that Rama’s bridge was not built by monkeys and that Noah did not build a giant ark to survive a heaven-sent deluge? Good for you.

But the New Atheists did not write books that simply attacked creationism. They wrote books that purport to challenge theistic belief as such. They therefore have a responsibility to address the best cases for God, not the dullest. When Dennett asks if super-God created God, and if super-duper-God created super-God, he is simply revealing a lack of acquaintance with the intellectual traditions of the major religions. If you want to argue against something, you have to understand what you’re arguing against. That’s axiomatic.

One of your commenters kindly informs me that Nietzsche was anti-democratic. Somehow I had already managed to pick that up even before I earned my PhD from the University of Chicago. This same reader believes that I want to claim for Christianity a monopoly on morality. Again, there are the words that I actually wrote, and the words that some people decided, on the basis of no evidence, I really meant.

What “American Christians” believe is diverse. Do most Catholics really reject “human rights, social justice, and egalitarianism”? Do most Episcopalians? Has this person met many American Christians? Has he or she decided that groups such as Sojourners are simply lying about their values?

Yes, many people believe things that are plainly untrue. Some atheists believe that their faith in scientific naturalism suffices to disprove the existence of God, for instance. Some Christians are mistaken about the age of the earth. Some religious believers don’t understand their own traditions. Some believers are better at explaining particle physics than some atheists.

So what? None of this has any bearing on what I wrote. But again, it’s no surprise that some folks decided to invent a caricature of my argument out of thin air. As Epictetus said, “If you say to somebody … ‘your opinions are ill-considered and mistaken,’ he immediately walks out, exclaiming, ‘You’ve insulted me!’”

All Publicity’s Good Publicity?

Joe Pinsker explains how anti-ACA ads actually inspired people to sign up for Obamacare:

Niam Yaraghi, a researcher at the Brookings Institution recently tried to determine the impacts these ads had on enrollment. His analysis, which he detailed in a blog post, compared states’ per-capita ad spending with their enrollment rates, and found that it was often the case that the more money spent on anti-ACA ads, the more Americans signed up for coverage—a trend made more impressive by the fact that, in the run-up to this fall’s midterm elections, the advertising budget of the ACA’s opponents was about 15 times the size of that of the law’s supporters.

Why might this be the case? “There are basically two theories,” Yaraghi told On The Media last week. “The first one is that with the negative ads, citizens’ awareness about this subsidized service increases, and the more ads they see, the more they know that such a service exists. … The other theory is that citizens who were exposed to an overwhelming number of ads about Obamacare are more likely to believe that this service is going to be repealed by the Congress in the near future … [so] he or she will have a higher willingness to go and take advantage of this one-time opportunity before it goes away.”