Andrew Sullivan's Blog, page 206

Understanding The Permanence Of Greater Israel, Ctd

A small but telling story in the Baltimore Sun reveals how an American couple and their kids, after losing their jobs, have decided to relocate to Israel. Except they’re not relocating to Israel – but to a settler outpost near Jerusalem in the occupied territories. But neither the couple nor the reporter notice this rather pertinent fact:

The Brenners acknowledge the controversy surrounding moves such as theirs, part of a larger movement that many view as a stumbling block to peace in the region. But they say peace is also part of their dream. “We understand that there are other people living in Israel. … We want to live in peace,” David Brenner said. “My wife and I pray for a time when the Jewish people and Arabs and Christians will be able to live peacefully side by side.”

Notice “other people living in Israel” means others living in the occupied territories. Greater Israel already exists. And always will.

Superhero Social Justice

ICYMI, @Marvel is making some great moves: Falcon is the new Captain America >> http://t.co/HxCA0oGcuD pic.twitter.com/h7MWXBhvR3

— ScreenCrush (@screencrushnews) July 18, 2014

Kevin O’Keeffe relays the big news out of the comic book world:

Continuing the trend of diversifying their lineup of heroes, Marvel announced on last [week's] episode of The Colbert Report that the next Captain America will be Sam Wilson – currently known as The Falcon. … It’s the second big change for Marvel’s Avengers this week. On Tuesday, the women of The View announced that the next Thor would be a woman. Like with Thor, the new Captain America isn’t an off-shoot series – this is the primary Captain America, and the first black Captain America to officially hold the title.

Freddie sighs at those he believes are confusing symbolic firsts for real progress:

The glee with which these changes have been met, contrasted with the bleak state of structural change and economic justice, will tell you pretty much all you need to know about a certain strain of contemporary American liberalism. We’re mere weeks away from a Supreme Court decision where an alliance of religious crazies and corporatists was able to remove a legal provision requiring employers to pay for emergency contraception, but don’t worry, ladies! You too can now be portrayed as a heavily-sanitized version of a minor god from a long-dead pantheon. Black Americans continue to lag national averages in a vast number of metrics that depict quality of life, and in some of them have actually lost ground, but never fear. The guy portrayed punching people while wearing red white and blue spandex will now be black.

Lighten up, Freddie. Progress comes in all forms, big and small. And it’s often the small cultural changes, added together, that have the most lasting impact. Ta-Nehisi put it best, in a post written four years ago, reacting to the news that Captain America was headed to the big screen:

One thing that makes me sad–I wish they’d been ballsy and made Captain America black. … The subtle power of a black Captain America–in the age of a black president–really could be awesome.

Also awesome:

LOOK AT THIS AND TELL ME THAT SAM WILSON AS CAPTAIN AMERICA ISN’T IMPORTANT AND THAT REPRESENTATION DOESNT MATTER pic.twitter.com/9TPmgWn8oe

— carol danvers allie (@buckynats) July 18, 2014

So far, the Hollywood version of Captain America hasn’t made the same move as Marvel, but here’s hoping. Meanwhile, Danny Fingeroth explains the business logic behind these sort of decisions:

[T]he challenge for comics is how to retain the existing audience and also grow new readers. How do you keep the attention of someone who has read thousands of stories and also take advantage of the visibility and familiarity that the movies and TV shows have brought to the characters? (Interestingly, in recent years, more girls and women have started reading superhero comics again, perhaps lured to the comics by the popular movies and TV series.) One of the answers is to make seemingly radical changes in a character, such as having Thor become a female (or to have a black man become Captain America). The Internet buzz indicates that as many fans are outraged by the gender switch as there are those who are intrigued.

But Liz Watson remarks that “slightly unconventional decision—from casting Heath Ledger as the Joker to putting pants on Wonder Woman—is met with a level of feverish debate normally reserved for schisms within the Catholic Church”:

The equivalence between comic books and scripture is telling of how seriously canon is taken by these fans. To violate the status quo is akin to sacrilege.

The irony is that a format characterized by the boundless scope of imagination is ultimately extremely conservative when it comes to risks with character or story. Major developments like deaths or marriages are almost always undone, via fantastic contrivances ranging from deals with the devil to time-travel. Characters are de-powered, murdered, raped, aged up and down, and yo-yoed between universes with an alarming lack of fanfare. It’s the same problem suffered by long-running soap operas, where catastrophes are regularly smoothed over or forgotten in order to keep the premise going. At least on soap operas, actors leave over contract disputes or pass away. In comics, the stories can go on indefinitely. As such, the limitless nature of comic book fantasy is used, by and large, to keep limits in place.

Related Dish here on the recent move to introduce the first black woman as a major character to the Star Wars franchise. Update from a reader:

Great to see Marvel Comics finally catch up with the times, and finally catching up with DC Comics. However, like most things in the comic world, don’t expect this to be new normal. Don’t expect that Sam Wilson will be Captain America for 30 years, unlike DC’s Jon Stewart, an African American who’s been a Green Lantern for over 3 decades. Hell, for readers of a certain age group, Jon Stewart is the REAL Green Lantern due to having a prominent role in the acclaimed Justice League animated series. Or let’s not forget that Wonder Woman has been a pillar of DC’s “Trinity” (Superman, Batman, Wonder Woman) for over 6 decades, and has been headlining her own comic book for over 70 years.

There’s no doubt that the comic book industry (and its fandom) has a long way to go. Misogyny is still rampant, and there still exists an undercurrent of racism. But I think the current hagiography regarding Marvel does a disservice to the industry as a whole. Comic books have been at forefront of social issues from the very first Action Comics, when Superman was a crusading populist who was willing to kill slum lords, through Green Arrow having to deal with teen a sidekick who was a heroin addict (Green Lantern vol. 2, #85, August 1971, “Snowbirds Don’t Fly”), to an openly gay Golden Age superhero (Alan Scott, the original Green Lantern from the ’40s). Did you also know that one of Green Arrow’s other sidekicks was HIV-positive? Google Mia Dearden.

If I’ve learned anything from my decades of reading comics, it’s that the more things change, the more things stay the same. Steve Rogers will be Captain America again, Thor will be male again, and we’ll wait another 5 years for some great barrier that was broken earlier to be broken again.

The View From Your Obamacare, Ctd

A reader has a jaded view:

It’s nice to see some of the stories you post about how much the ACA has helped people. The stories where people mourn for those who refuse it and need it are sad. Allow me to present you with a third type, the people who aren’t eligible due to system bugs.

Yep. Jack and shit for my family. I tried to sign up, since my wife and kids’ coverage ended in May and the ACA won’t cover them. We aren’t rich. We’re lower-middle class, according to the federal poverty line, but out of red state Medicaid income levels. I tried the site – nothing but errors. I spent an hour or more on the phone and neither the persons I spoke to or their supervisors understand why they can’t process it for us. I could call my senator or congressman, but I doubt Lindsey Graham or Trey “Benghazi” Gowdy will investigate.

I’m disabled and currently get Medicare. Prior to May, my wife, two small kids and I all received Medicaid.

It was my secondary provider and the only coverage for my wife and kids. My wife had been in school full time and started working two jobs at the end of last year – one ultra low-paying factory job and another seasonal government position. A few months later she was offered a permanent position at the government agency. Our income went from close to the poverty line to significantly higher than that. Not wealthy or even upper middle class, but not subsistence level either. Our income increased and I didn’t want to accept benefits fraudulently, so I called up Medicaid and told them about the income change (not easy to do since the state has minimized the number of social workers) and they set coverage to end that month.

Next I use the ACA website calculators and make sure we are eligible. I try to process an application and there are tons of errors. This is on the federal site. My state (South Carolina) didn’t do anything regarding ACA exchanges. I then call up the ACA support line. He walks the app through the same way I just did and it says my family isn’t eligible. Nothing. He puts me on hold for long periods to consult supervisors. Nothing. My family’s coverage ended, we meet all criteria for coverage, we are all US citizens – born and raised here. Nothing.

No explanation. No assistance. Nothing. They couldn’t figure out why. We are eligible to get coverage outside of the yearly switch period due to loss of coverage according to the rules and staff. So we meet the requirements but the computer hates us.

Anyway, glad it’s working for someone I guess. Must be nice.

Update from a reader:

I’m confused about one notable detail – the writer mentions a wife who recently started a permanent government position. If this is a Federal position, the writer and the kids would almost certainly be eligible under the FEHB (Federal Employees Health Benefit program) – the full family coverage is more somewhat more expensive than individual plan, but very likely a pretty reasonable deal out of the wife’s paycheck.

If this were a state position – or certain (fairly common) local government positions – I think the family would be eligible for the different options available under the South Carolina’s Public Employee Benefit Authority coverage. It looks to me that the deals here are a bit more expensive than the options under the FEHB options, but that’s a pretty quick peek.

Only wrinkle I’d be able to imagine seems a little bit arcane/improbable to assume: if the wife were divorced and there were a former spouse that had a divorce decree requiring the wife to provide coverage, that might be an issue, since SCPEBA only allows one spouse to be covered, and the divorce decree’s mandate might trump the current spouse’s coverage.

In any case, I think that the wife checking with her benefits administrator about expanding coverage from individual coverage to full family coverage would be a more economical strategy than trying to insure the spouse or spouse and children under a separate ACA plan. Hopefully, this sort of request would be pretty common and straightforward for the wife’s benefits admin.

The original reader follows up:

Those options for federal workers don’t apply because it’s a union job and the contract provides for some weirdness. She can join the union any time but can’t get healthcare until she’s been working her contract for a year. Even then she wouldn’t be eligible for most of the other normal federal benefit programs like life insurance until she is “converted” to a career position.

Welcome to the new United States Postal Service. Career-track mail clerks and carriers begin in a position that pays similar to career posts or even more, while having virtually no other benefits except annual leave (paid time off). The USPS will pay for a large portion of our insurance premiums come next year, but until then we are out in the cold.

The family is in great health with the exception of me (here’s a plug for CIDP – Chronic Inflammatory Demyelinating Polyneuropathy – similar to MS). We were broke with insurance and now we’re less broke with the possibility of being broke again if a medical situation arrises.

It’s disappointing, but hey, my 2nd grader was doing algebra two years ago and his little sister is on the same path. They’ll be in college by 12 or 13. I can still type, knock on wood. Sometimes you win, sometimes you lose. I count myself lucky if anything this nation manages to do is actually aimed at helping me. If it doesn’t hit the mark, at least Obama tried.

(Photo by Yoon S. Byun/The Boston Globe via Getty Images)

Retroactive Reform

On July 18, the US Sentencing Commission voted unanimously to retroactively apply new sentencing guidelines and allow almost 50,000 federal drug-offense prisoners the possibility of shorter sentences. Dara Lind provides background, including the Obama administration’s role, or lack thereof:

The US Sentencing Commission is independent of the Obama administration. In fact, the Department of Justice originally wanted the Sentencing Commission to approve a much more limited plan — one that would only let about 20,000 prisoners apply for shorter sentences. This week, reports surfaced that Department of Justice officials had been meeting privately with the Sentencing Commission, and had softened its position a little: it now wanted something that would affect about 40,000 prisoners. It’s not clear if the plan the Sentencing Commission approved today is the one the DoJ was lobbying for in private, or a different one.

Chris Geidner passes along Holder’s response to the new development:

“The department looks forward to implementing this plan to reduce sentences for certain incarcerated individuals. We have been in ongoing discussions with the Commission during its deliberations on this issue, and conveyed the department’s support for this balanced approach. In the interest of fairness, it makes sense to apply changes to the sentencing guidelines retroactively, and the idea of a one-year implementation delay will adequately address public safety concerns by ensuring that judges have adequate time to consider whether an eligible individual is an appropriate candidate for a reduced sentence. At my direction, the Bureau of Prisons will begin notifying federal inmates of the opportunity to apply for a reduction in sentence immediately. This is a milestone in the effort to make more efficient use of our law enforcement resources and to ease the burden on our overcrowded prison system.”

Douglas Berman asks how many of the eligible prisoners will be able to get a lawyer:

As hard-core federal sentencing fans likely already know, most lower federal courts have ruled that federal prisoners do not have a Sixth Amendment right to counsel applicable at the sentence modification proceedings judges must conduct to implement reduced retroactive sentencing guidelines. Consequently, none of the nearly 50,000 federal drug offense prisoners who may soon become eligible for a reduced sentence have any right to legal assistance in seeking this reduced sentence.

Fortunately for many federal prisoners seeking to benefit from previous guideline reductions, many federal public defender offices have traditionally made considerable efforts to provide representation to those seeking reduced sentences. But even the broadest guideline reductions applied retroactively in the past (which were crack guideline reductions) applied only to less than 1/3 of the number of federal prisoners now potentially eligible for reductions under the new reduced drug guidelines. I suspect that pubic defenders are unlikely to be able to provide significant legal help to a significant number of drug offenders who will be seeking modified sentences under the new reduced drug guidelines.

Jim Newell focuses on the muted response to from the right:

Had the Sentencing Commission and Holder made such moves even just a decade ago, there’s no question they would have been lambasted by Republicans — The Obama administration is setting dangerous drug addicts into the streets to eat your babies, et cetera. And yet, after the announcement Friday, there was relatively silence from the party, even though we’re just ahead of midterm elections.

How Does Ukraine’s Civil War End?

Smoke over #Donetsk as old car factory burns&shells fall. 4 more civilians killed. Civ casualties 500+ in this war pic.twitter.com/6KXl8Ev6N2

— Noah Sneider (@NoahSneider) July 21, 2014

Ivan Katchanovski predicts that attempts “to solve the conflict in Donbas by force will lead to mounting casualties among civilians, Ukrainian forces and armed separatists”:

Even a military defeat of separatists is unlikely to end the conflict because it reflects significant regional divisions since Ukraine’s independence in 1991, including a history of separatism in Crimea and Donbas. And Russia, with significant military, political, and economic leverage over Ukraine, is there to stay.

An internationally mediated negotiated settlement — which would include international investigations of the shooting down of the Malaysia Airlines plane and other mass killings — could preserve Donbas as a part of Ukraine. An example of one such peaceful resolution of an armed conflict between separatists and the central government is in Macedonia, in the former Yugoslavia. A negotiated settlement can also stop an escalation of the civil war in Ukraine and the growing conflict between the West and Russia. But such a peaceful resolution in Ukraine is not very likely to happen.

Maxim Eristavi’s report suggests that fighting won’t stop anytime soon:

On Friday, Putin called again for peace talks—but nobody in Kyiv is listening at the moment.

The Ukrainian public and its leaders insist they will go all the way to defeat the rebels.“It is time to put an end to this aggression, and the world should join us in the eliminating of terrorists. It doesn’t matter where they are,” Oleksandr Tyrchynov, the speaker of parliament said in a public statement, most likely hinting at a possible military campaign along the Russian border.

The war has its political upsides. Local analyst Yuriy Romanenko told me that the new ruling elite has the same core problem as the old one—corruption—which makes Western countries especially wary of providing more assistance, absent major economic and political changes. It also makes Kyiv less willing to compromise. “But the second they realize that they are losing the Eastern Ukraine war, peace talks will probably have a big comeback moment,” Romanenko said. “It’s an easier thing for them to do than go through painful reforms.”

But, even if Kyiv wanted a peace deal, it’s doubtful that many of the rebels are capable of negotiation. For example, Motyl does a close reading of rebel leader Pavel Gubarev’s “Methodological Guide for Struggle Against the Junta.” His take-away:

Is compromise possible with the likes of Gubarev? Probably not. He detests Ukraine and Ukrainians, and his agenda consists of little more than terrorism. Can Russian President Vladimir Putin control him? That, too, is by no means clear: fanatics such as Gubarev are by definition uncontrollable.

If so, the Poroshenko government may have no choice but to attempt to crush Gubarev and his militant groups. The bad news, for Kiev, is that Gubarev is implacable and is willing to die. The good news is that his manual clearly, if unintentionally, reveals that the militant groups are isolated, on the run, and in constant fear of exposure. His open admission that “[w]inning people’s confidence will not be easy” hardly reflects deep popular support. As the document stresses, the terrorists cannot trust the local population, not even the local criminals who in the early days of the insurgency actually comprised a significant portion of the fighters. Nor can they rely on their own comrades to remain silent, if captured, for more than a “few hours.”

Zen For Capitalists

Jacob Rubin defends books like Dan Harris’ 10% Happier that argue that spiritual practices like meditation and mindfulness make good business sense:

One might … claim that Harris’s watered-down vision of Buddhism, with its emphasis on career advancement, will encourage misuse. This may be fair enough, but it’s not an especially revealing criticism. After all, one of the first things that people do with any tool or philosophy is misuse it. A history of Christianity is largely a history of the abuse of Jesus Christ’s teachings; Buddhism is not exempt from such misprision. On the spectrum of misappropriation, using self-advancement as a lure seems forgivable enough if it leads people to try a technique as subtly transformative as mindfulness. (Indeed, if personal betterment is America’s religion, such an approach might be seen as syncretic.) What can be lost by broadening access to a philosophy of liberation, even if a majority of people conflate it with the more vulgar priorities of our culture?

Tracing Our Steps

The makers of an iPhone app that tracks exercise have transformed big data into beautiful GIF maps:

Using data collected from the Human smartphone app, major urban centres such as London, New York and Amsterdam have been drawn with pixels created by the movement of inhabitants that use the app. “We visualised 7.5 million miles of activity in major cities all across the globe to get an insight into Human activity,” said the team. “Walking, running, cycling, and motorised transportation data tell us different stories.”

The iPhone app was originally designed to encourage users to undertake at least 30 minutes of exercise each day. Using the phone’s location services and movement sensors while sat in a pocket or bag, it records the wearer’s type of movement and tots up the amount of activity completed. … As well as the city maps, the information was also used to rank the cities in percentage order of their residents’ most common means of transport. Amsterdam topped the list for cycling, Washington for walking, Berlin for running and Los Angeles for motorised transport.

Mark Byrnes recommends the video visualization, below the jump:

The city-by-city results are perhaps most fascinating when viewed as a video. Displaying minute-by-minute data from each location, Human shows how the volume of movement around different parts of each place changes throughout the day:

Write Wingers, Ctd

Recent the Dish featured Adam Bellow’s manifesto urging conservatives to engage with popular culture, especially novels, as a way of spreading their message. Adam Kirsch, however, argues that “a conservative literary revival, along the lines Bellow desires, is not going to happen.” The reason? He sees too much anger and resentment driving the proposal:

[A]nger is a not a conservative emotion. Genuine conservatism is something much broader and deeper than a political orientation; it is a temperament, one that looks to the past with reverence and the future with trepidation, and which believes that human nature is not easily changed or improved. Defined in this way, conservatism is in fact a major strain in contemporary American literature. David Foster Wallace, the leading novelist of his generation, was a champion of earnestness, reverence, self-discipline, and work—never more so than in his last, unfinished novel, The Pale King, whose heroes are hard-working accountants. Dave Eggers made his name with a memoir about raising his younger brother after his parents died, a hip but deeply earnest hymn to family values. Zadie Smith excels at the conservatism of comedy, which resolves differences in laughter and exposes human follies with an indulgent understanding.

Kirsch goes on to pan Bellow’s new site for conservative fiction, Liberty Island, which describes itself as a place where “good still triumphs over evil, hope still overcomes despair, and America is still a noble experiment and a beacon to the rest of the world“:

The problem is not that these are conservative ideas, but that they are simpleminded ideological dogmas, and so by their very nature hostile to literature, which lives or dies by its sense of reality. If you are not allowed to say that life in America can be bad, that Americans can be guilty as well as innocent, that good sometimes (most of the time?) loses out to evil—in short, that life in America is like human life in any other time or place—then you cannot be a literary writer, because you have censored your impressions of reality in advance.

Micah Mattix adds:

Kirsch is right that conservatism is much more than patriotism or a defense of individual freedom, even if he also overestimates how many “conservative” works of fiction are published today (only two of the novelists he cites are actively writing; Wallace, Malamud, and Bellow are dead, of course), and even if has a rather rose-colored view of the commitment of liberal writers to art above politics. …

I’d like to see more conservatives write good fiction and poetry, not in order to win the culture war, but in order to have better fiction and poetry. There are number of conservative positions that are true and that are often ignored in fiction and poetry today. In Rod’s article last year on conservatives and storytelling, I noted one of these: The belief that evil is rooted in individuals and not in the structures of society (the church, schools, property ownership).

The Best Of The Dish This Weekend

There are times, I suppose, when our weekend reflections might seem out of place in a busy, bruising, secular world. And that might have seemed all the more true these past two summer days, thick as they have been with the hubris of Putin, the nihilism of Hamas, and the collateral massacre of the innocent that is happening in Gaza, as I write these words.

But I would offer a mild disagreement. When there is nothing you or I can actually do about the disgusting criminality of the Russian separatists and goons in Eastern Ukraine, or the cynical, smug Hamas theocrats lobbing useless rockets, or the persistence of the Israeli military past the corpses of dozens of children, we can nonetheless find ways to live among it. It says so much more about the civilizing skepticism of Montaigne, for example, that he was making the case for doubt as the religious wars of absolute certainty were getting underway in his own country and beyond. It speaks to me, at least, that a Muslim cleric could also make the case, during Ramadan, that

oppression attempts to strip the oppressed of their rights and dignity; whereas oppressing strips the oppressor of their very own humanity.

He wasn’t referring to Israel’s endless mowing of the human lawn, but he surely might have. It helps too, I’d argue, to counter the more high-minded counterpoints to the horror to remember that war-makers are seeking peace as well, in their own way:

People who choose to participate in military action are more likely to be altruists than egotists: they are prepared to sacrifice their own lives for the sake of something that transcends them, such as their country or their religion, or socialism, secularism or democracy, or a world where peace and tolerance will reign in perpetuity.

What is Zionism if not a utopian desire for a peaceful, promised land – a desire now etched for ever in the blood and bitterness of so many – and that you see today in the bloodied tears of the Israeli soldier above?

This weekend, we further explored what makes life worth living – in the acerbically honest poems of Deborah “working girl” Garrison; in sex after sixty (I think); of sex between races – perhaps the best rebuke one can make to war between Jews and Muslims; in an escape from reality like Burning Man, seen here from a drone above – or in a post-acocalyptic Eden in Vanuatu. It was fitting too as children were blown apart by bombs, that I spent hours today reading a terrific book about Montaigne (the book club discussion is imminent – buy the book here), whose sanity and spirit reaches us across the centuries, and helps keep me sane, and even happy, although I am simultaneously distracted and distraught.

The most popular post of the weekend was A Game-Changer For Ukraine; followed by The Oldest Depiction Of Sex On Record.

This last week was the most trafficked since February; and brought in the most new subscribers in the same period. Join the 29,616 subscribers here. Or if a friend has a birthday coming up, buy a gift subscription here.

And see you in the morning.

(Photo: An Israeli soldier weeps at the grave of Israeli Sergeant Adar Barsano during his funeral on July 20, 2014 in Nahariya, Israel. Sergeant Barsano was killed along with another IDF soldier on the twelfth day of operation “Protective Edge,” when Hamas militants infiltrated Israel from a tunnel dug from Gaza and engaged Israeli soldiers. By Andrew Burton/Getty Images)

The Open-Source Sky

Professional astronomers have been looking at Flickr to better understand the universe:

To get detailed images of deep space, astronomers have a couple of options…. They can either use a long exposure to capture one really detailed image, or stack multiple less-detailed images together. [Astronomer Dustin] Lang and colleagues opted for the second approach. But rather than using multiple photos taken with the same telescope, they looked to the web. The team used a new alogorithm to stack nearly 300 images of the Galaxy NGC 5907 that they found on Flickr, Bing, and Google. They did this by “[l]iterally searching for ‘NGC 5907′ and ‘NGC5907′,” explains Astrobites.

For a photo of the night sky to be useful, though, the scientists first needed to know exactly what they were looking at. For that they turned to Astrometry.net*, a site that pinpoints exactly which patch of the sky is shown in an image. … Once they were stacked together, the images revealed faint features that offered information on the mass, age and orbitial configurations of the celestial bodies in galaxy NGC 5907–information that was not present in a single photo.

(Image via Openiduser2916 via Astronomy.net)