Andrew Sullivan's Blog, page 216

Pop-Culture Partisanship

Alyssa has grown tired of it:

As we have become more comfortable discussing the politics of culture, our discussions of art have become a lot more like our discussions of politics. We treat people whose interpretations differ from our own as if they are acting in bad faith. We focus on gaffes and supposed gaffes. And we demand that significant figures in cultural commentary have something to say about every big event so we can check their reactions against our sense of what they ought to feel to remain in good standing. …

The idea that enjoyment is tainted by argument shows up over and over again in our cultural conversations. There are fans of “Game of Thrones” who apparently cannot tolerate the idea that a show that ranges so broadly might not show the same deftness in all aspects of its production that it demonstrates when it is at its best. I regularly hear from readers of comic books who insist that the only way to judge superhero movies is to read them against their source material, which would surely change my feelings about the execution of a storyline or two. When I state an opinion – that the second paintball episode of the cult sitcom “Community” did not engage me as much as the first – that critical judgement is taken in some quarters as an error of fact.

Afghanistan Gets Worse

Reid Standish relays a troubling new report from the UN that shows violence there is on the rise again:

According to newly released United Nations data, the number of civilians who were injured or killed in Afghanistan rose by 24 percent over the first half of 2014, compared to the same period in last year. In total, the United Nations Assistance Mission in Afghanistan (UNAMA) documented 1,564 civilian deaths and 3,289 injuries during the six-month span.

The U.N. data indicates that ground combat has overtaken improvised explosive devices (IEDs) as the leading cause of civilian deaths. Ground combat — which can include the use of mortars, rocket-propelled grenades, and small arms — was responsible for 39 percent of civilian deaths and injuries in 2014, accounting for 474 civilian deaths and 1,427 injuries. The number of casualties caused by ground combat rose 89 percent from the previous year.

Reading the same report, Keating highlights the particularly grave danger women and children are facing:

Child casualties more than doubled and the number of women casualties increased by 60 percent. The reason is the changing nature of the violence. For the first time, more civilians were killed by crossfire in battles between government and anti-government forces than by improvised explosive devices. Suicide attacks are also down this year. This means more violence is taking place in heavily populated areas where women and children are likely to be found. As one U.N. official put it, “the fight is increasingly taking place in communities, in public places, near playgrounds, and near the homes of ordinary Afghans.”

Is Online Betting Less Addictive Than Casino Gambling?

Cameron Tung believes that former is less psychologically involving than the latter:

In 2006, researchers at the University of Guelph published a paper in which they concluded that a specific type of casino design was best for stoking people’s desire to gamble.The study’s authors collected the emotional and psychological responses of subjects to the “playground” model of casinos – distinguished by warm colors, “the presence of accessible green space and moving water” – and the Friedman-design model, in which the “gambling equipment should be the dominant decorative feature in a casino, and décor should be used only to highlight and enhance the equipment layout.”

The researchers determined that the playground model elicited higher responses of pleasure as well as mental restoration, a quality they found to be linked to a person’s willingness to gamble. Appearing to validate these conclusions are the financial reports of the Roger Thomas-designed Bellagio and Wynn hotel-casinos in Las Vegas, which contain extreme archetypes of the playground-style gaming floor and have trounced many of their Friedman-style competitors. One of the authors of the University of Guelph study, Karen Finlay, told the New Yorker that “gamblers in a playground casino will stay longer, feel better, and bet more. Although they come away with bigger losses, they’re more likely to return.”

In other words, it’s possible that many gamblers are not actually seeking the most convenient or efficient place to win money, but the most comfortable space in which to lose it.

Mental Health Break

A mesmerizing look inside everyday objects:

Verschleif from Laurin Döpfner on Vimeo.

With an edge sander, half a millimeter is sanded off each work piece (wood, walnut, transformer, skull or analogue camera) and photographed. About 650 photos are made into a short film, which contrasts the inner structure of nature and technology.

The Root Of The STEM Problem, Ctd

Freddie responds to Danielle Kurtzleben on the supposed shortage of workers trained in science, technology, engineering, and math:

[I]t’s very frustrating that Kurtzleben, and essentially our entire elite policy media, doesn’t go a step further: trying to predict what particular set of discrete and limited skills will be useful in the future is a mug’s game. It’s a fundamentally risky way for an individual to behave, and for policy decisions that are supposed to be based on the most good for the most people, it’s incoherent strategy.

Jobs in petrochemical engineering have been exploding, because of a largely-unpredictable boom in American fossil fuel reserves. Becoming a contracting engineer for a construction firm was a great idea in 1999, but by 2005, was a very risky proposition. Going to law school was the epitome of mercenary self-interest until, suddenly, it was the epitome of laughable, deluded foolishness. Teaching kids how to code Python now, when they’ll be hitting the job market 20 years from now, is ludicrous, especially in a world where there’s every reason to think that tech firms will continue to have very low employee to market cap ratios and where computers might take over the bulk of coding. Individuals can navigate the markets, if they’re smart, privileged, and lucky. But great masses of people never can. If you’re telling me that you know what every freshman should start studying in 2014 so that s/he can get a good job in 2019, I think you’re full of it.

The Best Of The Dish Today

In a rather weird post yesterday, Jeffrey Toobin argued bravely that it’s a shame that there is a squabble over who gets credit for the extraordinary success of the marriage equality movement. Well: duh. I couldn’t agree more. It’s unseemly and ungracious and ugly. And that’s why you can scour the web for examples of Mary Bonauto or Evan Wolfson or Robbie Kaplan or Dan Foley or me ever claiming that we, and we alone, “changed the world”. It’s a grotesque thing for anyone to claim in such a broad and long and multi-faceted movement.

But Ted Olson, David Boies and Chad Griffin have all claimed as such through the Becker book, the Prop 8 HBO documentary, and the Olson-Boies book. And that‘s why there’s been a fight. They did something no one had ever dreamed of doing before. And that’s why the near-universal response in the gay community to the books has been criticism and derision. It’s certainly not because we begrudge newcomers to the movement, or straight people, as Toobin also bizarrely implies. The very first lawyer who filed a successful marriage equality suit in Hawaii was straight, Dan Foley. I welcomed Olson and Boies with open arms and backed their lawsuit, despite its risks of backfiring. I’ve welcomed every convert to the cause for twenty-five years.

The issue is not between laborers and newcomers; it’s between laborers and a tiny number of newcomers who declared themselves indispensable saviors of a movement that had previously been allegedly “languishing in obscurity” – and then launched on a lucrative publicity tour to cement their place in history (something also that no one had ever done before). So no, Jeffrey, the correct historical analogy of Ted Olson is not to white freedom-riders in the South. They didn’t turn around and claim exclusive credit for the work of African Americans and then bill them over $6 million.

And no, Jeffrey, it isn’t just about the first paragraph. The framing of this lawsuit as “the legal battle to bring marriage equality to the nation” was the central message of the book, which is why Toobin used that exact phrase in his now-embarrassing blurb. It was neither of those things, as Toobin must now know. And as for the first paragraph, you know who doesn’t regret or retract a word of it, even when given several opportunities to do so? Jo Becker. There’s only so much the media establishment can do to keep a lie alive. And I guess Jeffrey just did his part.

Today, I took a long view of Obama’s long game – and didn’t buy the current chattering class consensus that he’s a failed president. We noted more good news for Obamacare; and continued awful news for Palestinians enduring the latest air assault on Gaza. Plus: feminism tackles circumcision; neocons know nothing (again!); a montage of soccer’s high drama in real life; and a mash-note from me to the Millennial generation.

The most popular post of the day was Meep Meep Watch; runner up: Never Listen To A Neocon Again.

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. 19 more readers became subscribers today. You can join them here - and get access to all the readons and Deep Dish, including my new podcast with Matthew Vines - for a little as $1.99 month.

See you in the morning.

(Photo: The body of eight-year-old Palestinian boy Abdul Rahman Khattab who was killed when an Israeli missile struck his home, is brought to al-Aqsa hospital morgue in Deir al-Balah, in the central Gaza Strip, on July 10, 2014. At least 86 Palestinians, mostly civilians, have been killed and hundreds injured in a major Israeli air offensive against the Gaza Strip that began late Monday night, according to reports by the Palestinian Health Ministry. By Ashraf Amra/Anadolu Agency/Getty Images.)

Face Of The Day

Charla Nash, the victim of a mauling by a pet chimp in Connecticut in 2009 and who underwent a face transplant, speaks at a press conference on Capitol Hill on July 10, 2014. Nash joined members of Congress in advocating for changes in federal law banning the interstate trade of primates. By Win McNamee/Getty Images. To get a better sense of how remarkable her surgeries have been, watch her famous Oprah interview here.

A Twentieth Century St. Paul

Ian Thomson details the just-translated Pier Paolo Pasolini screenplay, St. Paul, which the Italian filmmaker, who was killed before he could make the film, intended to be a sequel to his The Gospel According to Matthew. The plot involves the post-Damascus disciple coming to America to preach the message of Jesus:

St Paul champions those who have been disinherited by capitalism and the “scourge of money”. Pasolini believed that the consumerist “miracle” of 1960s Italy had undermined the semi-rural peasant values of l’Italietta (Italy’s little homelands). In the director’s retelling of the Bible, Paul stands as a bulwark against the “corruption” brought to Italy by Coca-Cola, chewing gum, jeans and other trappings of American-style consumerism.

Nevertheless, as the former Saul, a Pharisee and persecutor of Christians, Paul was an ambivalent figure for Pasolini.

After his conversion on the road to Damascus in 33AD, he took his mission round the world and became the founding father of the Christian Church in Rome, with its hierarchy of prelates and pontiffs. So, in some measure, he lay behind the Catholic Church that Pasolini had come to know in 1960s Rome, with its Mafia-infiltrated Christian Democracy party and its pursuit of power and political favour. In the screenplay, Paul is by turns arrogant and slyly watchful of his mission.

The saint’s story is updated, cleverly, to the 20th century. Cohorts of SS and French military collaborationists in Vichy France stand in for the Pharisees. With a fanatic’s heart, Paul oversees the killing and mass deportation of Christians. The action then fast-forwards to 1960s New York, where the post-Damascus Paul is preaching to Greenwich Village “beats”, “hippies”, “blacks” and other outcasts from conformist America (“I appeal to you, brothers . . .”). His attempts to overturn capitalist values in Lyndon Johnson-era America are met with hostility by FBI operatives and White House flunkies. In the end he is murdered on the same hotel balcony where Martin Luther King was assassinated in 1968. Pasolini’s approximation of the apostle of black liberation to the apostle of orthodox Christianity just about works.

The Price-Cut On Medicare

Sarah Kliff is impressed by the above chart:

This simple, four-line chart is amazing news for the federal budget. It shows that the government is expected to spend about $50 billion less paying for the Medicare program this year than it had expected to just four years ago. What this chart shows is how much the Congressional Budget Office expects we’ll need to pay for each and every Medicare beneficiary. And over the past four years, the forecasting agency has consistently downgraded the price of covering one senior’s health care costs.

Saving $1,000 per patient adds up quickly in a program that covers about 50 million people. More precisely, it adds up to about $50 billion in savings this year. The reduction in expected costs grows to $2,369 in 2019. With an expected 60 million seniors enrolled in Medicare that year, it would work out to more than $120 billion shaved off the total cost of the program.

Drum expects Medicare costs to continue declining:

There are two reasons for this. First, the growth rate of medical costs in general has been declining steadily for the past 30 years, and this has now been going on long enough that it’s highly unlikely to be a statistical blip. After a surge in the 80s and 90s, we really are returning to the growth rates that were common earlier in the century, and obviously this will affect Medicare.

Second, Obamacare really will have an impact. Not everything in it will work, but it includes a lot of different cost-cutting measures and some of them will turn out to be pretty effective. And who knows? If Republicans ever stop pouting over Obamacare, we might even be able to experiment with different kinds of cost reductions.

Tricia Neuman and Juliette Cubanskigo go into more detail on the factors at play:

In addition to scheduled reductions in Medicare’s more formulaic payment rates, providers may be tightening their belts and looking to deliver care more efficiently in response to financial incentives included in the ACA, and it is possible that these changes are having a bigger effect than expected. For example, CMS recently reported that hospital readmission rates dropped by 130,000 between January 2012 and August 2013. It is also possible that hospitals and other providers are using data and other analytic tools more successfully to track utilization and spending and to reduce excess costs. Another more straightforward factor is that several expensive and popular brand-name drugs have gone off patent in recent years, which has helped to keep Medicare drug spending in check.

Whatever the causes may be, the slowdown in spending is good news for Medicare, the federal budget and for beneficiaries—at least for now, and as long as it does not adversely affect access to or quality of care.

A Serious Plan To Fight Climate Change

A new report outlines what the world would need to do to head off severe global warming:

Given what we know about the sensitivity of the climate to added greenhouse gases, it’s possible to calculate how much more carbon dioxide we can admit while still having a reasonable chance of staying within the two degree Celsius envelope. What’s striking about these calculations is how many large changes we’ll have to make in order to get there. According to Jeffrey Sachs of Columbia University’s Earth Institute, the per-capita emissions would have to drop from five tons annually (where they are now) to 1.6 tons by 2050.

To accomplish this, Sachs says that all nations will have to undergo a process he calls “deep decarbonization,” which is part of the title of a report he’s helped organize and deliver to the UN [earlier this week]. Pathways to Deep Decarbonization, prepared by researchers in 15 different countries, looks into what’s needed to achieve sufficient cuts in our carbon emissions. The report finds that current government pledges aren’t sufficient, and the technology we need to succeed may exist, but most of it hasn’t been proven to scale sufficiently.

Plumer looks at what Sachs’ plan would mean for the US:

The United States eventually gets 30 percent of its electricity from nuclear power and 40 percent of its electricity from renewable sources like hydro, wind, and solar by 2050. Electric vehicles would handle about 75 percent of all trips. Large trucks would get switched over to natural gas. The coal plants that remained would all capture their carbon-dioxide emissions and bury them underground. Every single building would adopt LEDs for lighting.

David Unger reads through the report’s recommendations:

The biggest need: research and early-stage development. The world underinvests in clean-energy research, development, and demonstration by roughly $70 billion a year, according to the Center for Clean Energy Innovation, a Washington-based organization that designs and advocates for clean-energy policy. That amounts to only 13 percent of what the world spends on global fossil-fuel subsidies, according to CCEI, and 27.5 percent of what it invests in deploying clean-energy technologies.

“The main lesson in history is that targeted R&D works,” says Sachs, who says clean energy needs a large public-private effort along the lines of the Manhattan Project or the push to put a man on the moon. “The remarkable fact is that we have not invested [enough] in an issue that is of existential importance to the planet.”