Andrew Sullivan's Blog, page 219

July 8, 2014

Keeping An Eye On The Ball

Fans Hold Their Breath For An England Victory In The World Cup


Charles Simic confesses his long-held World Cup addiction:


As hard as it is to comprehend, there are human beings on this planet who have no interest in the World Cup. Not just in the United States, where many sneer at this foreign import and find the global passion for the game incomprehensible, but also in countries where the fate of the national team in such a tournament is the sole topic of conversation for months.


I remember visiting the great Mexican poet Octavio Paz in Mexico City on the day his country was playing Italy in the 1994 World Cup. At first, we lolled around for a couple of hours, sipping wine and having a leisurely chat about literature and art. But to my surprise and distress, when the time came for the game, instead of turning on the TV, Paz and his wife took me and my Mexican translator to a French restaurant where we sat surrounded by empty tables, because everyone else in Mexico that evening was either at home watching the game or in one of the big plazas in the city seeing it on a huge screen. As we got into an argument about Heidegger, I recall cheers and gasps of collective disappointment reaching us from the vast crowd gathered outside. Desperate to find out the score, I kept going to the bathroom so I could peek into the kitchen where the cooks and the waiters were watching the game.


I have no memory of anything Octavio said that night, and I sincerely regret that, because he was the most learned and articulate man I ever encountered in my life. But I do remember the final score: Mexico one; Italy one.


(Photo: England fans celebrate after watching the England beat Slovenia 1-0 on a giant screen in Manchester, England on June 23, 2010. By Christopher Furlong/Getty Images)



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Published on July 08, 2014 16:40

Israel’s Other Terror Problem

Keating suspects Israel is regretting its failure to do anything about the epidemic of of violence and vandalism committed by West Bank settlers against their Palestinian neighbors and their property:


While the attacks have been widely condemned in Israel, the response by authorities can charitably described as sluggish. According to one report, between 2005 and 2013, 992 investigations of complaints of Israeli violence against Palestinians were launched but only 7.8 percent of them led to indictments.


As Daniel Byman and Natan Sachs have argued, a large part of the problem is the state of legal limbo created by the occupation of the West Bank. While Israeli police have authority over criminal disputes between Israeli citizens, “the military governs most aspects of public life, from security to construction permits,” and with the overall level of violence low until the last few weeks, the Israeli Defense Forces felt little public pressure to focus on protecting Palestinians from settler violence. Despite this, the IDF has on several occasions been the target of settler attacks.


Jonathan Schanzer profiles the settler gang known as “Price Tag”, which is responsible for many such attacks:




Price Tag is more a network than a group, because its cadres — religious, teenage Jews living in the settlements and in Israel alike — operate informally, leave no electronic trail of their activities, and seem to know how to elude detection from authorities. They are so elusive, in fact, that Israel’s vaunted internal security services has made only a handful of arrests since the acts of vandalism, usually marked by graffiti bearing the words “price tag” in Hebrew, began in 2008.


Some, including Israeli Defense Minister Moshe Yaalon, have called Price Tag a terrorist movement. This is debatable, because its activities have been limited to acts of vandalism and destruction of property. But Israeli officials I spoke to this week began to speculate that if the network was responsible for the murder of Abu Khdeir, it would have graduated into the realm of terrorism. Price Tag, at least so far, has not been linked to the murder. But amid the unrest that is now spreading across East Jerusalem, the Arab areas in Israel’s northern “triangle,” and parts of the West Bank, it is clear that the network poses dangers to Israeli security.




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Published on July 08, 2014 16:15

Who Killed The RomCom?


Andrew Romano suggests the small screen is to blame:


[N]ow that Hollywood has concluded that its only remaining competitive advantage is spectacle, it’s all but ceded the fairer sex to cable TV. The only demographic adrenalized enough to reliably show up for this weekend’s latest extravaganza is men aged 18-24, or so the thinking goes, and so the industry keeps churning out dude bait. Even romantic comedies themselves have become more male-centric over the last dozen years, with the Nora Ephrons and Nancy Meyerses of the world giving way to “bromance” auteurs such as Judd Apatow (The 40-Year Old Virgin) and Jason Segel (I Love You, Man).


Girls have something to do with this shift as well – again, on both sides of the camera. Take Mindy Kaling, who has made no secret of her love for romcoms. “What I’d really like to write is a romantic comedy,” Kaling revealed in The New Yorker in 2011. “This is my favorite kind of movie.” And yet Kaling hasn’t created a big-screen romantic comedy yet; she’s been too busy making a television show (The Mindy Project). Same goes for Tina Fey (30 Rock) and Lena Dunham (Girls), two other female writers who could potentially reinvigorate the genre (but who likely see more creative freedom in TV).


Matt O’Brien ties the rise of the Chinese film market to the decline of film comedy:



[T]he death of the comedy movie has come because the world is flat — and senses of humor aren’t. What’s funny to an American audience doesn’t always translate for a Chinese one. And now that China’s box office is the world’s largest outside of North America, that’s a major consideration.



Remember, Hollywood studios aren’t in the business of making movies. Like all financiers, they’re in the business of minimizing risk. That’s why, as Derek Thompson points out, they churn out so many sequels, prequels and reboots (and unnecessary splits of the last movie of a series intotwo). They do this because it works, and Hollywood knows it does. And now Hollywood knows that American comedies don’t work overseas, but American action movies do — especially if, like “Transformers 4,” they suck up to the Chinese government.


Indeed, Transformers 4 is now China’s top-grossing movie of all time:


Given that critical reaction to Transformers: Age of Extinctionhas been almost conspiratorially negative across the board — Richard Roeper called it “relentless,” and not as a compliment; Peter Travers at Rolling Stone refused to give it even one star — much of the coverage of its success in China has been, well, pretty darn condescending: “Chinese people are dazzled by anything Hollywood, etc.”


The reality is more complex. If the bar of cinematic quality is indeed set lower in China, the tastes of its 1.3 billion people aren’t necessarily to blame. The Chinese Communist Party is exceedingly picky about the films screened in the country, especially in the case of foreign cinema; so if a movie does well, one can ultimately thank the government.


The long and the short of it: Bay made a movie set and filmed in China, starring Chinese actors, using Chinese resources and pushing Chinese products, and in exchange, the movie gets a timely premiere across the country’s 18,000-plus movie screens.




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Published on July 08, 2014 15:45

Building Blocks


Olivia Solon promotes newfangled Lego-style construction materials:


The bricks—which are patent pending—are much like Lego in that they come in a variety of forms for different purposes and can easily connect together, with rows of knobs along the top of bricks that slot into voids along the bottom of other bricks. A special adhesive—which works like a super-strong double-sided sticky tape, a bit like 3M VHB—dispenses with the need for cement. They can be delivered to building sites in a kit complete with traditional doors and windows, allowing for structures to be assembled with a minimum of debris and labor. Steel bars can be slotted through dedicated channels in the bricks to provide the same support as traditionally reinforced concrete.


The bricks feature open internal spaces for insulation, which means that buildings made with the bricks require less energy for heating and cooling. The spaces also allow for infrastructure elements—whether it’s plumbing or wiring—to run through them. Removable panels allow for easy access to these infrastructure elements so that portions of walls don’t need to be torn down for maintenance. The bricks can be used to make floors, walls, and ceilings and the company says that if it constructs the average five story building using the bricks it can save around 30 percent energy compared with traditional construction methods. Kite Bricks also claims to be able to reduce the cost of construction by as much as 50 percent.



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Published on July 08, 2014 15:14

Who Will Lead The Reformicons?

Not Paul Ryan:


The reformicons’ retreat from Ryan-style apocalypticism is not only a shrewd tonal shift, but also a welcome — albeit unacknowledged — recognition that the party’s doomsaying has not come to pass, and that the American way of life will indeed survive Obama’s reforms. Indeed, the success of Obama’s domestic agenda may create more space for a conservative counteroffensive, in the way that Reaganism opened political room for Bill Clinton. Whether or not the reformicons ever compose a workable domestic agenda, they have come to recognize that they cannot run a presidential campaign promising to rescue America from fire and rubble visible only to themselves.


Vinik takes a closer look at this split:


Term limits mean Ryan can’t keep his current chairmanship. And that’s where things get interesting. As a replacement, he’s expected to seek, and to get, chairmanship of the House Ways and Means Committee. That will give him direct jurisdiction over tax reform and, as the Washington Post’s Robert Costa confirmed in a tweet, Ryan hopes to keep pushing the same supply-side agenda. But that’s likely to put him in conflict with the nascent reform conservative movement. You’ve probably heard of this group. They’re the ones who were the subject of that New York Times Magazine article on Sunday – and who, prior to that, put together a new policy agenda in a compendium called “Room to Grow.” What you may not know is that the chapter on tax reform, written by Robert Stein, represents a substantial departure from agenda Ryan and other supply-siders have been pushing.


Kilgore celebrates this development:


[F]or the moment, it’s refreshing to see that Ryan looks more and more like a standard GOP business hack with an unhealthy addiction to Ayn Rand novels, and less and less like the Brains of the GOP.



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Published on July 08, 2014 14:45

ISIS’s “Mission Accomplished” Moment, Ctd

Say what you will about ISIS and the new caliphate, but at least it's doing its bit to save long-form journalism: http://t.co/4g4MQJC7F5
Samanth Subramanian (@Samanth_S) July 08, 2014


Keating notices that their declaration of a caliphate isn’t rallying many other jihadists around its flag:


So far, there hasn’t exactly been a rush of other jihadi groups pledging allegiance to [Abu Bakr al-] Baghdadi. A number of Islamist groups in Syria, including al-Qaida’s official branch there, al-Nusra, have denounced the announcement. The caliphate has gotten a few pledges of support from groups in Egypt and Libya as well as a factions of the Pakistani Taliban and al-Qaida in the Arabian Peninsula. But we’ve yet to hear from senior leaders like AQAP’s Nasir al-Wuhayshi or al-Qaida in the Islamic Maghreb under Abu Musab Abdel Wadoud. All in all, considering the power-play ISIS just mounted, it hasn’t gotten a particularly impressive show of support from the international movement it purports to now lead. As terrorism analyst J.M. Berger put it, “it’s starting to look like that time ISIS threw a caliphate party and nobody came.”


Richard Bulliet doesn’t expect the title of “caliph” to do much for Baghdadi either:


[T]he success or failure of an ISIL caliphate will have little to do with the history of either the title or the office. None of the OIC states will recognize Baghdadi’s grandiose proclamation, and without such recognition, it will remain meaningless.



ISIL may well continue to enjoy military success against the feeble and embattled Syrian and Iraqi regimes, and that success may well draw in recruits. But the benefit to ISIL of a claim to the medieval caliphate of Baghdad is nil. In fact, it already draws more ridicule than support. Yusef al-Qaradawi, a spiritual guide to the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt, declared that ISIL’s declaration is void under sharia and has dangerous consequences for the Sunnis in Iraq and for the revolt in Syria.”


There is an outside chance that ISIL’s Islamic State could become a regional polity with some degree of staying power, like the Sokoto Caliphate. But if that does happen, it will be due almost entirely to the fortunes of war rather than the fallacious founding of a caliphate.


Meanwhile, Robert Ford sees potential to peel other Sunni groups away from the Islamic State’s coalition:


In a reversal of their thinking after 2003, many Sunni Arabs also now call for a Sunni Arab region modeled off the Kurdistan Regional Government that they so bitterly opposed 10 years ago, during the drafting of the present Iraqi constitution. The present constitution would allow a Sunni Arab regional government with its own security forces and a wide margin of self-rule. They are surely also thinking about the share of Iraq’s big oil revenues from southern and northeastern Iraq that would go to their region, which would be centered in western Iraq. This suggests that there is space to negotiate with at least some of the Sunni Arabs. These figures would likely be willing to stop the fight against Baghdad in return for a reformed central government and an agreed path to decide if and where to establish another regional government in Iraq.


Nevertheless, Paul Miller contends that “the Middle East is now a more favorable operating environment for jihadist groups than ever before”:


Today there is no serious ideological rival left to Islamist politics in most Middle Eastern countries. Nationalist and Marxist politicians discredited themselves with decades of corruption, mismanagement, and autocracy that left the region nearly worst in the world for human development. The groups gaining ground in the political ferment of the last few years tend to espouse variations of Islamism — of the peaceful sort, where possible, as in Tunisia (the Ennahda Party) and Egypt (the Muslim Brotherhood has publicly foresworn violence since the 1960s), but of the violent sort elsewhere.


[T]here is now a wide swath of territory across Iraq and Syria that is essentially safe haven for jihadist militants. This is probably the greatest strategic setback to the United States in its long war against jihadists since al Qaeda declared war on the United States in 1996. That a menagerie of like-minded jihadist militant groups are alive and well and capturing territory suggests the irrelevance of former Defense Secretary Leon Panetta’s claim in 2011 that al Qaeda was nearing “strategic defeat.” The fate of al Qaeda is simply one small piece of a much larger problem. The situation is all the worse today because jihadist groups can now exploit the international border between Iraq and Syria to their advantage. In a move familiar to anyone watching the Afghan and Pakistani Taliban, terrorists plan, train, and hide on one side of the border, unmolested by the local government because they only carry out operations on the other side.



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Published on July 08, 2014 14:12

The Big Picture On Immigration

Charles Kenny argues that immigration reform isn’t really dead, at least not in the long run. He’s talking not just in the US, but Europe as well:


Politically, there’s little question that immigration is currently seen as a losing issue. … The average citizen in both the U.S. and Europe, however, appears to be far calmer about immigration than the heat and light of recent events would suggest. Though there has been an uptick in popular concern about levels of migration in Europe and (to a lesser extent) the U.S., that rise should be seen in the context of a longer-term trend away from nativism. According to World Values Survey data, the proportion of Germans who think that “when jobs are scarce, employers should give priority to people of this country over immigrants” has fallen from 56 percent in the late 1990s to 41 percent more recently. Over the same period in Spain, the proportion fell from 70 percent to 53 percent, and in the U.S., 59 percent to 50 percent.


The U.K. is the only country out of eight European countries and the U.S. surveyed by the German Marshall Fund where the majority of respondents thought there were too many immigrants in the country in 2013. Compare that with 41 percent in the U.S. and only 24 percent in Germany. In the U.S., more than two-thirds view immigration as a good thing for the country.


But Reihan feels that Kenny’s column “obscures more than it reveals”:


What Kenny does not mention is that when asked if there were “a lot but not too many” immigrants in the country, 39 percent of Americans, 55 percent of Germans, and 28 percent of Britons answered in the affirmative. One obvious possibility that Kenny neglects is that Germans might be reluctant to tell a pollster that there are “too many” immigrants residing in their country while Americans and Britons, who presumably don’t have the same anxieties about national chauvinism, are somewhat more inclined to do so. While Kenny cites the fact that only 24 percent of Germans will forthrightly say that there are too many immigrants in the country, he neglects to mention that 43 percent of Italians and 43 percent of the French say the same. The Swedes, like the Germans, are outliers in that only 23 percent report that there are too many immigrants in the country, yet Sweden is home to large numbers of migrants from neighboring countries like Finland (12.5 percent of all foreigners residing in Sweden), Denmark (6.8), and Norway (6) as well as countries like Iraq (9.3). A finer-grained question might ask respondents if there were “too many” immigrants from affluent market democracies or from the developing world. …


Instead of admonishing politicians on both sides of the Atlantic to consider the math, Kenny should keep in mind that the math favors immigration policies that raise the average skill level over those that lower it. Lo and behold, it turns out that societies that select immigrants on the basis of skill are also less hostile to immigration.



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Published on July 08, 2014 13:42

Americans And Danes Agree On Welfare

Aaroe-Fig-1


In fact, their views are almost identical, a recent study suggests, as long as you tell them whether the recipient in question is “unlucky” or “lazy”:


When modern individuals – Americans and Danes alike – form opinions on who deserves welfare in mass society, they do so using the same psychology that has guided help-giving decisions for millenniums: they watch out for cheaters and seek to help reciprocators. The key question guiding our intuitions about recipient deservingness is: Is this a person who is motivated to give something back to me and society? These psychological systems designed for cheater-detection and decision-making about reciprocity crowd out cultural learning and a lifetime of exposure to different welfare state cultures. Therefore, when provided with direct information about the motivation and the circumstances of the social welfare recipients, just two sentences of information can make Danes and American become substantially and statistically indistinguishable in their social welfare opinions.



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Published on July 08, 2014 08:01

Squeaky-Clean Energy

Michael Grunwald fears that efforts to avoid another failure like Solyndra will make the government too cautious:


So far, the [clean energy] loan program has only burned through about $800 million of its $10 billion in reserves. Mitt Romney suggested during a debate with President Obama that half of its loans had failed; in fact, more than 95 percent are performing fine. That’s a record most private portfolio managers would envy, and it’s especially remarkable for a program that’s supposed to focus on innovative projects that private financiers won’t bankroll without government help. The goal was to help push promising green technologies across the so-called “Valley of Death,” and it seems to be working. Now that a bunch of huge solar projects have been built with government help, a bunch of copycat projects are under construction with purely private financing. They’ll benefit from the lessons learned in the initial round.


… it would be a shame if Solyndraphobia drove the Energy Department towards overly safe projects that don’t need government help. We don’t need an energy version of the Export-Import Bank, offering slightly cheaper financing to borrowers with no plausible risk of default. The loan program’s main goal should be facilitating disruptive projects in order to reduce our dependence on fossil fuels, not avoiding failure in order to make sure taxpayers recoup every dollar. The Ex-Im Bank’s repayment rate is 99.7 percent; that means it’s very unlikely to have a Solyndra problem, and equally unlikely to accomplish anything useful.



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Published on July 08, 2014 07:27

The Guilty Gamer

New research suggests that violent videogames make players more “morally sensitive” by causing them to regret their own behaviors:


“This may, as it does in real life, provoke players to engage in voluntary behavior that benefits others,” notes lead author Matthew Grizzard [of the University of Buffalo] in a summary of the study, which is published (behind a paywall) in the journal Cyberpsychology, Behavior and Social Networking. So, the suggestion is that not only is amoral in-game activity harmless, it might also be beneficial to society.


This conclusion rests on previous findings within sociology/social psychology that when humans feel guilt about some real-world behavior (or lab-simulated real-world behavior, rather) they will convert that feeling into actual prosocial behavior. A quick survey reveals a 2003 New Mexico State University study finding that feelings of guilt could be used to push real-world cooperation, suggesting that guilt may be used as “‘information’ about the future costs of uncooperative strategy.”


Related Dish on torture in videogames here.



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Published on July 08, 2014 07:02

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