Andrew Sullivan's Blog, page 230

Fascism On The Field?

Saj Mathew explains why the Argentine short story writer and essayist Jorge Luis Borges disdained soccer:

His problem was with soccer fan culture, which he linked to the kind of blind popular support that propped up the leaders of the twentieth century’s most horrifying political movements. In his lifetime, he saw elements of fascism, Peronism, and even anti-Semitism emerge in the Argentinean political sphere, so his intense suspicion of popular political movements and mass culture—the apogee of which, in Argentina, is soccer—makes a lot of sense. (“There is an idea of supremacy, of power, [in soccer] that seems horrible to me,” he once wrote.) Borges opposed dogmatism in any shape or form, so he was naturally suspicious of his countrymen’s unqualified devotion to any doctrine or religion even to their dear albiceleste.

Soccer is inextricably tied to nationalism, another one of Borges’ objections to the sport. “Nationalism only allows for affirmations, and every doctrine that discards doubt, negation, is a form of fanaticism and stupidity,” he said. National teams generate nationalistic fervor, creating the possibility for an unscrupulous government to use a star player as a mouthpiece to legitimize itself. In fact, that’s precisely what happened with one of the greatest players ever: Pelé. … Governments, such as the Brazilian military dictatorship that Pelé played under, can take advantage of the bond that fans share with their national teams to drum up popular support, and this is what Borges feared—and resented—about the sport.

Sarah Albers, on the other hand, offers a more positive take on the sport’s cultural impact – at least for Americans:

At the Wall Street Journal, Jeremy Gordon called the World Cup a “global ritual.” And it would seem so. But, more importantly, it is a national ritual: it is a means for people from all around the country to connect, an opportunity so rarely afforded us anymore. William Leitch of Sports on Earth says that we “can talk all we want about a globalized society, … but that has always seemed more true in theory than in practice. In real life, we search out our own.”

And I think that this cuts to the heart of the issue: it is through sports that Americans, so wary of religion, race, and politics, can finally have confidence that we are among “our own.”

Book Club: A Conversation With Alexandra And Maria

Maria Popova, the host of our second Book Club, recently sat down with Alexandra Horowitz for a wide-ranging discussion of her latest book, On Looking:

 

Maria introduces it:

For the inaugural Dish Book Club podcast, I had the pleasure of sitting down with Alexandra to discuss her wonderful tapestry of perspectives on everyday life, On Looking: Eleven Walks with Expert Eyes. Our conversation, itself a winding walk through psychology, literature, and the perplexities of modern life, ranges from Alice in Wonderland to dog cognition. At the heart of the discussion lies an exploration of how to end the tyranny of productivity (“I don’t mean to be testifying against productivity per se,” says Horowitz, “but I do see that it’s certainly mindless, the way that we approach there being only one route to living one’s life.”) and learn to live with presence (“I value the moments in my life that are productive, certainly, but only the ones that are productive and also present.”) Please enjoy.

If you don’t have time to listen to the whole 40-minute recording, we will be sampling the best parts throughout the weekend. In this clip, Maria and Alexandra discuss how the book might help counteract the perils of a mind too focused on productivity:

 

If you enjoyed any part of the conversation, send us your thoughts at bookclub@andrewsullivan.com. Follow the whole Book Club discussion here. And don’t forget to check out Brain Pickings, Maria’s fantastic blog, and subscribe to it here if you like what you read. We sure do.

Face Of The Day

A Javanese Muslim woman takes a bath on the beach as she prepares for Ramadan with padusan ritual at Parangtritis beach in Yogyakarta, Indonesia on June 27, 2014. Padusan ritual has the purpose of purifying people welcoming the holy month of Ramadan. Ramadan, observed by Muslims worldwide, is the ninth month of the Islamic lunar calendar and is a holy month of fasting, prayer and recitation of the Quran. By Ulet Ifansasti/Getty Images.

Kurdistan’s Moment? Ctd

Steven Cook weighs in on the prospects for Kurdish independence. He’s less bullish than most:

For all the confidence in Erbil, the Kurds have a host of significant problems that seriously complicate the establishment of an independent Kurdistan.  The Kurds have enjoyed something that looks a lot like a state for the past three decades, but they have never actually had the responsibilities of a state.  Even as they railed against Baghdad for routinely bilking them out of large amounts of the 17 percent share of government revenue they were supposed to receive, they were still dependent on the central government.  The answer is obviously oil revenues, which are promising, but it is clear that with legal challenges and capacity issues, it is no panacea.  The Kurds will be living hand-to-mouth for quite some time.

There is a lot of oil and a fair number of Western oil guys hanging around the Divan and Rotana hotels, but beyond that there seems to be very little economic activity in Kurdistan.  Erbil is notable for its half-finished construction sites, including a shell of what is slated to be a JW Marriott and some of those exclusive have-it-all-in-one-place developments that cater to expats and super wealthy locals all around the Middle East.  The Kurds clearly envision Erbil to be the next Dubai, but it is not even Amman yet.  There are shops and some good restaurants, but no real banks to finance development. Other than oil, the Kurds do not produce much of anything.

Previous Dish on the Iraqi Kurds here, here, and here.

Your Moment Of Swimming Pig

Responding to our post on depressed animals starring Mr G and Jellybean, a reader sends the above video:

Want to see some serious inter-species animal heroics? Check this out.

And check out our long-running coverage of swimming pigs. Update from a reader:

I’m afraid you’ve been successfully pranked. The viral video was made by comedian Nathan fielder for his show Nathan for You. See here. I can highly recommend the show!

More Money For Meatballs

Ikea is raising its average minimum wage for American employees to $10.76 per hour, a 17 percent increase. Jordan Weissmann is encouraged by the news:

Notably, Ikea isn’t raising prices on its furniture to pay for the raise. Instead, the company’s management says it believes the pay hike will help them compete for and keep talent, which is of course good for business. The Gap used a similar justification when it announced it would raise its own minimum to $10 by 2015.

Which I think hints at something about what would likely happen if the U.S. raised the federal minimum. The conservatives who argue that higher pay floors kill jobs also tend to assume that businesses are already running at pretty much peak efficiency. According to this logic, forcing companies to spend more on labor will lead to less hiring. But left-leaning economists see it differently. They tend to argue that increasing wages can lead to savings for business by reducing worker turnover, for instance, and forcing managers to make better use of their staff.

But Bouie is less than thrilled:

[I]t’s worth noting that there’s less than meets the eye to Ikea’s promise to hew to local and municipal minimum wage hikes.

Most Ikea stores are located in suburbs, as opposed to urban centers. The Ikea near Charlotte, North Carolina, for instance, is located on the outskirts of the area, as is the Ikea near Seattle (in Renton) and the one in Dallas (near Frisco). By virtue of geography, these stores will avoid city-mandated wage hikes. What’s more, for as much as Ikea and similar stores might be good for workers, their overwhelmingly suburban locations makes them isolated from large numbers of potential workers who lack employment opportunities in their own areas and neighborhoods.

But Danny Vinik details one way Ikea is taking geography into account in a big way:

[The company] added a smart twist: They will tie the wage level in each store to the cost-of-living in the surrounding area, meaning Ikea workers in Pittsburgh will receive a different hourly wage than those in Woodbridge, Vermont.

At first glance, this may seem unfair. Those workers in Woodbridge and Pittsburgh are doing the same jobs. Why shouldn’t they receive the same pay? But Ikea has the right idea. The minimum wage is an arbitrary interference with the free market. Most economists justify it, and most Americans support it, because they want to make sure low-wage workers have an adequate standard of living. But living standards vary widely across the country.

Much more Dish on the minimum wage here.

Stick With Staycations?

Julian Baggini wonders whether going abroad necessarily broadens our horizons:

Travel can yield many benefits. There is the challenge of having to deal with novel and unexpected situations, learning about the world and adapting to different customs. It is something that is meant to forge our character and make us more flexible individuals, confronting our prejudices along the way.

Of course travel isn’t guaranteed to do any such thing. It might in reality create expense and discomfort while merely reinforcing our biases. Things back home can seem so much more civilised. The quality time with your family you were hoping for turns out to be more stressful than life at work. Instead of taking the opportunity to learn about local customs you end up getting drunk with your compatriots.

But there remains a lingering feeling that there is something wrong with being uninterested in travel. Much of this is likely to come down to cultural pressure but there is one way of making sense of it, which is that an unwillingness to travel can reflect a general lack of curiosity about the world. … [S]ome people simply feel that what drives their curiosity happens to be close to home. Far from being a problem, this can be an advantage, if it means that what thrills and stimulates them is nearer, cheaper and more in their control. But then one of the benefits of travel is to be receptive to what is unfamiliar. Taking that lesson means allowing ourselves to be open to other things that stretch our comfort zone.

(Photo of a many-stamped passport by Jesse Edwards)

The Case For Eating Bugs, Ctd

ASAP Science addresses the squicky subject:

Adopt American?

Kathryn Joyce registers a decline in domestic adoption rates:

[F]fewer women are willing to relinquish children for adoption if they find themselves pregnant at a young age, or while unmarried. A 2010 report from the Center for American Progress noted that annual domestic infant adoption rates have fallen so significantly that they are hard to track accurately. There is the simple fact that teenage pregnancies are down across the country. And for young women who do experience unplanned pregnancies, there are more choices available today. Although adoption is often presented as the pro-life alternative to abortion, the Center for American Progress report found that the greater acceptance of single parenthood is a stronger factor in fewer women choosing adoption than the availability of abortion, since both adoption and abortion rates have fallen, while rates of unmarried parenthood have dramatically increased.

Paradoxically, Rebecca Buckwalter-Poza notes that hundreds of American-born children are being raised by Canadian and European adoptive parents:

Over the past 10 years, Canadian parents have adopted more than 1,000 American-born children; another 300 are growing up in the Netherlands; and at least another 100 will be raised in the United Kingdom. … The best estimate, from Joan Heifetz Hollinger, a professor at the University of California-Berkeley School of Law, is that as many as 500 infants, most of whom are black, leave this country through outgoing adoption every year. When it comes to the adoption of black infants, the European market is all demand and America all supply. Social acceptance of single parenthood, the accessibility of contraception, and the legalization of abortion have drastically reduced the number of children available for adoption domestically in much of Western Europe, and U.S. agencies have emerged to meet the demand.

Buckwalter-Poza adds, “the perseverance of race-based preferences is troubling for a number of reasons, not least of which is that black children are less likely to be adopted than white”:

Any policy – official or not – that slows the adoption of non-white children is a worrying one. More than 100,000 thousand children become eligible for adoption in the US in a given year; on average, about 50,000 of these children will be adopted annually. Rough math finds a troubling truth: Approximately 46 percent of black children awaiting adoption were placed in 2012, compared to 58 percent of eligible white children over the same time period.

It can be argued that outgoing adoption is an indirect consequence of the commoditization of adoptees in the American market: White children are, in these terms, more “valuable,” and there is, as now-judge on the Seventh Circuit Court of Appeals Richard Posner once put it, “a glut of black babies.” Foreign prospective parents, it seems, appear less concerned with a child’s race than American parents; in some countries, international, transracial adoption has become “the norm.” One legal scholar explicitly champions outgoing adoption as a “win-win” for black adoptees, arguing that they benefit when we allow less racist countries to adopt children of color.

The Best Of The Dish Today

Catherine Rakowski captions the latest viral sensation from Upworthy ClickHole, which you won’t believe until you see it:

At 1:00:46 you’ll be surprised, at 1:49:03 you’ll be touched, and what happens at 2:16:44 will blow you away.

Today, we tracked one step forward on marijuana – the feds are thinking of reclassifying the substance – and one step back – the House Appropriations Committee tried to stamp out the will of DC’s voters on decriminalization. We tallied the astonishing progress toward marriage equality – almost half of gay Americans now live in states with civil marriage rights.

Meanwhile, Iraq remained Iraq: ISIS veered toward total control of Anbar province and Maliki refused to budge on a new multi-sectarian government. And I asked a pretty simple question on the question of Iraq: why don’t we treat other people’s civil wars as if they are other people’s civil wars?

Plus: David Cameron’s unexpected survival; John Boehner morphs into Michele Bachmann; and the Dish came out for Nigeria in the World Cup. And one of the most sublime poems in the English language – a gay Catholic defense of wilderness.

The most popular posts of the day were about our policy toward Iraq: Raging Against Obama – And History, and The “Simplification” Of The Issues. 

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. 15 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.

See you in the morning.