Andrew Sullivan's Blog, page 232

Don’t Drive Stoned And Drunk, Ctd

Sullum says Washington’s blood-THC limit effectively prohibits medical marijuana users from driving at all:

Washington’s five-nanogram rule, modeled after the per se standard for alcohol, was meant to reassure voters worried about the threat posed by stoned drivers. But like all per se standards, it treats some people as unsafe to drive even when they’re not.

Last year experiments by KIRO, the CBS station in Seattle, and KDVR, the Fox affiliate in Denver, showed that regular cannabis consumers can perform competently on driving courses and simulators at THC levels far above five nanograms. The lack of correspondence between the new standard and impairment is especially unfair to medical marijuana users, some of whom may be above the five-nanogram limit all the time, meaning they are never legally allowed to drive in Washington. …

“The five-nanogram rule doesn’t make sense,” says Mark Kleiman, a University of California at Los Angeles drug policy expert who was hired to advise Washington’s cannabis regulators. “It doesn’t correspond to impairment, and for regular users, they’re always going to be over the limit. It would be absurd to say you can smoke pot but then you can never drive.”

Along with Kleiman, Amy Weiss-Meyer reviews research on driving under the influence:

In 2000, researchers at Maastricht University in the Netherlands gave driving tests to subjects who had consumed various amounts of alcohol and/or marijuana. While all subjects both drank and smoked in each round of the study, some were given placebos, so that the researchers were able to test the effects of each substance on its own as well as their combined effect. They measured drivers’ “standard deviation of lateral position” (SDLP), or the distance they drifted out of their lane, and also the time out of lane (TOL).

The study found that alcohol on its own increased SDLP by 2.2 centimeters (as compared to double-placebo conditions). Marijuana, depending on the dosage of THC (100 or 200 micrograms per kilogram of body weight), increased SDLP from placebo conditions by 2.7 and 3.5 centimeters respectively. In other words, drivers who had smoked pot were less able to drive in a straight line than drivers with an elevated BAC. (Most drivers’ BACs fluctuated around 0.04 grams per deciliter, below the legal limit of 0.08.)

The researchers concluded that the percentage of TOL was not significantly affected by either alcohol or marijuana alone, but that it was much higher when both substances were used together.

Abby Haglage joins the conversation:

The truth is, after decades of analysis, we still don’t have a firm grasp on how THC impairs driving. Laboratory studies have confirmed that THC (officially, Delta-9-tetrahydrocannabinol) impairs many motor skills necessary for driving. But actual driving simulation studies have not mimicked these results. One sound example is a 2004 study in which three researchers found THC to inhibit attention, reaction time, hand-eye coordination, short-term memory, time and distance perception, and concentration.

But when tested in actual driving simulation, the authors found the results did not “replicate” their laboratory evidence. In other words, researchers were able to prove that THC should, technically, impair driving, but not that it does. Their explanation for the discrepancy: Drivers with THC are likely cognizant of their impairment and are thus able to “compensate…by driving more slowly and avoiding risky driving maneuvers.”

Face Of The Day

A boy has his face painted in preparation for the Grebeg ritual in Tegallalang Village, Gianyar, Bali, Indonesia on June 25, 2014. During the biannual ritual, young members of the community parade through the village with painted faces and bodies to ward off evil spirits. By Putu Sayoga/Getty Images.

Pain As Privilege

Historian Joanna Bourke, the author of The Story of Pain, recalls that physical discomfort was once thought to be an affliction of the elite:

In many white middle-class and upper-class circles, slaves and “savages,” for instance, were routinely depicted as possessing a limited capacity to experience pain, a biological “fact” that conveniently diminished any culpability among their so-called superiors for acts of abuse inflicted on them. Although the author of Practical Rules for the Management and Medical Treatment of Negro Slaves, in the Sugar Colonies (1811) conceded that “the knife of the anatomist … has never been able to detect” anatomical differences between slaves and their white masters, he nevertheless contended that slaves were better “able to endure, with few expressions of pain, the accidents of nature.” This was providential indeed, given that they were subjected to so many “accidents of nature” while laboring on sugar-cane plantations. …

But what was it about the non-European body that allegedly rendered it less susceptible to painful stimuli?

Racial sciences placed great emphasis on the development and complexity of the brain and nerves. As the author of Pain and Sympathy (1907) concluded, attempting to explain why the “savage” could “bear physical torture without shrinking”: the “higher the life, the keener is the sense of pain.” There was also speculation that the civilizing process itself had rendered European peoples more sensitive to pain. The cele­brated American neurologist Silas Weir Mitchell stated in 1892 that in the ‘process of being civilized we have won … intensified capacity to suffer.” After all, “the savage does not feel pain as we do: nor as we examine the descending scale of life do animals seem to have the acuteness of pain-sense at which we have arrived.”

Naturally Nonsense

Brad Plumer considers the absurdity of labeling food as “all-natural”:

In a recent essay in PLOS Biology, [Cambridge geneticist Ottoline] Leyser argues that it’s time to kill this mistaken idea once and for all. Basically everything in modern agriculture is unnatural. “The cereal crops we eat bear little resemblance to their naturally selected ancestors, and the environments in which we grow them are equally highly manipulated and engineered by us,” she writes. “We have, over the last 10,000 years, bred out of our main food plants all kinds of survival strategies that natural selection put in.”

There’s more along these lines. “Agriculture is the invention of humans,” she adds. “It is the deliberate manipulation of plants (and animals) and the environment in which they grow to provide food for us. The imperative is not that we should stop interfering with nature, but that we should interfere in the best way possible to provide a reliable, sustainable, equitable supply of nutritious food.”

Roberto Ferdman provides a chart on the subject:

The list of lucrative food labels is long, and, at times, upsetting.

Many of these labels are pasted onto food packages for good reason. It’s imperative, after all, that consumers with celiac disease be able to tell which food items are gluten free, or that those with milk allergies be able to tell which are made without lactose.

But some are utterly meaningless. Take food labeled with the word “natural,” for instance. Actually, remember it, because it’s probably the most egregious example on supermarket shelves today. The food industry now sells almost $41 billion worth of food each year labeled with the word “natural,” according to data from Nielsen. And the “natural” means, well, nothing. The US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) doesn’t even have an official definition or delineation of what “natural” actually means.

Update from a reader, who passes along a classic Carlin skit on the subject:

ISIS’s Frenemies

In a lengthy and penetrating look into the Syrian roots of the current conflict in Iraq, Rania Abouzeid discusses ISIS’s fraught relations with other militant groups:

ISIL couldn’t work with others in Syria, so how long before it turns on, or aggravates, its new Iraqi allies? ISIL’s code of conduct for Mosul’s Nineveh province, posted just two days after insurgents seized the area, provides one indication. Its repressive rules are the same as those it has enforced in Raqqa: obligatory prayers five times a day in mosques; women must dress modestly (i.e., in a balloon-like black cloak and face-covering veil) and should only leave their homes in emergencies; and all shrines should be destroyed, among other edicts. Unlike Nusra, it hasn’t learned to prioritize the importance of gaining popular support.

But the fate of ISIL is far from the only question. Will Nusra and other Syrian rebel groups try to make some sort of large-scale move against ISIL positions in Syria now that the group is preoccupied in Iraq? Will Nusra lose members to a group whose Islamic state is increasingly taking shape? How will Zawahiri react? He is unlikely to capitulate to ISIL, but nor can he much criticize a group that is implementing the ultimate goals of his own organization. Could al Qaeda try to prove its relevance through new attacks? Does it still have the capability?

Will Saletan breaks down how ISIS violates all of Osama Bin Laden’s rules for Jihad:

Bin Laden was a theocratic fundamentalist, but he cautioned his allies to avoid the “alienation from harshness” that was “taking over the public opinion.” The worst offender was Somalia’s al-Shabab. In a 2011 letter, Bin Laden urged Atiyah to “send advice to the brothers in Somalia about the benefit of doubt when it comes to dealing with crimes and applying Shari’a, similar to what the prophet (PBUH) said, to use doubts to fend off the punishments.”

When ISIS captures a city, it follows this rule at first. But soon, the nice-guy act disappears. The group seizes property and humanitarian aid. It executes Christian and Muslim “apostates.” Two days after taking Mosul, Iraq’s second largest city, ISIS banned booze and cigarettes, instructed women to stay home, and announced that government employees who failed to repent would be put to death. This behavior antagonizes Sunni fighters who have collaborated with ISIS. “In some areas that ISIS has taken they are killing our people, they are imposing their Islamic laws on us,” one tribal leader told the New York Times. “We do not want that.”

(Photo: A Turkish fighter of the jihadist group Al-Nusra Front, bearing the flag of Al-Qaeda on his jacket (C-back), holds position with fellow comrades on April 4, 2013 in the Syrian village of Aziza, on the southern outskirts of Aleppo. By Guillaume Briquet/AFP/Getty Images.)

Mental Health Break

So Now What – Los Shins from Brian Fejer on Vimeo.

I miss my pre-Internet brain too.

The Whoring Just Keeps Getting Worse

If you think I’m a crank on the surge of sponsored content replacing journalism, take a look at one big media company’s bet on the future:

The new [Yahoo] publications combine original articles and material licensed from other sites, as well as big photos and videos into an endless page of tiles aimed at enticing people to linger. Mixed into that stream is a different kind of advertising — so-called native ads or sponsored posts — which look almost exactly like all the other articles and videos on the page except that they are sponsored by brands like Knorr, Best Buy and Ford Motor. These ads, Yahoo hopes, will attract the attention of more readers and make more money for the company. In some cases, Yahoo editors even help to write that advertising — a blurring of the traditional lines between journalists and the moneymaking side of the business.

If Yahoo wanted to become an advertising or public relations company, I’d have no problem with that. But what they’re doing is deliberately deceiving readers on what is advertising and what is journalism, and using journalism as a cover for a lucrative public relations business. Here’s the industry consensus in a quote from the editor of Yahoo Food:

I think our involvement elevates the advertising. Our ability to bring editorial knowledge and finesse to advertising content makes it better and gives it a point of view.

And in so doing makes it more and more indistinguishable from editorial. That’s also the paradox of one of the recent native ads that got a lot of positive press:

the native ad at the New York Times on female incarceration by Netflix’s “Orange Is the New Black”. Check it out here. It’s gorgeously produced, vividly presented  – in ways more innovative and arresting in design than the NYT’s own editorial product! Yes, unlike Yahoo or Buzzfeed and the other whoring sites, there are markers that this is not produced by the editors of the paper. But then it gets a bit confusing because it was created by the NYT – by a

newly formed Brand Studio unit, which was built to create native ads for advertisers. The article was written by Melanie Deziel, an editor at the studio who worked in the past at The Huffington Post and BuzzFeed. The illustrations are by Otto Steininger, whose work has appeared on the cover of The New Yorker.

So you have a journalist writing ad copy and a New Yorker artist creating visuals for an article that is created by the NYT, but is actually an advertisement. The cumulative effect, if the ads keep improving in quality, have more journalistic input and better graphics, is to make fake journalism less and less distinguishable from, you know, real journalism – journalism informed by an independent writer’s views, rather than paid for by a client.

This decision to merge advertising and editorial was driven by one thing and one thing only: money. As ad rates have dropped, websites have gone back to their sponsors to ask them how high they should jump to get some more love:

Last year, Ms. Mayer met repeatedly with Unilever executives and asked how Yahoo could improve. When she shared her thinking about sponsored content for some new digital lifestyle magazines, Mr. Master said, “We put our hand up and said, ‘We will do that.’ ” Unilever has since expanded its commitment to advertising on Tumblr and Yahoo sites.

Use your magazine to inject corporate propaganda into what appears to be independent journalism and “we will do that.” Quite why any self-respecting editor of journalist would do that is another matter. But self-respect went out a long time ago in this business, didn’t it?

Past Your Bedtime As A Pastime

Researchers are finding that bedtime procrastination – “failing to go to bed at the intended time, while no external circumstances prevent a person from doing so” – runs rampant:

In [one] study—whose results will soon be published in Journal of Health Psychology— [researcher Floor] Kroese looked at a representative sample of twenty-four hundred and thirty-one Dutch adults, who responded to an online survey and kept a sleep diary every day for a week. The participants reported what time they wanted to go to bed, what time they actually went to bed, and, if there was a discrepancy between the two, whether that reason was outside of their control (crying baby, sick husband, waiting up for a tardy daughter) or within it (good TV). … [H]er team found that a large number of people got insufficient sleep and that, as the report states, “people who have low self-regulation skills are more likely to keep watching the late night movie, or play yet another computer game despite knowing they might regret it the next morning when waking up tired.”

“When you’re in these situations, it’s sort of a foggy state, a foggy inertial state,” [researcher Joel] Anderson said. “You need to get going, you need something to get you out of that. You need a greased skid to help you.” This might be a timer that switches off your television, or an alarm on your phone—anything to switch off the illicit zombie impulse that makes you keep scrolling through Twitter under the bedcovers. “It’s not magic, but the effect is robust,” he went on. “If there’s a clear cue, and a clear plan of action lined up, then there are ways of managing yourself.”

The Best Of The Dish Today

Goldblog and the Dish – in some strange solstice convergence – are on (roughly) the same page again with respect to Iraq. Jeffrey fisks Elliott Abrams’ deranged piece in Politico called “The Man Who Broke The Middle East.” As an insight into the hermetically sealed neocon mindset, Abrams is always worth reading. As an insight into, you know, reality, not so much. Anyway, a great fisk, Goldblog! Money quote:

In reference to a “contained” Iran, I would only note that Iran in 2009 was moving steadily toward nuclearization, and nothing that the Bush administration, in which Elliott served, had done seemed to be slowing Iran down. Flash forward to today—the Obama administration (with huge help from Congress) implemented a set of sanctions so punishing that it forced Iran into negotiations. (Obama, it should be said, did a very good job bringing allies on board with this program.) Iran’s nuclear program is currently frozen. The Bush administration never managed to freeze Iran’s nuclear apparatus in place. I’m not optimistic about the prospects for success in these negotiations (neither is Obama), but the president should get credit for leading a campaign that gave a negotiated solution to the nuclear question a fighting chance.

Think of the careful and global coalition Obama assembled to isolate Iran on the nuclear question – Russia, France, Britain, the US, China all on the same page, leading to a successful preliminary agreement and coming to a conclusion soon on the second (or maybe not). Now remember Walter Russell Mead’s contention that

There is also the question of whether the earnest White House types who have piled up such a disastrous record in the Middle East could negotiate their way into a used car lot, much less handle a complex negotiation involving Russia, Iran, Assad, and a bunch of other canny operators.

Blogger, please. And notice one of Mead’s more hysterical moments of criticism – when Obama decided against striking Syria in favor of Putin’s offer to coordinate the extraction of all of Syria’s WMDs. Yesterday, the final shipment left Syria’s shores. We were all told this would never happen. It just did. Now ask yourself: if Obama had bombed Assad, do you think those chemical weapons would now be secure? And if they were still in Syria, with ISIS raging nearby, we’d have a real international crisis, wouldn’t we? Dick Cheney’s nightmare – Jihadists with WMDs – would be one step closer to reality. But, thanks to Obama (and not Bush) the threat of those WMDs from Syria has evaporated, and Iran’s nukes could be next. Without invading anywhere or torturing anyone.

I’m still trying to figure out how Rebekah Brooks was acquitted today, but the shoe that really dropped was the news that Scotland Yard will soon be formerly interrogating Rupert Murdoch himself about the widespread criminality on many of his papers over a long period of time.

Today, we also witnessed America’s initiation into the loss and grief of the World Cup; wondered if NATO expansion had made Europe less secure; noted the sudden lurch downward in Obama’s approval ratings; and continued the greasy, bacterial thread on grocery bags (now with GIFs!).

The most popular post of the day was Spurious Correlations from May (a gem); next up was my fisking of Walter Russell Mead, Raging Against Obama – And History.

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. One subscriber writes:

It’s seriousness and sanity that Dishniks like me crave and value. Not for nothing, in other words, that you call them “Mental Health Breaks.” They feel like an intrinsic part of the sanity of The Dish, not a luxury option or frill. I’m going to get your brutal, naked self-examination of your position on the Iraq War, but I also get sloths as beards (and groan-worthy reader updates about beavers).

I skip over most but not all of your religion-themed posts (as one might expect from an atheist), but I’ll stop to marvel at the ingenuity of the VFYW contestants along the way. Then you’ll write something mildly infuriating about social constructionism or whatever it is you mean by “post-modernism” and I’ll begin a tart retort in high dudgeon, only to be side-tracked by one of your insightful assessments of the sanity of Obama … or by some shameless beagle-bait (you could do more of that, actually). And so I’ll be reminded once again that my redoubtable dudgeon switch can be safely disengaged. Dishness achieved once again; we now return you to your regularly scheduled program.

Which will continue in the morning; see you then.

(Photo: Queen Elizabeth II meets cast members of the HBO TV series ‘Game of Thrones’ Lena Headey and Conleth Hill as she views some of the props including the Iron Throne on the set of Game of Thrones in Belfast’s Titanic Quarter on June 24, 2014 in Belfast, Northern Ireland. By Jonathan Porter – WPA Pool/Getty Images.)

Raging Against Obama – And History

[Re-posted from earlier today.]

If you’re looking for a majestically sweeping indictment of everything president Obama has achieved in foreign policy over the last six years, go read Walter Russell Mead’s screed. The rise of an ISIS-led Sunni insurgency in Iraq is, apparently, “a movement that dances on the graveyard of his hopes.” No one wants to take on the emperor with no clothes or “the full and ugly course of the six years of continual failure.” He’s not done yet: “Rarely has any American administration experienced so much ignominious failure, or had its ignorance and miscalculation so brutally exposed.” And on it goes. The Obamaites “have piled up such a disastrous record in the Middle East” that they couldn’t be trusted to “negotiate their way into a used car lot.” And the final denouement:

The President isn’t making America safer at home, he doesn’t have the jihadis on the run, he has no idea how to bring prosperity, democracy, or religious moderation to the Middle East, he can’t pivot away from the region, and he doesn’t know what to do next.

Inevitably, when one reads a piece like this, you expect the author to tell us what he would do next. If the results of specific Obama policies have been so disastrous, then surely he must be able to point to several mistakes, offer an alternative in hindsight, or, heaven forfend, provide a constructive proposal today. But you will, alas, find no such thing in the screed. The most you’ll get it this:

How could the U.S. government have been caught napping by the rise of a new and hostile power in a region of vital concern? What warning signs were missed, what opportunities were lost—and why? What role did the administration’s trademark dithering and hairsplitting over aid to ISIS’s rivals in the Syrian opposition play in the rise of the radicals?

Indeed, I’m sure those questions will be debated by pundits and historians. But Mead has no answers. He supported arming the “moderate” Syrian rebels, sure, but even he acknowledged this could end up in tears. And when you grasp his admiration for ISIS’ strategic chops, it seems quite likely that American arms could have ended up in the Jihadists’ hands. After all, one result of the US’ arming, training and equipping the moderate Iraqi army are the humvees and arms being paraded around Iraq by the Sunni-ISIS insurgency today. Arming any single side in a complex, metastasizing conflict is fraught with unintended consequences and the constant risk of blowback. But even if we’d been able to arm genuinely “moderate” Syrian rebels, does anyone believe they would prevail in an internecine war with the true fanatics?  From the record of the last year or so, almost certainly not.

Mead also manages to blame Obama for the failure of the democratic revolution in Egypt. Quite how the US president could have changed the course of Egyptian politics in a period of massive unrest and revolution is not entirely clear. And that’s really the deepest flaw in the case against the president. There is an assumption – even now! – that the world is controlled by the US and that everything in it is a result of American hegemony. So there are no places on earth where the US is not a factor, and any bad things that happen are ipso facto a consequence of poor foreign policy. The planet is “Obama’s brave new world,” and the actual actors in it, from Moscow to Fallujah, from Qom and Cairo, are denied the real agency they have and keep exercising. And of course, whatever Obama has done has failed. When we don’t intervene, as in Syria, the result is a disaster. When we do intervene, as in Libya, the result is “an unmitigated disaster from which not only Libya but much of north and west Africa still suffers today.” So what does Mead suggest? This is as good as it gets:

The U.S. might do better to try to strengthen the non-ISIS components of the Sunni movements in Syria and Iraq than to look to Tehran and the Kremlin for help.

As they still say in Britain’s Private Eye, er…. that’s it. We should actually be arming the very Sunni forces that are trying to take Baghdad, and somehow hoping they’ll turn around and beat the fanatics if we ask nicely. Well, thank you very much, Mr Mead. How could the administration have ignored your genius for so long?

I think what’s missing from Mead’s harrumph is any sense that the world is, in the end, not about us; that the Arab and Muslim worlds are in a historic convulsion that has been fed by countless tributaries from the past and will forge many unexpected paths in the future; that the generational shifts, the impact of new technology and media, the decay of traditional Islam, the rise of an Internet Islamism, the legacies of the sectarian war in Iraq and the Assad despotism in Syria, and the rise of a new Shiite awareness … all these represent forces we have no way of arresting, let alone controlling, let alone micro-managing, as Mead suggests. Our role, if we are not to become insane, is not to manage the unmanageable; it is to understand that some historical processes have to take place and that some of them will not necessarily be in our interests.

Interventionists, in other words, can become like addicts.

Yes we need the courage to change the things we can change (like our surveillance, security and intelligence apparatus), but also, critically, the serenity to accept the things we cannot change (like the future of the younger Arab and Muslim generations or that of the ancient Sunni-Shia struggle), and the wisdom to know the difference. Interposing ourselves even now as the indispensable overseer and arbiter of the fate of Iraq and Syria and the Middle East is to further engage in the fantasies that still linger from the elysian period of 1989 – 2001. If we haven’t learned from the last decade and a half that our assumption of that control is a self-defeating chimera, then we’re incapable of learning anything.

Even with unlimited resources, a decade of effort and death and suffering on a vast scale, we were unable to change the reality of Iraq: a divided traumatized, sectarian mess, where the Sunnis believe they have a right to rule, the Shia have somehow regained power, and the Kurds could give a shit about either. Maybe it should have occurred to us that there has not been majority Shiite rule in Iraq for so long for a reason. Maybe Maliki’s dictatorial impulses were not some wanton decision to destroy Iraq, but a rational move if you are actually trying to govern Iraq as it is, just as Saddam’s despotism was. What amazes me about critics such as Mead is that they have learned no deeper lessons from this; they still, rather pathetically, cite the surge as a success, when it clearly did nothing but bribe a phony peace into temporary existence in order for us to leave … and the old order of things return. And they still cling to a worldview in which everything is run from Washington.

But it isn’t. Our long-term goal is the emergence of a peaceful, democratic Middle East that does not export terror and medieval fanaticism across the globe. And we’ve seen the first spasms of that process: the ousting of tyrants, the failures of revolutions (with one notable success in Tunisia, one place where we haven’t intervened), and the ructions of a youth movement in Iran. But we have barely seen the next phase – and it will surprise us, I’m sure. The great religious wars in Europe burned (literally for some) for a couple of centuries. And it was only the bitter, collective experience of those endless, brutal, bloody wars that persuaded the majority that they weren’t worth fighting any more. At some point we have to ask: why are we spending lives and treasure and attention to prevent that outcome from coming sooner rather than later?

(Photo: Barack Obama yesterday by Chip Somodevilla/Getty.)