Andrew Sullivan's Blog, page 240

Trolling Or Threatening?

That’s roughly the question at the heart of a new First Amendment case the Supreme Court is taking up in its October term:

The case, Elonis v. United States, which we’ve previously covered in some detail, has reached the nation’s high court on appeal, after the Third Circuit Court of Appeals found that defendant Anthony Elonis’ 2010 Facebook rants mentioning attacks on an elementary school, his estranged wife, and even law enforcement, constituted a “true threat” under First Amendment precedent. As such, the court upheld Elonis’ sentence and conviction. In his petition to the Supreme Court, Elonis’ counsel said the issue boils down to “whether a person can be convicted of the felony ‘speech crime’ of making a threat only if he subjectively intended to threaten another person or whether instead he can be convicted if he negligently misjudges how his words will be construed and a ‘reasonable person’ would deem them a threat.”

For example, in one such Facebook posting, about which Elonis has since argued that he lacked criminal intent, he wrote: “Do you know that it’s illegal for me to say I want to kill my wife? It’s illegal. It’s indirect criminal contempt. It’s one of the only sentences that I’m not allowed to say.”

Lithwick’s take:

This case is not only crucially important in that it will force the court to clarify its own “true threats” doctrine and finally apply it to social media to determine whether—as Justice Stephen Breyer has suggested—the whole world is a crowded theater.

But perhaps it’s even more important in pushing the conversation about law enforcement, prosecution, and threats to include a much more sophisticated understanding of the ways in which the Internet is not just a rally or a letter. As Amanda Hess has explained so powerfully, women experience threats on social media in ways that can have crippling economic and psychological effects. At the margins, this is a case about the line between first amendment performance art, fantasy violence, real threats—and real fear. In a world in which men and women find it nearly impossible to agree on what’s an idle threat and what’s a legitimate one, it’s also a case about where that line lies, or whether there can be one.

Alex Goldman ponders how the Internet has changed the way we interpret threatening speech:

The internet has, in a strange way, diluted the power of the death threat. In more heated, less moderated corners of the internet, death threats are as natural as breathing. While threats against the President tend to be investigated seriously, and depending on the venue, they can land people in disproportionate trouble, death threats have sort of become part of internet parlance. Don’t like the my political views? I’ll kill you. Don’t like my favorite sports team? I’ll kill you. Don’t like the latest DLC for Fallout 3? I’ll kill you. For better or worse, the context of a death threat is often used to gauge how seriously it should be taken.

How Obamacare Is Splitting Republicans

Senator David Vitter, who is running for governor in Louisiana, is flirting with Obamacare’s Medicaid expansion:

Republicans have found they have a good deal of leverage in using the Medicaid expansion to request state-based reforms, which require a federal waiver, from the expansion-supporting Obama administration. Arkansas pioneered the unique approach with a private option that uses Medicaid dollars to enroll people into private insurance plans through HealthCare.gov. Since then, Michigan, Iowa, Indiana, and New Hampshire have adopted their own reform-pegged expansions.

Whether Vitter actually becomes governor and manages to expand Medicaid is, of course, an open question. But at the very least his current support for a reform-based expansion shows the growing schism among Republicans about whether they should approve the Medicaid expansion

It’s worth noting that Vitter’s support of expansion is conditional:

In an email to The Wire a Vitter spokesperson wrote that any support of the expansion would depend on fixing the program: “The only way Senator Vitter would ever consider any expansion is if it fundamentally reformed the program, did not continue to drain state dollars way from higher ed, and did not provide additional disincentives for able-bodied folks to work, all factors he laid out clearly.”

Still, Igor Volsky sees Vitter’s maneuvering as part of a trend:

Vitter’s comments come as a growing number of Republicans are re-evaluating their opposition to Medicaid expansion. In May, Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnnell (R-KY) expressed support for growing Medicaid by arguing that the process could be controlled by the state. Indiana Gov. Mike Pence (R), a possible 2016 presidential candidate, has also announced that he would apply for a waiver that would allow Indiana to provide private coverage to its residents using funding secured by the Affordable Care Act. In total, nine Republican governors have backed Medicaid expansion, and the provision is also being embraced by vulnerable Democrats up for re-election, including Louisiana’s Mary Landrieu (D) and North Carolina’s Kay Hagan (D).

Beutler makes similar points:

[Vitter is] no stranger to the scatter-rightward impulse. But he’s also seen Louisiana’s unpopular current governor Bobby Jindal struggle with the absolutist position on Obamacare, and wants to replace Jindal who’s up against a term limit in 2015. So Vitter’s is actually triangulating against the current governor—banking against the possibility that some other hardliner will outmaneuver him. Vitter still boasts of his efforts to repeal Obamacare on his Senate website. But running anti-Medicaid expansion isn’t good politics. Even in Louisiana.

This kind of doublespeak isn’t new. But as Affordable Care Act enrollment inches toward 9 million, skeptical carriers announce that they’ll enter the marketplaces next year, and others announce nominal premium hikes, it’s becoming common in more and more conservative states.

Our Little Lie Detectors

Ryan Jacobs reviews research that suggests kids know how to spot a liar:

Studies have already shown that kids work as incredibly precise detectors of straight-up lies. Outside the realm of bold-faced falsehoods, though, children perform quite brilliantly, too. Subtler and more elegant deceit—the kind where the truth is told but other important elements are shaded or concealed—doesn’t go unnoticed by six-year-olds either, according to a new study published in Cognition. Unbeknownst to their teachers and parents, young kids are apparently equipped with the perceptive powers of seasoned Cold War spies. The new paper suggests that they don’t appreciate when they’re being misled with lies of omission and even adjust their behavior based on a previous record of deceit.

Eliana Dockterman explains how the experiments worked:

Researchers at MIT studied how 42 six and seven-year-olds evaluated information. … [T]he children were separated into two groups: one group got a toy that had four buttons, each of which performed a different function—lights, a windup mechanism, etc.; the other group got a toy that looked the same but only had one button, which activated the windup mechanism.

After the two groups of children had played with their respective toys, the researchers put on a show: a teacher puppet taught a student puppet how to use the toy, but only showed the student puppet the windup function. For the kids playing with the one-button toy, this was all the information; but for the kids playing with the four-button toy, the teacher puppet had left out crucial information. The researchers then asked all the children to rate the teacher puppet in terms of how helpful it was on a scale from 1 to 20. The kids with the multi-functional toy noticed that the puppet hadn’t told them the whole story and gave it a lower score than the children with the single-function toys did.

Privatize The VA?

A bill to reform the department, which passed the Senate in a nearly unanimous vote last week, would allow veterans facing long wait times at VA facilities to seek out care from private local doctors instead. However, it would also more than double the VA’s annual healthcare spending:

The analysis from the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget suggests that providing VA-reimbursed private care to veterans, without setting budgetary caps and oversight, could explode the VA’s health-care budget with an additional $500 billion in spending over the next 10 years. … That’s more expensive than the entirety of Medicare Part D, which funds prescription drugs for seniors.

Patrick Brennan pans the reform as expensive and unnecessary:

The VA scandals demand an immediate response, of course, but the Senate bill isn’t necessary to execute it: President Obama has already ordered that the VA expand the coverage it offers outside the system for vets waiting for care. No program like this should be passed as an emergency measure.

Fixing the VA’s problems, such as they are, may require lots and lots of money — and maybe the Senate wasn’t voting to spend quite as much money as the CBO just said. But any congressman with any respect whatsoever for the concept of fiscal responsibility — not deficit hawks, just anyone concerned with how much we spend and on what — should want Congress to take time to study this issue (as, indeed, the House is planning to).

Danny Vinik calls it a “Trojan horse” for privatization:

The reason that clinics and hospitals—at both VA and non-VA facilities—have such long wait-times is a shortage of primary care doctors. This shortage has happened for a number of reasons: Medical students face financial incentives to choose a specialty field instead of becoming a primary care doctor. State occupational licensing laws prevent nurse practitioners from performing many straightforward medical tasks. Medical schools receive billions in federal funding with little oversight for how may primary care doctors they produce. The bills’ partial privatization scheme does nothing to ease these problems.

But Kevin Drum sees it as an opportunity to finally resolve the question of whether privatization actually works or not:

Maybe this is a good thing. Better access to health care means more people will sign up for health care, and they’ll do it via private providers. That’s the basic idea behind Obamacare, after all.

Of course, it’s also possible that this might be a bad thing. As Phil Longman points out, outsourced care lacks the very thing that makes VA care so effective: “an integrated, evidence-based, health care delivery system platform that is aligned with the interests of its patients.” …

So which is it? Beats me. That’s why I sure hope someone is authorizing some money to study this from the start. It’s a great opportunity to compare public and private health care on metrics of both quality and cost. It’s not a perfect RCT, but it’s fairly close, since the people who qualify for private care are a fairly random subsegment of the entire VA population. If we study their outcomes over the next few years, we could learn a lot.

Michael Cannon and Christopher Preble would prefer to do away with the separate VA health system entirely:

We propose a system of veterans’ benefits that would be funded by Congress in advance. It would allow veterans to purchase life, disability and health insurance from private insurers. Those policies would cover losses related to their term of service, and would pay benefits when they left active duty through the remainder of their lives. To cover the cost, military personnel would receive additional pay sufficient to purchase a statutorily defined package of benefits at actuarially fair rates. The precise amount would be determined with reference to premiums quoted by competing insurers, and would vary with the risks posed by particular military jobs.

Insurers and providers would be more responsive because veterans could fire them — something they cannot do to the Department of Veterans Affairs. Veterans’ insurance premiums would also reveal, and enable recruits and active-duty personnel to compare, the risks posed by various military jobs and career paths. Most important, under this system, when a military conflict increases the risk to life and limb, insurers would adjust veterans’ insurance premiums upward, and Congress would have to increase military pay immediately to enable military personnel to cover those added costs.

Graduating Summa Cum Latte

Starbucks will help employees attend online courses at Arizona State:

The plan comes with a few caveats, according to The New York Times: employees must work at least 20 hours per week at Starbucks and meet admission criteria for ASU. The online program at ASU admission requirements are the same as general admission, with average SAT reading and math scores of 508 and 491, respectively, an ACT score of 22, and a high school GPA of at least 3.0 necessary for acceptance.

While restricting this plan to one school might seem limiting, the Arizona State online program is a pretty good one. U.S. News ranks ASU’s the ninth-best online bachelor’s program in the country. Nearly 200 of the school’s full-time faculty teach courses available online (the average teaching experience for online instructors is seven years), the program has a retention rate of roughly 80 percent, and a little more than one-third graduate in three years.

The Bloomberg editors are pleased with the new tuition scheme:

What makes this different from other companies’ tuition-support programs is that employees don’t have to stay at Starbucks after they graduate. Nor is the benefit limited to long-serving workers; anyone can take advantage of them, regardless of how long he or she has been with the company. And there are about 40 programs to choose from.

Danielle Kurtzleben believes it’s a pretty good deal for Starbucks:

Starbucks’ new program isn’t about altruism. Research shows educational reimbursement can have big benefits for employers. One issue is taxes. The first $5,250 in tuition benefits accrue to workers tax-free, making tuition payments a way to get more bang for your compensation buck. (That said, a Starbucks spokesperson told the Chronicle of Higher Education that the “vast majority” of workers won’t hit the $5,250 threshold.)

But another issue is that different employees will value a tuition benefit differently, and tuition assistance might disproportionately appeal to higher-quality workers. In a 2002 NBER working paper, Wharton School of Business Professor Peter Cappelli studied Census data and found that employees who use tuition assistance are more productive than their peers. In addition, those extra abilities are not readily visible to most other employers who are competing for talent; the very act of offering tuition assistance draws in people with those higher abilities. An employer doesn’t have to go looking for them.

But Andy Thomason urges baristas to check the fine print:

Participating employees will get reimbursed only for every 21 credits they complete (the equivalent of about seven courses) and only after the fact. Starbucks says the rule is meant to encourage completion, rather than having employees sporadically take a handful of classes. But for someone living off a barista’s wages, that’s a pretty hefty chunk to pay upfront.

And Rachel Fishman argues that, “like many ‘free college’ programs, this benefit comes with a lot of strings attached”:

In this situation, the student picks up the tab first, and then if they are successful Starbucks will pay the student back. Removed from the equation is the institution. ASU Online is an expensive school. At approximately $15,000 a year for tuition and fees alone, the price is more than four times the price of an average community college ($3,264) and a little less than double the average in-state tuition rate of $8,893. Undoubtedly, this program will benefit some of Starbucks’ 135,000 employees. But anyone who thinks this may be an innovative solution to the college cost problem is mistaken.

Related thread on tuition costs here.

The View From Your Window

Dhaka, Bangladesh, 12 pm

Gold Stars For Teachers

Adam Ozimek argues that educators get more love than many realize:

The truth is that teaching is still a highly respected career, and we still lionize teachers in this country. One piece of evidence for this comes from a Harris Interactive poll that has asked the following question sporadically from 1977 to 2009:

I am going to read off a number of different occupations. For each, would you tell me if you feel it is an occupation of very great prestige, considerable prestige, some prestige or hardly any prestige at all?

So how do you think teachers have faired on this survey? It turns out the do quite well. As of 2009, 51 percent of respondents thought teachers had “very great prestige” and another 22 percent thought they had considerable prestige. This is compared to 17 percent and 22 percent for journalists, and 44 percent and 24 percent for police. Judging by the “very great prestige” percentage, teachers rank 6th under firefighters, scientists, doctors, nurse, and military officer. Only 10 percent of individuals thought teachers had hardly any prestige at all.

Freddie counters that while the American public may hold teachers high in esteem, the country’s elites do not:

Ozimek has repeatedly denied to me that the Ivy League striver types that are at the pinnacle of American aspirational culture have a low view of teaching as a profession. But we can let the people within those institutions speak for themselves. Harvard Graduate School of Education Dean James Ryan — who, I presume, Ozimek would recognize as knowledgeable on this topic – says that only a minuscule percentage of Harvard students study education, despite the fact that almost 20 percent of Harvard students apply for Teach for America. And Walter Isaacson, who as president of the Aspen Institute has plenty of exposure to both educational research and elite culture, is quoted as saying there’s a perception that “it’s beneath the dignity of an Ivy League school to train teachers.” That’s reflected in institutional behavior: Cornell has stopped providing undergraduate teacher training. That actual institutional behavior tells us far more about what elites think of teaching than polling could.

The Best Of The Dish This Weekend

We can only hope and pray that the summary executions of members of the Iraqi army shown above and here are not what they appear to be. Because what they appear to be is an incendiary attempt to reignite the most brutal and vicious of sectarian wars. On that front, the sudden attempt by Ayatollah Sistani to rein back in his call to arms last week in order to avoid the worst type of sectarian conflict does not bode well either. Our coverage on Saturday is here and here.

My only and continuing concern is that we do not continue to believe, as Tony Blair apparently does, that further Western intervention on any side – Iran’s? Assad’s? Saudi Arabia’s? it gets surreal when you play it all out – can do anything but hurt us. The lesson to be drawn from the last decade is not that we somehow managed to pull off the impossible in Iraq and then, for some unfathomable reason, it fell apart, but that Iraq itself is a deeply divided country, has long been riven by sectarian hatred, was constructed precisely to exploit those divisions, and, without thorough secularization, is impossible to govern in one piece without despotism.

This is what we discovered while occupying it, and lifting up the rock on ancient, deep and resurgent cycles of sectarian fear and revenge. And if we could not truly change that deep dynamic with over 100,000 troops in the country over a decade at the cost of trillions – and it was an impossible task – there’s no way it can be changed with some weapons or humvees. Just look at who has our weapons and humvees now anyway: ISIS.

You have two choices there: a dictator or a constantly simmering civil war. And they tend to go together over time.

On saner, calmer notes, we introduced the poetry of Kevin Simmonds this weekend (here and here); the great Alan Watts explained what God is; Los Angeles never looked so serene; and someone actually had the bright idea of getting the government to create a safe and cool designer drug.

The most popular post of the day was Iraq: You Broke It, You Bought It? followed by Our Cold Civil War intensifies.

See you in the morning.

1,700 Slaughtered?

That’s the number ISIS claims to have killed in its ongoing rampage through Iraq. Yesterday the group released a disturbing series of images they claim shows the capture and execution of numerous Iraqi troops last week. Bill Roggio has full details. A glimpse from the NYT:

The photographs showed at least five massacre sites, with the victims lying in shallow mass graves with their hands tied behind their backs. The number of victims that could be seen in any of the pictures numbered between 20 and 60 in each of the sites, although it was not clear whether the photographs showed the entire graves. Some appeared to be long ditches. The photographs showed the executioners flying the ISIS black flag, with captions such as “the filthy Shiites are killed in the hundreds,” “The liquidation of the Shiites who ran away from their military bases,” and “This is the destiny of Maliki’s Shiites,” referring to Prime Minister Nuri Kamal al-Maliki.

If the alleged executions prove accurate, the atrocity would surpass Assad’s chemical weapon attack in Syria last year, which killed 1,400:

The latest attack … would also raise the specter of the war in Iraq turning genocidal, particularly because the insurgents boasted that their victims were all Shiites. There were also fears that it could usher in a series of reprisal killings of Shiites and Sunnis, like those seen in the Iraq war in 2005-7.

A reputable theory explaining the publicity ISIS seeks with these photos:

Point of ISIS mass executions is to radicalize Shi’a population, so Shi'a do the same to Sunnis, so ISIS then becomes protectors of Sunnis.

—
Aaron Y. Zelin (@azelin) June 14, 2014

Face Of The Day

Andrew George photographs people at peace with their impending deaths:

“When the idea for this project came to me, the mother of a friend had recently passed away and at her memorial, I marveled at how there was so much genuine love for her,” George explained to The Huffington Post. “I began to wonder what it was about this woman that brought that out. She had this magic in the clear and wise way she spoke and never took herself too seriously. She laughed more than anyone I knew, reacted with sincerity and interest to her friends, and had so much passion in her fearless curiosity to travel and explore different cultures of the world. She was, quite simply, one of the best people I’ve known, yet, regrettably, was no one you’d ever learn about if you didn’t know her because her material accomplishments did not include fame.”

See more of the project here and more of George’s work here.