Andrew Sullivan's Blog, page 244

The Best Of The Dish Today

The Onion’s “Clickhole” debuts and finally sinks its teeth into the big fat juicy target called Buzzfeed.

Seriously, just tool around in there. And keep reminding yourself this is a parody. Which, given the original pap, is quite an achievement. And this is just a classic parody of Buzzfeed’s whoring out of content to advertisers, in a section called “CashHole”:

Meanwhile, Marc Lynch has a must-read on the disintegration of Iraq. He’s particularly sharp on our ability to shape anything Maliki does:

Maliki wants U.S. military aid, from helicopters to airstrikes, to fight the ISIS advance. Many in Washington will want to offer assistance to save Iraq from complete collapse. But at the same time, U.S. policymakers understand from painful experience that such military aid will simply enable Maliki’s autocratic sectarianism and allow him to avoid making any serious concessions.

Instead, we’d be likely to become Maliki’s protector, which would make the US much more likely a target for the ISIS Jihadist lunatics. We really want to paint that target on our back? And join Iran in a Shiite-Sunni regional war, alongside … Assad? The mind boggles. But never under-estimate the “something-must-be-done” crowd. This is an acid test, it seems to me, for Obama’s foreign policy coherence and credibility. Will he blink as he did on Libya and return us to that vortex? Or will he have the strength to keep his distance, as he has done on Syria?

Today, I tackled the question of deepening cultural and political polarization in the US and had a somewhat alarming evening watching Fox News hysteria. We pored further over the meaning – or lack of it – in Eric Cantor’s political demise and Dave Brat’s theo-political philosophy. Plus: rapshirts for white people!; Hillary gets defensive (understandably) on marriage equality; and the resilient power of right-wing populism.

The most popular post of the day was Don’t Under-Estimate The Power of Right-Wing Populism. Next up: Our Cold Civil War Intensifies.

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. 27 more readers became subscribers today. You can join them here and get all Dish content – all the readons and access to Deep Dish – for as little as $1.99 month.

See you in the morning.

FIFA Sucks

John Oliver explains why:

Bershidsky longs for FIFA to kick out Sepp Blatter, who he claims “has run soccer’s governing body like an old-school dictatorship” since 1998:

Blatter has been no visionary in sports terms. His tenure has yielded a few minor rule changes, notably one that penalizes players for pulling off their T-shirts after scoring a goal. Some changes were quickly reversed. In 2007, for example, FIFA banned games at stadiums more than 8,200 feet above sea level. It then raised the limit to 9,840 feet and was forced to grant an exception to Bolivia’s main stadium. By contrast, Blatter’s predecessor, Joao Havelange, boosted FIFA’s membership from 142 to 204 federations, and recast the rules in ways that made the game more dynamic and enjoyable to watch — and less rough.

Blatter has also done little to combat the corruption that flourished under Havelange, who was proved to have taken bribes and forced out as FIFA’s honorary president last year.

The Economist identifies deeper problems with the organization:

It would be good to get rid of Mr Blatter, but that would not solve FIFA’s structural problem. Though legally incorporated as a Swiss non-profit organisation, FIFA has no master. Those who might hold it to account, such as national or regional football organisations, depend on its cash. High barriers to entry make it unlikely that a rival will emerge, so FIFA has a natural monopoly over international football. An entity like this should be regulated, but FIFA answers to no government.

All the same, more could be done. The Swiss should demand a clean-up or withdraw FIFA’s favourable tax status. Sponsors should also weigh in on graft and on the need to push forward with new technology: an immediate video review of every penalty and goal awarded would be a start.

Catherine Addington feels the “fundamental problem is that FIFA is self-regulating, which is to say that it doesn’t self-regulate”:

The only things to keep it in check are vaguely uncomfortable sponsors and only nominally responsible participating governments. (Fans for their part have no other organization to turn to. FIFA has a monopoly on international soccer.) Even FIFA’s upcoming Congress, in which each country has an equal vote, is unlikely to make waves. With few checks and balances in sight, FIFA is under no obligation to be transparent about either its policies or its finances.

FIFA has done the impossible: they have made Brazilians hate soccer. But as Brazilians’ anti-government protests over the past few years have shown, this is about much more than soccer. That’s why this World Cup, and the inevitable spilling over of these anti-cronyism tensions, are crucial to watch, even for those uninterested in soccer. FIFA is running an experiment to find out just how many platitudes people will put up with from the crony capitalists running a global entertainment industry.

Ta-Ta To Teacher Tenure? Ctd

Noah Feldman eviscerates the Vergara ruling:

So how did California’s teacher tenure laws violate the state constitution? The court’s two-part reasoning was thin to the point of being emaciated. First, it observed that the state constitution guarantees a right to education and guarantees equal protection of the laws. Second, it “found” that teacher tenure laws can tenure ineffective teachers – which it said was a violation of California children’s right to education.

The logic of this holding is pretty obviously flawed. All sorts of policies and rules affect the quality of what goes on in the classroom. Do all policies that reduce the quality of education violate the state constitution? Obviously not – or the court would have to take over the state school system and review every lesson plan for effectiveness. There was also no precedent supporting this expansive reading of the state constitution.

Eric Posner remains unimpressed by Judge Treu’s reasoning:

One of the reasons that employers – and not just public schools, but regular commercial firms, as well as universities and many private schools – offer job security is that employees value it so much. They’re willing to accept a lower salary in return for job security. The employer faces a tradeoff: it loses some ability to control employees, but it saves a lot of money, which it can use for other things. And so with the schools. If California is no longer allowed to offer job security, it will either need to pay teachers more (leaving less money to spend on students) or hire fewer teachers. Is that going to advance education? The court has no idea, indeed doesn’t seem to have given any thought to these issues.

The long and the short of it is that a judge is in no position to make these tradeoffs.

Kevin Carey – generally a supporter of education reform – argues that the courts are “an inherently problematic venue in which to resolve fundamental education questions”:

Deciding whether schools are providing children with a good enough learning environment requires us to decide what we want our children to learn and what kind of citizens we want them to be. That, in turn, flows from our convictions and values about the nature of just and civilized society. Such questions can never be resolved with legal finality. They represent the unending project of debate in an open society, the balancing of sometimes irreconcilable priorities that we manage with democratic and inherently political institutions. Which means that we should expect more Vergaras in the future – and expect to never be fully satisfied with the result.

Jill Barshay notes that the research underlying the ruling is controversial:

Many researchers are questioning whether test-score gains are a good measure of teacher effectiveness. Part of the problem are the standardized tests themselves. In some cases, there are ceiling effects where bright students are already scoring near the top and can’t show huge gains year after year. In other cases, struggling students may be learning two years of math in one year, say catching up from a second-grade to a fourth-grade math level. But the fifth-grade test questions can’t capture the gains of kids who are behind. The test instead concludes that the kids have learned nothing. In both of these cases, with top and bottom students, the teachers would be labeled as ineffective. Morgan Polikoff of the University of Southern California and Andrew Porter of the University of Pennsylvania looked at these value-added measures in six districts around the nation and found that there was weak to zero relationship between these new numbers and the content or quality of the teacher’s instruction. Their research was published in May 2014, after the Vegara trial ended.

Freddie sighs:

Teacher attrition is sky-high, with best estimates of between 40 to 50 percent leaving the profession within five years of starting. That amounts to something like a thousand teachers quitting for every school day of a given year. Anecdotally speaking, most successful, Ivy League striver-types do not consider teaching as a serious option. But why would they, when there’s so many more remunerative, less stressful, less emotionally grueling, and better respected options out there? If your argument is that a profession’s problems stems from a talent deficit, you should be doing everything to make the job more attractive, not less.

But Ed Morrissey suggests the ruling could be a mark a turning point:

Treu’s ruling does not rely on the US Constitution, and it has yet to be endorsed by a state appellate court as of yet. It is a signal, though, that people are fed up feeding tens of billions of dollars into educational systems that produce poor results, and that disgust over the priorities of the people within the system has reached a level where even the judiciary can no longer ignore it. California’s legislature had better take this lesson and apply it regardless of whether the ruling holds up on appeal.

And Eric Hanushek sees nothing but positives:

A small percentage of teachers inflicts disproportionate harm on children. Each year a grossly ineffective teacher continues in the classroom reduces the future earnings of the class by thousands of dollars by dramatically lowering the college chances and employment opportunities of students. There is also a national impact. The future economic well being of the United States is entirely dependent on the skills of our population. Replacing the poorest performing 5 to 8 percent of teachers with an average teacher would, by my calculations, yield improved productivity and growth that amounts to trillions of dollars.

The Grilling Of Hillary Clinton On Marriage Equality

A tip of the hat to Terri Gross who simply and persistently tried to get out of Clinton why she supported the Defense Of Marriage Act in 1996, and why and when she changed her mind on marriage equality. Listen to the full exchange here:

Clinton says she didn’t support gay marriage in the 1990s but subsequently changed her mind. When and why she changed her mind is what Gross was trying to get at. Had she changed it by the time she and her husband left the White House? Or when George W Bush endorsed the Federal Marriage Amendment in 2004? Was she still opposed to marriage equality when Massachusetts became the first state to enact it legislatively in the same year? The answers to these questions remain mysterious.

But one thing isn’t mysterious: she was not just another evolving American. She was the second most powerful person in an administration in a critical era for gay rights. And in that era, her husband signed the HIV travel ban into law (it remained on the books for 22 years thereafter), making it the only medical condition ever legislated as a bar to even a tourist entering the US. Clinton also left gay service-members in the lurch, doubling the rate of their discharges from the military, and signed DOMA, the high watermark of anti-gay legislation in American history. Where and when it counted, the Clintons gave critical credibility to the religious right’s jihad against us. And on the day we testified against DOMA in 1996, their Justice Department argued that there were no constitutional problems with DOMA at all (the Supreme Court eventually disagreed).

What I’d like to hear her answer is whether she regrets that period and whether she will ever take responsibility for it. But she got pissed when merely asked how calculated her position on this was.

Here’s my guess:

Unlike Obama, she was personally deeply uncomfortable with this for a long time and politically believed the issue was a Republican wedge issue to torment the Clintons rather than a core civil rights cause. I was editor of TNR for five years of the Clintons, aggressively writing and publishing articles in favor of marriage equality and military service, and saw the Clintons’ irritation with and hostility to gay activists up close. Under my editorship, we were a very early 1991 backer of Clinton – so I sure didn’t start out prejudiced against them. They taught me that skepticism all by themselves, and mainly by lying all the time.

So when did she evolve? Maybe in the middle 2000s. Was political calculation as big an influence as genuine personal wrestling? She’s a Clinton. They poll-tested where to go on vacation. Of course it was. But she’s also a human being and probably came around personally as well. She’s not a robot, after all. But I think of her position as the same as the eponymous gay rights organization the Clintons controlled in the 1990s, the Human Rights Campaign. As long as marriage equality hurt the Democrats, they were against it. Now it may even hurt Republicans, they’re for it. So Hillary is for it now. We’ve just got to hope the polling stays strong.

Iran Is Already Fighting In Iraq

Iran Deploys Quds Forces To Support Iraqi Troops, Helps Retake Most Of Tikrit via /r/worldnews http://t.co/5P7szLbmwX pic.twitter.com/fe6zBPyjx1

— fa (@fa77775682) June 12, 2014

Farnaz Fassihi reports:

Two battalions of the Quds Forces, the overseas branch of Iran’s Revolutionary Guard Corps that has long operated in Iraq, came to the aid of the besieged, Shiite-dominated government of Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki[.] Combined Iraqi-Iranian forces retook control of 85% of Tikrit, the birthplace of former dictator Saddam Hussein, according to Iraqi and Iranian security sources.

They were helping guard the capital Baghdad and the two Shiite holy cities of Najaf and Karbala, which have been threatened by the Islamic State of Iraq and al-Sham, an al Qaeda offshoot. The Sunni militant group’s lightning offensive has thrown Iraq into its worse turmoil since the sectarian fighting that followed the 2003 U.S.-led invasion. Shiite Iran has also positioned troops along its border with Iraq and promised to bomb rebel forces if they come within 100 kilometers, or 62 miles, of Iran’s border, according to an Iranian army general. In addition, Iran was considering the transfer to Iraq of Iranian troops fighting for the regime in Syria if the initial deployments fail to turn the tide of battle in favor of Mr. Maliki’s government.

Beauchamp adds:

The Quds Force is one of the most effective military forces in the Middle East, a far cry from the undisciplined and disorganized Iraqi forces that fled from a much smaller ISIS force in Mosul. One former CIA officer called Quds Force commander Qassem Suleimani “the single most powerful operative in the Middle East today.”

But the escalation from a country many Iraqis still remember fighting a war against could get out of hand, and fast:

Shia Iran’s intervention could infuriate the Sunni Muslims whose allegiance ISIS needs to win in the long run.  The internal Iraqi conflict is firmly sectarian: ISIS is a Sunni Islamist group, and the Iraqi government is Shia-run (a majority of Iraqis are Shia). … The perception that the Iraqi government is far too close to Iran is already a significant grievance among Sunnis. That’s part pure sectarianism and part nationalism.

Hayder al-Khoei observes that Iraq’s Shia don’t really have a choice but to accept the help:

[T]here is an ideological difference between the Shia of Iraq and the Shia of Iran. The religious establishment in Iraq and Iran don’t see eye to eye when it comes to the role of the clergy in the state. But in the south there is a sense—it’s not as desperate as in Baghdad—but the Shia in general now recognize the important [role] that the Iranian Revolutionary Guard are going to play in making sure that their cities do not fall to ISIS. They may not like the Iranians, they may be ideologically opposed to the Iranians, but in terms of threat perception, it’s a matter of survival.

ISIS was definitely picking the fight:

The al Qaeda affiliated ISIS considers Shias heretics who deserve to be killed, and is taking forth its campaign to liberate Iraq from what it sees as Shia domination; the group has said it will destroy Shia shrines along the way, stoking fears in Tehran of an attack on Shia Islam’s holiest sites, Najaf and Karbala.

Social media sites have quoted Suleimani saying if ISIS destroys the holy shrines, it will face Iran’s ire. Asked what the manifestation of that rage will be, the former Iranian diplomat laughed nervously. “They [ISIS] know that we’re not kidding around, so we shouldn’t worry about them doing anything stupid. And if they’re foolish enough to even approach the shrines, they have to be prepared for anything.” The diplomat paused. “Battles, attacks, raids, massacre. All the options will be on the table.”

Ali Hashem notes that Iranian involvement might be as much about Syria as it is about Iraq:

What seems clear is that Iran wants to invest in the Iraqi crisis to help end the Syrian war. It hopes to do so by bringing together states fighting each other via proxy in Syria in a unified front in Iraq, given the international consensus on backing the Iraqi fight against ISIS.

Face Of The Day

That’s a big nautical knot door-stopper that Bowie gamely tried to take into her crate and chew on yesterday. Guilty never looked so adorable.

Don’t Under-Estimate The Power Of Right-Wing Populism, Ctd

I’m a little chagrined to find myself in agreement with Obama-foe Ron Fournier on the subject of our populist moment, but his report on talking to regular folks in Pennsylvania last Tuesday has some great insights. Money quote:

Americans see a grim future for themselves, their children, and their country. They believe their political leaders are selfish, greedy, and short-sighted—unable and/or unwilling to shield most people from wrenching economic and social change. For many, the Republican Party is becoming too extreme, while the Democratic Party—specifically, President Obama—raised and dashed their hopes for true reform. Worse of all, the typical American doesn’t know how to channel his or her anger. Heaven help Washington if they do.

What are the main themes of this discontent? Anger at Wall Street; anger at a rigged capitalist system; anger at K Street and the permanent Washington class; anger at gridlock and Obama’s inability to break out of it; anger at depressed living standards and soaring inequality. Some choice quotes that cannot be summarized in a poll:

“America is for the greedy, for those who’ve made their buck or grabbed their power. It’s not for us.” … “The rich get richer. The poor get benefits. The middle class pays for it all.” … “Do I think there might be some group or some person who might tap into our frustration and, unlike the president, actually change things? Yes. Yes, I do.”

Fournier comes up with a rough list of core populist demands. The first of which is something the foreign policy mavens in DC should hear and hear well:

A pullback from the rest of the world, with more of an inward focus.

A desire to go after big banks and other large financial institutions.

Elimination of corporate welfare.

Reducing special deals for the rich.

Pushing back on the violation of the public’s privacy by the government and big business.

Reducing the size of government.

Rand Paul fits the mold. Hillary Clinton? In my view, she has a few months to prove she can actually run a populist campaign, which means a stump speech worthy of a rabble-rouser, and not the usual pabulum of a careful and calculated pol. I’ve never heard her give such a speech or exhibit the kind of retail political skills her husband is a master of. But she deserves a chance to prove she is the person for this moment. If she can’t hack this, she should get out of the way for someone who can.

Our Contribution To The Fossil Record

Mother Earth has turned our plastic trash into a new type of stone:

Most plastic in the ocean disintegrates into small pieces (which don’t go away, either), but some of it melts into “molten” plastic, and it fuses with all the regular, organic materials below it, forming a super-hard monolithic stone. It was first observed in Hawaii in 2006 by an oceanographer, but geologists didn’t collect the stones until 2012. According to the new study, even though most of the plastic is molten, you can often still identify specific objects within the stone, including “netting/ropes, pellets, partial containers/packaging, lids, tubes/pipes, and ‘confetti.’”

Unsurprisingly, these superhard “plastiglomerate” stones are sticking around:

The resulting materials, researchers report in the journal GSA Today, will probably be long-lived and could even become permanent markers in the planet’s geologic record. “Most conventional plastic is relatively thin and fragments quickly,” said Richard Thompson, a marine biologist at Plymouth University in England, who was not involved in the research. “But what’s being described here is something that’s going to be even more resistant to the aging process.”

(Image: Rocks made from molten plastic, rope, netting, plastic pellets, “confetti,” and other plastic debris found on Hawaii’s Kamilo Beach. Via GSA Today.)

A Computer That Codes Itself

Gary Marcus and Ernest Davis detail attempts to invent one:

What [the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA)] and [programmer Charles] Simonyi are hoping for is a complete paradigm shift. A programmer—and this could be anyone—would simply tell the computer what he needed in plain English, and the computer would figure out the rest. Anyone would be able to program, not just highly trained specialists, and, at least in principle, computers might ultimately produce much more reliable code than their human counterparts.

One big problem with this dream is “that computers still have too little understanding of how the external world works, and therefore too little understanding of how the programs they create will actually work”:

Consider, for example, this seemingly simple, hypothetical programming task: “Add a feature to Google Maps that allows a user to place a simulated boat on a river and have it float downstream.” To do this, you need to know what a river is, what a boat is, and what it means for a boat to float downstream. Any human programmer knows that, but no computer system has the real-world understanding of an average human being. As Tom Dean, a researcher at Google, told us, “Programming is [challenging for artificial intelligence] not because it requires concentration and attention to detail but because the path from the conception of what you want to accomplish to the realization of code that actually accomplishes it requires artistry, insight, and creativity as well as incredible mental dexterity.”

One day computers may have that kind of dexterity and intuition; the DARPA program is a good first step in that direction. But the path to the automated, thinking computer will also require a shift in research priorities, from the currently popular focus on the question “What you can do with Big Data?” back to A.I.’s original, driving one: “How do you build machines that are broadly intelligent?”

Passing The Turing Test, Ctd

With the last weekend’s breakthrough being called into question, Brian Barrett argues that these days, the Turing test “isn’t so much a test of computer intelligence as it is human gullibility”:

A bad chatbot might luck its way to victory if the judges aren’t familiar with tell-tale signs of chatbot-ness. That’s usually of less importance when your panel includes experts in the field of computer science. In this case, it included an actor from Red Dwarf and a member of the House of Lords, both of whom are incredibly accomplished and by all indications brilliant minds, but not specifically trained in this field.

David Auerbach argues that “Eugene Goostman” did in fact pass the Turing test – but that the test itself has a fatal flaw:

Trashing the Reading results, Hunch CEO Chris Dixon tweeted, “The point of the Turing Test is that you pass it when you’ve built machines that can fully simulate human thinking.” No, that is precisely not how you pass the Turing test. You pass the Turing test by convincing judges that a computer program is human. That’s it. Turing was interested in one black-box metric for how we might gauge “human intelligence,” precisely because it has been so difficult to establish what it is to “simulate human thinking.” Turing’s test is only one measure.

So the Reading contest was not the travesty of the Turing test that Dixon claims. Dixon’s problem isn’t with the Reading contest – it’s with the Turing test itself. People are arguing over whether the test was conducted fairly and whether the metrics were right, but the problem is more fundamental than that.”Intelligence” is a notoriously difficult concept to pin down. Statistician Cosma Shalizi has debunked the idea of any measurable general factor of intelligence like IQ. Nonetheless, the word exists, and so we search for some way to measure it. … The Turing test, famous as it is, is only one possible concrete measure of human intelligence, and by no means the best one.

Elizabeth Lopatto offers some background about how Turing turned imitating a conversation into a proxy for intelligence:

The strength of the test is obvious: “intelligence” and “thinking” are fuzzy words, and no definition from psychology or neuroscience has been sufficiently general and precise to apply to machines. The Turing test side steps the messy bits to provide a pragmatic framework for testing.

But this strength is also the test’s weakness. Turing at no point explicitly says that his test is meant to provide a measure of intelligence. For instance: human behavior isn’t necessarily intelligent behavior—take responding to an insult with anger. Or typos: normal and human, but intelligent?

Joseph Stromberg still believes the episode was noteworthy:

This announcement certainly doesn’t mean that self-aware robots are about to take over the world – and it doesn’t even mean that there’s one out there capable of consistently fooling people into thinking its a human. It does, however, mean that one has crossed the threshold Turing predicted would be passed by 2000, a meaningful milestone on the way to artificial intelligence.

That said, there are plenty more milestones that still need to be passed — even in terms of the Turing test. The Loebner prize, for instance, will award a silver medal for the first program to pass a text-only test, but a gold medal for one that passes an audio test — something that’s probably still a long way off.

But a less-charitable George Dvorsky makes the case that it’s time to abandon the “bullshit” Turing test:

Turing had no way of knowing that human conversation – or the appearance of it  – could be simulated by natural language processing (NLP) software and the rise of chatterbots. Yes, these programs exhibit intelligence — but they’re intelligent in the same way that calculators are intelligent. Which isn’t really very intelligent at all. More crucially, the introduction of these programs to Turing Test competitions fail to answer the ultimate question posed by the test: Can machines think?

Though impressive, and despite their apparent ability to fool human judges, these machines – or more accurately, software programs – do not think in the same way humans do. … It’s all smoke and mirrors, folks. There’s no thinking going on here – just quasi pre-programmed responses spouted out by sophisticated algorithms. But because Turing’s conjecture was directed at assessing the presence of human-like cognition in a machine, his test falls flat.