Andrew Sullivan's Blog, page 292

When Home Is Where You Travel

Having grown up a third culture kid, Ruth Behar considers the cultural impact of “the transient places that the French anthropologist Marc Augé has called ‘non-places’ – airports, shopping malls, hotels, highways, bus terminals, and subways”:

As ‘non-places’ expand from centers to peripheries all around the world, there is renewed pressure to work hard to prevent the home from becoming a long-term hotel room. Sentimental notions of the sanctity of the home are enlisted as a means of challenging the threat of ‘non-places.’ A preponderance of guides, including websites such as Apartment Therapy and Houzz, exist for the sole purpose of assisting us in making our homes uniquely charming and irreplaceable. …

But there is another choice we can make, and that is to give up home altogether and be homeless by choice – not as a result of poverty or broken family ties, but to let go of the weight of the things that prevent us from fully engaging with the world and becoming true cosmopolitans, people at home everywhere.

(Photo by a reader: Charleston, West Virginia, 1 pm)

Face Of The Day

A girl embraces a cross at symbolical cemetery in Prague, Czech Republic on April 23, 2014. Activists placed 107 meter tall wooden crosses each carrying the name of a victim of Ukraine’s Maidan protests. By Matej Divizna/Getty Images.

A Pivotal Visit?

As Obama begins an East Asian tour, Keating asks whether the much-touted “pivot to Asia” is a real thing:

[T]here doesn’t seem to be much evidence that the administration is spending more of its energy on Asia, or less of it on the Middle East, than it did previously. As Gideon Rachman argues, the fact that the pivot hasn’t been much in evidence doesn’t mean that the idea wasn’t a sound one. The Pacific is an area of growing strategic and economic importance and the U.S. position still carries a significant amount of weight there.

But the fact is that more attention tends to be paid to the places where things are blowing up on a regular basis. Thankfully, despite tensions running high on the Korean peninsula and the East China Sea, Asia is not yet that place. But it means that the region is often going to be pushed to the back-burner when more obvious crises present themselves

Dan Blumenthal thinks the pivot was a bad idea from the get-go:

Yes, Asia is of emerging consequence in world affairs. All post-Cold War presidents have recognized this. And China has had the potential to pose the greatest challenge to the United States since it became the prime actor in world affairs. Without a doubt, Asia needs more U.S. attention and resources. But the United States is a global superpower with vital interests in several interlinked regions. There can be no Asia policy without a global strategy.

For example, Japan gets most of its energy from the Middle East, where Washington has played a stabilizing role. And what about India? How will Delhi play the role Washington imagines for it in Asia if the United States mishandles Afghanistan? Furthermore, all Asian powers watch Washington’s handling of the other revisionist states — Russia and Iran — for clues about its fortitude in Asia. U.S. grand strategy must account for these facts.

The editors at Bloomberg take a more nuanced line, saying the idea was good but the implementation was fumbled:

The notion of prioritizing Asia should hardly be controversial. The region, as one of the pivot’s original architects noted recently, exerts an “inescapable gravitational pull.” It is home to half the world’s population, and before the middle of this century it should account for half the world’s economic output. Already the U.S. exports 50 percent more to Asia than to Europe. The U.S. and almost every country in Asia share an overwhelming interest in ensuring a free flow of goods, information and ideas to and from the region.

But it’s obvious now that all the trumpet-blaring back in 2011 about a coming Asian Century raised expectations too high and too fast. China naturally assumed the pivot was designed to thwart its rise and grew emboldened when budget cuts slowed the movement of U.S. military assets to the region. Japan, the Philippines and other countries that had assumed the same thing now fret about U.S. staying power. From Myanmar to Vietnam, small nations lament that they haven’t received the kind of attention and money once showered on the likes of Djibouti or Tajikistan. Clearly, the White House overpromised and underdelivered.

But Michael Mazza wonders whether Obama can still pull it off:

The president will not save his pivot by racking up frequent flyer miles. “Showing up” is important, but not nearly as important as what the president has in hand upon his arrival. Assuming that “success” is defined as preservation of the peace in Asia and the establishment of relative stability, the president’s presence in the region will certainly be insufficient to achieve it.

The president has a long to-do list. He needs to reassure allies that the United States will live up to its security obligations in Asia. He likewise needs to assure them that he will not fiddle while the rest of the world burns. He needs to convince capitals across Asia that “21stcentury” America can play hardball with the world’s “20th century” powers—and play to win. He needs to demonstrate that he has a strategy for winning the peace in Asia, that the pivot is more than a slogan. This is a tall order.

Quote For The Day

“At the hospital they gave me Xanax for anxiety. Xanax doesn’t get rid of your anxiety. Xanax tells you not to feel it for awhile until it stops working and you take the next pill. The beauty of psilocybin is: it’s not medication. You’re not taking it and it solves your problem. You take it and you solve your problem yourself,” – a patient with acute anxiety, after treatment with the active ingredient in “magic mushrooms.”

Extensive Dish coverage of psilocybin here.

(Photo: Fresh Colombian magic mushrooms legally on sale in Camden market London June 2005 before such sales became a crime. By Photofusion/Universal Images Group via Getty Images.)

Hold The Vodka

Russians are turning away from the bottle, at least relatively:

[When Dmitry] Medvedev handed the presidency back to Putin in 2012, his anti-alcohol campaign had quietly produced marked improvements in Russian health. Consumption of all types of alcohol had dropped from 18 liters per capita to 15. Suicides, homicides, and—most telling—alcohol-poisoning deaths occurred less frequently. In 2011, “only” 11,700 Russians died from alcohol poisoning, quite a drop from the average of 36,000 a year during Putin’s first eight years (2000–08) but still some 50 times higher than the rate in Europe and North America. The same year, combined life expectancy for men and women surpassed 70 years (64.3 for men, 76.1 for women) for the first time since 1986, during Mikhail Gorbachev’s anti-alcohol campaign.

Clapper’s Clampdown

Jack Shafer criticizes the gag order (seen above) that James Clapper recently placed on the entire intel community:

The nation’s top spy has prohibited all of his spies from talking with reporters about “intelligence-related information” unless officially authorized to speak. … Directive 119 increases the insularity of the national security state, making the public less safe, not more. Until this directive was issued, intelligence community employees could provide subtext and context for the stories produced by the national security press without breaking the law. Starting now, every news story about the national security establishment that rates disfavor with the national security establishment — no matter how innocuous — will rate a full-bore investigation of sources by authorities.

Tina Nguyen has more on how far the order extends:

From now on, all communications between US intelligence officials and media must be authorized in advance, and no one is allowed to discuss anything deemed “covered matters” (nebulously defined as “intelligence-related information, including intelligence sources, methods, activities, and judgments”). Any violation of these rules “will be handled in the same manner as a security violation” and offending parties will likely lose their clearances, get fired, or even get investigated by the Department of Justice.

Is that reasonable? Not particularly in this case, as the Guardian lays out: the new rules are “agnostic” as to the degrees of classified information his employees can give the press. In addition, “unplanned or unintentional contact with the media” must be reported immediately to the employee’s relevant agency — even if the employee hadn’t disclosed any “substantive information.” From the looks of it, if I accidentally ran into a high school friend who now works with the NSA — not that I have a friend like that — and we talked about nothing more than the weather, he would have to immediately notify the NSA that we’d been in contact.

Marcy Wheeler’s take-away:

I guess James Clapper, whose credibility is already shot to shit for lying to Congress and spending 10 months uttering transparent lies, wants to doom the [Intelligence Community's] credibility entirely. After all, from this point forward, we can assume that any statement citing an [Intelligence Community] source is approved propaganda. Thanks for clearing that up, Clapper.

Even Atheists Stereotype Atheists

Theo Hobsons wonders if atheists can offer a satisfying approach to ethics, arguing that “when God is rejected, the stakes are gulpingly high; the entire moral tradition of the West is put in question.” That dubious line of reasoning brings to mind a study Tom Jacobs recently flagged, which found that “the way Americans view non-believers remains extremely negative”:

After reading a description of someone committing an immoral act, participants in five experiments “readily and intuitively assumed that the person was an atheist,” University of Kentucky psychologist Will Gervais reports in the online journal PLoS One. “Even atheist participants judged immoral acts as more representative of atheists than of other groups.”

The findings suggest our instinctive belief that moral behavior is dependent upon God—as ethical arbiter and/or assigner of divine punishment—creates a belief system strong enough to override evidence to the contrary. It leads people many to look at non-believers and reflexively assume the worst.

Mental Health Break

The Tale of the Plump Bird from sakiiyori on Vimeo.

Slate Wants You To Subscribe

My old friend and former colleague in the intern pit, Jake Weisberg, sent out an email the other day. He was pitching Slate‘s new subscription push: Slate+. But the reason the email caught my eye was the following paragraph:

We face one major impediment to future success: we’re too dependent on advertising. Don’t get me wrong — we love our sponsors. But we’ve long recognized that we’d be a healthier and more secure magazine if — like many of our favorite ancestors in the print world — we got a meaningful share of our revenue from readers as well as advertisers. The catch for Slate is that we don’t want to put up a paywall, which would shrink our big audience and make the site more of a hassle to access.

One other option would be a pay-meter, like the Dish’s, but they’re going the TPM route of a VIP membership of $50 a year or $5 a month, with some exclusive features for subscribers:

You’ll get Slate articles without pagination, Slate podcasts without ads, first-crack at tickets and discounts to our many live events, a special Members-only section of the site with extra content, privileged status for your comments, and more.

My own view is that pay-meters for repeat readers is a better way to do this. Yes, they do reduce traffic a bit. Our unique visitors now average around 800,000 a month compared with around a million with no meter. But we still have surges. Last October we were back up at 1.2 million and in February, more than 2 million unique visitors. My take-away is that the immense benefits of close to 30,000 subscribers, and freedom from intense advertizing pressure, far outweigh any minor downsides in pageviews. But every site is different, and what works here may not work for Slate.

And Jake’s point about being too dependent on advertising is the critical one. Editors who only have to please advertisers will make different choices than those who have to please advertisers and subscribers. If you want to assign one reason for the scourge of sponsored content, it is that when you have no source of income except ads, the advertisers have you over a barrel. So what Jake is proposing – and what Josh at TPM has also done (yes, I know their backing of sponsored content messes things up) – is the only real way to get out of these woods.

I guess we’re in some competition. But I think the general benefits to online journalism of a more robust subscription model are enormous and vital. And the one thing you can actually do to stop the rot is to subscribe to the sites you love and believe in. So, if you haven’t already, subscribe to the Dish here, to TPM here, and to Slate here. It matters.

Kidnapped In Slovyansk

Pro-Russian forces in the eastern Ukrainian city have abducted American reporter Simon Ostrovsky (whose latest Vice dispatch from Slovyansk is above):

Ostrovsky, a veteran reporter for a number of outlets, had been filing regular video reports from the region for Vice, including the one above on Ukrainian forces’ botched attempts to retake Slovyansk, which was posted on Sunday. This just the latest is a series of attacks on the press by pro-Russian forces in the area, including the arrest of journalist and activist Irma Krat. [Ostrovsky's cameraman Frederick] Paxton himself was beaten by a pro-Russian crowd last week. The Committee to Protect Journalists has documented multiple cases of journalists being “assaulted, detained, or obstructed from reporting” in Russian-controlled Crimea.

It seems the insurgents have no plans to release him anytime soon:

“He’s with us. He’s fine,” [the group's spokeswoman] Stella Khorosheva told The Associated Press, adding, “(We) need to be careful because this is not the first time we’re dealing with spies.” Khorosheva also told The Daily Beast that Ostrovsky is being held according to the “laws of war” because “he was not reporting in a correct way.”

Perhaps more worrisome, the spokeswoman said that the militants had planned the journalist’s kidnapping. “We knew where he was going and the men manning the checkpoint were told to look out for him,” Khorosheva said of Ostrovsky. Sloviansk’s self-declared “mayor” told a journalist that he was holding the Vice News reporter “as is their right, will release him whenever he deems fit.” Speaking to the Russian outlet Gazeta.ru, Vyacheslav Ponomarev said, “We won’t release Ostrovsky any time soon. We need hostages — small change to trade with Kiev.”

Joe Coscarelli suspects the pro-Russians didn’t appreciate his brand of gonzo journalism:

He was … reporting in the Vice and Ostrovsky way, which one reporter described as “poking the bear with a video camera and seeing what reaction he gets.” A dual citizen of the U.S. and Israel, Ostrovsky has spent weeks in Ukraine aggressively covering the conflict by getting in the middle of it. In one clip, he approaches the Russian insurgents only to get roughed up. “Stand fucking still,” the soldier tells him as the camera gets jostled. “I said stand still. I’ll shoot to kill!” (The video has since been made private by the Vice News YouTube channel, but can be seen here.)

Robert Mackey puts the kidnapping in the context of the volatile situation in the city (NYT):

Tensions in Slovyansk spiked over the weekend, when a gun battle late Saturday left at least three men dead in murky circumstances. On Tuesday, Ukraine’s acting president, Oleksander Turchinov said in a statement that government forces would relaunch the operation to quell the separatist movement after it was revealed that one of the “brutally tortured” bodies discovered near Slovyansk was a government official from the president’s own political party.

Before his disappearance, Mr. Ostrovsky reported on Monday via Twitter that Vyachislav Ponomaryov, a pro-Russian activist and the town’s de facto mayor, had berated journalists for “provocative” questions about the town’s former mayor, and a woman pressed reporters to make donations toward the funeral expenses of the separatists killed in the shootout.