Andrew Sullivan's Blog, page 3

Will Vaccination Become Partisan?

Sarah Despres hopes not. She notes that, currently, “support for immunizations is largely bipartisan”:

According to a recently released survey from the Pew Research Center, the public opinion on vaccine requirements, for example, divides much more by age than by political affiliation. This may be a function of the fact that younger people are less likely to have seen the diseases the vaccines are designed to protect against. (In other words, vaccines are victims of their own success.) However, the poll was worrying in one political respect: In 2009, there was no partisan difference in attitudes toward these requirements. The latest study did find some small differences along party lines. According to Brendan Nyhan, a Dartmouth political science professor who has done research on effective communication around vaccines, injecting partisan politics into individual decisions about whether to vaccinate could have unintended consequences. He argued in the New York Times recently that making the decision to vaccinate one of partisan allegiance could potentially push some individuals who might otherwise have vaccinated their children to forgo the process.

Seth Masket warns that “if enough Republican leaders or conservative cultural figures publicly question the importance of immunizations, and if such messages go unchallenged or even embraced by commentators on Fox and other conservative media outlets, that message could soon be adopted by conservative parents with only modest attachments to politics”:

And in some ways, this argument meshes very well with the American conservative world view. The idea that I can make better judgments about my kids than the government can, that I should be concerned about me and my own rather than the larger social network, that I shouldn’t have to make sacrifices or face risks on behalf of strangers — it wouldn’t take much to fold that into the definition of modern conservatism. Resistance to vaccinations doesn’t have to mean embracing organic food or breastfeeding toddlers; that’s simply a liberal interpretation of it.

But we’re not quite there yet. The main cultural elites advocating avoiding or at least questioning vaccinations, from doctors with celebrity pretensions to celebrities with medical pretensions, are mostly on the left right now. Chris Christie has limited appeal, and Rand Paul has not quite yet demonstrated an ability to reach those outside his libertarian circles. But if we’re going to see the anti-vaxxer belief system mutate and spread to the right, this will be how it happens.

Should Even Heroin Be Legal? Ctd

A reader writes:

I am enjoying Johann Hari’s Chasing the Scream very much. For the most part I find that the author backs up his views with solid evidence and logic.

However, the suggestion in Chapter 13 that a chaotic, abusive home and the parents’ failure to bond (attach) with the child is what causes addiction proves too much. Recent NIMH studies by Bridget Grant show that personality disorders persistently and robustly predict the persistence of substance abuse disorders. Grant’s work shows that roughly 50% of substance abusers meet the criteria for borderline personality disorder. There is good reason to believe that these individuals are quite resistant to treatment as usual.

It is fair to say that people with personality disorders feel isolated and alone. So, to that extent, Hari’s thesis has validity. And while early literature connected personality disorders to a chaotic home, abuse and a failure of attachment, the more current view is that these individuals may be so sensitive that they perceive chaos and abuse where others would not. And the failure to attach may be due to something inherent in the child rather the parent.

The point is that it is unfair, as Hari does in his book, to assume that because an addict feels isolated and reports an abusive or chaotic home, that this report is accurate. Sometimes, it is just the way the disordered person has misperceived the world.

Another reader:

I’ve gotten a little more than halfway through Hari‘s book, looking forward to actually being able to take part in the coming Book Club discussion, now never to happen. But the reading itself is worthwhile: What a marvelous book so far.

That it is. And don’t miss Johann on Real Time tomorrow night.

The View From Your Window

Oxford, England, 11.15 am. And my old classmate from Oxford who sent this photo yesterday follows up with three more, all from ’81:

The Genetics Of Fucking Around

The Economist unpacks new research suggesting that humans are not born equally promiscuous:

As with many biological phenomena—height, for example—propensity for promiscuity in either sex might be expected to be normally distributed; that is, to follow what are known colloquially as “bell curves”. The peaks of these curves would have different values between the sexes, just as they do in the case of height. But the curves’ shapes would be similar.

Rafael Wlodarski of Oxford University wondered whether things are a little more complicated than that. Perhaps, he and his colleagues posit in a study just published in Biology Letters, rather than cads, dads and their female equivalents simply being at the extremes of a continuous distribution, individual people are specialised for these roles. If so, the curve for each sex would look less like the cross-section of a bell, and more like that of a Bactrian camel, with two humps instead of one.

They found some evidence to back that theory up:

These results suggest that—probably for men and possibly for women—caddishness, daddishness and so on are indeed discrete behavioural strategies, perhaps underpinned by genetic differences, rather than being extremes of a continuum in the way that tall and short people are. Although there is some overlap between the two strategies, they are, if Dr Wlodarski and his colleagues are correct, what biologists call phenotypes. These are outward manifestations of underlying genes that give natural selection something to get hold of and adapt down the generations.

Intriguingly, the difference in phenotypic mix between the sexes is not huge. Dr Wlodarski and his colleagues calculate that cads outnumber dads by a ratio of 57:43. Loose women, by contrast, are outnumbered by their more constant sisters, but by only 53:47. Each of these ratios tends in the direction of received wisdom. Both, though, are close enough to 50:50 for that fact to need an explanation.

So much more to find out about us as a species. And now, finally, some time …

The Fight For Independent Journalism

A CBC camera crew led by the wonderful Michelle Gagnon visited the Dish “offices” recently:

The CBC’s Neil Macdonald takes on native advertizing sponsored content branded content ads disguised as journalism. Money quote:

Sullivan’s case against native advertisement is powerful and succinct. “It is advertising that is portraying itself as journalism, simple as that,” he told me recently. “It is an act of deception of the readers and consumers of media who believe they’re reading the work of an independent journalist.”

Advertisers, he says, want to buy the integrity built up over decades by journalists and which, in the past, was kept at arm’s length. Now they will happily pay to imitate it: “The whole goal is you not being able to tell the difference.” Sullivan’s argument is so doctrinaire, so principled, that it makes bourgeois practitioners of the craft, like me, squirm.

Well, we never compromised on this. Of that I am deeply proud.

A Final Bleg

What was your favorite moment of Dishness over the years?

Email your reply under the subject heading “Moment of Dishness” to dish@andrewsullivan.com and we’ll post some for tomorrow morning. Please keep your response under 100 words (about twice the length of this post) so we can read as many as we can. Points for esoteric or embarrassing moments.

(Photo mashup of this post and this thing sent this morning by a reader, because Dishness.)

The Latest On Those Gitmo “Suicides”

It’s a story we have long covered, even as many MSM outlets pooh-poohed the idea of accidental-homicide-through-torture. So we’re glad to be able to the recent Newsweek piece as the definitive latest word on the affair. It contains the following key paragraph:

A highly placed source in the Department of Defense who deals with detainees’ affairs, and who asked to remain anonymous because he is not permitted to speak to the media without receiving prior clearance, wrote to me in an email: “After reviewing the information concerning the three deaths at Camp Delta on June 9, 2006, it is painfully apparent the personnel involved in fact created an illusion of an investigation. When you consider the missing documents, the lack of key interviews, and the questionable evidence found on the bodies, it is blatantly obvious there was something that occurred that night that is not documented.”

It may take time but if more people refuse to believe the official line on this, the truth may eventually win out.

(Photo: Google Earth picture of a facility, allegedly known as “Camp No”, outside the perimeter of the main detention camp, where Gitmo guards say they saw prisoners being taken to on a regular basis.)

Quote For The Day

GENIUS: 'I think we just recognized gay marriage,' lawmaker says after amendment to gun permit bill in #Nebraska omaha.com/news/legislatu…

—
Brian Ellner (@brianellner) February 04, 2015

Email Of The Day

Mostly for the bottom part:

Hi Andrew, I know you’ll be receiving hundreds, likely thousands, of tributes and thank-yous this week, notes of appreciation long and short from your readers around the world. I hope you find time in your transition to read and absorb these messages of love and support. I hope too that you find pleasure and satisfaction in knowing that your readers appreciate you for who you are, not just what you do. You deserve all the good things you’re going to read about yourself, including (hopefully) this big chunk from me.

You surely know this already, but you’ve worked yourself into your readers’ daily lives in a way that cannot entirely be explained by your intellect and skill as a writer, prodigious as your talents may be. The internet is full of smart and talented writers. But their readers don’t know their favorite bands, their favorite shows, their favorite comedians, their favorite drag queens, where they vacation, what turns them on, what turns them off, the names of their partners, and, of course (because most people keep these thing private), deeply intimate details about their personal health. I haven’t seen these writers at their best and their worst. I was not brought to tears when their dogs died. I don’t even know if they have dogs. But you, Andrew, are unique. We have come to know you. You have come to be our friend, and we will miss you. I will miss you.

I’m finding it difficult to tell you how important your voice has been to me personally, and I think more broadly, to the political discourse, since I began reading the Dish eight years ago (I’ve read it nearly every day since). Back then, I was finishing law school in South Carolina. Raised in a very liberal, very Christian southern family, I had never felt quite at home in the red state of my birth or in the academy of conventional liberal thought.

In your voice I recognized a fellow-traveler, and – more importantly – an honest voice in what felt to me like an increasingly dishonest world. Between you and another fellow-traveler – Barack Obama – I felt a renewed sense of hope that there was space for honesty and integrity in public debate, or at least a worthy counterpoint to the toxic truthiness fed to us for eight years by the Bush Administration-Fox News noise machine.

You and Obama were certainly not Bush’s only critics. But you were his most important critics, because you recognized rightly that Bush’s biggest failures were not failures of policy (though his policies were failures); they were failures of process. They were failures, on some level, of judgment and character – the result of rash and reckless decision making that prioritized emotion and ideology over conservative, rational consideration based on ascertainable facts.

This always struck me as a moral critique as much as it was a political critique, and I always believed it was the most compelling reason for Obama’s candidacy. When I told my friends – Democrats and Republicans – in 2008 that the first reason I was voting for Obama because he was the “conservative” candidate (“small-c conservative,” I’d add), and the second reason was that he was the liberal candidate, everyone scratched their heads. No one knew what I was talking about.

But you know what I’m talking about. I think you learned these lessons yourself, the hard way. And I learned them – at least in part – from you. The lessons ground into me in those years inform my thinking as a practicing attorney – and indeed, just a normal person – every day.

I now live in D.C., and I don’t write on the internet much. But I do make arguments for a living. And I know how hard it is to work in an adversarial business while maintaining your integrity, to make winning arguments without giving in to the forces of ego and insecurity that will make bad facts disappear and turn nuanced arguments into grade-A cable news bullshit. Your open, daily struggle to examine and re-examine your own views is an act of moral virtue and courage, and I know of no other writer who is as vigilant in this regard. You should be very proud of that. It’s your character, not your intelligence, that makes you special. And to have built the credibility you have in this town – where a premium is placed on smarts, and too little value placed on character – is a colossal achievement.

I don’t mean to make this overly sentimental. We have obviously never met, and I cannot look into your heart. Like everyone – as I’m sure you would be the first to acknowledge – you have your share of faults and failures. But you (and your fantastic team, I should not fail to mention) have done something great here, something of which you should be very proud, and something that has been very meaningful to me. It’s not every day I write ridiculously long, laudatory emails to strangers. But there is so much that I will miss about the Dish – your faith; your skepticism; your humor; your humanity; your appreciation for the subversive and the absurd; your deep reverence for the rich complexities of the American experience; all the inside jokes. I am sad to see you guys move on, but I know you have much more to give. I look forward to seeing what that is, as I know you do too.

So, all that said, I’m closing with a parting gift. I’ll call it “The 10 Pet Shop Boys Songs Most Likely to Double As the Dish’s Final Post.” Here goes:

10. This Must Be the Place I’ve Waited Years to Leave

9. A New Life

8. Happiness Is An Option

7. Leaving [embedded above]

6. No Time For Tears

5. The End of the World

4. To Step Aside

3. I Made My Excuses and Left

2. I Don’t Know What You Want But I Can’t Give It Anymore

1. I’d Rather Leave While I’m in Love

Best of luck to you, Andrew, and all the Dish staff. Get some rest!

Face Of The Day

Yep, this is me, at Oxford, in 1981. Sent in by an old classmate and Dishhead as a parting gift. As the world turns …