Andrew Sullivan's Blog, page 304

Fur Babies

Robert A. Ferdman contrasts America’s birthrate decline with the increased popularity of small dogs:

It could just be a coincidence that Americans are birthing fewer babies at the same time as they’re buying a lot more little dogs. But there’s pretty good reason to believe it isn’t, Damian Shore, an analyst at market-research firm Euromonitor, told Quartz. “There’s definitely some replacement happening there,” he said.

One telling sign that the two are not entirely unrelated is that the same age groups that are forgoing motherhood are leading the small dog charge. “Women are not only having fewer children, but are also getting married later. There are more single and unmarried women in their late 20s and early 30s, which also happens to be the demographic that buys the most small dogs,” Shore said. There’s also evidence people are treating their dogs a bit more like little humans these days. Premium dog food, the most expensive kind, has grown by 170% over the past 15 years, and now accounts for 57% of of the overall dog food market.

The View From Your Window

Manila, Philippines, 6.04 am

How Did Heartbleed Happen?

Rusty Foster blames the bug on the insufficient attention we pay to open-source software:

OpenSSL, which is used to secure as many as two-thirds of all encrypted Internet connections, is a volunteer project. It is overseen by four people: one works for the open-source software company Red Hat, one works for Google, and two are consultants. There is nobody whose full-time job it is to work on OpenSSL. ….

Unlike a rusting highway bridge, digital infrastructure does not betray the effects of age. And, unlike roads and bridges, large portions of the software infrastructure of the Internet are built and maintained by volunteers, who get little reward when their code works well but are blamed, and sometimes savagely derided, when it fails. To some degree, this is beginning to change: venture-capital firms have made substantial investments in code-infrastructure projects, like GitHub and the Node Package Manager. But money and support still tend to flow to the newest and sexiest projects, while boring but essential elements like OpenSSL limp along as volunteer efforts. It’s easy to take open-source software for granted, and to forget that the Internet we use every day depends in part on the freely donated work of thousands of programmers.

The developer who introduced the bug called it “a simple programming error.“

The Best Of The Dish Today

Only days after Reihan declared himself still a neocon, the latest results of the Iraq War and the triumph of good over evil came in. The Shiite democracy is getting ready to legalize marriage for girls as young as nine years’ old:

The legislation, known as the Jaafari law, introduces rules almost identical to those of neighboring Iran, a Shia-dominated Islamic theocracy. Ayad Allawi, a former Iraqi prime minister, warned on Tuesday that approval of the law would lead to the abuse of women. “It allows for girls to be married from nine years of age and even younger,” he said. “There are other injustices [contained in it] too.”

While there is no set minimum age for marriage, the section on divorce includes rules for divorces of girls who have reached the age of 9 years. Marital rape is condoned by a clause that states women must comply with their husband’s sexual demands. Men are given guardianship rights over women and the law also establishes rules governing polygamous relationships.

Hanaa Edwar, a well-known activist and head of the charity Al-Amal (“Hope” in Arabic), has campaigned against the law as a setback for women’s rights in a country that has struggled since the 2003 invasion. “It turns women into tools for sexual enjoyment,” she said. “It deletes all their rights.”

So we spent a trillion dollars, thousands of American lives and tens of thousands of Iraqi lives to “delete all the rights” of Iraqi women. I wonder if anyone has asked Condi Rice about that.

The most trafficked post of the day continued to be “Why Aren’t Gay Men On The Pill?” – with replies from readers and Truvada-user Dave Cullen here. Runner-up: my defense of Ayaan Hirsi Ali against her hard-left critics at Brandeis. Other popular posts included my socks’ appearance on Colbert last night and the response to Jim DeMint’s surreal view of American history. You can comment on the posts at our Facebook page. See what people are saying about @sullydish here. It can get brutal over there:

A close up pic of Andrew Sullivan’s moderate #GOP #LGBT socks from his appearance on @StephenAtHome @SullyDish pic.twitter.com/ovCLYExMSV

— Patrick Connors (@uppityfag) April 10, 2014

Yo @sullydish wtf is up with your socks? Are you on house arrest? Because it sure looks like you’ve got an ankle monitor under there

— Chris Jacques (@chajax) April 10, 2014

:/

Meanwhile, our most popular reader thread right now is on ADHD and how to medicate for it. And these posts have updates you might have missed: a video for “Colbert To Take Over Letterman!” and another disclosure that Ayaan Ali Hirsi is indeed a personal friend. A Dish dad got Beard Of The Week honors. Also: sloth squeaks.

21 25 more readers became subscribers today. One writes:

I just resubscribed – basically I had been riding free for a few months. The main reason I re-upped: not that I wanted to read the full pieces, although that is an attraction, but because I want to be part of your project – not just in an abstract way, but in reality. When I have emailed you thoughts on various issues, or links or suggestions, they have in several cases wound up as items in your blog. You have replied to my emails personally. One day you had a link, totally unexpected, to my wife’s scholarly book, based on a TLS book review – which blew my mind and hers. Though I’d taken some time off, I wish to reconnect and support you always, and I’ll be in touch.

It doesn’t get much better than that. If you’ve been procrastinating, subscribe!, and we’ll be able to keep the Dish both alive, profitable and ad-free – something almost unheard of on the commercial web.

See you in the morning.

Dust To Ice

Lauren Davis watched We Will Live Again, seen above:

Filmmakers Myles Kane and Josh Koury focus much of their documentary on Cryonics Institute founder Robert Ettinger and staff members Ben Best and Andy Zawacki (the latter lives on the premises most of the week) and their thoughts on the cryonics movement. But facility, with its tanks stacked with men and women hoping to be revived (and, in some cases, their pets), is a magnetic costar. It’s remarkable that, for all of the science fiction dreams that cryonics evokes, the Cryonics Institute itself is fairly non-descript, a warehouse outside of Detroit dedicated to keeping its clients—or patients as Ettinger calls them—on ice. Even the acceptance and storage of the institute’s 100th patient seems fairly straightforward—packing more ice onto the body and placing it in a container.

A Conservative Minority

15% of marriages in America are now interracial http://t.co/4xb5UGd6Co pic.twitter.com/zSItF0cMmR

— Judd Legum (@JuddLegum) April 10, 2014

A recent study found that white people get more conservative when they’re told they are becoming a minority:

The authors, Maureen Craig and Jennifer Richeson of Northwestern, use data from two main experiments. In one, a group of survey respondents was told that California had become a majority-minority state, and the other group was told that the Hispanic population was now equal in size to the black population in the US. Then, all respondents were asked what their political ideology was. The group that was told whites were in the minority in California identified as more conservative than the second group.

In another experiment, one group of respondents read a press release saying that whites would soon become a minority nationally in 2042, while a second group read a release that didn’t mention race. The group primed by race then endorsed more conservative policy positions.

Bouie worries about the finding:

[E]ven if there’s no minority-majority it’s still true that the United States is becoming browner, with whites making up a declining share of the population. And if this Northwestern study is any indication, that could lead to a stronger, deeper conservatism among white Americans. The racial polarization of the 2012 election—where the large majority of whites voted for Republicans, while the overwhelming majority of minorities voted for Democrats—could continue for decades.

That would be great for Democratic partisans excited at the prospect of winning national elections in perpetuity, but terrible for our democracy, which is still adjusting to our new multiracial reality, where minority groups are equal partners in political life. To accomplish anything—to the meet the challenges of our present and future—we’ll need a measure of civic solidarity, a common belief that we’re all Americans, with legitimate claims on the bounty of the country.

With extreme racial polarization—and not the routine identity politics of the present—this goes out the window.

A Greek Rebound?

Greece issued its first new bonds since its restructuring this morning, raising 3 billion euros. Mark Gilbert, however, discourages celebration:

The front page of today’s Financial Times newspaper heralds today’s sale as Greece coming “out of bond exile,” and describes it as “a sign of growing confidence in the region’s weakest economies.” I beg to differ. First, the sale is evidence that yield-starved bondholders staring at record-low returns on even Italian and Spanish debt holdings are growing more desperate with every lurch lower in bond rates. Second, it shows that investor faith in European Central Bank President Mario Draghi’s pledge to do “whatever it takes” to secure the future of the euro remains unshaken, even though that July 2012 promise has never been tested.

Pointing to the chart above, Ryan Cooper thinks it’s very premature to talk about a recovery:

Indeed, I rather fear this could be the worst of all worlds.

 Moving off the Euro would have been awful, but at least held the prospect of returning to growth and full employment within a couple years (from a much lower base). By contrast, the bank Natixis recently estimated that, given very generous assumptions, it will take Spain (which is in similarly dire straits) 25 years to return to 2007-era employment. A nation can do a great deal of catch-up growth in that time.

Realistically, I’d guess this means that Spain, Greece, Italy, Portugal, Ireland, etc., will never recover fully, and instead we’re witnessing the birth of a crummy, tattered Franco-German empire with a permanently depressed periphery.

Sam Ro describes just how crippling the country’s unemployment rate still is:

According to new data from the Hellenic Statistical Authority, Greece’s unemployment was at a staggering 26.7% in January. This is up from 26.5% a year ago, but down from 27.2% in December. In January 2009, the unemployment rate was at 8.9%. The economic crisis has been particularly harsh for young workers. The unemployment rate among 15-24-year-olds and 25-34-year-olds were at 56.8% and 35.5%, respectively.

Face Of The Day

A robot is pictured at the Morsettitalia stand at the Hannover Messe industrial trade fair  in Hanover, Germany on April 10, 2014. The Netherlands is the official partner country of this year’s fair with more than 5000 companies showcasing their latest industrial products and solutions. The Hannover Fair will run from April 07-11. By Nigel Treblin/Getty Images.

Poseur Alert

“69 confronts us with an unfortunate truth: it is a distinctly capitalistic, efficiency-emphasizing endeavor that erases the unique personhood of each participant by relying on a crude approximation of how human bodies fit together if human bodies are conceived of as identical, two-dimensional figures like the numbers of its name. … The position also echoes the service economy in its demand (mainly on women) of a convincing performance of pleasure. It’s not enough to simply be present and to competently do the job that’s asked of you by your lover, you must also appear to simultaneously enjoy said lover’s ministrations, regardless of the delicate balancing requiring to keep from suffocating him or breaking his nose. This is a form of emotional labor like that demanded from baristas, servers, and sex workers; not only do you have to do a good job, you have to like it,” – Susan Elizabeth Shepard and Charlotte Shane. 

Dan Savage suspects the piece is a parody. But several of his commenters are taking it seriously.

I don’t think it’s parody so much as whimsy. This paragraph convinces me:

We will be silenced by your sexual hubris no longer. There can be no freedom without an end to the tyrannical mediocrity of 69. Let us commit to a new world where this vision can be realized. Working together – but not at exactly the same time – we can achieve it.

I would call this “tongue-in-cheek” in any context less charged.

Heh.

The View From Your Window

Mesa, Arizona, 12 pm