Andrew Sullivan's Blog, page 306

Beard Of The Week

The other kind of daddy beard:

It came from the in-tray:

I’m a long-time Dish reader and wanted to send in a pic of my daughter Layla and myself for BOTW consideration. Thanks!

Quote For The Day II

“The question of setting fair boundaries for debate may not be as important a problem as racism, but it is a major problem for the left. It also happens to be the problem that gave rise to Obama’s political career. The president’s transformation from regular student to national figure began at the Harvard Law Review, then torn bitterly between over race and what everybody called “political correctness.” In 1990, Obama was elected the first black president of the Harvard Law Review, and thus made the subject of national news coverage, because he alone was able to understand the perspective of both enemy camps.

One can see the contours of the same debate swirling around him today as president. There’s no contradiction between grasping the deep and continuing power of white supremacy in American politics and culture while still affording one’s opponents a basic presumption of fairness. One might even call this an important part of the definition of liberalism,” – Jon Chait.

The View From Your Window

Grizane Cavour, Italy, 12 pm

The Epiphany Of John Paul Stevens

In his new book, Six Amendments: How and Why We Should Change the Constitution, the retired Supreme Court justice describes how he would rewrite our founding document if it were up to him. Among his proposed changes, the one that has gotten the most attention is an addendum to the Eighth Amendment explicitly barring the death penalty. Andrew Cohen urges Stevens, whose voting record during his 35 years on the Court was largely pro-capital punishment, to embrace abolitionism as a sort of penance:

I have written before about how continuing exposure to capital cases turns Supreme Court justices from supporters to opponents of the death penalty. About how no one on the Court who sifts through the litany of unfair capital trials bubbling up from state courts ever becomes a more ardent supporter of the death penalty. Justice Stevens is just the latest example of this frustrating phenomenon. These jurists see the light—almost always too late to do any good.

Except it is not yet too late for Justice Stevens.

In Six Amendments, he directly criticizes Justice Antonin Scalia’s tendentious capital jurisprudence, and he should continue to do so as he now embarks upon his book tour. Freed from his obedience to Court precedent, and his self-imposed constraints as a judge, Justice Stevens should shout as loudly as his modest demeanor permits about the injustices he sees in the administration of the death penalty.

Damon Root holds up Stevens as an example of how SCOTUS Justices’ devotion to precedent sometimes overshadows their vow to uphold the Constitution:

In the 2008 case Baze v. Rees, the Supreme Court ruled that Kentucky’s use of lethal injection did not qualify as “cruel and unusual” under the Eighth Amendment. Justice Stevens joined in that outcome, but also filed a separate concurrence where he said the death penalty was unconstitutional in all forms. How did he reconcile those clashing positions? “This Court has held that the death penalty is constitutional,” Stevens wrote, “and has established a framework for evaluating the constitutionality of particular methods of execution. Under those precedents…I am persuaded that the evidence adduced by petitioners fails to prove that Kentucky’s lethal injection protocol violates the Eight Amendment.” Put differently, Stevens did not like those precedents, but he believed he was bound to follow them.

Mental Health Break

When you don’t have a circus tent, an abandoned warehouse will do:

Are Toy Preferences Innate?

Cordelia Fine challenges the notion:

Newborn boys and girls, untouched by the forces of gender socialization, supposedly show stereotypical preferences for looking at hanging mobiles versus faces, respectively. And, we are told, girls with congenital adrenal hyperplasia, who are exposed to unusually high levels of testosterone in the womb, prefer “boy toys.”

But these findings are far less compelling than they appear. For instance, if the preference of female Rhesus monkeys for stuffed animals shows that love of dolls is “innate” in girls, what do we make of the fact that the favorite toy of male vervet monkeys was a stuffed dog, which they played with more than a third longer than a toy car?

Recent experiments, more methodologically rigorous than the much-cited mobiles versus faces newborn study, found no sex differences in the preferences of babies for looking at objects versus faces. Both preferred the latter to an equal extent. And girls with CAH—born with atypical or masculinized genitalia who undergo intensive medical and psychiatric intervention and have physical characteristics inconsistent with cultural ideals of feminine attractiveness—may be more willing to play with “boy toys” because of unconsidered effects of the condition on their psychosexual development, rather than because their brains have been “wired for wheels.”

Previous Dish on gendered toys here.

Ask Jennifer Michael Hecht Anything: The Impulsivity Of Suicide

And because it’s very contingent on convenience, suicide can be easily prevented in many circumstances:

A reader writes:

Regarding this video from Jennifer Michael Hecht, it’s the most useful encouragement I’ve heard to keep your life. I have mild depression, and I think about dying or going away fairly constantly. I haven’t attempted suicide, but the idea of not wanting to live is compelling. So thanks for continuing this thread.

Another reader was in a much darker place:

I suffered from soul-crushing clinical depression that started in my mid-teens and only lifted in my mid-30s. Twenty years of suicidal ideation literally every day.  I would lie in bed, staring at the ceiling, unable to summon the energy to do anything, just utterly overwhelmed by the sick, pulsing pit of anxiety I felt in my belly, the pit that just sucked all of my life force and left me spent.  I would fantasise about getting a shotgun, laying it next to me on the bed, pointing it at my stomach, and blasting my stomach away, just to replace that awful psychological pain with something real and physical.

I even fantasised about taking out some others with me.

No-one in particular, but maybe some of those smug rugby playing jocks who were so dumbly happy and fun-loving and got all the girls.  I’ll show you what real pain feels like before I take myself out, motherfuckers.

So yeah, when I was feeling that way, I wasn’t thinking about what I would leave behind when I went. My life was so dark and full of pain, so if my death dished out some of that pain to other people, well good.  They could share in some of the darkness that I had to deal with every fucking day.

Most people had no clue.  I was clever enough to get a degree without ever opening a book, and this dark intensity I had going attracted some girls like moths to a flame.  I was dissociated enough to be able to talk to people like nothing was wrong. I was very good at hiding this inner devastation.  You know, out of consideration for those around me.  So no-one really knew.

So I agree with the idea that suicide is selfish – of course it is!  You are ending your own life: what could be more selfish?  But I also cannot in any way endorse the folks who generate moral outrage out of this – “how can this person have not thought of the people they left behind?”  People who think this way have never experienced real depression.  They have no idea of the utter nihilism that drives the act.  If they were granted one day of staring into that abyss, I do believe their moral outrage would vanish and be replaced with a profound sadness and sorrow for the suffering that those people had to endure, day in a day out, before they made the choice to just fucking end it once and for all.

For the record, I made it through.  I was lucky.  A chance prescription to an anti-depressant 10 years ago (one of the few I had never tried before) actually worked, and lifted the darkness for the first time in decades.  After a few weeks, I started seeing colours brighter, seeing the good in people, not the ugly.  I used this new energy to get into therapy, where I stayed for years, after I had dropped the prescription and worked to understand what the hell had happened to me.

I’m still on that road - I’m not immune to feeling low and anxious – but I have a pretty good marriage, two wonderful kids and a business of my own. I do community work and employ people whom I treat well.  I never suffer suicidal ideation anymore; I fear death now, sometimes with more anxiety that is healthy I guess. But man, this is a life I never expect to be able to live.  And it is good.

Jennifer’s previous Ask Anything videos here. Update from a reader:

As much as I applaud your in-depth look at suicide, I wish you would mention Friends for Survival, who, for more than three decades, provide support for those who have lost a friend or relative to suicide. They have scores of materials to help people through what is often the darkest time of their life. They even have crisis counseling for those for whom the event is recent (and I greatly admire those counselors – I accidentally picked up one of those calls when volunteering there and spoke to a women who had three hours earlier found her 16-year-old son hanging from a belt in his closet; I was simply devastated). They also have a lending library, skill forums, and host of other tools to help make a difference. For anyone who is feeling the pain of a suicide death, these are THE folks to go to.

(Archive)

A Bad Sign For Deficit Reduction

Earlier this week, the Obama administration reversed cuts to Medicare Advantage. Philip Klein puts the decision in context:

Medicare Advantage is an early test for Obamacare. The program gives beneficiaries the ability to gain private coverage that offers benefits beyond traditional Medicare and currently has nearly 16 million enrollees. A 2012 CBO report finding that that Obamacare reduced deficits by $109 billion over 10 years also found that the bill produced $156 billion in Medicare Advantage savings from cutting payment rates. In other words, under that CBO estimate, doing away with Medicare Advantage savings – with all else being equal – would mean that Obamacare would go from reducing deficits to increasing them.

Waldman is candid about the political calculations involved:

The administration had proposed at 1.9 percent cut to the program in 2015, but now they’re actually going to increase it by .4 percent. I’m not defending the administration’s reversal. I’m sure officials will come up with a justification (“strengthening the program” is the standard one), but the truth is that this is about politics.

Democrats in both houses who are vulnerable in this year’s elections joined with the insurance companies to pressure the administration, because they could already see those ads in the fall: “Senator X did nothing while the Obama administration cut your Medicare!” In a political campaign, you aren’t going to get far trying to explain the details of why it would be smart policy. So the administration gave in.

Suderman notes that this has happened before:

This is not the first time that Medicare Advantage cuts have conveniently transformed into increases. Last year, CMS initially proposed a 2.2 percent cut—which, over the course of a few months, evolved into a 3.3 percent hike. In both years, what happened between the initial proposal and the final was the same: an intense lobbying campaign by insurers who get paid by the program, as well as heavy political pressure from both sides of the aisle.

Edwin Park urges Congress to allow Obamacare’s Medicare Advantage cuts go into effect:

In response to yesterday’s announcements, leading Senate and House Republicans immediately called for scaling back or repealing health reform’s Medicare Advantage savings as well, warning of substantial harm to enrollees. But, as my colleague Paul Van de Water told Congress last month, claims that Medicare enrollees will face much higher costs and lose their choice of plans are highly exaggerated.  Moreover, curbing overpayments is sound policy, lowering premiums for all beneficiaries and extending the solvency of Medicare’s trust fund.

Policymakers should thus reject any attempts to undermine health reform’s Medicare Advantage savings.

Quote For The Day

“To me, progress hinges on our ability to discriminate knowledge from belief, fact from fantasy, on the basis of evidence. It’s not the known unknown from the known known, or the unknown unknown from the known unknown, that is crucial to progress. It’s what evidence do you have for X, Y or Z? What is the justification for your beliefs? When confronted with such a question, Rumsfeld was never, ever able to come up with an answer.

The history of the Iraq war is replete with false assumptions, misinterpreted evidence, errors in judgment. Mistakes can be made. We all make them. But Rumsfeld created a climate where mistakes could be made with little or no way to correct them. Basic questions about evidence for W.M.D. were replaced with equivocations and obfuscations. A hall of mirrors. An infinite regress to nowhere. What do I know I know? What do I know I know I know? What do I know I don’t know I don’t know? Ad infinitum. Absence of evidence could be evidence of absence or evidence of presence. Take your pick. An obscurantist’s dream,” – Errol Morris.

(Photo: US Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld speaks to the media with Ahmed Chalabi, leader of the Iraqi National Congress, and Paul Bremer, top US civilian administrator in Iraq, prior to a meeting of the new Governing Council in Baghdad on September 6, 2003. By Rabih Moghrabi/AFP/Getty Images.)

Peace Talks Fail, Blame Game Begins

Juan Cole catches John Kerry publicly pinning the failure of the Mideast peace process on Israel:

Note that actually Kerry attributed the breakdown to two separate Israeli moves. One was to decline to release the remaining 25 or so Palestinian prisoners jailed before 1993, whose release had been agreed to in the Oslo Peace Accords (a pledge on which Israel reneged, as it did on the whole Oslo process), and which Israel had undertaken to free last August. The second was the announcement of 700 new squatter homes in Palestinian East Jerusalem by fanatical Israeli expansionist, Housing Minister Uri Ariel.

The State Department rushed to affirm that Kerry blamed both sides for the collapse of his talks, but he was pretty plain about what he thought actually happened.

An apoplectic Jonathan Tobin asks why Kerry would make such a “disingenuous” and “mendacious” statement:

Kerry doesn’t want to blame the Palestinians for walking out because to do so would be a tacit admission that his critics were right when they suggested last year that he was embarking on a fool’s errand.

The division between the Fatah-run West Bank and Hamas-ruled Gaza has created a dynamic which makes it almost impossible for Abbas to negotiate a deal that would recognize the legitimacy of a Jewish state no matter where its borders were drawn even if he wanted to. Since Kerry hopes to entice the Palestinians back to the talks at some point, blaming Israel also gives him leverage to demand more concessions from the Jewish state to bribe Abbas to negotiate.

In a thoughtful, pessimistic reflection on the peace process last week, Matt Steinglass  that the US would ever force Israel to cut a deal:

The standard blog-post turn at this point would be to say that Americans will eventually have to decide whether they can support a state that dispossesses, disenfranchises and exploits millions of people in territories it has conquered on the basis of their ethnicity and religion. …

But I think this standard blog-post turn is too optimistic. I’m not confident that Americans will ever have to face such a decision. The human capacity for tolerating cognitive dissonance is immense. While some American Jews are starting to demand that Jerusalem reach a peace deal with the Palestinians or lose their allegiance, others will stick with Israel regardless of its policies, elaborating ever more baroque arguments to justify their position. Most American evangelicals and conservatives remain staunch supporters of Israel, and have little trouble blaming the conflict on Islamic extremism. It’s entirely possible that most Americans could continue backing Israel indefinitely, as the prospect of a peaceful solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict recedes into the mist. Maybe we won’t force a solution for Israel’s treatment of its non-citizens any more than we’ve forced a solution for our treatment of our own non-citizens.

Zbigniew Brzezinski and several other senior advisors to the US/Middle East Project urge Kerry to stand firm on clearly stated American positions:

The terms for a peace accord advanced by Netanyahu’s government, whether regarding territory, borders, security, resources, refugees or the location of the Palestinian state’s capital, require compromises of Palestinian territory and sovereignty on the Palestinian side of the June 6, 1967, line. They do not reflect any Israeli compromises, much less the “painful compromises” Netanyahu promised in his May 2011 speech before a joint meeting of Congress. Every one of them is on the Palestinian side of that line. Although Palestinians have conceded fully half of the territory assigned to them in the U.N.’s Partition Plan of 1947, a move Israel’s president, Shimon Peres, has hailed as unprecedented, they are not demanding a single square foot of Israeli territory beyond the June 6, 1967, line.

Netanyahu’s unrelenting efforts to establish equivalence between Israeli and Palestinian demands, insisting that the parties split the difference and that Israel be granted much of its expansive territorial agenda beyond the 78 percent of Palestine it already possesses, are politically and morally unacceptable. The United States should not be party to such efforts, not in Crimea nor in the Palestinian territories.

Michael Crowley wonders whether the process has any future:

The question now is whether this is just pantomime. Are the two sides still meeting for purely public relations purposes—to demonstrate a faux good faith to the world? Or are they still capable of cutting a deal?

It wouldn’t be surprising to see Obama conclude that the process is hopeless, at least for now. Many others in Washington have. Last week’s effort by Kerry to secure Israeli concessions through the release of Jonathan Pollard, convicted of spying for Israel, had carried a whiff of desperation that suggested Washington wants a deal more than the Israelis do.

But it’s also possible that Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Palestinian Authority leader Mahmoud Abbas are engaging in brinksmanship to maximize their leverage.