Andrew Sullivan's Blog, page 323

Under Water?

Flood insurance rates are spiking:

President Obama has signed a law that would reduce rates for residents of coastal areas. Tracey Samuelson summarizes the news:

President Obama signed the Homeowner Flood Insurance Affordability Act into law, which dramatically slows down the federal government’s effort to end subsidies for the program. The law was fought for by coastal homeowners who feared that previous attempts to reform the National Flood Insurance Program, passed by Congress in 2012, would make insurance premiums unaffordable. … The legislation caps premium increases at 18 percent a year and reinstates subsidized rates for properties that had begun to be phased out under the 2012 reforms. Those restored subsidies apply to properties which were built in compliance with earlier flood elevation recommendations and ensures that those rates will apply to new homeowners, if a property is sold.

Scott Gabriel Knowles believes the 2012 law, the Biggert-Waters Flood Insurance Reform Act, should have been left intact:

Its stipulations were firm: Properties built before the NFIP were no longer grandfathered into the program; homes that flood repeatedly (“Repetitive Loss Properties”) were denied coverage; and insurance premiums would be recalculated to accurately reflect real actuarial risk. The law further mandated the formation of a Technical Mapping Advisory Council, a body of experts empowered to advise FEMA on best practices in floodplain mapping. Biggert-Waters marked a rare moment in American disaster politics: enlightenment. Local interests were sacrificed for something bigger – preparing the nation for the storms on the horizon. …

For advocates of sustainable development, Biggert-Waters held out the hope that the longstanding promise of the NFIP—controls over rampant real estate development in hazardous terrains—could at last be realized. Intense lobbying by homebuilders at the state level has a long history of thwarting local zoning restrictions. And many governors and local officials were eager to hand out relief checks and spur a return to the shore after a flood rather than waiting for impact studies that might restrict post-disaster reconstruction. The weakened act is much less likely to slow down coastal development in flood zones, and that’s bad news for advocates of an aggressive climate change policy.

Previous Dish on flood insurance here, here, and here.

What Will Our Sanctions Do?

Oliver Bullough is concerned that America is helping Putin consolidate power:

Since coming to power, Putin has made it his goal to restore the Kremlin’s power: by crushing Chechnya, by cancelling elections, by controlling the media and by squashing over-mighty oligarchs who felt they could challenge him. A natural next step is to enhance his control over the remaining oligarchs’ money by forcing them to repatriate it. John Christensen, executive director of the Tax Justice Network, which campaigns to open up the shoal of tax havens that are all that remains of the British Empire, says that bringing the money home would both increase Russia’s tax take and improve the Russian economy by forcing businessmen to invest productively rather than in London property or U.S. basketball teams.

Jamile Trindle also evaluates the impact of the sanctions:

“The real potential damage to Russia’s economic future is self inflicted,” said Chris Weafer of Moscow-based consultancy Macro-Advisory, in a recent research note.

“The real damage from a prolonged conflict in Ukraine,” Weafer said, “may be to radically slow the inflow of much needed investment capital.” Weafer recently cut his forecast for the Russian economy in 2014 from 1.9 percent to 1 percent growth.

Investors’ cooling interest in Russia could make it more expensive for Russia to borrow money in international markets. Rating firms Standard & Poor’s and Fitch Ratings both downgraded Russia’s outlook from stable to negative, after the U.S. rolled out new sanctions Thursday. The Russian Finance Ministry has said it might delay plans to sell $7 billion in Russian sovereign bonds this year. Russian Finance Minister Anton Siluanov acknowledged Friday that Russia’s borrowing costs are going up.

Packer’s take on the Ukraine crisis:

A successful election in a stable Ukraine is half the battle against Putin’s aggression. The other half is deterrence. It would be naïve to take Putin at his word that Russia has no designs on territory outside Crimea. He needs an atmosphere of continuous crisis and grievance to maintain support at home, to distract his own public from the corruption, stagnation, and repression that are his real record as a leader. Deterrence can be designed to expose Russia’s weakness: non-lethal military aid to Kiev, escalation of sanctions against Putin’s cronies, and the ultimate threat of financially targeting Russia’s energy sector. But no strategy will work if the U.S. and the European Union don’t act together, and America can no longer simply expect Europe to follow its lead. That was a different era.

Lastly, Larison continues to ask why we are sanctioning Russia:

[W]hat is the purpose of the punishment beyond proving that it can be done? If a punitive approach makes Russia more antagonistic and intransigent, as it seems likely to do, how is that a desirable outcome? Another illusion that needs to be dispelled is the belief that punitive measures achieve anything other than increasing tensions and making conflicts in the future more likely.

Face Of The Day

A relative of passengers on Malaysia Airlines flight MH370 cries at a hotel in Beijing on March 24, 2014 after hearing the news that the plane plunged into the Indian Ocean. Prime Minister Najib Razak made the announcement today as the airline reportedly told relatives that none on board survived. By Goh Chai Hin/AFP/Getty Images.

The Down’s Spectrum, Ctd

A reader elaborates on the themes broached by the earlier one:

I have seen things like that video promoting the upside of a child with Down Syndrome before, but a mildly affected child isn’t the reality for most parents. Between 3 to 12% of children with Down’s are profoundly mentally handicapped and unable to do much without assistance. Another 25% are severely afflicted and 55% are moderately so. Only about 13% are mildly impaired, and they are the ones who have the best shot at some degree of independence as adults. But people with Down’s are never truly independent, and by middle age evidence of memory loss and reduced cognitive function begins to set in as they are prone to early Alzheimer’s, in addition to other physical issues.

My 62-year-old cousin has Down Syndrome. While he has never been independent, he has been able to live in group homes at different points of his life and has held jobs through various programs for the mentally disabled. But now he has behavior issues and is showing signs of dementia. His older siblings don’t want the responsibility of his care, so my 88-year-old uncle is still his sole caregiver. I know his siblings well enough to know that not one of them will step up should my uncle be unable to care for him anymore, and my uncle, while healthy, isn’t going to live forever.  I wonder what will happen to my cousin.

Going ahead with a pregnancy when you know the baby is going to need life-long care is not just a decision you make for yourself and the child, but it obligates other siblings and family members as well. That’s something that potential parents should take into consideration.

Another shares some raw honesty:

I’ve been reading your thread on Down Syndrome with interest. My 17-year old son does not have Down’s, but he does have multiple disabilities including developmental delay, cerebral palsy and visual impairments, due to complications at birth. He is a happy, joyful young man and my husband and I love him to bits and have done our best to ensure he has a loving and happy life.

However, it is an exhausting and thankless existence, resulting in no respite, decreased career prospects and pay (due to being only available for part-time work). We fear about our son and our future when we get older. Knowing what I know now about raising a severely disabled child, in my heart of hearts I know if I was given the option today of raising such a child or terminating our pregnancy, I would choose abortion.

Asked for the source of her statistics, the first reader follows up:

This pdf is where I found the percentages. They were not easy to ferret out and maybe you can find better stats somewhere else. Most of the medical stuff I found seemed reluctant to lay out hard numbers and kept things very general. It reminded me of the difficulty of finding information on outcomes for extremely premature infants, which is also not as rosy as it’s generally painted to be. I don’t remember if I mentioned it, but there is now evidence that between 10 and 15% of Down’s children are also autistic, and it’s not particularly hard to find articles listing the numerous health issues of Down’s adults or the fact they seem to age prematurely (which probably is why they experience dementia symptoms at such a young age).

I never spent much time with my cousin as a child. He was a teen and his behavior with girls in particular was … inappropriate. So my siblings I weren’t around him much and usually supervised when we were.

I admire my uncle. He has been a good father. His step-children and his grandchildren adore him. But, according to my mother who recently visited him, his quality of life is suffering a bit now. He has vision issues himself and the stress of dealing with my cousin’s health issues on top of his own takes a toll. He is fortunate to have one step-daughter who helps out, but she is unable to take her brother’s care on completely – mostly because of his behavior issues. An extended network of friends and a girlfriend help him a bit as well, but most of the work falls on him. My cousin is quite set in his routine and is violently opposed to being care for by other than his dad.

Chart Of The Day

Olga Khazan sticks up for Vivek Murthy, the president’s choice to be the next surgeon general, whose confirmation is being held up based on pressure from the NRA:

One of the NRA’s sticking points … is that Murthy once tweeted, “Guns are a health care issue.” It’s not immediately clear what Murthy means by that. The NRA claims that guns are used more than 2 million times a year for self-defense (though social scientists think it’s closer to 100,000 times.) And it’s healthy to want to defend yourself. Murthy has already said that he plans to use his office to work on obesity, not guns.

But looking at the instances in which firearm use ends in death, it becomes clear that there’s a health case to be made for gun control, too. Guns are far more likely to be used in suicides than in killing assailants.  According to the CDC, 19,392 people committed suicide with a gun in 2010, the latest year for which data are available. That same year, meanwhile, the FBI recorded only 230 justifiable homicides (the legal term) in which a private citizen used a firearm to kill a felon during the commission of a felony.

Turkey Kills Twitter, Ctd

After last week’s largely ineffectual ban drew criticism and ridicule, Erdogan intensified his crackdown on the site within Turkey. Steven Cook calls the country “a case study in the reversal of political reforms, especially in the area of freedom of expression”:

The recent ban on Twitter is the logical next step in a process that has unfolded during the last few years in which the Turkish government has sought to intimidate and thereby silence critical journalists, academics and other observers. Erdogan, who is both paranoid and calculating, has sought to frame his offensive against freedom of expression as a fight against foreign plots to dishonor Turkey and undermine its recent prosperity and diplomatic influence.

Jenna Krajeski argues the ban “only serves to demonstrate how tone-deaf the A.K.P. has become in its zeal for message control”:

The move against Twitter looks desperate and, given how accessible the service remains, futile – the sort of clumsy measure that authoritarian leaders often take as they witness their power draining away. (The last time I woke up to news of Twitter being blocked was three years ago, in Cairo, when it was ordered by Hosni Mubarak.) But the ban also highlights a disturbing trend in Erdogan’s attitude toward the opposition, and signals that the authoritarian tendencies that surfaced during last year’s Gezi protests are only growing stronger.

But, writing elsewhere, Cook argues that Erdogan is playing a “shrewd and cunning” game:

Here is how it goes: He plays to his base, frames the issue as a plot among various outside and inside forces to bring Turkey to its knees, declares that he will not allow that to happen, and then emphasizes everything he and the Justice and Development Party (A.K.P.) has done for Turkey in the last eleven years. Erdogan’s message in Turkey’s profoundly polarized political environment is a way to ensure that the bulk of his base never accepts his or the A.K.P.’s culpability for anything. The fact that the prime minister is contributing to what seems to be a deep divide among Turks is all the better for Erdogan and his electoral prospects.

Aaron Stein also examines Erdogan’s political calculus:

Erdogan has championed the ballot box as the final arbiter of all that ails Turkish politics. Yet, in doing so, Erdogan is practicing majoritarian politics in an increasingly polarized political climate. Thus, as Turks prepare to vote in local elections this March, an AKP victory in key cities like Ankara and Istanbul could spark further anti-government protests. To counteract such a possibility, the government is certain to take more steps to ensure that the right to peaceful protest is further encroached upon.

And, when paired with the likely leaking of more recordings, Erdogan is sure to deem it necessary to further increase his hold over the government bureaucracy. Thus, even while Erdogan appears to have calculated that increased political polarization is the key to electoral success, it has come at a steep price for Turkish democracy.

Meanwhile, Shadi Hamid suggests Erdogan “fell victim to his own success”:

With each election, his party’s share of the vote only increased, culminating in the 2012 elections, where it received an unprecedented 49.8 percent of the vote. Winning nearly 50 percent of the vote in a parliamentary democracy is no small feat, and Erdogan interpreted it as a mandate to reshape the constitution, the political system – and ultimately the Turkish republic – in his own image and according to his nearly insatiable ambition. Now, he finds himself struggling for political survival, as opposition mounts not just in the usual quarters but among erstwhile allies and within his own party.

Previous Dish on the political situation in Turkey here, here, here, and here.

Mental Health Break

Dogs react to a magic trick:

Quote For The Day

“I think, I mean, that we have very gravely underestimated the damage that apartheid inflicted on all of us. You know, the damage to our psyches, the damage that has made — I mean, it shocked me. I went to Nigeria when I was working for the World Council of Churches, and I was due to fly to Jos. And so I go to Lagos airport and I get onto the plane and the two pilots in the cockpit are both black. And whee, I just grew inches. You know, it was fantastic because we had been told that blacks can’t do this … And we have a smooth takeoff and then we hit the mother and father of turbulence. I mean, it was quite awful, scary.

Do you know, I can’t believe it but the first thought that came to my mind was, “Hey, there’s no white men in that cockpit. Are those blacks going to be able to make it?” And of course, they obviously made it — here I am. But the thing is, I had not known that I was damaged to the extent of thinking that somehow actually what those white people who had kept drumming into us in South Africa about our being inferior, about our being incapable, it had lodged somewhere in me,” – Archbishop Desmond Tutu.

What’s A Bisexual Anyway? Ctd

Benoit Denizet-Lewis has an extensive essay (NYT) on the efforts of the American Institute of Bisexuality to counter myths and stigmas surrounding bisexuality. Below he outlines the latest scientific efforts by Northwestern’s Michael Bailey, who led – and subsequently corrected – a controversial study in 2005 suggesting that “identity and arousal didn’t appear to match” among bisexual men (the study and followup study are described by Dan Savage in the above video, starting at the 2:20 mark):

[Bailey] went into an explanation of his proposed study, which I was surprised to hear wouldn’t include any actual bisexuals. Instead, he planned to test the arousal patterns of 60 gay-identified men. “We’re interested in the role that sexual inhibition can play in people’s sexuality, in ways that might be relevant to sexual identity or capacity,” he began. “There’s evidence from prior studies that if you start with a stimulus that might turn on a gay guy — say, two guys [being sexual] — and then add a woman to the scene, some gay men are going to be inhibited by that and feel less aroused, while others won’t see their arousal decrease. A subset of bisexual-identified men might be explained by that.”

“How so?” I asked. Carlos Legaspy, an A.I.B. [American Institute of Bisexuality] board member from Chicago, tried to clarify: “There’s some indication that what makes a bisexual person may be less about what they’re strongly attracted to and more about what they’re not averse to.”

Denizet-Lewis also calls me out for this post:

Though a number of famous women have said they’re bisexual (including Drew Barrymore, Anna Paquin, Megan Fox and Azealia Banks), few big-name men have followed suit. And because [Clive] Davis was 80, it would be difficult for skeptics to dismiss his declaration as one of a confused young man who would surely grow out of his bisexual phase, as the gay writer Andrew Sullivan suggested months later about the 19-year-old British diver Tom Daley.

Daley had said in a YouTube video that he was happily dating a man but was still interested in women. Sullivan predicted that Daley would “never have a sexual relationship with a woman again, because his assertion that he still fancies girls is a classic bridging mechanism to ease the transition to his real sexual identity. I know this because I did it, too.”

Sullivan’s logic is particularly frustrating to Sylla and other bisexual activists. Though they agree that many gay men use bisexuality as a transition identity — sometimes as a way to soften the blow of coming out to parents — “gay men seem to have a hard time fathoming that someone might have an honestly different trajectory,” Sylla said. (Gay men aren’t the only ones. In an episode of “Sex and the City,” Carrie Bradshaw dates a bi guy and suspects that he’s just on “a layover on the way to Gaytown.”)

Bisexual activists told me that much of what gay and lesbian people believe about bisexuality is wrong and is skewed by a self-reinforcing problem: because of biphobia, many bisexuals don’t come out. But until more bisexuals come out, the stereotypes and misinformation at the heart of biphobia won’t be seriously challenged. “The only ‘bisexual’ people that many gays and lesbians know are the ones who ended up gay,” a bisexual woman in Columbus, Ohio, told me. When she tells her gay and lesbian friends about studies showing that bisexuals outnumber them, “they look at me funny and say, ‘That’s strange, because I don’t know any bisexual people.’ ”

I take the point. But I am not backing down on my Daley prediction. Dan in the above video shares my observation about the bi bridging mechanism among many gay men. Mark Joseph Stern ponders Denizet-Lewis’ piece:

Is bisexuality the ability “to fall in love with people regardless of their gender,” as Denizet-Lewis’ bisexual friend states? Or is it, as others insist, the ability to fall in love with both men and women in part because of their genders? Each of these stances is really quite distinct; the former ignores (or transcends) gender, while the latter embraces both genders equally. Yet both of them wind up shoehorned into the umbrella category of “bisexuality.”

Of course, all this questioning is in some ways a political trap—the end-goal of the LGBTQ movement as a whole could be described as a world in which the interrogation of individual (consenting adult) desires is no longer a cultural pastime. That said, as a thought experiment, it’s interesting to consider the black hole at the center of Denizet-Lewis’ piece: Is bisexuality even an identity, in the way that homosexuality is?

Read the long Dish thread on bisexuality here.

Planning Your Digital Detox, Ctd

And Now a Moment With Kanye, Kim, Selfies and Mirrors: Shouldn't…shouldn't Kanye be in the mirror? pic.twitter.com/fipm1ZJYJw — Kath…

— :.｡.™н≈в≈đ 27.｡.: (@FlowUrbano_x3) March 24, 2014

The 5th annual National Day of Unplugging was earlier this month. Casey Cep throws cold water on the idea, claiming that “we’ve focussed our collective anxiety on digital excess, and reconnecting with the ‘real’ world around us represents one effort to control it”:

[T]he “real” world, like the “real” America, is an insidious idea. It suggests that the selves we are online aren’t authentic, and that the relationships that we forge in digital spaces aren’t meaningful. This is odd, because some of our closest friends and most significant professional connections are people we’ve only ever met on the Internet, and a third of recently married couples met online. It’s odder still because we not only love and socialize online but live and work there, too. Is it any less real when we fall in love and break up over Gchat than when we get fired over e-mail and then find a new job on LinkedIn?

Lindsay Holmes pushes back:

Now don’t get me wrong, I love technology just as much as the next person and I see the immense value of it (after all, I do work for an online media company). I also agree with Cep when she argues that it connects us with others in ways we were never able to before. But there are extreme advantages to going off the grid for a while — and there’s science behind it that can’t be ignored. Studies have shown that being constantly plugged into our devices can make us feel more lonely, less likely to engage in prosocial behavior, can severely mess with our sleep and can even cause weight gain.

And it’s not just ourselves we’re protecting by being mindful of technology — it’s future generations. Now more than ever, children as young as 2 have their eyes fixated on screens — and it’s negatively affecting their growth. Children’s excessive technology use has the potential to cause attention, brain and behavioral problems. When I think back on my childhood, I think about playing jump rope outside and going swimming. The only faint recollection I have of technology is the grating sound of dial up. When the next generation gets older, what will be the source of their nostalgia? Angry Birds over the real birds they’d hear if they were playing outside?

Recent Dish on digital detoxing here.