Andrew Sullivan's Blog, page 33

The Sinking Ship Of Chivalry

Tyler Cowen points out the abstract of a new paper that upends notions of “women and children first”:

Since the sinking of the Titanic, there has been a widespread belief that the social norm of “women and children first” (WCF) gives women a survival advantage over men in maritime disasters, and that captains and crew members give priority to passengers. We analyze a database of 18 maritime disasters spanning three centuries, covering the fate of over 15,000 individuals of more than 30 nationalities.

Our results provide a unique picture of maritime disasters. Women have a distinct survival disadvantage compared with men. Captains and crew survive at a significantly higher rate than passengers. We also find that: the captain has the power to enforce normative behavior; there seems to be no association between duration of a disaster and the impact of social norms; women fare no better when they constitute a small share of the ship’s complement; the length of the voyage before the disaster appears to have no impact on women’s relative survival rate; the sex gap in survival rates has declined since World War I; and women have a larger disadvantage in British shipwrecks. Taken together, our findings show that human behavior in life-and-death situations is best captured by the expression “every man for himself.”

The Best Of The Dish This Week

Dish editor Chris here. Andrew usually writes the BOTD feature, but, as he noted yesterday, he’s been out sick this week with a wicked flu. His message to readers:

Just a note to apologize for my absence from the blog since a little after Christmas. I got the flu pretty bad (yes, like most HIVers, I got the shot) and haven’t been mobile now for ten days. I’m waiting on blood-work results to make sure nothing else is going on, and feel a little better today. So with any luck, I should be back blogging very soon. My deepest thanks, as always, to the Dish team for making my absence so worryingly hard to discern. And my deepest condolences to the people of Paris and France. Nous sommes Charlie aussi.

Andrew was still feeling shitty today with a fever, but hopefully he’ll be back to blogging on Monday. You can email your well-wishes here.

Our three most popular posts this week were the final results of the 2014 Dish Awards, one of the first posts titled Slaughtered For Satire, Ctd, and Andrew’s year-end evaluation of President Obama’s performance (spoiler alert: he still likes him). All of our coverage of the Charlie Hebdo attack and resulting debates over free speech can be found here (to read in chronological order, go here). That round-the-clock coverage was carried out by Chas, Jonah, Patrick and myself. Some props from a reader after an exhausting week:

Just a note to say that your coverage of the events in Paris has, so far, really been at your highest level. We are getting perspectives on every intelligent side of the issues, which is exactly what we need, as opposed to, say, Nicholas Kristof-type pieties. I am thinking of teaching a course sometime in the near future on blasphemy, and your posts are really helping me to appreciate the complexity of the issue.

We also added reader updates to many of our Charlie posts – review all of them here. The most important updates you might have missed: readers provided context here and here to Charlie cartoons that some people believe to be racist caricatures of black people; that didn’t seem to be the cartoonists’ intention at all. Another reader tore apart the false equivalence of an offensive Holocaust-Muhammed cartoon created by the anti-Semitic artist Carlos LaTuff. And another pointed out that, while the WaPo scrubbed some controversial cartoons from its coverage, the paper did in fact republish one of Charlie‘s Muhammed covers, in the opinion section.

Two reader threads kept us sane this week – the one on bathroom graffiti and the other on eggcorns. All of our official mental health breaks can be watched here, capped by a beautiful one from Paris. Alice offered a poetic escape here. We also compiled many of your window views from this week’s cold snap. This new one from Clyde, North Carolina looks a bit phallic:

You can always leave your unfiltered comments at our Facebook page and @dishfeed. 22 more readers became subscribers today. You can join them here – and get access to all the readons and Deep Dish – for a little as $1.99 month. Gift subscriptions are available here. Dish t-shirts are for sale here and our coffee mugs here. One new subscriber writes:

Well, you’ve done it. Months of clicking “Read On” only to not read on has drawn me into your political and cultural vortex. After discussing the high price of $19.99 with my wife, noting it couldn’t come from the budget but from Christmas Cash, I finally signed up … and then a new post confirmed that decision: “Following Jesus in an Age of Violence“. This is the reason I want to click more and ultimately support the work you do: honest engagement with various views, unfearful critique, and the evident value of holding faith, politics, economics, and personal relationships in tension. So, thank you and have a great New Year!

See you in the morning for our weekend coverage, edited and curated by Jessie and Matt, with more poems from Alice. Those three were also responsible for most of the Dish coverage over the holidays, with help from Phoebe and Tracy. A Founding Member noticed:

I’ve been an avid reader for many years and was a charter subscriber. It’s just amazing to me how informative and interesting your site always is. Even this week (between Christmas and New Years), when it’s nearly impossible to find anything decent to read on the web, you have more than your quota of fascinating and stimulating articles. Thank you so much. When I think of my greatest fears, it’s not getting old but that Andrew is getting old and might someday retire. Love you guys.

(Photo: The words “Paris Est Charlie” are projected onto the Arc de Triomphe on January 9, 2015. By Richard Bord/Getty Images)

Never Forget The Muslim Victims Of Islamic Terrorism

Terrible. At least 15 attacks took place in France after the #CharlieHebdo massacre. And it will continue. pic.twitter.com/AzrD4pRjFC

— Emran Feroz (@Emran_Feroz) January 9, 2015

Wednesday’s attack on Charlie Hebdo has already inspired a backlash against France’s Muslim community, with several incidents targeting mosques, businesses, and even individuals:

Three grenades hit a mosque in Le Mans, in the early hours of Thursday while in Aude, southern France, two gunshots were fired at an empty prayer room. A Muslim family in their car in Vaucluse came briefly under fire but escaped unharmed, and a mosque in Poitiers was daubed with graffitti saying “Death to Arabs”. In Villefranche-sur-Saône, an explosion blew out the windows of a kebab shop next door to the town mosque. …

Nourredine, a taxi driver, said the cold-blooded attack on Wednesday at Charlie Hebdo had left him very saddened and angry. It had reminded him of his home country, Algeria, in the 60s and 70s, he said, where “journalists were often the first to be targeted” by extremists. “But you know, we will become victims of this atrocity,” he said. “There is real stigmatisation in France. I love this country, really I do, but this stigmatisation, this amalgamation, this tarring all Muslims with the same brush – all it does is feed the extremists. It helps the Front National, the people who hate and fear Islam.”

This tweet says it better than anything else:

In case you are confused… #JeSuisAhmed pic.twitter.com/ckpchvqHey

— HibHop (@misshibhop) January 9, 2015

H.A. Hellyer is dismayed that French Muslims are being called upon to condemn an act that, in the long run, stands to hurt them as much as anyone else:

While the attackers may claim to have killed in the name of the Prophet’s honor, they killed someone with the Prophet’s name in the process: a French policeman called Ahmed Merabet.

As a Frenchman, he was targeted by extremists; as a Muslim, his community is targeted by extremists worldwide; and as a French Muslim, his local community stands at risk of an anti-Muslim backlash. Muslim terrorists kill far more Muslims than non-Muslims, and far more Muslims than non-Muslims are fighting these extremists. The day of the Charlie Hebdo attack, several dozen Muslims were killed by radical extremists in Yemen. Many others die every day in Iraq and Syria. …

The disgraceful attacks on Charlie Hebdo may have further consequences, such as entrenching the false notion that Muslims and non-Muslims simply cannot coexist, or that civil liberties need to be rethought, with yet more powers given to the state, diminishing the commitment to human rights. That is merely giving the attackers a further victory, rather than honoring the loss of life that took place.

Merabet is being held up as a hero on Twitter with the hashtag #JeSuisAhmed:

I am not Charlie, I am Ahmed the dead cop. Charlie ridiculed my faith and culture and I died defending his right to do so. #JesuisAhmed

— Dyab Abou Jahjah (@Aboujahjah) January 8, 2015

“The story of Merabet’s confrontation with the Paris terrorists,” Jim Edwards writes, ” is turning out to be one of the most poignant in the whole affair”:

And it’s proof, if further proof were needed, that Muslims are much more frequently the victims of Islamic terrorism than Westerners are. According to the Global Terrorism Index, 80% of all the deaths from terrorism in 2013 were in Muslim-majority countries Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Nigeria, and Syria. Since 2000, only 5% of all deaths from terrorism have been in developed countries — although they have been among the deadliest. …

Merabet is the officer seen in the heartbreaking video of the shooters’ attack on the Charlie Hebdo office, as seen through a mobile phone from across the street. The worst part of the video — aside from the moment in which the gunmen finish him off with a shot to the head — is where Merabet, lying injured on the pavement, tries to raise his arms in surrender. He is clearly no threat to the gunmen. And they kill him anyway.

This is why, in John Cassidy’s opinion, the “clash of civilizations” narrative that some are trying to superimpose on this tragedy misses the point entirely:

But to interpret things in such black-and-white terms is to distort reality. Although Islam largely missed out on the Reformation and the Enlightenment, a point frequently made by its critics, it is far from a monolithic religion. And many ordinary Muslims, rather than being on the side of the jihadis, are taking up arms against them, and sometimes paying with their lives. In Iraq, the Iraqi, Kurdish, and Iranian soldiers battling ISIS are mostly Muslims. In Pakistan and Afghanistan, the government forces fighting jihadis are also almost all Muslims.

On top of this, most of the victims of jihadi atrocities are Muslims. In Iraq last month, more than eleven hundred people were killed in acts of terrorism and violence, including nearly seven hundred civilians. It’s fair to assume that almost all of them belonged to the Islamic faith.

A Computerized Card Shark

It’s a reality:

Two-player limit Texas hold’em poker has finally been solved, according to a study published in Science today. Scientists have designed a computer program, named Cepheus, with a strategy for the game that is so close to perfect that statistical analysis shows it can’t be defeated by a human poker player, even if that player competed against the computer for an entire lifetime. This means that no matter how the game starts out, the computer will win or break even in the long run — making it essentially unbeatable.

Jason Koebler provides more details:

[Co-creator Neil] Birch said that if he, someone who is very bad at poker, were to play against a professional poker player, the professional poker player could possibly end up winning more money than if Birch were to play against Cepheus.

That’s because human poker players are often trying to maximize on the mistakes of their opponents in doing so, that human player can end up winning big with larger bets, but could also miscalculate and end up losing. Cepheus, meanwhile, is just trying to make the mathematically logical play, every single hand, regardless of opponent and is unlikely to overly penalize other players for their mistakes with large bets. If two Cepheus machines play, the winner will be whoever ends up getting the best cards, over the time period the two play.

The Economist points out that Heads-Up Limit Hold’Em (HULHE) was picked “because, in poker terms, it is about as simple as it gets”

Only two can play, and betting is heavily restricted. This means only 1.38×1013 (13.8 trillion) different circumstances can arise within it. … Whether computers will ever be able to solve other forms of poker remains doubtful. Merely removing the betting restrictions on HULHE, for instance, boosts the range of possibilities to 6.38×10161, a figure so mind-bogglingly big that it far exceeds the number of subatomic particles in the observable universe. No amount of improvement in computer hardware will ever make such a problem tractable. The only hope is an enormous, and unlikely, conceptual breakthrough in how to attack the question.

Philip Ball reminds us that a “few other popular games have been solved before”:

In particular, in 2007 a team from the same computer-science department at Alberta — including Neil Burch, a co-author of the latest study — cracked draughts, also known as checkers.

But poker is harder to solve than draughts. Chess and draughts are examples of perfect-information games, in which players have complete knowledge of all past events and of the present situation in a game. In poker, in contrast, there are some things a player does not know: most crucially, which cards the other player has been dealt. The class of games with imperfect information is especially interesting to economists and game theorists, because it includes practical problems such as finding optimal strategies for auctions and negotiations.

Faces Of The Day

Residents return to their homes following the hostage situation at a kosher deli in Port de Vincennes in Paris, France on January 9, 2015. By Dan Kitwood/Getty Images. From a summary of today’s events on the Guardian live-blog:

• Two separate police raids in Paris and Dammartin-en-Goële killed the Charlie Hebdo gunmen and a third man, ending a three-day manhunt. Police found Chérif and Saïd Kouachi, wanted for murdering 12 people in Paris on Wednesday, and cornered them in a printworks office. … One hostage escaped unharmed in Dammartin-en-Goële.

• Four hostages were killed and four wounded in the supermarket in Paris, where Amedy Coulibaly held civilians captive. Authorities believe Coulibaly and an accomplice killed a policewoman Thursday in southern France, naming her as Hayat Boumeddienne, and described her as “armed and dangerous” and at large.

• In an interview before he was killed, Cherif Kouachi claimed that he was sent by al-Qaida in Yemen, as a defender of the prophet. In a separate interview, Coulibaly said that his attack had been ‘synchronized’ with the Kouachis’ Charlie Hebdo attack.

Best Friends, Forever

Hanna Kozlowska passes along some new research indicating that marriage-based happiness has some serious staying power:

Analyzing three different databases, (two British population surveys and the Gallup World Poll), [Canadian economists Shawn Grover and John F. Helliwell] found that the reported life satisfaction of married and single people follows a similar pattern – high in their youth, dropping in their 40s and 50s, and rising again towards the end of their lives. But, even when controlled for happiness levels before tying the knot, married people consistently report that they are happier than those who are unmarried.

What’s more, the dip in happiness during the middle of their lives is less pronounced, indicating that having a spouse moderates the effects of the mid-life crisis that everyone goes through.

Christopher Ingraham adds an important qualifier:

It’s not simply enough to be married — it has to be a good marriage.

The study finds that the happiness benefits of marriage are strongest among spouses who consider each other their best friends, and that this “best friend effect” is substantial. “The well-being benefits of marriage are on average about twice as large for those (about half of the sample) whose spouse is also their best friend,” the authors conclude.

The paper also finds good evidence to support the notion that the effect of marriage on well-being is causal. After controlling for individuals’ self-reported happiness before getting married, the authors found that those who get married end up happier than those who stay single.

Leonhardt wants liberals who downplay the importance of marriage to face facts:

In recent years, there have been more than a few policy debates in which liberals have had this greater claim on the evidence — climate change, tax increases on the affluent, Federal Reserve policy or health care. As journalists, we should be willing to say so. We should also be willing to say when we think liberals don’t have a claim on the evidence — such as when they argue that education is overrated (but still send their own children to expensive colleges) or when they argue that marriage isn’t very important.

The View From Your Window

San Francisco, California, 6.56 am

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Why Aren’t Gay Men On The Pill? Ctd

Peter Staley imagines how PrEP will be used in the years to come:

Women use contraception during periods of their lives when they believe they might need it. They can choose from a variety of options, from a daily pill to intrauterine devices, implantable contraceptives, patches, vaginal rings, and injections. PrEP will have the same future.

We just got a glimpse of PrEP version 1.1 from a European trial called IPERGAY. (Ah, those French, putting “gay” right in the trial’s acronym.) Instead of daily Truvada, trial participants have been taking intermittent, or on-demand, Truvada PrEP, consisting of two pills taken in the 24-hour period before anticipated sex and two pills during the two days after sex. The results thus far have been so dramatic, lowering HIV infections by approximately 80 percent, that the placebo arm has been halted early. Final results are due in early 2015.

He also notes that “PrEP 2.0 and beyond are in development, including an injectable that lasts three months.” In response to Staley, Bryan Lowder raises concerns about using PrEP intermittently:

PrEP, in Staley’s rendering, is something you pick up and use during periods of high and/or higher-risk sexual activity and then drop during fallow times or monogamous commitments. Clearly, this is one valid way to use the medical technology. But I do wonder how many people conceive of their sexual lives in such clear-eyed, pre-considered terms: Attraction has a way of surprising us, regardless of how we picture our situation, and, at least as it is currently administered, Truvada cannot just be snagged at the pharmacy on the way home from the bar. There is a kind of dissonance between the pitch that (for most people) PrEP is insurance for those random times when broader safer sex methods like condoms fail or fail to be employed, and Staley’s idea that it should function more like a limited-term, pre-planned diet. One wants lifelong insurance precisely because one cannot, generally speaking, foretell a season in which dental interventions will be more necessary or fender benders more likely.

The Dish’s thread on PrEP is here.

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Where Death For Blasphemy Is The Norm

The flogging of @raif_badawi in Saudi Arabia is a vicious act of cruelty! #JeSuisRaif / image via @EvelyneAbitbol pic.twitter.com/HMFdrXsWUm

— Amnesty Deutschland (@amnesty_de) January 9, 2015

The staff of Charlie Hebdo were not the only people killed on Wednesday for blaspheming Islam. In Pakistan, 52-year-old Aabid Mehmood, a mentally disturbed man who had served two years in jail for claiming he was a prophet, was kidnapped and murdered – a sadly common occurrence in a country where blasphemy is a capital crime:

Mehmood was spared a death sentence, but he spent more than two years in prison. He was released several months ago because of his medical condition, said Muhammad Ayub, a local police official. On Wednesday, according to Ayub, unknown gunmen took Mehmood from his home and shot him in the head and chest before dumping his body. …

Thirty-eight people in Pakistan are serving life sentences or are on death row after being accused of blasphemy, according to Knox Thames, director of policy and research at the U.S. Commission on International Religious Freedom. Five of them were convicted in 2014, the same year that a high court upheld the death sentence for a Christian woman accused of defaming Muhammad during a 2010 argument with co-workers. For many blasphemy suspects, however, the real death sentence all too often comes at the hands of enraged mobs.

And just today, a liberal blogger in Saudi Arabia was publicly flogged for “insulting Islam”:

[Raif] Badawi, 30, was arrested in June 2012 and charged with offenses ranging from cyber crime to disobeying his father and apostasy, or abandoning his faith. He was sentenced to 10 years in prison, a fine of 1 million Saudi riyals ($266,666) and 1,000 lashes last year after prosecutors challenged an earlier sentence of seven years and 600 lashes as being too lenient. Witnesses said that Badawi was flogged after the weekly Friday prayers near Al-Jafali mosque as a crowd of worshipers looked on.

Badawi got off easy, in the sense that Saudi Arabia also considers apostasy a capital crime. So as bad as France’s blasphemy laws are, they’re nothing compared to many in the Muslim world. In the search for some constructive response to the Charlie massacre, Tomasky suggests we focus our ire on the latter laws:

[S]urely at least part of the reason that terrorists think it’s okay to kill people who blaspheme the Prophet is that too many Arab or Muslim states say it’s okay. It would be nice to see a concerted international effort to change these laws grow out of this week’s calamity.

At least Western governments like Ireland and Canada are getting that message:

Blasphemy laws are harshest and most common in the Muslim world, but aren’t exclusive to it. In the wake of Pussy Riot’s church performance, Russia’s parliament passed a new law mandating jail terms for insults to religion. Nearly a quarter of the world’s countries have blasphemy laws on their books, according to Pew, and one out of 10 bans apostasy. The Charlie Hebdo killings have already prompted some Western governments, notably Ireland and Canada, to announce that they will reconsider the blasphemy laws on their books. But in much of the world, governments, not terrorists, will continue to be the biggest threat to freedom of and from religion.

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Mental Health Break

Vive la France:

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