Andrew Sullivan's Blog, page 346

Marathoners Anonymous?

James McWilliams, an avid long-distance runner, wonders whether he might be addicted to exercise:

Potentially addicted runners will cheat family time to run, sneak in runs without telling people, design vacations around exercise opportunities, will (if injured) count the days since their last run like an alcoholic counts the days since his last drink, and forgo sex to run (we often joke that nobody spends a Saturday morning running 20 miles because they have a great sex life). It seems certain that, if these symptoms are in any way common, running addiction will become an official disorder in due time.

The problem, from the perspective of these symptoms, seems quite real. But then what?

It’s hard to imagine how such “addicts” would be treated in a clinical setting. Would they be pushed to go cold turkey, as many drug and alcohol addicts are advised to do? That option would deny them the real benefits of a healthy activity they had merely taken too far. In the end, quitting could lead to a worse situation than the one the addict was already in. Scaling back, which is becoming an option for substance abusers, seems like it would be a more realistic option. But here, too, it’s hard to see how—given the tendency of the high to diminish for the exercise freak—the temptation to add one more mile could be resisted, especially when acute negative consequences do not result. It’s hard to imagine ever effectively treating this “disorder.”

Stanton Peele asserts that “people can become addicted to anything, whether drugs, alcohol, food, shopping, gambling, love, or sex, if it is the focus of an encapsulating experience that alleviates bad feelings and buttresses their self-esteem”:

Contrary to the common view of addiction as a choice-nullifying disease, this approach holds people accountable for their actions. Addicts are actively involved in building their attachments and can modify their behavior when they have an incentive to do so. Alcoholics drink moderately at home with their parents, for instance, and addicted smokers wait all morning during work until they can smoke outdoors. They might prefer to indulge their addictive impulses instantly, but those impulses can be resisted and ultimately eliminated.

Some Rare Good News About War

Contrary to conventional wisdom, rape in conflict zones is far from universal:

A recent study by the Peace Research Institute of Oslo of all 48 conflicts and all 236 armed groups – including state, rebel groups, and pro-government militias – in Africa between 1989 and 2009 found that 64 percent of armed groups were not reported to have engaged in any form of sexual violence. Of course, in most contexts, especially war, sexual violence is underreported. But even after 2000, when wartime rape became a highly salient public issue actively investigated by NGOs, more than half of armed groups were not reported to have engaged in sexual violence.

Why does this matter? Instead of framing rape as an inevitable outcome of war, by understanding which groups engage in sexual violence – and which do not – and what accounts for the difference, advocates and policy makers will be far better positioned to limit – and perhaps even to end – this scourge of war.

(Video: Trailer for the Oscar-nominated live-action short film “Aquel No Era Yo” (That Wasn’t Me), which contains a brutal rape scene.)

Translating Emotion

Cristina Soriano researches how people describe feelings across different languages and cultures:

[W]e use a questionnaire and ask people around the world about the meaning of their emotion words. Questions are made about the various “components of emotion”, that is, the basic aspects of experience commonly believed to compose an emotional episode. These include, among others, the way we perceive events around us (was this intentional? is it controllable?), the way our body reacts (e.g. increased heart rate, shivers, blushing), or the way we express our feelings (e.g. frowning, smiling, crying). The responses allow us to compose a mean semantic profile for those words that we can then compare across languages and countries. So far we have investigated the meaning of 24 emotion terms in 23 languages and 27 countries.

She has found a lot of overlap, but the differences are fascinating:

For example, Spanish “despair” (“desesperación”) designates a more excited emotion than English “despair.” The latter means, for instance, that when I say I feel “despair,” I may be clenching my teeth and pulling my hair out. By contrast, when my husband says he feels “despair,” he is more likely to have bowed his head and covered his face with his hands.

Interestingly, differences can also be found between countries that speak the same language. For example, the meaning of French “serenité” (serenity) seems to be more positive in Canada than Gabon, and indeed the facial expression of “serenité” in Canada has been found to include a smile, whereas in the African country, “serenity” has more of a neutral face.

“Dictatorship By Cartography”

Matt Ford considers the relationship between city planning and social unrest:

In many ways, France pioneered the conscious use of urban design for political purposes. Paris in the early 19th century was essentially a medieval city, suffocating from overcrowding and poor infrastructure. Baron Haussmann’s urban renovations under Napoleon III in the 1850s and 1860s gave the City of Light a modern sewage system, beautiful suburban parks, and a network of train stations. He also took the opportunity to demolish unruly lower-class neighborhoods, banish their impoverished inhabitants to suburbs, and replace their cramped, narrow alleys with spacious, grand boulevards. In the event of an uprising, like those that took place in 1789, 1830, and 1848, French authorities hoped the wider streets would be both harder for revolutionary Parisians to barricade and easier for columns of French soldiers to march through to suppress revolts.

Similar calculations are still made today.

In 2005, Burma’s ruling junta moved the government from Yangon, a sprawling metropolis of 5 million people, to the new inland capital at Naypyidaw for security reasons. Isolated from other population centers, Naypyidaw is populated mostly by government functionaries and military officials who spend as little time as possible in the eerily desolate city. Burmese officials claim almost a million people live there, although the true population is likely far, far lower than that. When the Saffron Revolution erupted two years later, in 2007, the large-scale protests that rocked other Burmese cities never took hold in Naypyidaw, and the country’s military rulers remained in power after a brief but brutal crackdown.

Even if the city’s population had been large enough for demonstrations, where would they have taken place? Broad boulevards demarcate the specially designated neighborhoods where officials live, with no public square or central space for residents, unruly or otherwise, to congregate. A moat even surrounds the presidential palace. One journalist described the city as “dictatorship by cartography.”

(Photo: Aerial view on May 23, 2008 of the purposefully-built capital city of Naypyidaw, Myanmar. By Stan Honda/AFP/Getty Images)

Should AGs Ignore Laws They Don’t Like?

Eric Holder on Monday tossed some live bait to right-wing critics by telling state attorneys general that they don’t have to defend state laws they believe are discriminatory:

Comparing today’s gay rights fight to the civil rights movement in the 1950s and 60s, Holder said he would have challenged discriminatory laws on the books during the time of racial segregation. “If I were attorney general in Kansas in 1953, I would not have defended a Kansas statute that put in place separate-but-equal facilities,” Holder said.

While Holder later clarified that AGs should appoint independent counsel to represent the state in such cases, Byron York still finds fault with his argument:

So the full version of Holder’s position on one-man, one-woman marriage laws is: State attorneys general should not defend them, but they should hire private lawyers who will. It was a much more nuanced opinion than what was reported in the headlines. And it left some attorneys general pretty unhappy. They have sworn to uphold the laws and constitutions of their states, and there has been no Supreme Court decision invalidating those state laws and constitutions. So they should just make a judgment on their own not to defend?

“It’s troubling to have the attorney general advise you that you can ignore your oath to uphold and defend the constitution and laws of your state,” said Luther Strange, the attorney general of Alabama, who was at the meeting. “We certainly don’t advise him how to enforce federal laws, how to do his duty — so that was a little unusual, to say the least.”

Morrissey is also troubled:

It’s not necessarily unusual to bring in outside counsel, certainly for corporations (who don’t usually keep litigators on salary), and occasionally for public-sector agencies. It might be a little more unusual to see that in an AG office, which presumably has a plethora of capable litigators available for assignment. However, the retention of outside counsel for any legal effort usually comes in response to a gap in skills or specialties, not in a primary area such as defense of existing statutes for an AG. That’s a key part of the job, after all — what the clients (voters) hired the AG to do. Forcing a client to pay for additional counsel just because an attorney doesn’t particularly like the issue should raise significant ethical questions about lawyers who make that kind of choice. The ethical choice would be to resign from the case, or in this context, to resign from the office so that the client can hire an attorney that wants the job.

Barbie’s Feminist Figure?

Ann Friedman recalls how her childhood Barbies were a part of “a lot of plastic dry-humping”:

This is one of the rarely acknowledged benefits of a doll mostly singled out for her downsides: Barbie is a safe way for girls to explore dangerously adult concepts like sexuality. “Little girls are starting to understand their own sexuality but also what it means to be a grown woman, and Barbie is the perfect vehicle for that,” says Joyce McFadden, a psychoanalyst and author of Your Daughter’s Bedroom: Insights for Raising Confident Women. She likens young girls’ play-acting Barbie sex with them trying on their mothers’ makeup or bras. They’re trying to imagine what life is like for grown-ups.

Anti-Barbie arguments have a tired ring to them — even among feminists, we’re in backlash-to-the-backlash mode. There’s also some research to back up the claim that Barbie affects girls’ body image and their views on gender roles. Yet when I look back at my own Barbie-influenced youth, I have a hard time pointing to anything but positive effects. “The feminist perspective is she has this unattainable figure,” McFadden says. “But Barbie was the only doll that had breasts, the only one to create a space where girls could start to fantasize about that.”

China’s Social Network Of Choice

LinkedIn:

At first glance, the platform looks well positioned to become the only major U.S. social network to succeed in China. Twitter, for example, has been blocked in China ever since July 2009 riots in the Western Chinese region of Xinjiang, when news of police violence there first leaked via tweet. Facebook started having problems earlier, in July 2008, after launching a Chinese-language version. (The Chinese government has never admitted to blocking either of them.)

By contrast, the California-based LinkedIn bills itself as the “world’s largest professional network,” and doesn’t appear to aspire to much more than fulfilling that core competency. Its sharp focus surely lends some comfort to Chinese authorities wary of speech-and-information-freedom advocates like Twitter. LinkedIn’s emphasis on helping members make professional connections — all communicated through a barrage of red status alerts and email invitations to congratulate a connection on tweaks to their profile — seems a perfect fit for what many Chinese would agree is a status-obsessed society, some of whose members suffer from Internet addiction.

George Anders wonders whether Chinese censors will give LinkedIn trouble:

[LinkedIn CEO Jeff Weiner] says his company will implement Chinese restrictions on content “to the extent required,” while also undertaking “extensive measure to protect the rights and data of our members.” Given that LinkedIn’s main news feed is a haven for articles like “The Secret to Never Being Tired at Work,” Chinese authorities may clap their hands with joy when they read most content. But back corners of the LinkedIn site still might stir controversy. It’s possible to imagine the site in a tougher spot if China’s censors objected to specific user groups or personal profiles created by social activists.

Lily Hay Newman notes that “even before the Simplified Chinese site, LinkedIn was one of the only U.S.-based social networks that the Chinese government allowed access to in China”:

Twitter, Facebook, and Foursquare are all blocked, among others. It seems that LinkedIn was blocked for a day in February 2011, though there was never an official government statement about it, because the government was concerned that information about pro-democracy protests were spreading too quickly, inspired by action contributing to the Arab Spring. But the site was back the next day.

Mental Health Break

F***ing Nemo:

The Psychology Of Hoarding, Ctd

David Wallis looks into research on the disorder:

[S]ome of the same brain areas that are underactive under normal circumstances become hyperactive when hoarders are confronted with their possessions. David F. Tolin of the Yale University School of Medicine asked participants in a study to decide whether their old papers can be shredded, while monitoring their brain activity. He found that hoarders’ brains zoomed into overdrive like a seismograph measuring an earthquake—compared to healthy controls. (That didn’t happen when they watched someone else’s papers being ditched.) “The parts of the brain involved in helping you gauge that something is important are kicked into such overdrive that they are maxed out, so everything seems important,” Tolin explains.

Monika Eckfield, a professor of physiological nursing at California State University, San Francisco, concurs that many hoarding patients struggle with processing information. To avoid the anxiety of throwing something away, they simply put off the decision to do so. “This is common to all of us,” Eckfield says. Like the neuroscientists, she believes hoarding becomes abnormal as a result of “mis-wiring” in the brain’s executive functions. Chronic hoarders “have a much harder time following through,” she says. “They get distracted. They get disorganized. They end up adding to the pile, and the idea of sorting through those piles is very overwhelming.”

Previous Dish on hoarding here.

Dave Camp vs The Tax Code

House Ways And Means Committee Chairman Dave Camp’s tax simplification proposal is out (pdf). Waldman provides the knee-jerk liberal response:

The centerpiece is an elimination of most tax brackets, leaving only two, at 10 percent and 25 percent. In a total shocker, that means a huge tax break for the wealthy! I know—I too am amazed that Republicans would propose such a thing.

Pareene has actually read the proposal:

Yes, it contains a tax cut, and effectively cuts tax rates on dividends and carried interest — two huge sources of income for the very rich — but it also taxes large financial institutions, adds a surcharge for very high-income households, and closes some loopholes that primarily benefit wealthy taxpayers.

Drum gives Camp credit “for going after a long laundry list of very specific deductions”:

Camp’s plan is long and includes upwards of a hundred specific tax deductions that he wants to reform or eliminate. There are enough caveats that it’s hard to tell exactly how far his proposals go, but again, kudos to him for making specific proposals at all. His plan may be DOA precisely because he was so specific, but kudos anyway. I’ll be interested in following the reaction as everyone figures out just whose ox would be gored by his various bullet points. Should be fun.

Critics are already dismissing some of Camp’s revenue-raisers as “gimmicks”:

Camp reportedly would allow U.S. companies with overseas operations to repatriate some of their foreign-sourced income at a lower tax rate — which would raise revenue in the short term but not in the longer term. The same would be true with some of the proposed depreciation changes allowed in the proposal.

Chuck Marr, the head of tax policy for the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, said his organization would oppose any proposal that uses these methods to raise revenue temporarily while cutting taxes permanently. He also questioned whether Camp’s proposal would count against revenue the enactment of so-called tax extenders, provisions such as the research-and-development tax credit, which expired at the end of the year, and are always extended by Congress.

Salmon likes Camp’s proposal for a bank tax:

At heart, this is a Pigovian tax on something (too-big-to-fail financial institutions) we don’t want, and often Pigovian taxes are more effective than regulation when it comes to minimizing such things. What’s more, it’s sharp enough to hurt: JPMorgan, for instance, would have ended up paying about 15% of its 2013 net income in this one tax alone.

For exactly that reason, however, I’m still skeptical that the tax will ever actually arrive. Those ten institutions are extremely powerful, and are more than capable of persuading politicians on both sides of the aisle to vote against a tax which singles them out for pecuniary punishment. The tax was a good idea in 2010, and it’s a good idea today. But it has very little chance of ever becoming a reality.

Pethokoukis thinks “mortgage interest reform is maybe the best of his tax reform plan”:

The [mortgage interest deduction] is a $70-billion-a-year, market distorting subsidy for the purchase of expensive homes by high-income taxpayers. It does little to promote homeownership by Americans of more modest means. There is no sound economic reason to use the tax code to artificially advantage the higher-end real estate sector over other sectors of the economy.

In any case, Brett Logiurato expects the plan to go nowhere:

On Wednesday, even House Speaker John Boehner wouldn’t publicly offer his support for the legislation. In a press conference, he said it was good to start a “conversation” about tax reform. But, when asked if the party was prepared to back Camp’s plan, he told a reporter, ”You’re getting a little bit ahead of yourself.”

Camp is likely making this play because it’s the last year of his chairmanship on the Ways and Means Committee — and because one of the dreams of every Ways and Means chair is to lead a comprehensive overhaul of the nation’s too-complicated tax system.

Howard Gleckman looks further into the future:

In the end, the details of Camp’s plan are less important than the fact that he wrote a plan. His framework, like the ones proposed by President George W. Bush’s orphaned tax reform commission, the Bowles-Simpson fiscal commission, the Bipartisan Policy Center, and others will help inform future efforts to rewrite the code.  Think of Camp’s plan as one big step down a very long road