Andrew Sullivan's Blog, page 348

Faces Of The Day

Brett Martin exhibits a pair of Mario retail displays in his “Video Game Memorabilia Museum” at his home in Littleton, Colorado on February 25, 2014. His collection, with 8030 pieces, has been recognized by the Guinness Book of World Records as the largest collection of video game memorabilia. Martin says half of his collection is connected to Mario game series. By Craig F. Walker/The Denver Post/Getty Images.

History Is Written By The Sober

Stanton Peele blames the Temperance movement for expurgating our Founding Fathers’ prolific drinking habits from American history:

It is impossible for Americans to accept the extent to which the Colonial period—including our most sacred political events—was suffused with alcohol. Protestant churches had wine with communion, the standard beverage at meals was beer or cider, and alcohol was served even at political gatherings. Alcohol was consumed at meetings of the Virginian and other state legislatures and, most of all, at the Constitutional Convention.

Indeed, we still have available the list of beverages served at a 1787 farewell party in Philadelphia for George Washington just days before the framers signed off on the Constitution. According to the bill preserved from the evening, the 55 attendees drank 54 bottles of Madeira, 60 bottles of claret, eight of whiskey, 22 of porter, eight of hard cider, 12 of beer, and seven bowls of alcoholic punch.

That’s more than two bottles of fruit of the vine, plus a number of shots and a lot of punch and beer, for every delegate. That seems humanly impossible to modern Americans. But, you see, across the country during the Colonial era, the average American consumed many times as much beverage alcohol as contemporary Americans do. Getting drunk—but not losing control—was simply socially accepted.

A Friendlier Face For Big Brother

For a fresh take on what security cameras should look like, Rob Walker points to a project for Dutch Railways by the Amsterdam-based firm Fabrique, which “resulted in a form of security camera that expects to be seen”:

“The goal was to reduce the Big Brother feeling,” [Fabrique creative director Jeroen] van Erp told me, straightaway. Dutch Railways (or NS), had done some research on “what kind of emotions were or weren’t evoked” by its camera system. “People knew there were cameras,” he continued, but they didn’t always know where they were (since the cameras were mounted to see, without much thought to being seen). And when they did spot one, they didn’t necessarily feel great about it. According to the data van Erp gave me, research found that while 68% of subjects agreed that the cameras they saw made them “feel safe,” an alarming 34% also said the objects inspired “a ‘big brother’ feeling.” (And a mere 9% found the things  “beautiful,” which is actually a surprisingly high number, to me.)

“So we said: Let’s try to change attitudes, with design,” van Erp said. … Rounded edges, bright colors, a more organic sense of living “eye”-ness: The upshot was a camera that’s comfortable being visible. The cameras were also deployed in a more determinedly visible way, acknowledging that people should see them. …

The data van Erup gave me suggests that the public … responded positively to these cameras. The percentage who called the object “beautiful” leapt to 80%; those reporting Big Brother vibe dropped to 12%. And the obviously critical safe-feeling response rose a bit — to 71%.

(Image of security camera by Fabrique)

Chutzpah Watch

Bill Kristol’s latest column is close to self-parody:

Kiev is ablaze. Syria is a killing field. The Iranian mullahs aren’t giving up their nuclear weapons capability, and other regimes in the Middle East are preparing to acquire their own. Al Qaeda is making gains and is probably stronger than ever. China and Russia throw their weight around, while our allies shudder and squabble.

Why is this happening? Because the United States is in retreat. What is the Obama administration’s response to these events? Further retreat.

PM Carpenter calls the editorial “a magnificent send-up to flamboyant despair and rhetorical folderol”:

Regional history needn’t be consulted, complexities needn’t be pondered, alternatives needn’t be explored. All trouble spots can be explained by America’s “retreat” in confronting what Kristol obliquely calls the world’s “barbarians”–a perilous legacy, he warns us as well, which is at our gates: ”Rome fell not to the majestic Hannibal but to groups of unimpressive barbarians.” You might think Rome fell because of a bloated military complex that had extended its imperial borders beyond both affordability and defensibility–by which point those “unimpressive barbarians” were indeed remarkably impressive–but you would only be committing the error of consulting history.

Michael Brendan Dougherty adds:

[T]he idea that America is in retreat is hysterical gibberish. It can only be made plausible if one takes the immediate years after 2001 as the normal state of American foreign policy, or if you consider the emergence of any regional power (whether it be Iran or Russia) a dire threat. The U.S. still maintains 20 large foreign military bases around the globe, including some 70,000 troops stationed throughout Europe. Any diminishment of our war footing initiated by the Obama administration over his last years in office will leave America far and away the largest military force on the globe, better equipped and more easily deployed than any of its rivals.

Larison piles on:

It is absurd to pin these events on American “retreat,” since for the most part this isn’t even happening. So-called U.S. “retreat” didn’t cause any of these things, and all of them would probably still be happening whether the U.S. was “retreating” or “advancing.” The U.S. is responsible for the effects of its own actions and policies, and to a lesser extent the actions of its allies and clients that it supports, but it isn’t responsible for what authoritarian and illiberal regimes do inside their own countries, and for the most part it can’t be held responsible for how other major powers behave.

Chart Of The Day

Cillizza looks at how the midterms might impact state legislators:

It turns out that the six-year itch is even more devastating at the state legislative level, which, as we documented in a post late last week is a critical piece of the political and policy equation for both parties nationally.  Check out this chart, courtesy of the National Conference of State Legislators, to grasp just how daunting the history of second term, midterm elections are for the president’s party at the state legislative level.

When Press Is The Best Protection

Masha Gessen feels that the American gay rights movement failed the Russian LGBT activists who protested during the games:

These brave Russian activists came out to protest because they thought that the eyes of the world were fixed on them that day and that their American activist allies in Sochi would support them by word and deed, staging their own protests and ensuring that the thousands of international correspondents in Sochi would hear of their protest and the treatment they faced. They were wrong. Their American allies watched the opening ceremony, socialized with Team U.S.A., and visited the famed Sochi gay bar. Their American allies failed them.

Why the lack of publicity matters:

First and foremost, working with LGBTQ activists in Russia has to involve ensuring that their names and their individual arrests and court hearings are well-publicized in the Western media. It also means ensuring that their fines are paid: The point of those extremely high fines is to open the way for further prosecution for nonpayment. Only if Russian authorities know that the world is watching the specific individuals they are targeting will the LGBT activists on the ground be relatively safe—which is to say, alive and unlikely to face long prison sentences in the near future.

Mental Health Break

The beautiful birth of snowflakes:

snowtime from Иванов Вячеслав on Vimeo.

The Imperfect Science Of Justice

Balko brings us the latest on Shaken Baby Syndrome:

New research suggests that most humans aren’t capable of shaking an infant hard enough to produce the symptoms in SBS. It usually takes an accompanying blow to the head. And in about half to two-thirds of the 200 or so SBS cases prosecuted each year in the U.S., there are no outward signs of physical injury. Indeed, this is the reason SBS is such a convenient diagnosis. It allows prosecutors to charge a suspected abuser despite no outward signs of abuse. But we now know that other causes can produce these symptoms, which means that some percentage of the people convicted in SBS cases are going to prison for murders that may have never happened.

He contrasts this SBS research with DNA testing:

The blood or semen or hair either matches the defendant, or it doesn’t. It will show that either the defendant raped or murdered the victim, or that someone else did. Things get murkier when the question isn’t who committed the crime, but if a crime was committed at all. The new research into SBS doesn’t state definitively that without external injuries, a child couldn’t have died from shaking. It suggests only that there are other possibilities—that shaking wasn’t the only possible cause of death. It isn’t an advance in science that will produce dispositive exonorations. It’s an advance that merely calls prior convictions into question.

Back To The Futurism

Vivien Greene, curator of the Guggenheim’s new exhibit on the Italian Futurists, explains how F.T. Marinetti and his compatriots violate our ideas about the avant-garde:

This is sort of a scholarly debate, but I think for many people the definition of avant-garde means it follows the idea of the scholar named Bürger, and to be avant-garde means you have to be of the left. So if you break out of that mold—it’s hard to think of an avant-garde that was on the right. And I think with Futurism you have that, because in every other way, they’re satisfying our ideas of what is avant-garde: they’re new, they’re disruptive, and as they continue to develop into the ’20s and ’30s, they are reinventing themselves. It’s not as though they’re painting the same thing over and over again. They evolve while still keeping in mind the basic tenets of what is Futurist: dynamism, simultaneity, speed, technology, the machines. They embrace new things; they’re not at all static. Innovation is very important to the ideas of the avant-garde.

The Economist suggests that the movement’s fascist associates were one reason the Futurists have never had a major retrospective in the US:

Marinetti, a showman who liked to call himself “the caffeine of Europe” for the energy he put into promoting the futurist movement, was an early fan of Benito Mussolini and took part in the founding of the fascist movement in 1919. Marinetti wanted futurism to be Italian fascism’s official art movement. But the dictator refused, preferring to bestow his favours on different art movements at different times. The two men blew hot and cold about one another. Yet when Mussolini fell from power in 1943 and Hitler named him the head of the puppet Italian republic of Salò, the founder of futurism was one of the first to offer his support. Marinetti died just five months before Mussolini was executed, their lives seemingly forever linked.

In a largely complimentary review, Peter Schjeldahl calls Italian Futurism “the most neglected canonical movement in modern art – because it is also the most embarrassing”:

An avant-garde so clownish, in its grandiose posturing, and so sinister, in its political embrace of Italian Fascism, has been easy to shrug off, but the [Guggenheim] show makes a powerful case for second thoughts. It arrays some superb paintings and sculptures, the best of them by Umberto Boccioni, whose death in the First World War, at the age of 33, deprived the movement of its one great artist. And marvels of graphic and architectural invention reward a stroll up the Guggenheim’s ramp.

(Boccioni’s States of Mind II: The Farewells, 1911, via Wikimedia Commons)

What If Ukraine Splits? Ctd

Alexander Motyl calls Ukraine’s east-west divide a false binary that doesn’t explain the conflict as neatly as some Western commentators would like:

The real divide in Ukraine is not between East and West, but between the democratic forces on the one hand and the Party of Regions on the other. The latter is strongest in the southeast, mostly because its cadres (who are mostly former communists) have controlled the region’s information networks and economic resources since Soviet times and continue to do so to this day. Their domination since Ukraine’s independence rests on their having constructed alliances with organized crime and the country’s oligarchs, in particular with Ukraine’s richest tycoon, Rinat Akhmetov. They have enormous financial resources at their disposal, control the local media, and quash — or have quashed — all challengers to their hegemony. Their rule has been compared, not inaccurately, to that of the mafia. Ukrainians in the southeast tend to vote for them, less because they’re enamored of Yanukovych (they are not), and more because they have no alternatives and, due to the Region Party’s control of the media, see no alternatives.

But Christian Caryl says neglecting the divide is “wishful thinking”:

To emphasize these complexities is not — as some would claim – to deny Ukraine’s viability as a state. Nor does it imply that Ukraine ought to be carved up into constituent units.

Ukraine is perfectly capable of continuing its existence as a state if it can find an institutional framework that will take its political diversity into account — instead of lurching from one crisis to the next as it has over the past 15 years.

Ukraine’s regional differences do, however, mean that we should take the possibility of civil conflict seriously. Reporters in Kiev have already described the rise of quasi-military “self-defense units” among the protesters. What has gone largely unremarked is the rise of similar paramilitary groups in the East. As this map by political observer Sergii Gorbachev shows, Yanukovych’s political machine has been busily standing up “militia units” throughout the East, sometimes with overt ties to local gangland structures. Here, for example, is a Russian-language interview with one ex-convict who’s setting up his own pro-Yanukovych militia in the Eastern city of Kharkov. He won’t say how many members the new group has, but he’s quite open about its aims: “I’m preparing my population and my people for war.”

Adam Taylor points to Crimea, where loyalties are distinctly Russian, as a potential breakaway region:

From the 18th century on, the region was part of Russia, but that changed in 1954, when the Supreme Soviet of the Soviet Union passed it from the Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic to the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic, a decision that is still controversial in some circles. Today the peninsula might still be a part of Ukraine, but in many ways it is separate from the rest of the country: It has its own legislature and constitution, for example, and it’s still very Russian: Some  60 percent of the population is ethnically Russian, with the rest being Ukrainian or Crimean Tatars.

It appears that some members of this Russian community have regarded the events in Kiev with a mixture horror and opportunism: The chaos in Ukraine could finally be the region’s chance to turn back to Moscow.

Max Fisher, who has pushed a structural explanation of the conflict, argues that both competing narratives have some merit:

The structural storyline, of an identity crisis fueled by history and demographics, appeals for its neatness and its comprehensive breadth. But it tends to rankle people, and not without reason, who see it as explaining away the bravery and idealism of the protesters, or forgiving the very real abuses of Yanukovych.

The more human narrative, of regular Ukrainians pushed to the breaking point by an abusive government they can no longer tolerate, is much more emotionally satisfying. Anyone can relate to it. It appeals especially to Americans, who feel an immediate affection for any pro-democracy movement, particularly one that expresses a desire to reject Russia and embrace the West. Still, this story ignores the 30 percent of Ukrainians who wanted to reject the E.U. deal for a Russia-led trade union, and it ignores the pro-Russia attitudes in the eastern half of the country. It almost seems to tell pro-Russia Ukrainians that they don’t count, which can feel a bit Russophobic.