Andrew Sullivan's Blog, page 353

America Slowly Sours On Afghanistan

Paul Waldman is pleased that a plurality of Americans now see the war in Afghanistan as a mistake:

We’ve now amassed over 2,300 American dead there, in addition to the hundreds of billions of dollars we’ve spent. We didn’t get Osama bin Laden when we invaded. Our “partner” Hamid Karzai increasingly looks like he has lost his mind and is determined to make sure that when American troops leave later this year, the country will promptly get taken over by the Taliban again. So it isn’t too surprising that so many Americans are asking what the whole thing was for.

But it has taken us an unusually long time to come to that conclusion:

Just take a look at Gallup’s polling data from the four major U.S. wars since 1950. In comparison, the Afghanistan conflict actually took quite a long time for a plurality of Americans to consider it a mistake.

It took two years or less for public opinion to turn on the wars in Korea, Vietnam, and Iraq. The 12-plus it took for Afghanistan is practically a lifetime. And when you track the course of the Afghanistan War’s popularity compared to the Iraq War’s, it appears much more stable (and higher overall). Support for the Iraq war has fluctuated since mid-2004, and a majority of Americans have considered it a mistake since 2007.

Seeing The World As A Prodigy

A short documentary profiles Victoria and Zoe Yin, sisters who are both art prodigies:

Scott Barry Kaufman describes research that “investigated the cognitive profiles of 18 prodigies,” a sample set consisting of eight music prodigies, five math prodigies, and five art prodigies:

In terms of total IQ score, math and music prodigies had a significantly higher total IQ score than the art prodigies:

Math Prodigies: Average IQ= 140; Range= 134-147

Music Prodigies: Average IQ=129; Range=108-142

Art Prodigies: Average IQ= 108; Range=100-116

The math and music prodigies scored higher than the art prodigies on tests of general cultural knowledge, vocabulary, quantitative reasoning, and visual spatial ability. Surprisingly, the art prodigies displayed below average visual spatial skills (average visual spatial IQ = 88; Range=82-94). This finding suggests that the kind of mental visualization skills tested on IQ tests does not adequately capture artistic talent.

As a possible explanation, [psychologist Joanne] Ruthsatz and colleagues discuss research suggesting the key role of attention in the development of artistic talent. Artistically talented children tend to actively focus on the forms, shapes, and detailed surface features of their environments. As a result, the visual information around them is better and more selectively encoded, and they are able to remember those details while drawing. This skill may be at odds with the visual spatial skills tested on IQ tests, which highlight categories, concepts, and holistic perception at the expense of detailed-oriented perception. Consistent with this account, one of the art prodigies explained to the researchers that she uses her extraordinary memory to conjure images in her mind while painting. She remembers such details as how shadows fall on an object and is able to paint the entire scene from memory building up from those details.

Raped Where Rape Doesn’t Exist

In a lengthy, detailed investigation, Kiera Feldman interviews victims of sexual assault at Patrick Henry College, the bastion of evangelical elites, and describes how the college’s fundamentalism makes it hard for them to get justice:

Last September, the school chose Dr. Stephen Baskerville, a professor of government, to deliver a speech that the entire student body was required to attend. He argued that feminism and liberalism have transformed the government into “a matriarchal leviathan.” The result, he said, according to a copy of the speech, was a society plagued by politically motivated “witch hunts” against men—while “the seductress who lures men into a ‘honeytrap’ ” was really to blame. “Recreational sex in the evening turns into accusations of ‘rape’ in the morning, even when it was entirely consensual,” Baskerville explained. “This is especially rampant on college campuses.” (In a statement, PHC said Baskerville’s speech was “an exercise in academic freedom” and not “endorsed by the administration.”)

“When you have a culture of license where you can’t tell the difference between what’s full rape or fake rape and what’s real rape,” PHC journalism professor Les Sillars added during the post-speech Q&A, “it makes dealing with real rape really, really hard.”

Researchers estimate that one in five American women is sexually assaulted in college, and Patrick Henry College’s unique campus culture has not insulated the school from sexual violence. In fact, it puts female students, like Claire Spear, in a particular bind: How do you report sexual assault at a place where authorities seem skeptical that such a thing even exists?

Hanna Rosin, who wrote the book on PHC, comments:

A Patrick Henry statement says the expected things: that they don’t “elevate one gender above the other” and that they don’t view women who experience sexual abuse as “deserving of their fate.” But the problem is baked into their philosophy. An “innocent” woman in their context is one who never ever breaks the rules, which would mean never getting in a car or sitting on a bed with a boy. That’s where Patrick Henry shares borders with Andrea Dworkin: all sex is at some level a violation of women. But that line, whether it comes from an evangelical or a feminist, is unlikely to foster a situation where college kids or their administration can make reasonable decisions about what constitutes sexual assault.

Dreher passes along an e-mail from a recent PHC alumna, disputing Feldman’s characterization of the school’s culture:

The TNR piece said women interested in government or leadership are viewed as “unmarriageable.” Nothing could be further from the truth—my smartest, most politically savvy, strong-willed female friends are either dating, engaged, or married (with a couple exceptions, and those women have turned down multiple requests). The meek, frightened, abused woman in the TNR  piece just doesn’t exist: at least not at the fault of the school. There may be larger, familial issues there, but it’s not an issue of institutional patriarchalism.

And Leah Libresco puts Feldman’s report in the context of sexual assault on college campuses in general:

Patrick Henry’s Christian ethos informs the tone in which these students were brushed off (you’d be unlikely to hear concerns about purity at a public or secular private school), but the alleged underlying betrayal is more attributable to being a university than a Christian one in particular.

Treating Patrick Henry’s crisis as unique because of its singular status as a private, Christian school (one of only four private colleges in the country that decline federal funds and, thus, aren’t regulated under Title IX) masks a broader problem with administrations’ treatment of students in crisis, one that isn’t limited to sexual assault.

Is Moderation Killing British Democracy?

Rob Ford (no, not the crack-smoking one) thinks the UK could use a dose of American-style polarization:

The British have been governed for 20 years by pragmatic parties, focused on the center and happy to steal each other’s ideas. Has this made for a contented electorate? Not at all. Turnout in British elections has slumped since this convergence began, as the figure below shows, leading to debate about a crisis in British democracy. Between 1992 and 2001, nearly one in five British voters stopped showing up on polling day, and most have not returned. Trust in politicians and satisfaction with politics have also fallen. Party identification and party memberships have collapsed to their lowest levels in modern history. Growing numbers of voters now either ignore politics entirely, or express their hostility to the mainstream parties by backing the radical new entrant, the United Kingdom Independence Party (UKIP). After 20 years of rising polarization, America’s voters hate their politicians. Yet, after 20 years of steady moderation, Britain’s voters seem to hate their politicians too. What is going on?

Polarization leaves moderate voters without a voice in politics; centrism leaves voters at the extremes without a voice, and similarly unhappy about it, as recent research illustrates. What’s more, centrism may be more of a problem for parties, because political activists tend to hold more extreme views. Moderation may bring parties closer to the average citizen, but it also hollows them out, starving them of the activists and funders they rely on to communicate with voters.

But there’s a lot of noise in this model. Two other factors, among many, to take into account: the exposure of corruption in the political classes in the last decade – from the MPs’ expenses scandal to the collusion of government, media and police in phone-hacking; and the general affluence and civil peace that was the norm from the early 1990s to 2001. When things are hunky-dorey, politics becomes blessedly less essential. Then look at the very peak of participation in the 1950s. This was an era of bipartisan consensus unlike any other before or since: it even had its own name – “Butskellism” – a combination of the moderate Tory grandee, Rab Butler, and the Labour leader, Hugh Gaitskill, whose views were pretty close to indistinguishable.

Trinkets Of Genocide

Goldblog visited the Dachau gift shop:

I admire the country’s willingness to memorialize its atrocious past and to make sites like Dachau accessible to tourists, especially when compared with Austria’s unwillingness to do the same. But I’m not sure I’ll ever warm up to the idea of concentration camp gift shops, particularly those that sell Woody Allen biographies. (The last time I visited Yad Vashem, the Israeli Holocaust memorial, the gift shop was selling key chains, so this isn’t just about Germany.) In the absence of dispositive answers but knowing a bit about how modern-day German culture objectifies Jews in odd and somewhat disconcerting ways, my best guess is that these biographies are meant to suggest to visitors, especially German ones, that Jews are, in fact, really quite excellent — for one thing, they’re funny! — and therefore the Nazis were idiots for trying to annihilate them.

The View From Your Window

Ann Arbor, Michigan, 11.07 am

Net Neutrality 2.0

Federal Communications Commission chair Tom Wheeler announced yesterday that the commission would propose a new regulatory framework to preserve the open Internet after a January court ruling invalidated its net neutrality rules. Fran Berkman outlines Wheeler’s ideas:

Aside for the non-discrimination rules, Wheeler said he will also push for a couple of other new rules to buttress net neutrality. One is a transparency rule that would compel companies to disclose, in detail, how their networks operate. This would ensure that ISPs aren’t violating these standards. The other is a rule to reestablish the Open Internet Order’s “no-blocking goal.” This means ISPs can’t simply block whatever websites they want, for instance, those run by competing companies. The no-blocking goal, which the D.C. appeals court also ruled against, protects any and all websites that operate within the law.

Suderman reminds readers that the FCC’s authority is pretty broad:

Even though the most [recent court] ruling struck down the FCC’s specific net neutrality requirements, it also gave the agency a lot more power over the Internet, saying that under Section 706 of the Telecommunications Act, the agency does have the power to promote and regulate broadband competition and deployment. We’ll have to wait and see how the agency ends up using its new powers, but they are potentially far-reaching. In a dissenting opinion, Judge Laurence Silberman wrote that the majority ruling “grant[s] the FCC virtually unlimited power to regulate the Internet” by giving it the authority to put in place “any regulation that, in the FCC’s judgment might arguably make the Internet ‘better.’”

Brian Fung digs deeper:

As it considers rewriting the net neutrality rules to more explicitly rely on Section 706, the FCC will simultaneously keep open the possibility of “reclassifying” broadband providers. Such a step would allow the FCC to regulate ISPs just like it does phone companies, and policy watchers say reclassification would grant the FCC unambiguous authority to regulate broadband providers with a blanket ban on traffic discrimination. Keeping reclassification on the table effectively gives the FCC a nuclear option to use as a deterrent against companies that want to prioritize Internet traffic.

Benen notes that the change is not so much in the content of the rules but rather the source of the FCC’s authority to enforce them:

How will this be any different from the FCC’s neutrality policy, 1.0? For the most part, it’s not different at all. The FCC appears to have come to the conclusion that the federal appeals court struck down the previous rules because the agency didn’t have the proper legal authority to regulate the major telecoms. So in the new policy, as the New York Times reported, the FCC “will cite another section of the law for its authority.”

Peter Weber warns Republicans that they’re not making any friends by standing against net neutrality:

Their main complaint is that this is government interference in the free market. And in a narrow sense it is, as is all government regulation. But when the government steps in to make sure that private companies can’t bilk consumers by exploiting their dominant slice of a market or through legalese, that tends to be pretty popular. Is anyone really upset that George W. Bush’s FCC mandated that cellphone customers can bring their phone numbers with them when they switch carriers?

More Dish on the net neutrality ruling here and here.

What The Hell Is Happening In Venezuela? Ctd

A reader questions the narrative thus far:

The coverage on Venezuela is making it seem as if only anti-government protesters are out on the street. This is not the case. The Maduro government, like Chavez’s before it, for its many faults, does have popular support, as the video [seen above] shows. Likewise, the governments of Brazil, Argentina, Uruguay, and Paraguay represent the regional perspective when they released this joint statement: “firm commitment to the full observance of democratic institutions and, in this context, [they] reject the criminal actions of violent groups that want to spread intolerance and hatred in the Bolivarian Republic of Venezuela as a political tool.”

Mark Weisbrot of the Guardian adds: “We may recall that when much larger demonstrations rocked Brazil last year, there were no statements from Mercosur or neighboring governments. That’s not because they didn’t love President Dilma Rousseff; it’s because these demonstrations did not seek to topple Brazil’s democratically-elected government.” To get a sense of how warped the Venezuelan opposition is becoming, consider that like their Tea Party cousins in the United States, the Venzuelan opposition has engaged in birtherism against the dark-skinned president Maduro.

Not every ski-mask wearing protester that throws a molotov at police is a hero. Considering that supporters of the government are being attacked by the same people who tried to launch a coup in 2002, we should view their media campaign with some skepticism.

Update from a reader:

I have to respond to your most reader about what’s going on in Venezuela. It is true, the protestors in Venezuela are unique in that they are trying to topple the government. But an important part of context that Weisbrot and the other reader miss is that Venezuela is a democracy in little more than name. There were presidential elections in April, and they were very close and very controversial with the Maduro – acting as president at the time despite clear constitutional instructions to the contrary – spending hours on air through mandatory broadcasts called cadenas while his challenger could spend no more than three minutes per channel per day advertizing.

Moreover, the government has systematically sought to close down every avenue of media opposition, closing radio stations and television stations and replacing them with state-run media in a bid to create what they call “media hegemony.” Similarly, the government is denying newspapers access to dollars so they can’t import paper, leaving many with literally just days worth of paper left.

Finally, it is true that the government still garners significant support, but those marches are less indicative than their numbers would indicate. It is well-known that public employees are often bussed to marches and required to attend in order to keep their jobs. That doesn’t mean that many who attended aren’t dyed-in-the-wool chavistas but it is indicative that 1) the government is less able to mobilize supporters than it would like people to believe and 2) that supporting the government is a requisite for working in the government in a country where the private sector is being systematically dismembered.

The opposition has spent the last five years trying to build a coalition that could challenge Chávez and now Maduro working within the increasingly undemocratic, centralized and corrupt system and were systematically prevented from doing so, even when they won local elections. That some are trying to paint them as the undemocratic ones in this fight is disingenuous as best and complicit at worst.

Another:

I find it very amusing that a joint statement from Mercosur was used by Mark Weisbrot as evidence that Venezuela’s neighbors reject the opposition’s protest against the Maduro regime. As you may know, Brazil, Argentina, Uruguay, and Paraguay were the original members of Mercosur, which was supposed to be a trade-free zone. As a free-trade bloc, Mercosur is an utter disaster; for example, Argentina not only charges tariffs to imports from Brazil, they levy taxes on their own exports to keep food prices down in the midst of horrible inflation. So rather than a free trade area, Mercosur has become a soapbox for the left-leaning leaders of South America.

Argentina, Uruguay, and Brazil wanted to add Venezuela to the group, but faced opposition from Paraguay’s legislature, which would block their addition. In June 2012, Paraguay’s then-President Fernando Lugo was removed from office in a very rapid – but entirely Constitutional – impeachment process. Argentina, Brazil, and Uruguay wasted no time in claiming that Lugo’s removal from office undermined democracy and just as quickly suspended Paraguay from the group, thus paving the way for Venezuela’s inclusion in Mercosur within a month of Paraguay’s suspension. In fact, Venezuela currently holds the presidency of the bloc. To think we should listen to Mercosur, with their record, as an upholder of democratic values in this case, especially considering the ample evidence of vote-rigging for both Chávez and Maduro, is nothing short of laughable.

The Arizona House Debates The Anti-Gay Bill

There’s a live-stream here. Dan notes that, following the expansive wording of the bill, “it could soon be legal for Satanists to discriminate against Christians in Arizona.” Now Maine is following suit. Their live-stream is here.

Uploading The Past Into The Present

“The Internet has muddled the line between past and present,” argues Paul Ford:

Pick any historical subject and the Internet will bring it to life before your eyes. If you’re interested in vaudeville, you’ll find videos galore, while college football scholars can browse Penn State’s 1924 yearbook, complete with all the players’ names and positions. And every day, more history keeps washing up. Not long ago the news went out that a Philadelphia woman named Marion Stokes had recorded 140,000 VHS tapes of local and national news from 1977 to her death in 2012. Her collection has been acquired by the Internet Archive, and soon it will trickle onto the web. [A similar compilation of old network news bloopers is seen above.]

This omnipresence of the past has weird effects on contemporary culture.

Take any genre of music, from death metal to R&B to chillwave, and the cloud directs you not just to similar artists in the present but to deep wells of influence from the past. Yes, people still like new things. But the past gets as much preference as the present—Mozart, for example, has more than 100,000 followers on Spotify. In a history glut, the idea of fashionability in music erodes, because new songs sit on the same shelf as songs recorded five, 25, and 55 years ago, all of them waiting to be discovered. In this eternal present, everything can be made contemporary.

Relatedly, Ted Scheinman appreciates the vastness of online info:

Today we have at least three different ways to follow [Lord] Byron on Twitter and can access facsimiles of certain crucial manuscripts via the Morgan Library. Indeed, each day more and more manuscripts appear on library and university websites, a massive boon for both scholars without one of those blank-check fellowships and civilians curious to see a poet’s hand, and to compare it with unattributed parchment passed down in a commonplace book.

Beyond Byron, whole realms of databases and scholarly communities are making dissertations better, even as they make grad school less lonely. Peter Beal’s Catalogue of English Literary Manuscripts 1450-1700 is appearing in fits and starts, while the Orlando Project at the University of Alberta brings to light hitherto un(der)-read work by women writers whose importance the pre-digital humanities have overlooked. The British Library seems to unveil a new flight of high-resolution images each day, while stateside enterprises, including the William Blake Archive and the Beinecke’s Boswell project, add significant collections annually.