Andrew Sullivan's Blog, page 355

King Of The Anthill

Meet the crazy ant:

Researchers recently discovered that crazy ants have a natural defense against the venom of fire ants:

When a crazy ant is sprayed with venom from the abdomen of a fire ant, the crazy ant secretes formic acid from its own abdomen, takes the secretion in its mouth, and smears it over its body. According to Furturity, exposed crazy ants that were allowed to detoxify themselves had a 98 percent survival rate in lab experiments. When [researcher Edward] LeBrun and his team sealed up the crazy ants’ abdominal glands with nail polish, the number of survivors dropped to below half. On the battlefield, this makes the crazy ants impervious to the weapons of the fire ant.

Kate Shaw Yoshida has more on the evolutionary arms race between the species:

While this rare ability confers a huge advantage for crazy ant survival, its biggest implications are ecological.

Ever since fire ants were imported into the southern US in the 1930s, they have been the dominant ant species in most grassland ecosystems. But crazy ants—introduced only about 12 years ago—are now taking over, thanks in part to their ability to detoxify fire ant venom. When the two species fight over food or space, crazy ants come out on top 93 percent of the time.

Digging into these two species’ past sheds light on this asymmetry. Tawny crazy ants and red imported fire ants share an evolutionary history since their native ranges overlap in parts of South America. Their arms race began there, with fire ants evolving venom to defend themselves and crazy ants evolving a detoxification mechanism as a counter-defense. Now the chemical warfare has been re-engaged here on a second continent, playing out across the Gulf Coast. And for a second time in the past century, a new invasive ant species is dominating and drastically transforming ecological communities.

George Dvorsky calls crazy ants “a total headache”:

As they make their way north at a rate of 600 feet a year, they’re wreaking havoc on populations of insects, spiders, centipedes and crustaceans. This is likely to cause deleterious effects on various ecosystems. They can’t be stopped with conventional pesticide, they’ve been known to disable a huge industrial plant, and they frequently short out electrical equipment.

Do Children Have A Right To Die?

Late last week, Belgian lawmakers overwhelmingly passed a measure that would allow euthanasia for terminally ill children. Ben White and Lindy Willmott explain:

Belgium has removed the age limits to access its assisted dying regime and this has been reported as a world first. This is true, but it is also important to note that the scheme in the Netherlands permits access for children as young as 12, provided various conditions are met. So, the key difference in Belgium is that access to euthanasia is not limited by age. A child will only be eligible to access the legislation if all of the following conditions are satisfied:

The child must be “conscious” and display “a capacity of discernment”. This refers to a child who is competent to decide for themselves. …
The child must “be in a hopeless medical situation of constant and unbearable suffering that cannot be eased and which will cause death in the short-term”.
The child must be counselled by doctors and a psychiatrist or psychologist, and the child’s decision must be approved by his or her parents.

What is apparent is that the cohort of children who may access euthanasia in Belgium is narrow: terminally ill children who cannot otherwise be helped and who are capable of making a considered decision about seeking assistance to die. The capacity aspect serves as an indirect limit related to age, as only older, mature children would be able to satisfy that criterion.

Eugene Kontorovich fiercely objects:

Allowing minors to take their lives, or have them been taken, necessarily makes assumptions about their capacity that is at odds with many liberal features of international law.

International treaties, including the Rome Statute of the ICC, make the recruitment of child soldiers a crime, and European countries have been active in promoting the expansion of these norms. Being a child soldier (under 15) is not a crime, only enlisting them. Crucially, the consent of the child, her parents or any psychologists is not a defense. Indeed, consent is presumed, as the crime covers accepting voluntary enlistees. As the Special Court for Sierra Leone put it:

The act of enlisting presupposes that the individual in question voluntarily consented to be part of the armed force or group. However, where a child under the age of 15 years is allowed to voluntarily join an armed force or group, his or her consent is not a valid defense.

But is this still a far cry from euthanasia? Not if the underlying issue is one of capacity to make life-imperiling decisions.

The Belgians, who overwhelmingly approve of euthanasia for adults, seem to have been caught off guard by the international outcry. As Clare Wilson reports, even Belgian kids seem to support euthanasia, at least in certain cases:

There is some research on how children themselves view euthanasia. Take Femke, a fictional 14-year-old girl who has terminal bone cancer, cannot tolerate the pain and wants to die. Her hypothetical case was presented to 1,769 Belgian teenagers aged around 14 at 20 secondary schools. Of these, 61 per cent said Femke should be offered euthanasia, compared with only 18 per cent for Nathalie, a girl with severe but not life-threatening burns. In another study, 90 per cent of adolescent cancer survivors interviewed said terminally ill children should be free to make end-of-life decisions. ”Most children say they would want to make the decision on their own,” says Johan Bilsen of the end-of-life care research group at the Free University of Brussels and Ghent University, who co-authored both studies, “but would want their parents involved.”

California’s Endless Summer, Ctd

David Dayen runs through what means for residents, farmers, and the rest of the country:

The conditions have created impossible, Sophie’s Choice-type dilemmas. The State Water Project, which supplies water to agencies serving 25 million residents, announced they would make no deliveries this month for the first time in history. Seventeen California communities and water districts, primarily in the Central Valley, may not have drinking water in the next 60-90 days. Residents in these cities are being asked to cut their water usage by as much as 30 percent.

Farmers may have to leave half a million acres fallow this planting season, a record loss that could cost more than $2 billion. They must choose between watering perennially thirsty almond and cherry trees and planting annual crops like tomatoes and lettuce. Any choice will result in lower yields and increased food prices across the country. Migrant workers won’t get hired to cultivate crops, leading to unemployment that could top 50 percent in some Central Valley towns. The state has banned fishing in several rivers to protect thinning populations. The dry conditions create breeding grounds for wildfires, which started this year as early as January. Ranchers have been forced to sell off their calves at half their usual sale weight because of a lack of grass, a predicament that has even faced rancher and Congressman John Garamendi, who has sold one-third of his herd. “It’s going to affect everything that goes on in the state,” Garamendi said.

Alex Park and Julia Lurie add:

Even though some rain has finally come, it would be nearly impossible for California to make up the water it needs. According to the Department of Water Resources, the state would need to experience heavy rain or snowfall every other day from now until May in order to achieve average annual precipitation levels. Dr. Peter Gleick, codirector of the water-focused research nonprofit the Pacific Institute, explained that because California’s reservoirs are already depleted from a dry past two years, “We need a really, really wet rest of the season. And that’s statistically unlikely.”

Earlier Dish on the drought here.

(Map from the US Drought Monitor)

Unfriending Facebook, Ctd

A reader pushes back against the Facebook defenders:

There’s something distinctly unfriendly in requiring people to participate in your chosen broadcast forum in order to participate in your life, rather than reaching out to them individually. It’s like that older aunt who sends out a form letter once a year to tell you all about that family vacation and their kids’ successful lives and the new car they bought, with the only personal touch being the signature at the end: she isn’t interested in you or your path through life, she’s just proudly announcing her own satisfaction at you. Which is great – I’m glad that people are happy and want to share that – but that’s not a friendship.

Another reader:

My problem with Facebook isn’t my all-too-happy friends. I love my happy friends and find happiness in their happiness. I love seeing pictures of their vacations, of their children, and hearing about their life events. But finding that in my newsfeed is getting harder and harder. Instead, I’m barraged with videos that someone thinks funny, shared articles about how Obama or the Republicans are destroying America (while I love to hear about my friends’ lives, I have no interest in hearing about their politics), or the endless stream of link bait that some friends seem incapable of not sharing. News flash to my friends: I never click on the links you share.

Another:

I’m 28 – about the same age as your reader who “can’t imagine leaving the site” – and I deleted my Facebook account last fall, after being a user since 2004. This happened to be a few months after I departed the city I’d lived in for five years, leaving behind most of my closest friends, and moved across the country.

Guess what? My friends are, miraculously, still my friends.

They still know what’s going on in my life, and I theirs. I’m still in daily contact with most of them, via old-fashioned means like texting, G-chatting, e-mails, and phone calls. (Not getting sucked into the Facebook/Buzzfeed/Upworthy meme-industrial complex five times a day means I have a lot more time for actual conversations.)

A telling anecdote: An old friend I hadn’t heard from in two years texted me out of the blue one night. She wondered how I was doing, and when she couldn’t find me on Facebook, she figured she’d ask me herself. We ended up meeting a few weeks later and rekindling our friendship. Not only did this happen despite my not being on Facebook; it seems like it happened because I was not on Facebook.

Another reader, on the other hand, emphasizes that social networking is what you make it:

I find Facebook to be interesting, broadening, connecting, and other very positive things. So many of my Facebook friends post links to great articles or TED talks or whatnot that I would not otherwise see. Virtually none of my friends “brag,” unless it’s about a big deal (“My daughter had her baby!”).

On the other hand, I am FB friends with exactly one high school friend and one college friend. I am FB friends only with family members I feel like keeping intimately up to date with, which includes my husband’s second cousin’s wife (because I adore her) but only two of my nine nephews. I have 178 friends, not 590 or 823 or 1,672. I am friends with people whose opinions I value and whom I care about.

Here are 10 topics my friends have posted about today:

Rejoicing over getting concert tickets.
Asking for recommendations for a hair stylist.
Dad died this morning after a long illness.
Link to NYT article on food co-ops (and how they fail).
Lament that former elementary school is being torn down.
Ill dog is continuing to recover.
Lament about lousy winter weather. (Lots of those!)
Family photo from 1968.
Discouraged over (temporary) work issue.
(This is my favorite!) “Looking at Charles Ingalls’ and Almanzo Wilder’s land claims.” (by my friend who is an archivist)

You want Facebook to be a positive experience? Select the people you choose to be friends with.

Read the whole thread here. More readers share their unfiltered thoughts on our Facebook page. For instance:

For someone with a business, being active on Facebook is almost a necessity. Facebook is our primary (and free) method of advertising/getting our name out there. I suppose we’d get by without it, but it sure makes things easier.

The Best Of The Dish Today

In the latest manifestation of intolerance, the Museum of Jewish Heritage has withdrawn a previous invitation to John Judis to give a talk on his new book, Genesis: Truman, American Jews, And the Origins Of The Arab-Israeli Conflict. It’s distressing how some in the American Jewish community seem so terrified of open public debate about Israel, America and Zionism, and particularly poignant in this case. I knew John as a colleague at TNR for many years, and he is a sober, restrained, reasoned intellectual: always careful, never inflammatory, but also possessed of a very keen sense of social justice. We didn’t see eye to eye on a lot of things, but I was proud to edit and publish him. It does not surprise me that the usual hatchet-men are on his case for daring to question the accepted story of Israel’s birth, and to pinpoint the moral costs of it. But it is depressing nonetheless. All I can do in response is to order the book from Amazon. You can too. A decent review can be found here. Another rave was just published in the Boston Globe.

So I brought up the parallels between Hillary Clinton and the fictional Claire Underwood. No, I’m not trying to rehash the 1990s. I actually think that Clinton’s best argument for the presidency is that she’s a tough “old broad” who knows how to make things work in Washington. It has the added benefit of being true, unlike all the Clintonista bullshit.

Ukraine erupted; another black teen was shot by an angry racist white guy who couldn’t be convicted of pre-meditated murder; I had my fill of the liar in charge of NSA surveillance, James Clapper; and former inmates from the gulags of North Korea described and illustrated several of the torture techniques Dick Cheney and Kim Jong-Un have in common.

The most popular post of the day was What The Hell Just Happened In Kansas? That single post has now garnered more than 1.6 million pageviews; and well over a million unique visitors since it went live. Second up: How Much Is Hillary Clinton Like Claire Underwood?

Rabbits!

See you in the morning.

The Expanding Right To Bear Arms

Last week, the Ninth Circuit issued what Lyle Denniston calls “the most sweeping decision yet on the right to carry a gun in public places.” David Kopel points out that “shall issue” is becoming the rule rather than the exception:

Zach Weissmueller supports the ruling:

In its ruling, the court wrote that “to forbid nearly all forms of public arms bearing would be to destroy the right to bear arms entirely.” California issues concealed carry permits on a “may issue” basis, meaning that in many counties, citizens must apply to the county’s sheriff department and show “good cause” to have a [concealed carry weapon (CCW) permit]. A majority of states have a “shall issue” rule, which forces local governments to justify the denial of a permit by citing a criminal record, mental health issue, or some other potential public safety risk. Approximately 0.1% of California citizens have CCWs, which is almost 20 times lower than in the average shall-issue state, a statistic that supports the court’s opinion that the “good cause” rule is destroying, or at least severely hindering, the right to bear arms.

Mataconis expects SCOTUS to take up the question:

Once the Supreme Court ruled that the Second Amendment protected the keep a gun in one’s home for self-defense in Heller, and then ruled that, like the rest of the Bill of Rights, the Second Amendment applied to the states in McDonald v. Chicago, it was inevitable that the day would come when the Federal Courts in general, and the Supreme Court specifically, would be required to rule on the issue of whether or not the right recognized in Heller extended beyond the confines of the home. Logically, of course, there’s no reason why it shouldn’t, and while there is arguably a good case to be made that states should be permitted to create some reasonable regulations when it comes to the right to carry, whether it be open or concealed, it seems unlikely that a Supreme Court that still treats Heller as good law will decide that individuals only have Second Amendment rights inside their home. How far the right extends beyond that is something we’ll have to wait to find out.

Another Trayvon?

So this happened this weekend:

After four days of deliberation, the jury in the racially tinged trial of Michael Dunn, a Florida man who set off another firestorm over the state’s self-defense laws when he shot a teenager to death in a parking lot during a dispute over loud music, said it could not agree on whether Mr. Dunn had acted to protect himself or was guilty of murder. The jurors did find Mr. Dunn guilty of three counts of second-degree attempted murder for getting out of his car and firing several times at the Dodge Durango sport utility vehicle in which Jordan Davis, 17, was killed. Three other teenagers, the subjects of the attempted murder charges, were in the car but were not struck. Mr. Dunn continued to fire at the vehicle even as it pulled away. On the attempted murder convictions, he could be sentenced to 60 years in prison.

In other words, a white man was found guilty of firing shots at a car filled with unarmed black teenagers, yet somehow he is not responsible for the young man who died inside. TNC is livid:

I wish I had something more to say about the fact that Michael Dunn was not convicted for killing a black boy. Except I said it after George Zimmerman was not convicted of killing a black boy. Except the parents of black boys already know this. Except the parents of black boys have long said this, and they have been answered with mockery. …[T]he inability of black parents to protect their children is an ancient tradition.

He adds in a followup:

What is bracing about these regular deaths is how easily I can slot myself into the same circumstance. Follow me in a Jeep, then follow me on foot and we might come to blows. Demand that I turn down my music, at 17, and you might well not like my response. And I do not think this is a fact of black magic, of pathologies, of my culture. I think it is product of 17. I ride the trains in New York and I see boys of all colors who are very loud, because they finally can be, and no one can stop them. I see them and smile, and remember my own days back in Baltimore, my first freedoms, talking shit and being out in the world.

Bouie describes the cases of Zimmerman and Dunn as “our Dirty Harry epidemic”:

[Both] stories rely on particular tropes. Martin and Davis aren’t just rude or rowdy teenagers, they are dangerous intruders — aggressive thugs who can turn violent at any moment. And it’s up to the keepers of the peace – Zimmerman and Dunn – to play Dirty Harry and put them in their place. To wit, in one of his letters from prison, Dunn said as much: “This may sound a bit radical, but if more people would arm themselves and kill these (expletive) idiots when they’re threatening you, eventually they may take the hint and change their behavior.” …

Put simply, the narratives of Dunn and Zimmerman reflect a cultural near-consensus on the idea of the threatening black criminal. And, when trying to explain the verdicts in both cases – Zimmerman’s acquittal and Dunn’s hung jury on the count of first degree murder – it’s worth considering the extent to which they found receptive audiences; jury members who believed their stories, or at least, could empathize with their fear of “thugs.”

Meanwhile, David Kopel argues that Stand Your Ground laws had nothing to do with the verdict:

Because the jury convicted Dunn of three counts of attempted murder, it is certain that the jury determined that Dunn was not acting in lawful self-defense. Stand Your Ground is a rule about one detail of when self-defense is lawful. Accordingly, the assertion that Stand Your Ground may have been a reason why the jury hung on the first degree murder charge is totally implausible. The three convictions for second-degree murder show that the jury had determined there was no self-defense; ergo, jury confusion about self-defense was not the reason why the jury deadlocked on first-degree murder.

Sullum isn’t so sure:

The right to “stand your ground” when attacked in a public place did not figure prominently in the trial, but Dunn’s lawyer, Cory Strolla, did mention it during his closing argument, saying, “His honor will further tell you that if Michael Dunn was in a public place where he had a legal right to be, he had no duty to retreat and had the right to stand his ground and meet force with force, including deadly force.” As in the Zimmerman case, the jury instruction concerning justifiable homicide mentioned that right, and it is more plausible in this case that it made a difference, since Dunn arguably could have driven away even if, as he claimed, Davis menaced him with a shotgun.

But he’s still skeptical of a connection:

If Davis had a shotgun and threatened to kill Dunn, as Dunn claims, the shooting was justified. If Davis had no weapon and made no threats, the shooting was not justified. If Davis threatened Dunn (or merely shouted curses at him) and was holding something that Dunn mistook for a shotgun, the question is fuzzier: In the circumstances, was it reasonable for Dunn to believe Davis had a gun and intended to use it? But the question of what Dunn reasonably believed has nothing to do with the presence or absence of a duty to retreat. … Jurors across the country face this same challenge of deciding whether a homicide was justified based on the reasonable-belief standard, regardless of whether their state imposes a duty to retreat.

And Corrine McConnaughy considers the research on racial bias in the courtroom:

A courtroom environment where race is present but not consciously checked is precisely the kind that research has shown is conducive to a number of cognitive biases entering the legal process. Studies have shown that jurors in these circumstances are more likely to selectively remember and misremember the facts of the case in ways that are more consistent with racial stereotypes – being more likely to recall, for example, facts related to aggression by African Americans. They also demonstrate that white jurors are more likely (pdf) to find black defendants guilty in the absence of conscious processing of the racial meaning of the case. While this case did not involve a black defendant, it did involve a need for jurors to judge the culpability of Jordan Davis for his own death in order to decide upon Dunn’s self-defense claims. Whether and how the absence of individuating details about Davis in the trial mattered in the jury’s decisions thus stands an open but legitimate question.

Ask Reza Aslan Anything: How Can A Muslim Write About Jesus?

That’s the question Fox News used against Reza, channeled here by a less interrogatory reader:

Reza is an Iranian-American writer and scholar of religions. He is the author of No god but God: The Origins, Evolution, and Future of Islam and, most recently, Zealot, which offers an interpretation of the life and mission of the historical Jesus. Previous Dish on Zealot here, here and here.

Our full Ask Anything archive is here.

Quote For The Day

“There have been seven disasters since humans came on the earth, very similar to the one that’s just about to happen. I think these events keep separating the wheat from the chaff. And eventually we’ll have a human on the planet that really does understand it and can live with it properly. That’s the source of my optimism,” – maverick British scientist (with a great track record), James Lovelock, on what he considers the pending catastrophe of climate change. Bonus money quote:

Enjoy life while you can. Because if you’re lucky it’s going to be 20 years before it hits the fan.

Ukraine Reignites, Ctd

Troubling images from #Kiev. @AP pic shows protestor engulfed in flame. 9 dead, toll likely to rise #Ukraine pic.twitter.com/skmpzXPzSX

— Jon Williams (@WilliamsJon) February 18, 2014

BREAKING: Protest camp in center of Ukraine's capital engulfed in flames as police advance on protesters.

— The Associated Press (@AP) February 18, 2014

Ukrainian authorities cut off the center of Kyiv then issued an ultimatum to leave. It's like they want to kill more people. #euromaidan

— joshuafoust (@joshuafoust) February 18, 2014

Protester tents burning on Maidan right now after police toss Molotov cocktails from their perch above square. #euromaidan #ukraine

— Christopher Miller (@ChristopherJM) February 18, 2014

Ukraine Liveblog: Intense fires after police light protesters' tents on fire in Maidan http://t.co/a6dwzF9mzO pic.twitter.com/kxZcW9KMKZ

— The Interpreter (@Interpreter_Mag) February 18, 2014

protesters have set water cannon on fire.

— Kateryna_Kruk (@Kateryna_Kruk) February 18, 2014

RAW VIDEO: Thousands of angry anti-government demonstrators clash with police outside Ukraine's parliament: http://t.co/zEzqUsjjXu

— The Associated Press (@AP) February 18, 2014

#euromaidan #Ukraine @insider_com_ua reports that Lviv regional administration building is retaken by protesters.

— Taras Denysenko (@TarasDenysenko) February 18, 2014

As riot police move in on opposition camp in Kiev, protesters sing Ukrainian national anthem #euromaidan

— Maria Danilova (@mashadanilova) February 18, 2014

Arseniy Yatsenuk, one of the opposition leaders has called for truce till morning, but calls were ignored. Heavy smoke rising from maidan

— Yulia Bragina (@YuliaSkyNews) February 18, 2014

Great shot RT @AFP Police clash with anti-government protesters in Kiev, Ukraine pic.twitter.com/9S6m3ZQt6B

— Neal Mann (@fieldproducer) February 18, 2014

Ukraine protest leader, ex-Minister Lutsenko: "The slaves of Putin want to make us all slaves…We will lay down our lives for the freedom"

— Simon Shuster (@shustry) February 18, 2014

Dad saw heavy-duty vehicles on the way to Maidan. License plates not local. Buses – license plates not local. #Kiev #euromaidan

— Natalia Antonova (@NataliaAntonova) February 18, 2014

Crimean parliament says civil war is under way in Ukraine. States possibility of mobilization. http://t.co/3gJPfDw6ZB

— Leonid Ragozin (@leonidragozin) February 18, 2014

Watch the live feed from Kiev: https://t.co/ypMeNI4hnO #ukraine #euromaidan

— Andy Carvin (@acarvin) February 18, 2014

21 journalists covering #Euromaidan clashes today in Kyiv were attacked by Berkut & "titushki" groups http://t.co/jZsCj3b30r

— Ryskeldi Satke (@RyskeldiSatke) February 18, 2014

Ukraine riots in pictures: Violent scenes in Kiev as police clash with protesters http://t.co/KEoNveT8CF pic.twitter.com/AJeXcukE4z

— Telegraph Pictures (@TelegraphPics) February 18, 2014

Analysis and commentary from the blogosphere to follow. Recent Dish coverage of the violence in Ukraine here. More context from early December here.

(Hat tip: Max Fisher, who rounded up “the 16 essential Twitter accounts to follow Ukraine’s unfolding crisis”)