Andrew Sullivan's Blog, page 374

“A Symptom Of A Sick Consumer Society”

A reader writes:

If you’re going to be posting any Superbowl-related links this week, might I suggest the [above video]. It is an old, old Daily Show clip that I watch every year around this time, wherein Rob Corddry gives what has to be one of his best performances ever pretending to report on what the big ads were that year and then suffering a breakdown/spiritual epiphany that leads to some of the most biting cultural satire I’ve seen… all for that special night each year “when the advertising industry takes all of our black, empty yearning and spins it into dreams!”

The Robots Took Er Jerbs! Ctd

Last week, a study identified the jobs most likely to be automated in the future. Derek Thompson looks at how the fastest-growing jobs will be impacted:

Here are the ten fastest-growing jobs and the odds that robots and software eat them:

1) Personal care aides: 74%

2) Registered nurses: 0.9%

3) Retail salespersons: 92%

4) Combined food prep & serving workers: 92%

5) Home health aides: 39%

6) Physician assistant: 9%

7) Secretaries and admin assistants: 96%

8) Customer service representatives: 55%

9) Janitors and cleaners: 66%

10) Construction workers: 71%

These ten occupations account for 3.85 million projected jobs in the next ten years, or 25 percent of the decade’s projected job haul. And six of them are at least two-thirds automatable, based on researchers’ projections of current computing power.

James Bessen takes comfort in historical precedents:

According to 60 Minutes, “Bank tellers have given way to ATMs. Sales clerks are surrendering to e-commerce. And switchboard operators and secretaries to voice recognition technology,” arguing that digital technologies are leading to persistent unemployment. But, in fact, there are more bank tellers, sales clerks and receptionists and secretaries in 2009 than in 1999, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. The reason: demand.

For example, it takes fewer bank tellers to operate a bank branch, thanks to the ATMs. This makes it less costly to operate a bank branch, allowing banks to open more of them. With more branches, banks can expand their markets. But more branches mean greater demand for tellers, offsetting the loss in the number of tellers per branch. Bank tellers today perform different tasks than in the past – they do fewer simple jobs like counting cash and more of the customer interaction of “relationship banking.” These tasks require different skills, but ATMs have not eliminated teller jobs.

Miles Brundage joins the conversation:

[T]he tasks that are easy to automate aren’t necessarily the boring and repetitive ones, and the tasks that are hard to automate aren’t necessarily the fun and interesting ones. Consider, for example, the warehouses that power Amazon’s vast supply chains. As shown in a recent BBC documentary and a first-person account in the Guardian, the workers in these warehouses aren’t exactly living the dream—they are under constant pressure by their computerized overlords to meet impossible picking-and-placing targets, are physically exhausted at the end of work each day, and their working conditions may put them at increased risk of mental illness.

From a technological point of view, these warehouses are perfect examples of human-machine symbiosis in action. People have excellent dexterity and perception compared with robots, and computers can schedule workers’ movements around the warehouse efficiently, use their perfect memories to keep track of the locations of items, and set targets to motivate employees. From a subjective point of view, though, many of these workers report feeling like robots themselves.

A Poem For Thursday

“Upon Looking into Sylvia Plath’s Letters Home” by John Updike:

Yes, this is how it was to have been born

in 1932—the having parents

everyone said loved you and you had to love;

the believing having a wonderful life began

with being good at school; the certainty

that words would count; the diligence with postage,

sending things out; the seeing Dreyer’s silent Joan

at the Museum of Modern Art, and being

greatly moved; the courtship of the slicks,

because one had to eat, one and one’s spouse,

that soulmate in Bohem-/Utop-ia.

You, dead at thirty, leaving blood-soaked poems

for all the anthologies, and I still wheezing,

my works overweight; and yet we feel twins.

(From Collected Poems, 1953-1993 by John Updike © 1993 by John Updike. Used by permission of Alfred A. Knopf, an imprint of the Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group, a division of Random House LLC.  All rights reserved.)

“The Right To Be Different”

In a blog post summarizing his review of The Book Of Matt, Freddie DeBoer argues that rethinking the popular narrative of Shepard’s death could be good for the gay rights movement:

This will to make Shepard a martyr is part of a broad change in the philosophy of the gay rights movement of the past several decades, which has retreated from its traditional advocacy for the equal legitimacy of all sexual and gender identities to the assertion that gay people are just like straight people, in a way that ultimately cuts against the broader movement to equally protect and value all human beings across difference. “Respect all forms of human difference” is a liberal argument. “Everybody’s the same” is a reactionary one.

If there was a time when robbing Shepard of his life’s complexity was a necessary part of the political effort to defend people like him, that time has passed. The gay rights movement is ascendant, and those within it should use that visibility and power to advocate for the right to be different, not merely for the right to be gay.

I would put the task in more neutral terms: we should advocate not for normalcy or queerness. We should fight for the right of people to be fully themselves.

See the Dish’s Ask Anything series with The Book Of Matt author Stephen Jimenez here.

Faces Of The Day

Chinese opera performers pose as they wait backstage before The Beauty of China Opera show in Surabaya, Indonesia on January 30, 2014. Chinese opera is an important traditional art performance of music and drama which has been performed for over 500 years, however popularity has been on the decline in today’s modern society. It performed as part of the Chinese New Year celebrations known as the Spring festival or the Lunar New Year on January 31st, welcoming the Year of the Horse. By Robertus Pudyanto/Getty Images.

What Does Snowden Deserve?

Some say it’s a Nobel Peace Prize:

A pair of Norwegian politicians hailing from their country’s Socialist Left Party have nominated Snowden, arguing that his actions have helped to preserve trust between nations.

Moyihan rolls his eyes:

Remember that flurry of reports in October that “Russian President Vladimir Putin was nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize by an advocacy group that credits him with bringing about a peaceful resolution to the Syrian-U.S. dispute over chemical weapons?”

In 2012, hundreds of news organizations reported on Bradley Manning’s nomination (one of those Norwegian parliamentarians who nominated Snowden also nominated Manning). In 2011, the wires were clogged with stories of a potential Peace Prize gong for Julian Assange. And my personal favorite, courtesy of a former Swedish deputy prime minister and parliamentarian, the 2006 nominations of former U.N. ambassador John Bolton and right-wing polemicist Kenneth Timmerman, author of books on Jesse Jackson, the Iran nuclear program, and how the French “betrayed” America. (On the cover of Timmerman’s book Countdown to Crisis: The Coming Nuclear Showdown with Iran, potential readers are told the book is written by “a Nobel Peace Prize nominee.”)

This happens regularly because so many individuals can submit nominations:

[A]ny member of a “national government or legislature” or, say, any philosophy professor—from a member of Hungarian parliament representing the neo-Nazi Jobbik party to the bonkers Slovenian professor Slavoj Žižek—can create fake news by legitimately nominating someone who might be considered illegitimate by reasonable people.

Weigel adds his two cents:

Moynihan follows these fake news explosions more regularly than I do, but I was turned on to them nine years ago. This was when Dr. William Hammesfahr appeared in Florida, describing himself (and allowing news organizations to describe him) as a Nobel Prize nominee as he argued against pulling Terri Schiavo’s plug. A Florida congressman had written a letter recommending him for the prize, and Hammesfahr didn’t possess the self-awareness that usually prevents people from saying they were merely nominated for things. (You can safely ignore any reporter or TED speaker whose bio leads with how he made the short list for something but didn’t win.)

What Good Is Foreign Aid? Ctd

A reader writes:

I was thrilled to see the aid debate come up on your blog, as it’s a discussion well worth having for a large forum. Aid itself is a brilliant idea, and one with far-reaching and lasting effects, but there are basically no metrics for ROI, and nobody is acting to direct it intelligently. This happens because of the phenomenon Easterly notes, wherein people truly donate to feel good, not to actually effect change (which requires much more work).

For every successful vaccination program, we have extravagant shenanigans like “spreading Internet,” or other nonsense. Paul Farmer is a fundraising machine, and after over a decade in Haiti, the public health situation is actually worse there due to a set of diseases that are shockingly easy to treat and prevent: diarrheal illness.

Now I’ll admit that this is my personal area of work, so I’m biased, but the fact of the matter is that diarrhea is still the number-one infectious disease killer in the developing world, with HIV/AIDS so far off in the distance as to be virtually irrelevant. But money is still flowing in gobbets to a project that while compelling emotionally, is functionally useless in comparison.

Aid has to be intelligent, or it’s just rich people quacking about how great they are.

A jaded reader writes:

I was a Peace Corps volunteer in Bahrain and then spent 23 years as a foreign service officer with USAID. In my opinion, 90 percent of all projects are crap. One hundred percent of the assistance given to Israel and Egypt is crap. We need to fix the United States before we run around the world “fixing” other places.

Hillary’s Silence On Iran

Stephen Kinzer notes that “one of the surest signs that Clinton is running for the presidency is her refusal to take a position on the greatest geopolitical question now facing the United States”:

A strong statement by Clinton in favor of reconciliation [with Iran] would be a game-changer in Washington. She would be giving a centrist, establishment endorsement of her former boss’s most important foreign policy initiative. That would provide political cover for moderate Democrats terrified of antagonizing the Netanyahu government and the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, which is leading the anti-reconciliation campaign in Washington.

Such a statement, however, would risk outraging pro-Netanyahu groups and individuals who have been among Clinton’s key supporters since her days as a Senator from New York. Having spent years painstakingly laying the ground for a presidential campaign, she does not want to risk a misstep that would alienate major campaign contributors.

Kinzer doesn’t think a deal with Iran would have been happened if Clinton had remained the Secretary of State. However, a few weeks ago, Crowley pointed out that Hillary was open to diplomacy:

She was the first Obama official to suggest that Iran could maintain a domestic uranium enrichment program under an international nuclear deal. And one of her most trusted State Department aides, Jake Sullivan, conducted secret talks with the Iranians in Oman. “She was skeptical that diplomacy would work with the Iranians but absolutely convinced that we had to test the possibilities,” [Dennis] Ross adds.

Same Love, Different Genes?

In response to Macklemore and Ryan Lewis’s “Same Love,” the soundtrack to the cringe-worthy Grammy wedding, Brandon Ambrosino asks whether we can support equality without imagining sexuality as biologically predetermined:

One of the reasons I think our activism is so insistent on sexual rigidity is because, in our push to make gay rights the new black rights, we’ve conflated the two issues. The result is that we’ve decided that skin color is the same thing as sexual behavior. I don’t think this is true. When we conflate race and sexuality, we overlook how fluid we are learning our sexualities truly are. To say it rather crassly: I’ve convinced a few men to try out my sexuality, but I’ve never managed to get them to try on my skin color. …

Arguing that gayness is as genetically fixed as race might have bolstered our rhetoric a few years ago, but is it necessary to argue that way now? I understand that the genetic argument for homosexuality is a direct response to the tired “You weren’t born that way” rhetoric of religious people. But in my opinion, we could strip that religious argument of much of its power if we responded like this: “Maybe I wasn’t born this way. Now tell me why you think that matters.” I imagine many religious people haven’t really thought through the implications of their own rhetoric. (What, for instance, does a socially-constructed word like “natural” even mean?)

Sigh. The salient fact for a vast majority of gays is that we experience our sexual orientation exactly as straights do. We experience it as a given – and even the old-school reparative therapists believed it was fixed by the age of three. The pomo left doesn’t want this to be true, just as the Christianist right doesn’t either. But it is. John Aravosis makes the obvious point:

I’d love to see the Great Ambrosino in action, willing an attraction to a gender where, only moments ago, there was none.  It’s never happened in the history of the world.

Ambrosino is likely not formulating his thoughts terribly well (which happens when magazines hire people who can’t write).  He’s not describing gay people actually choosing their sexual orientation. He’s talking about either bisexuals (or people who are predominantly of one orientation, but still have enough attraction the other way that if the right person came along they could act on it), or he’s describing people who legitimately have seen their orientation morph over the years, through no causation of their own.  But all three of those categories are not people who “chose” to change their sexual orientation.  They are simply people who chose to act on the already-appealling meal placed before them.  Ambrosino didn’t choose to find men sexually attractive any more than I choose to love chocolate.  I can choose whether to partake in chocolate, but I can’t choose to turn on and off the underlying desire for the sweet.

Savage, meanwhile takes the gay outrage machine to task for bitching about Same Love:

The queers complaining about Macklemore & Ryan Lewis now remind me of the queers who used to bitch and bitch and bitch about how big beer companies didn’t advertise in queer publications or sponsor pride parades. (“Queer people drink a lot of beer! They want us to support them and buy their beer but they don’t want to support us and our community!”) But when big beer companies began advertising in queer publications and sponsoring pride parades… the exact same queers who had been complaining about how big beer companies weren’t advertising in queer publications or sponsoring pride parades immediately started bitching about how the beer companies were trying to profit off our sexuality. (“The pride parade is not for sale! We are a community, not a commodity!”) Blah blah bitchy blah.

I kinda hoped this lefty whininess and escape from reality would dissipate at some point. But no! At least at this point they aren’t actively sabotaging the case for gay equality and integration, as they did in the 1990s. But you’d think these fantasies about fluid male sexual orientation and the social construction of everything all the way down would have faded away by now.

A Time-Traveling Photographer

In an interview, Jennifer Greenburg discusses how the “American Dream” factors into her photography project, Revising History, in which she inserts herself into old photographs:

I look at casual pictures that I have taken and I notice that the more I look at an image of an event, the more I begin to remember that event differently. Something happens to the memory. It becomes translated into something else — something better than it was in the moment. Suddenly, I remember having the time of my life! Even if, in reality, I had been quite bored at that moment.

With this in mind, I then wonder if the concept of the American Dream was simply crafted by photography: is it simply an ideology made by editing key moments together, releasing them into the culture, thus re-writing our cultural memory? I think so.

And that is my idea behind Revising History: I take over someone else’s moment to call my own, but, I also go on to comment that I am not sure that the original moment was any more real than my fabrication.

(Photo caption: “My dreams came true the day I did hair for a fashion show,” 2013. By Jennifer Greenburg)