Andrew Sullivan's Blog, page 423

Are Human Rights For Chimps, Too?

We’ll soon see:

On Monday, the Nonhuman Rights Project filed papers suing the state of New York for the emancipation of a privately owned chimpanzee named Tommy. They plan to file two more suits on behalf of another privately owned chimp named Kiko, and a pair of research chimps called Hercules and Leo.

The group uses the legal argument of habeas corpus, which requires a person under detention to be brought before a court, especially to end unlawful imprisonment. It was notably used by the antislavery movement to define human beings as legal persons, not legal property. Chimpanzees, because of their awareness of self and of passing time, should also have rights to bodily liberty, the group argues.

Ben Richmond digs into the case:

The group’s essential argument is that a chimpanzee can be recognized as “legal person” without biologically being a person. Just as corporations can be people under the Fourteenth Amendment, “legal personality may be granted to entities other than individual human beings, e.g. a group of human beings, a fund, an idol.” The memorandum of law for Tommy’s case cites a case in New Zealand where the Whanganui River Iwi was designated as a legal person, as well as two separate examples from India where a mosque and an idol were granted legal personhood. If Tommy can be recognized as a legal person then, the case argues, he deserves to be set free under the common law writ of habeas corpus, unless the owner of Santa’s Hitching Post, a tourist attraction where Tommy is kept, can prove that “their imprisonment of Tommy is legally sufficient.”

Bryan Walsh calls the suit “potentially revolutionary” from a legal perspective:

Habeas corpus allows someone being held captive to seek relief by having a judge force his captors to explain why he is being held. It’s frequently used in cases alleging unlawful imprisonment, including those of detainees in Guantánamo. The lawsuit makes reference to a famous 1772 English case that dealt with an American slave named James Somerset, who had escaped from his owner in London, been recaptured and was set to be returned from slavery. … With testimonials from experts like Jane Goodall, [the suit] makes the case that chimpanzees have qualities that allow them to have the very basic legal right not to be imprisoned. It’s not that chimpanzees are the legal equivalent of human beings. Rather, the court filing – obtained by James Gorman at the New York Times – argues that chimpanzees are enslaved, and that the courts already recognize that slavery is wrong

Michael Todd adds:

“Personhood” is a big step beyond just calling for an end, say, to animal experimentation or pigeon shoots.

A lot of observers, including some in the animal rights movement itself, see it as quixotic or loaded with a raft of unintended, and potentially unwelcome, consequences. But we already know that corporations are people, possibly even having rights like freedom of religion, so what might have once seemed absurd now merely seems a stretch.

Elie Mystal sees the logic:

Whatever you think of the cognitive abilities and emotions of chimps, I think we can all agree that they are different from, say, chairs. They’re different from cars. Treating these animals as mere property is simply wrong. We do, of course, have a class of persons in this country who don’t have maximum rights but are more than mere property. They’re called “children,” and most of them have considerably less intelligence than a chimpanzee. So there is precedent for extending legal protection to “human-like” creatures who throw poop and change the channel during the last two minutes of a football game.

But Stephen Bainbridge isn’t buying it:

The problem, I believe, is that attempts to define the debate in moral or philosophical terms ignores the basic fact that the rationale for corporate personhood sounds in neither. Instead, it is based on practicality and utility. Put another way, we treat the corporation as a legal person because doing so has proven to be a highly efficient way for real people to organize their business activities and to vindicate their rights. Put yet another way, we treat the corporation as a legal person because it is a nexus of contracts between real persons. Which is something no animal can ever be.

Either way, the stakes are high:

If NhRP is successful in New York, it could be a significant step toward upending millennia of law defining animals as property and could set off a “chain reaction” that could bleed over to other jurisdictions, says Richard Cupp, a law professor at Pepperdine University in Malibu, California, and a proponent of focusing on animal welfare rather than animal rights. “But if they lose it could be a significant step backward for the movement. They’re playing with fire.”

(Photo: Orlando Sierra/AFP/Getty Images)

The Master Of The Viral Web

Neetzan Zimmerman, formerly of The Daily What, dwarfs the traffic of all other Gawker bloggers:

Farhad Manjoo profiles the aficionado:

Mr. Zimmerman is a 32-year-old editor at the news-and-entertainment site Gawker, where he’s responsible for posting “viral” content—videos, photos, crazy local news stories—that readers can’t resist sharing with everyone they know. “Mom Fined $140 Every Day Until She Circumcises Her Child” or “Black Man Arrested Dozens of Times for ‘Trespassing’ While At Work.” With his posts generating more than 30 million page views a month, Mr. Zimmerman may be the most popular blogger working on the Web today.

Indeed, Mr. Zimmerman earns traffic so reliably that it’s tempting to dismiss him as an automaton who simply posts every sensational news story that comes along, or as a mere “aggregator” who doesn’t contribute anything original to journalism. But that take misses Mr. Zimmerman’s skill. He posts only about a dozen items a day. Almost every one becomes a big traffic hit—an astonishing rate of success. I’ve worked on the Web for years, and I still have trouble predicting which of my stories will be hits and which will appeal only to my mom. Mr. Zimmerman has somehow cracked the code.

His secret, he says, is a deep connection to his audience’s evolving, irreducibly human, primal sensibilities. Usually within a few seconds of seeing an item, Mr. Zimmerman can sense whether it’s destined to become a viral story. “I guess you could call it intuition,” he says.

Ezra draws lessons from Zimmerman’s success. Among them:

The traffic potential of the social Web is far beyond what most media sites recognize. We all might think we understand Facebook and Twitter’s power to drive traffic. But it turns out that when you actually create content specifically meant for those networks –particularly Facebook – they drive vastly more traffic than ever seemed possible.

Another:

Publishers need to spend a lot more time thinking about how to package non-social content to give it the best chance on the social Web. This is the one that I’m a bit obsessed with. Newspapers and magazines put tremendous effort into producing hard-hitting reports and beautiful long reads and then basically just hope that they take off socially. The tools they use are, for the most part, the same tools they’ve always used: Headlines and press releases, and nowadays they’ll push articles through their Facebook and Twitter accounts, too.

But they’re not routinely creating visual — much less video — promotions for their best content, even though that kind of content does much better socially.

But Facebook looks like it is going to make Zimmerman’s job harder:

Our surveys show that on average people prefer links to high quality articles about current events, their favorite sports team or shared interests, to the latest meme. Starting soon, we’ll be doing a better job of distinguishing between a high quality article on a website versus a meme photo hosted somewhere other than Facebook when people click on those stories on mobile. This means that high quality articles you or others read may show up a bit more prominently in your News Feed, and meme photos may show up a bit less prominently.

Ezra considers the implications of this development.

Should We Strive For A World Without Borders?

Joseph Carens, author of The Ethics of Immigration, questions the morality of deportation:

I ask people, “Do you think the way the world is organized is really fair?” Well, one of the ways in which it’s unfair is that states are given this right to control who gets in and who cannot get in. That’s key to the ability to have some very rich states and a lot of very poor states, because if the rich states didn’t have that control, then people would move from the poor states to the rich states. And that’s exactly what the people in the rich states are worried about.

So you have to ask, “How is this fair?” I think it’s not fair. I don’t think the solution to that is to have all these people moving, because most people would rather live in the society where they’re born. And they would stay there if the opportunities were adequate. The real point is that we have an obligation to make the world more equal, to lower the disparity. There are a variety of ways to do that, and immigration would be one component.

But I think in a just world there wouldn’t be any need for immigration controls.

There could be open borders, and it wouldn’t be a big threat, because most people don’t want to move. Europe has open borders within Europe, and there’s a very low rate of movement. Very few European citizens live outside the state where they’re citizens. Who wants to move to a place where they don’t know anybody or can’t speak the language? People in Greece or Spain might try to move now because things are so desperate, but normally people aren’t going to move for just a minor advantage.

Speaking of immigration within the EU, Massie wishes Brits were capable of a real conversation on the topic:

Almost no-one, not even the relative handful of people truly in favour of open borders, claims there is no downside – or potential downside – to immigration. Most people acknowledge that there are circumstances or places in which it can cause some difficulties. It is not daft to think that population growth can sometimes, in some places, place additional stress on public services. Nor is it reprehensible to think that some immigrants are better placed to thrive in Britain than others or that some are less likely to assimilate or make a valuable contribution to life in this country.

But it is possible to note that – even, if you prefer, to concede that – and still conclude that the right to move anywhere within the European Union is one of the greatest expansions of human liberty we – that is, Europeans –  have enjoyed in recent decades. It is an achievement that should not be cast aside lightly, far less with great force.

Is Climate Change Fueling Terrorism?

Tristan McConnell and Nick Loomis consider the connection, specifically in the Sahel, a region just south of the Sahara:

“Climate change plays two roles,” says [energy efficiency company] Opower’s [Drew] Sloan. “When you and your family have been living off the same land for generations and all of a sudden that becomes impossible, the first impact is relocation. But there’s a limited amount of land in the world so we’re going to see more and more skirmish zones. … Second, climate change makes people feel small and helpless, and Islamic fundamentalists have been very good at turning helplessness and despair into anger and action. If you give someone who feels small a gun, they stop feeling small,” he adds. Sloan is a former US Army soldier. “If you give them a direction to point that gun they stop feeling helpless.”

[UC Berkeley scholar Marshall] Burke, a resource economist, is more cautious.

He says the evidence does not yet suggest direct cause-and-effect links between climate change and specific conflicts, but that climate change increases the likelihood of conflict in general. “Years of bad climate — in particular, years of unusually hot temperatures or extreme rainfall — substantially increases the likelihood that many different types of conflict might occur,” says Burke. “We cannot say definitively that changes in climate are what has caused the growing conflict across the Sahel but the types of climate change we’ve seen are on average associated with higher rates of conflict.” …

[Burke] also sees glimmers of hope. “There are many other factors that also affect conflict, and many of these things are improving: countries are getting a little wealthier, and developing better institutions. Whether these improvements will outweigh the negative effects of climate change, I don’t think we know yet.”

The Bell Keeps Tolling, Ctd

Judis sees New York going bi-weekly as “the latest indication that high quality print magazines and newspapers are slowly but surely passing from the scene”:

Smaller specialized publications with niche audiences and advertisers have survived the transition to the web. So have smaller political publications that have always depended on sympathetic benefactors to make up their losses. Bigger general interest magazines like New York or Time will, if they survive, become more dependent on the kind of consumer features that have allowedU.S. News to limp along. But the danger here is that the kind of features or reporting for which they were known will become accessories the way they are in airline or fashion magazines. I worry even more about the big newspapers. Who will be around to fund investigative stories into local corruption, or who will have the reporters ready to report on a revolution in Jakarta that threatens to spread through Asia?

James Poniewozik looks on the bright side:

That same Times story noted that New York is not laying off staff; in fact, it will be hiring staff for the magazine’s already busy website. It will plow the savings from printing less often into digital publishing. As a magazine–a physical thing–New York may be cutting back. As a news organization, it is–for now at least–growing. Palpable? Maybe not. But at least potentially thrilling.

All this illustrates something we need to remember when we talk about the media business, its changes, and its (very real) problems paying for itself. The physical form of journalism is not the journalism itself.

Alexander Abad-Santos praises New York’s digital offerings:

The magazine’s spin-off sites Vulture, The Cut, and Grub Street are on fire. The company reports that their online audience was up over 40 percent this October, which translates to about 18 million monthly unique visitors. And they say that their investments will include a new blog focused on human behavior (titled “the Science of Us”), the Daily Intel blog beefing up its political coverage, and more manpower at Vulture and The Cut.

My thoughts here.

After The Gorging And Consuming

If you’re all, “WTF is an #UNselfie?” … well, educate yourself. #GivingTuesday pic.twitter.com/2EFWFHd7Vo

— Upworthy (@Upworthy) December 3, 2013

Giving Tuesday is on its way to becoming America’s newest holiday tradition:

Already more than 3,400 nonprofits and companies have agreed to push the idea of donating to charity on December 3, and organizers predict the effort will easily attract more than 5,000 participants, double the number of organizations involved last year in promoting charitable donations just after the high-profile shopping days Black Friday and Cyber Monday. Many nonprofits that participated in Giving Tuesday last year say they raised much more that day than they typically do on a day in early December. For instance, nonprofits that raise money through Network for Good, which processes online gifts, reported a 155-percent increase in donations on Giving Tuesday compared with the Tuesday after Thanksgiving in 2011. 

Eileen Heisman of the National Philanthropic Trust says the holiday is a win-win for businesses and charities:

The leaders of these organizations immediately got the concept that the philanthropic community stood to benefit by converging on a day like this, in the same way that retailers (even though they compete aggressively) all take part in and benefit from Black Friday. With every project, they are spreading the word through their networks, and the connection to #GivingTuesday becomes more valuable. At the same time, they appreciated that their participation did not require them to spend on messaging over and above what they had been planning. Because the timing and tagline of #GivingTuesday can easily be incorporated into existing campaigns, even thinly-stretched charities can use it to refresh their message and increase awareness.

Laura Flanders concedes that “whenever haves help have-nots, that’s worthy of praise,” but adds “when massive global corporations want praise too, I get a little queasy”:

Take Verizon. For Giving Tuesday, the Verizon Foundation says it will contribute to three large nonprofits as directed by the votes of Verizon workers. The company calls it giving back and “giving voice” to employees. Call me cynical, but I bet most Verizon workers would have preferred more voice and fewer givebacks in their contracts. Over the last decade Verizon’s forced concessions on everything from wages to pensions to job security and the right to organize. Giving Tuesday’s nice, but Verizon workers give back every day.

Meanwhile, Kelly Kleiman offers a practical suggestion: “Next year will the powers that be who created this quasi-holiday please consider scheduling it before, and not after, Black Friday, Small-Business Saturday, Football-Wagering Sunday and Cyber Monday?”

Before Thanksgiving, everyone’s in the mood to think about things they should be thankful for: the perfect mood from which to give generously. Before Thanksgiving, most people are at home in their regular lives and regular schedules, not packing or unpacking or sitting in airport lounges fretting. Before Thanksgiving, people have eaten normally instead of excessively and therefore will find it easier to believe that other people don’t have enough. There’s nothing like a full stomach to eradicate thoughts of others’ hunger.

Is Thailand Due For Another Coup?

In Bangkok, protests that began over a week ago demanding the resignation of Prime Minister Yingluck Shinawatra turned violent over the weekend. Joshua Keating explains the origins of the protests and points out a curious anomaly:

Thailand’s political predicament appears to contradict the longstanding idea in political science that as populations become wealthier and more educated, they will become more democratic. In Thailand, the wealthy, urban middle class are perhaps the least supportive of democracy. It’s not the only place where this seems to be the case.

Steve Herman notes that Thai democracy “has long been fragile here with the military conducting 18 coups since the end of absolute monarchy rule in 1932.” Jay Ulfelder considers why certain countries are prone to coups:

The most informative factors in thinking about coup risk are a country’s wealth, its form of government, and the recent occurrence of coup activity.

Coup attempts very rarely happen in countries that are rich, either fully dictatorial or fully democratic, and have no coup activity in the recent past. Almost all coup attempts, successful or failed, occur in countries that are relatively poor and have political regimes that mix features of autocracy and democracy. These mixed regimes are especially susceptible to coups when politics within them is sharply polarized, as it has been in Thailand for nearly a decade now.

Bruce Einhorn adds that, with the anti-government forces pressing for the military to step in, the current standoff could end the same way:

Pimpaka Nichgaroon, head of research for Thanachart Securities in Bangkok, warns that the current unrest could end as it often does in Thailand, with the generals intervening. Chances of a military coup are now 50-50, according to Pimpaka. The anti-Yingluck forces “want some kind of national unity government to help reform the political system before the country has a new election,” she wrote in a report published yesterday. However, that kind of regime change is unlikely “without some kind of military intervention or a coup, a risk we see rising from only 5% a month ago to a 50% probability now.”

Mental Health Break

Just another Russian dog dancing to German Europop duo Modern Talking:

The Misery Of Miscarriage, Ctd

The remarkable thread continues:

I have had four miscarriages and, at the age of 40, have finally accepted that I will never have my own biological children. Your reader with the PhD in genetics wrote, “When something is very wrong with the genetic makeup of the embryo, it doesn’t develop properly and the body rejects it, as it should. … I wish there was more education about this; I think people would have an easier time accepting this outcome if they understood.”

This reader has obviously never experienced a miscarriage. I guarantee you that when a woman has a miscarriage, the first question she asks is, “What went wrong?” And unless a specific medical cause can be identified, she hears the above explanation. For most people, this in no way will lessen the grief. The loss of the pregnancy means the loss of not just a future baby, but all your hopes and dreams for that baby and your family. It sounds corny, but unless you have experienced the loss of a very wanted pregnancy, it is difficult to express the depth of grief and loss.

And yes, an early miscarriage is very different than a late term miscarriage, a stillbirth, or the death of child. But, to basically tell parents who miscarried early that they should get over it more easily because the baby was just not “meant to be,” biologically speaking, is highly insensitive at best.

By the way, I had an abortion in my early 20s. I have never regretted it, even now. Having a child at that age would have destroyed my sanity and life. My parents are very strict Catholics and I would probably have dropped out of college due to the shame it would have brought on my family. Why should I have destroyed my life just because our contraception of choice failed? Despite my four miscarriages later in life, I have always been, and remain, pro-choice. It’s so very personal.

Several other readers sound off:

I am a childless older gay male, and I have been really interested in reading your posts on the impact of miscarriages on couples. Thank you for bringing this to public conversation. The most important factor to me is how society treats this particular loss – by ignoring it, essentially. I have been guilty of the same ignorance – with my sister and niece, who both miscarried but subsequently had great kids. I was also struck by juxtaposing these comments to an earlier post on your site, “When Children Weren’t Cherished,” which tells the story of how losing young children before the 19th century, not to mention early miscarriages, was treated with as little emotion as the loss of a pet. Of course, many children died early then, so maybe it was so common that it wasn’t as sad as it might be today. However, there’s also the possibility that those older mothers grieved much as we do today, but it wasn’t noted because they were women and women had considerably fewer modes of communication then.

Another male reader:

Thank you for the thread on miscarriages. Because my wife was high risk, we knew we would have difficulty with her getting pregnant. We tried for years and then decided to try IVF. IVF was successful in getting her pregnant, but she suffered five miscarriages (all early on in the pregnancy). They were extremely emotionally painful. She viewed the miscarriages as her weakness (or maybe her fault). That, of course, is understandable, but, as a result, she didn’t want me to talk to anyone about them. She could talk to her trusted friends to help her process the pain, but I was kind of left to suffer in silence. I could, of course, talk to my wife about it, but I didn’t want to burden her with my pain. She was dealing with hers. It sucked.

Well, after the five miscarriages, she got pregnant again (via IVF). All was going well and about four weeks in she went for a routine sonogram. I usually went to all the appoinments, but couldn’t make this one. Our regular doctor was not there and one of the other doctors did the sonogram. He told my wife that the fetus was not viable and that a DNC will be scheduled. Of course, she was devastated and called me very upset. She then said that something did not feel right about the whole thing and she called our regular doctor. He said come in again the next day and he will re-do the sonogram. Of course, I went.

Well, he found the pulsating of a viable fetus. It was a miracle. Well, that little bundle of pulsating cells is now a beautiful six-year-old girl who is the light of our life. To this day, I can’t tell this story (or type it) without tearing up. To know we came so close to ending her life based on a faulty sonogram. Thank God my wife felt something was not right. Thank God!

Another happy ending from a reader:

I am sure that you’ve been inundated with stories in response to this thread. I was a bit reluctant to share, but others’ tales have deeply touched me … as so many of your threads have over the years. My husband and I had been happily married for over 13 years when we mutually decided that we would like to share our lives with a child. At 37, I was older to be trying for the first time. But for some reason, it never really crossed my mind that we might have a tough time getting (and staying) pregnant … even when the doctors warned that it might be.

After trying for several months, we were ecstatic when an early test came back positive. My husband was away on a business trip and I snapped a selfie (before everyone was calling them that) and texted him the great news with a subject line of “congratulations, Papa!” We told everyone, blithely. I went to the first OB visit on my own, figuring there would be many more visits when my husband could join me. The OB performed what we both expected to be a routine scan, but they couldn’t find a heartbeat. He told me not to be overly worried, as it was early on. I cried all throughout a blood draw, as a nurse told me to stop because my tears were “bad for the baby.” The tests indicated that I was still pregnant, but the scare left me shaken and I cried all the way home. I continued to feel pregnant and looked forward to the next visit, but they were never able to locate a heartbeat and eventually I stopped feeling pregnant and began to bleed.

Flash forward a few months and we were again elated when an at-home test came back affirmative. We were far more circumspect this time around and waited to tell even our families until I had a positive test at the OB and we saw a heartbeat on the monitor. We allowed ourselves to get excited and shared our good news. I was told that the signs looked good for us and started working out again. At just over 12 weeks, I was resting at home on a beautiful winter’s day after a workout when I felt a strange pull. I went to the bathroom and to my horror, was bleeding profusely. I called the doctor, asking if I could go to the emergency room. He said there was nothing they could do. He said he was very sorry that I’d miscarried again and that he would see me on Monday and we could talk about next steps. Distraught, my husband asked me what I felt like doing. I replied honestly, “I feel like getting drunk.” We cried over beers at the now-closed Brickskellar and decided that we still wanted to try again. That we truly wanted to be parents. I bled all weekend.

My husband took me to the hospital on Monday, but didn’t come in as we had our beloved dog with us. I cried as I recounted what had happened with the doctor. He sympathized and said that he would still need to do an ultrasound to let him know what we should do next and whether I would need a D&C. He began and then pulled back in surprise. I’ll never forget what he said next, “I don’t know what to tell you, but you have a completely healthy baby here.” He showed me my lovely and lively girl on the screen, with the strongest heart beat clearly visible. Through laughter and tears, I told him I’d gone drinking the night that I thought I had miscarried. He laughed and said not to do that again … but also not to worry. Everything was fine. I ran to the car to share the unbelievable good news with my husband. I burst out laughing again as I said that I had a feeling this was going to be one tough girl.

And she has been. She’s the strongest, funniest, most quixotic child and we know that we are unaccountably lucky and blessed to have her in our lives. Since all of this, I’ve comforted a number of my friends as they’ve dealt with their own miscarriages or pregnancy scares. It amazes me how no one talks of this … until we do. I now know that my own mother miscarried shortly after I was born. Thank you for making the space for this important conversation. It’s been cathartic to write out my own story.

Face Of The Day

(Photo by Alexander Khokhlov via My Modern Met)