Andrew Sullivan's Blog, page 89

Slavery Is Still With Us, Ctd

Rick Noack discusses the above map, indicating the portion of the global population currently enslaved, as per a recent report:

About 60,000 people suffer under modern-day slavery in the United States. According to the authors of the report, in the U.S. “men, women and children are exploited as forced laborers, and in the commercial sex industry — In 2013, potential modern slavery cases were reported in fifty states.” The report explains that slaves are forced to perform domestic work and home healthcare, they work in the food industry, as well as in construction, agriculture, nursing, factories and garment-manufacturing, among other sectors.

Neighboring Mexico struggles with about 270,000 slaves, and Japan surprises with a staggering 240,000 enslaved people — a number that is the highest in any developed country. Japan is primarily confronted with sex slavery, a problem which has not been tackled seriously enough in the past by the country’s government, as rights groups have repeatedly criticized.

Larry Elliott comments on the findings as they relate to Britain:

Modern slavery is a live political issue in the UK, with a bill on the issue moving through parliament and David Cameron highlighting it in his speech to the Conservative party conference this year.

“But there’s still more injustice when it comes to work, and it’s even more shocking. Criminal gangs trafficking people halfway around the world and making them work in the most disgusting conditions,” Cameron said. “I’ve been to see these houses on terraced streets built for families of four, cramming in 15 people like animals. To those crime lords who think they can get away with it, I say ‘no, not in this country, not with this party’

And The Economist hones in on Mauritania:

Biram Dah Abeid…, a self-proclaimed descendant of slaves who was runner-up in Mauritania’s presidential election in June, albeit with only 9% of votes to the incumbent’s 82%, was detained along with a clutch of fellow members of his Initiative for the Resurgence of the Abolitionist Movement.

On paper, Mauritania abolished slavery in 1981, though without passing legislation to punish slave-owners. In 2007 it made slave-owners liable to prosecution. But Mr Abeid, who says that half of Mauritania’s population are descendants of slaves (or are still slaves), insists that the law continues to be flouted. Amnesty International, among other advocacy groups, has protested against his recent arrest. The Walk Free Foundation, an Australia-based lobby that published its latest global slavery index on November 18th, reckons that around 150,000 people out of Mauritania’s total population of 3.8m are still enslaved.

Previous Dish on modern-day slavery here.

Platonic Procreation

As Kaitlin Mulhere reports on how asexual college students across the country have made gains for greater visibility, evolutionary psychologist Michael Woodley suggests that geniuses tend toward asexuality:

[Geniuses] are, he says, often asexual, as their brains use the space allocated to urges such as sexual desire for additional cognitive ability. “You have a trade off between what Freud would have referred to as libido and on the other hand pure abstraction: a Platonistic world of ideas,” he said. The evolutionary reason for this may lie with the theory that geniuses have insights that advance the general population. “It’s paradoxical because you think the idea of evolution is procreation, and that might be true in a lot of cases,” he explains. “But what if the way you increase your genes is by benefitting the entire group, by giving them an innovation that allows them to grow and expand and colonise new countries? ”The lack of common sense is in keeping with the idea that a genius exists as an asset to other people, and so: “They need to be looked after,” he says. “They are vulnerable and fragile.”

Lots of previous Dish on asexuality here.

Coloring Our Perception

Erika Hall presents her findings on people who use “African-American” versus “black”:

[A]long with colleagues Katherine Phillips and Sarah Townsend, I conducted a series of studies to determine whether white Americans perceived African Americans more favorably than blacks. In one study, we randomly assigned white participants to associate words with either blacks or African-Americans. Specifically, they selected 10 terms out of a list of 75 (e.g. aggressive, ambitious) that they felt best described each group. The participants that evaluated blacks chose significantly more negative words than those who evaluated African-Americans. Notably, whites did not associate more negative words with “Whites” than with “Caucasians.” …

Naturally, we were interested in nailing down the “Why?” question.

Perhaps, each term evoked different individuals. For example, if White Americans were told that an African-American man was at the door, would they expect a refined gentleman who looked like former U.S. Secretary of State Colin Powell? If they were told that a black man was at the door, would they expect a more thuggish man who looked like a character from the hit crime series, the Wire? We wondered whether whites perceived blacks as lower socioeconomic status than African-Americans, and we speculated that whites’ feelings toward blacks (vs. African-Americans) could be explained by this factor.

Should concludes with the question, “How many of our youth would have been more rightfully vindicated in the justice system if they were first identified as an ‘African-American’ rather than ‘Black’ suspect?” Meanwhile, Lori L. Tharps insists on capitalizing the “b” in “black”:

Black with a capital B refers to people of the African diaspora. Lowercase black is simply a color.

Linguists, academics and activists have been making this point for years, yet the publishing industry — our major newspapers, magazines and books — resist making this simple yet fundamental change. Both Oxford and Webster’s dictionaries state that when referring to African-Americans, Black can be and often is capitalized, but the New York Times and Associated Press stylebooks continue to insist on black with a lowercase b. Ironically, The Associated Press also decrees that the proper names of “nationalities, peoples, races, tribes” should be capitalized. What are Black people, then? …

If we’ve traded Negro for Black, why was that first letter demoted back to lowercase, when the argument had already been won?

Shuttering The World’s Coal Plants Isn’t Enough

Ross Koningstein and David Fork worked on Google’s defunct RE project, “which aimed to develop renewable energy sources that would generate electricity more cheaply than coal-fired power plants do.” Their reflections on the failure of RE

We decided to combine our energy innovation study’s best-case scenario results with [climate change expert James] Hansen’s climate model to see whether a 55 percent emission cut by 2050 would bring the world back below that 350-ppm threshold. Our calculations revealed otherwise. Even if every renewable energy technology advanced as quickly as imagined and they were all applied globally, atmospheric CO2 levels wouldn’t just remain above 350 ppm; they would continue to rise exponentially due to continued fossil fuel use.

So our best-case scenario, which was based on our most optimistic forecasts for renewable energy, would still result in severe climate change, with all its dire consequences: shifting climatic zones, freshwater shortages, eroding coasts, and ocean acidification, among others. Our reckoning showed that reversing the trend would require both radical technological advances in cheap zero-carbon energy, as well as a method of extracting CO2 from the atmosphere and sequestering the carbon.

Those calculations cast our work at Google’s REstill wouldn’t have solved climate change. This realization was frankly shocking: Not only had RE

What they recommend going forward:

Consider Google’s approach to innovation, which is summed up in the 70-20-10 rule espoused by executive chairman Eric Schmidt. The approach suggests that 70 percent of employee time be spent working on core business tasks, 20 percent on side projects related to core business, and the final 10 percent on strange new ideas that have the potential to be truly disruptive.

Wouldn’t it be great if governments and energy companies adopted a similar approach in their technology R&D investments? The result could be energy innovation at Google speed. Adopting the 70-20-10 rubric could lead to a portfolio of projects. The bulk of R&D resources could go to existing energy technologies that industry knows how to build and profitably deploy. These technologies probably won’t save us, but they can reduce the scale of the problem that needs fixing. The next 20 percent could be dedicated to cutting-edge technologies that are on the path to economic viability. Most crucially, the final 10 percent could be dedicated to ideas that may seem crazy but might have huge impact.

Our society needs to fund scientists and engineers to propose and test new ideas, fail quickly, and share what they learn. Today, the energy innovation cycle is measured in decades, in large part because so little money is spent on critical types of R&D.

(Video: NASA shows “exactly how carbon pollution travels across the planet over the course of a year, moving away from the largest polluters and across the atmosphere.”)

Mental Health Break

Like a blogger tackling the gender debate:

More Guns ≠ Less Crime?

Ingraham flags a new study that calls the core belief of gun-rights advocates into question:

The notion [that more guns mean less crime] stems from a paper published in 1997 by economists John Lott and David Mustard, who looked at county-level crime data from 1977 to 1992 and concluded that “allowing citizens to carry concealed weapons deters violent crimes and it appears to produce no increase in accidental deaths.” Of course, the study of gun crime has advanced significantly since then (no thanks to Congress). Some researchers have gone so far as to call Lott and Mustard’s original study “completely discredited.” …

Now, Stanford law professor John Donohue and his colleagues have added another full decade to the analysis, extending it through 2010, and have concluded that the opposite of Lott and Mustard’s original conclusion is true: more guns equal more crime.

“The totality of the evidence based on educated judgments about the best statistical models suggests that right-to-carry laws are associated with substantially higher rates” of aggravated assault, robbery, rape and murder, Donohue said in an interview with the Stanford Report. The evidence suggests that right-to-carry laws are associated with an 8 percent increase in the incidence of aggravated assault, according to Donohue. He says this number is likely a floor, and that some statistical methods show an increase of 33 percent in aggravated assaults involving a firearm after the passage of right-to-carry laws.

The Word Of The Year

Oxford picked “vape”:

Vape, a verb meaning to inhale and exhale the vapor produced by an electronic cigarette or similar device, beat out everything from bae to normcore. It was coined in the late 1980s when companies like RJR Nabisco were experimenting with the first “smokeless” cigarettes. But, after years of languishing, the word is back, needed to distinguish a growing new habit from old-fashioned smoking. According to Oxford’s calculations, usage of vape, which as a noun can refer to an e-cigarette or similar device, more than doubled between 2013 and 2014.

Edwin L. Battistella mulls our love new words:

Clippings frequently rub me the wrong way for some reason. When I am in a conversation where someone used words like cray, vacay, and bro, the usages somehow feel much too familiar, like a telemarketer addressing me by my first name. Abbreviations can be annoying too, as if the speaker assumes I am as immersed in some topic as they are and know all the shorthand. IMHO.

I’m enamored of blends though, and I smile at the recollection of the first time I came across the word hangry in a tweet from a former student. To me blends are verbal magic tricks: words sawed in half and magically rejoined. I always think of publisher Bennett Cerf’s description of Groucho Marx as someone who looks at words “upside down, backwards, from the middle out to the end, and from the end back to the middle. Next he drops them in a mental Mixmaster, and studies them some more.” Groucho would have loved the Urban Dictionary’s blend bananus, for the brown part at the end of a banana. When I finished my book on the language of public apology I toyed with using the word regretoric in the title, but wiser editorial heads prevailed. The best blends have a playful punning to them, in which the remnants of the old words encapsulate the new meaning perfectly (the worst blends are like Frankenstein’s monster, like schmeat, a finalist in 2013.). I’ll leave it to you to judge the blends in this year’s finalists: slacktivism (from slacker + activism), normcore (from normal + hardcore), budtender (from bud + bartender).

History Is Not On Hillary’s Side

Judis concedes that Democrats will be vulnerable in 2016:

The chief obstacle that any Democratic nominee will face is public resistance to installing a president from the same party in the White House for three terms in a row. If you look at the presidents since World War II, when the same party occupied the White House for two terms in a row, that party’s candidate lost in the next election six out of seven times.

The one exception was George H.W. Bush’s 1988 victory after two terms of Ronald Reagan, but Bush, who was seventeen points behind Democratic nominee Michael Dukakis at the Republican convention, was only able to win because his campaign manager Lee Atwater ran a brilliant campaign against an extraordinarily weak opponent.

Larison agrees:

When a president has mediocre or poor approval ratings, as Obama probably will have at the end of his term, it becomes almost impossible for a candidate to find the right balance between approval and criticism. That is because it becomes much more difficult to win over alienated voters without further demoralizing one’s own core supporters. Even in cases of extreme presidential unpopularity, most candidates for the nomination don’t want to be seen as trashing or repudiating the president. Most partisans that vote in primaries remain supportive of the president at least as long as he is still in office, and so the eventual nominee has to cater to that. An added difficulty is that the presidential party’s nominee usually is very closely aligned with the administration on policy, so that it is only too easy for the other party to use the administration’s failings as a bludgeon against the nominee. That attack becomes even easier when the nominee is very closely associated with the administration or even served as a part of it.

There’s another possibility: that the economy will keep growing so as to make a dent in the lives of those passed over by the recovery so far; that the ACA will win more recruits and, with some enthusiastic backing from a Democratic nominee, could even be an asset in the next election; that a deal with Iran averts war in the Middle East; and that, once the public gets a sense of the actual alternatives to Obama – more war; more secrecy; less healthcare security – the mood might shift. I’m not predicting this, and I basically agree with John and Daniel. But the public mood is restive and fickle. It could turn yet again.

(Photo: By Bill Clark/CQ Roll Call)

What Drove Down Gas Prices?

Jordan Weissmann admits that, contrary to the predictions of liberals, drilling has played a role:

There had never been much of a statistical relationship between U.S. oil production and what Americans paid at the pump. But with crude prices crashing, gas down to about $3 a gallon, and the International Energy Agency declaring that we have reached “a new chapter in the history of the oil markets,” it is time to acknowledge that the left in some respects was wrong, and that drilling in North Dakota, Texas, and beyond has actually helped cut the price of gas. …

The combination of U.S. drilling and a global slowdown didn’t necessarily have to end in plummeting oil prices. Traditionally, OPEC members have cut their production in the face of global gluts in order to keep their profits high. But now, OPEC appears to be fraying. Earlier this month, Saudi Arabia shocked much of the world by cutting its crude export prices to the U.S., in what was interpreted as an attempt to protect its market share and possibly put pressure on America’s domestic drillers. Instead of trying to buoy the price of petroleum, the Saudis are now helping drive it down further in order to save their own revenue stream.

Plumer passes along word that “US is now producing more crude oil than at any point since 1986″:

Worldwide, only Russia and Saudi Arabia now pump out more crude oil, and the US is quickly closing the gap. (Sometimes you’ll see news stories saying that the US is already the largest oil producer. This is only true if your definition of “oil” includes things like natural gas liquids — which are still useful, though not exactly the same as crude oil.)

But Max Ehrenfreund finds it worrisome “that no one is buying all that oil”:

The unfortunate truth is that low prices for gasoline are a symptom of a sickly global economy. It isn’t just gas prices that are falling as consumers make do with less and businesses put off new investments in Europe, China and Japan. Metals such as copper, silver and platinum are cheap, too, and so are crops like corn, soybeans and wheat.

Earlier Dish on $3-a-gallon oil here.

A Time To Rend?

The polarizing trends of our current cultural moment are alive and well, alas, in the debate over civil marriage for gay couples. We seem incapable of compromise, of an unsatisfactory (to both sides) middle ground, of the give-and-take that makes a liberal society possible. And so we now come across a proposal for religious ministers to withdraw from any role in establishing civil marriage – for straights as well as gays. The institution is now so tainted no minister should acquiesce to it. Hence this proposed pastoral pledge, endorsed by the editor of First Things:

In our roles as Christian ministers, we, the undersigned, commit ourselves to disengaging civil and Christian marriage in the performance of our pastoral duties. We will no longer serve as agents of the state in marriage. We will no longer sign government-provided marriage certificates. We will ask couples to seek civil marriage separately from their church-related vows and blessings. We will preside only at those weddings that seek to establish a Christian marriage in accord with the principles ­articulated and lived out from the beginning of the Church’s life.

Of course, these pastors are well within their rights to do this. Maybe some more secular types will even welcome it. I find it merely sad and somewhat spiteful. Does accommodating a tiny minority in the civil rights and responsibilities of civil marriage really require all Christian ministers to withdraw from their traditional role in certifying a civil marriage? It’s just one more thread removed from our commonality.

And, then, of course, there’s the absolutism of the hard left on these matters. The idea that you cannot simply live with people who don’t want to celebrate or participate in gay marriages – but have to sue them to enforce equality – is also likely to make things worse, not better. Over-reaching to restrict religious freedom unravels us as a society – and abjures the simple virtues of getting along. Then there’s this kind of maneuver, which is an extreme outlier – but would have lots of support on the hard left if they had their druthers. Catalonia has just passed a new bill protecting gays, lesbians and transgender people from discrimination. But with a twist:

The new law includes a range of sanctions, which has been one of the most controversial points of the new legal framework. The sanctions include fines, whose amount is graded in relation to the seriousness of the offense. The parties supporting the new measure argued that without sanctions, the new law would be “a mere statement of good will”. Furthermore, another controversial aspect is that those accused of being homophobic against somebody will have to prove their innocence, instead of the victim having to prove the accused’s guilt. This positive discrimination measure is already in place for other offenses, such as domestic violence against women, in instances when it is very difficult to prove.

And this is not that far from what the Obama administration has decreed is appropriate for campuses. No wonder the defense lawyers are gearing up for conflict. What’s missing from this is balance, some accommodation for all in a society, and a fair judicial system to separate the true from the false. Raising awareness of how this stuff can happen with impunity is extremely important – just as signaling a religious opposition to civil marriage for gays is well within the bounds of fair advocacy. But finding a way not to over-reach is a trickier task. And we’re not doing so well with that right now, are we?