“The gay responsibility agenda has been a hard slog—harder, ironically, than the gay rights agenda. The anti-gay lobby was more alarmed by strong, independent homosexuals than with weak, victimized ones. Over time, though, the responsibility agenda has done for gays what Israel has done for Jews. It has retired the stereotype of weakness. The country has responded by seeing us in a new and more positive light: one in which oppressed-minority status makes less sense by the day,” – Jon Rauch in a piece on his indifference to the passage of ENDA.
Year: 2013
A Plasma TV In Every Pot
Plasma TVs are a weapon in Venezuela’s “economic war”:
With support for the ruling United Socialist Party of Venezuela (PSUV) crumbling ahead of local elections due next month, [President Nicolás] Maduro decreed on November 8th that as part of an “economic war” with unscrupulous businessmen, prices of electrical appliances were to be cut to their level of a month earlier. For good measure he had a couple of dozen shopowners and managers arrested for “usury.” Shops were besieged by bargain hunters. In the country’s third city, Valencia, looters ransacked an outlet belonging to the Daka electricals chain. Even members of the national guard, deployed along with partisan militiamen to keep order, were filmed loading looted goods onto pickup trucks. Several days later people were still queuing in their dozens and even hundreds, in the hope of picking up a discounted television or fridge.
Jonathan Watts and Virginia Lopez report that the army has occupied electronics stories accused of “profiteering” and that more than 100 “bourgeois” businesspeople have been arrested for alleged price-gouging. As Juan Nagel notes, “the use of cheap appliances to shore up political support is nothing new in Venezuela”:
Last year, [then-president Hugo] Chávez handed out more than a million Chinese appliances to his supporters as a way of convincing them to vote for him. I witnessed one of these acts, in which unsuspecting citizens were gifted free washing machines, courtesy of Comandante Chávez. The ailing Chávez coasted to a 10-point victory at the polls in October.
But Maduro does not have the deep pockets that Chávez had a year ago. The new president faces a mayoral election a month from now, yet Venezuela’s reserves are low, and oil prices are dropping. The budget deficit is enormous, and with inflation running at more than 50 percent a year, the government is finding it hard to make ends meet. Faced with this reality, Maduro has decided that if he can’t give away appliances, he will give away someone else’s.
The economy’s in shambles:
Since Maduro took over from Chávez, Venezuela’s economic woes have worsened. Although the country is oil rich, with the world’s largest deposits, other industries have collapsed as a result of price controls, government mismanagement and land appropriation. Once a major producer of agricultural commodities, Venezuela has to import most of its food. Even though malnutrition has fallen as a result of subsidized food programs, it has become hard for many people to secure basic necessities because dollars are in short supply.
In the past year, residents of Caracas have struggled to buy rice, coffee and cornflour, there has been a run on toilet paper. Wine and bread supplies ran so low that Catholic priests were instructed by bishops to conserve what was left so that they did not run out during mass. Despite abundant oil, poor infrastructure has also led to power cuts. In September 70% of the country was left without electricity for hours.
Not to mention this:
Since Chavez’s death, this house of cards has begun to collapse, and the black market exchange rate between the bolivar (VEF) and the U.S. dollar (USD) tells the tale. Since Chavez’s death on March 5, 2013, the bolivar has lost 62.36 percent of its value on the black market, as shown in the chart below. …
This, in turn has brought about very high inflation in Venezuela. The government has responded by imposing ever tougher price controls to suppress the inflation. But those policies have failed, resulting in shortages of critical goods, such as toilet paper, without addressing the root cause of Venezuela’s inflation woes.
The Maduro government has responded to this problem with the very same tactics employed by other regimes with troubled currencies. Yes, from Mugabe’s Zimbabwe to North Korea today, the playbook is simple, if misguided: deny and deceive.
Jay Ulfelder ran some numbers and found that “chief executives in democracies are about as likely to lose their jobs during a hyperinflationary episode as they are to hang on to them, while autocrats face more favorable odds of political survival of roughly 3:1.” In autocracies, the length of the episode also plays a role. So what does that mean for Maduro?
I consider Venezuela’s political regime to be authoritarian, so f I only had these statistics to go by, I would say that Maduro will probably survive the episode, but the chances that he’ll get run out of office will increase the longer the hyperinflation lasts. I’m not an economist, so my best guess at how long Venezuela might suffer under hyperinflation is the average duration from Hanke’s list. That’s a little shy of two years, which would give Maduro odds of about 4:1 to of weathering that storm.
Of course, those statistics aren’t all the information we’ve got. Other things being equal, authoritarian regimes with leaders in their first five years in office – like Venezuela right now – are about three times as likely to transition to democracy as ones with guys who’ve been around for longer, and democratic transitions almost always entail a change at the top. We also know that Maduro so far has been a “boring and muddled” politician, and that there are some doubts about the loyalty he can expect from the military and from other Chavista elites. Putting all of those things together, I’d say that Maduro’s presidency probably won’t last the six years he won in the April 2013 election.
Yes, Elizabeth Warren Would Probably Lose
Noam Scheiber defends his piece on Warren regardless:
I can’t help thinking many pundits missed the point when, in response to my recent story about Elizabeth Warren (“Hillary’s Nightmare”), they ticked off all the reasons Hillary Clinton would crush Warren in a potential primary matchup. It’s not that I disagree. In the piece, I describe how a Warren-Clinton primary might play out before concluding that “Warren would probably lose.” It’s just that I don’t think this is an especially interesting discussion. Most overwhelming favorites go on to win the race they’re running. The difference is that, in presidential primaries, how the frontrunner wins matters almost as much as whether they do.
Do they have to adopt an entirely new political persona (see Romney, Mitt)? Do they have to make big ideological or policy concessions? Do they have to replace one set of advisers with another? Do they have to break with a key constituency or embrace an entirely new one? This “how” tells us a lot about the party and where it’s headed. And it’s here where Warren’s influence is potentially enormous.
Weigel doesn’t let Scheiber entirely off the hook:
This was what I disagreed with. It’s one thing to say that a candidate can do more damage to a front-runner than any of us think. Those reporters tailing around Eugene McCarthy in 1968 got a hell of a story, even though McCarthy did lose New Hampshire. Sure. But as Nate Silver’s pointed out for years, leaving a lot of embarrassed pundits groaning in the corner, there are demographics and data points and factors that complicate Narratives but tell you who will actually win an election. It’s just ridiculous to point out that Warren might have an advantage in the New Hampshire primary without acknowledging that, when John Kerry was tested against Clinton in 2005, he got 40-plus points closer to the front-runner than Warren does now.
In another response to Scheiber’s piece, Hertzberg notes “the remarkable shallowness of the Democratic bench”:
Whether or not [Clinton] chooses to run, the supply of plausible alternatives is shockingly thin. The Republicans have an ample roster of men (and only men) who are readily imaginable as nominees, even if thinking about some of them as Presidents (step forward, Ted Cruz) requires contemplating about the unthinkable. On the other side, there’s Joe Biden, our septuagenarian Vice-President. There’s Andrew Cuomo—another legacy case. After that, the list drops off rather sharply. Martin O’Malley, governor of Maryland? Sherrod Brown, senator from Ohio? Alec Baldwin? Who else?
Dear God, not Alec Baldwin.
Introducing Deep Dish
From the beginning of this experiment in the new media economy, we’ve said that one day, we’d like to add a monthly magazine to the Dish. Today, we’re launching a prototype, and we’re calling it Deep Dish. It’s a skeletal first issue, but we hope it sketches the kind of things we want to publish in the months and years ahead.
What we’re trying to do – to put it bluntly – is to reinvent the idea of a magazine through a blog.
I love magazines – but the web has not been kind to them. The web tends to favor the quick hit and the rapid fire of blogging; and long-form journalism, magazines’ previous specialty, has taken a hit as a result. Online, no one wants to read a long piece, as they sit at their desks or check their iPhone on the bus. The tablet has changed that a huge amount, but it’s still a struggle. Our idea is to do something relatively simple: connect an already vibrant and subscriber-based blog community (that would be you) to monthly long-form pieces in all the variety that the web can support. We know we have the kind of committed readership that the best long-form writers love to reach. And we think we have the ability to find those writers. We want to connect the two.
It’s monthly because you already have too much to read; and it’s called Deep Dish because we want to use it to provide substantive but compelling depth to online journalism. Plus, I like puns.
The first issue is bare-bones, compared with our eventual hopes. With a handful of staff, and a commitment first and foremost to creating and innovating the Dish every day, it’s frankly the most we can accomplish right now. Since we haven’t yet reached our annual goal of $900K for just putting out the Dish, it’s an act of faith as well as an act of entrepreneurship.
But it’s a start. Our first issue has two long-form pieces: an eBook, I Was Wrong, which is an edited diary-like chronicle of my blogging of the 
Iraq war from 2001 – 2008; and a 100-minute conversation with a remarkable former Iraq war commander, Mikey Piro, who now deals with PTSD, and in our conversation, tells the story of his war – on the ground and in the front-lines. Together, we hope they provide a deeper look at the narrative of the core event of the first decade of the 21st century.
We intend to follow up each month with long-form journalism that is close to the polar opposite of our daily blogging, yet fueled by its thriving community of readers. We’ve already begun taping a series of audio conversations called “Andrew Asks Anything” of which Mikey Piro is our first. I wanted to create something deeper, more intimate and less constrained than a television or radio interview. I didn’t want to interview anyone so much as enter into a conversation with another person, in which both of us have something to say and learn. It grew out of my one early experiment with such a sprawling, recorded after-dinner chat with Hitch.
I’ll also be writing long-form essays of the kind I used to produce for the Atlantic, the New York Times Magazine, Newsweek and Time. We’ll also use Deep Dish to create edited eBooks of some of the Dish’s best reader threads – from the death of pets to the cannabis closet. Soon, we hope to have the resources to pay outside writers for the kind of long-form journalism that is increasingly under threat of extinction: lengthy 
investigative reports, New York Review of Books-style reviews, and sustained arguments and essays that require more than a column’s length. I have ambitions for long-form video as well; adventures in photography (an eBook of the best window views around the world, for example); and a continuing commitment to the publishing of poetry. In other words, we want to begin creating the kind of content we often link to.
Think of it as the Dish – but deeper, longer and uncut. You can check out our inaugural issue here. But Deep Dish is not as accessible to the world as the Dish. It’s behind a real paywall, which means it is for subscribers only. We wanted to offer the 32,000 or so subscribers a token of gratitude for their amazing support this year, but also to show everyone else (a million monthly readers) what subscribing to the Dish could help spawn: a new business model for long-form magazine journalism.
There are signs that our own model of subscriber-based online journalism is beginning to bear fruit. Here’s a piece by Mathew Ingram on Beacon, a new media start-up he summarizes thus:
Beacon wants to give journalists who may not have the ability — or the desire — to run their own site a way to connect with readers who might want to subscribe.
It’s a collective version of the Dish model – for those who have not had thirteen years to build an online readership. We deeply hope it works. As long-form struggles to survive, and as “sponsored content” or page-view trolling gain more and more traction in the media, we want to pull in the very opposite direction – toward more reader-writer interaction and support, toward subscription-based journalism that can focus on the quality of content, rather than on the need to placate corporate advertisers with unprecedented leverage over struggling news sites or to rack up pageviews.
So here’s our first prototype. As always, we welcome feedback of all kinds, including your ideas of what we could do with Deep Dish in the months and years ahead. Our regular in-box is always open, and we read it carefully.
If you’re a subscriber, just click here to read and listen to the first issue. (If you can’t access Deep Dish, you probably need to sign in with your username and password. If you need help signing in, check out this help page. If you’re still having trouble, email us at support@andrewsullivan.com.)
If you haven’t yet subscribed but want to read the eBook – the kind of journalistic accountability for error Paul Krugman called for today – or listen to the podcast (perhaps the most intense and humbling public conversation I have ever had), you can get immediate access to Deep Dish and unlimited access to the Dish by subscribing [tinypass_offer text=”here”]. If you’ve been hemming and hawing, this is an opportunity not just to help us, but to help others pioneer a new business model for long-form quality magazine journalism. Subscribe [tinypass_offer text=”here”]. It takes two minutes and it’s just $1.99 a month or [tinypass_offer text=”$19.99 a year”]. Or more, if you really want to help us turn this prototype into a more sustainable reality.
Only you can make it happen. But welcome to the beginning of what could be our future.
Get The HPV Vaccine
Why it’s important:
Obama’s Executive Power Grab
Jonathan Adler questions the legality of the Obamacare fix that the president announced last week:
It’s nice that regulators may forbear enforcing the relevant regulatory requirements, but this is not the only source of potential legal jeopardy. So, for instance, what happens when there’s a legal dispute under one of these policies? Say, for instance, an insurance company denies payment for something that is not covered under the policy but that would have been covered under the PPACA and the insured sues? Would an insurance company really want to have to defend this decision in court? After all, this would place the insurance company in the position of seeking judicial enforcement of an illegal insurance policy.
Nicholas Bagley also has concerns:
I’m uncomfortable with the “enforcement discretion” justification. Because I haven’t yet seen a complete legal defense, I remain open to persuasion. As it stands, however, the administrative fix looks awfully vulnerable to legal attack.
McArdle adds:
President Obama, who used to be so sharply critical of George W. Bush’s use of executive power, is now pioneering his own expansive views of what the president may do. The White House seems to believe that they are allowed to shinny around any rule, as long as they wrote it. I’d argue that this is exactly backward: They have an especial duty to uphold the laws that they themselves constructed, because if they don’t, why should the rest of us go along?
The Cheneys And The Republicans
For quite a while now, the GOP has lived with a rather spectacular contradiction over homosexuality. It was perhaps best summed up by the split between George W Bush and Dick Cheney in 2004 over the federal marriage amendment. Bush backed the amendment – you can read my real-time response that day here – and Cheney didn’t. So on a major issue of social policy – one on which the 2004 election was waged in Ohio – the ticket was split. Well: not so split. Bush – we were led to believe – was not exactly energized on this subject. His wife and daughters all backed marriage equality. In his personal life, Bush wasn’t a hater or a man lacking in empathy. Far from it. But Rove knew the base, and knew what could deliver it. So, with the aid of his then-closeted campaign honcho, Ken Mehlman, Rove won Ohio. With Ohio, he won Bush’s re-election.
Ask yourself: on what ticket in living memory did a president and vice-president publicly disagree on an issue that was critical to winning the election? And there you see the clash. Republican elites had gay friends, offspring and key aides. Yet the Republican base continued to view gays as some kind of threat to the family. The electoral math won. I remember – those were the days – when I was invited to meet Rove in the White House early in the first Bush term, and pressed the case against the FMA, or any variant thereof. Rove simply told me that there were many more Christianists than homos, and that mathematical reality dwarfed any arguments, however meritorious. It wasn’t the first time I had seen utter cynicism on this issue in high places – it was hard to beat the Clintons for that. But the baldness of the cynicism – the reflexive refusal even to address the actual rights and wrongs of the matter – was never better expressed than by Rove.
Cheney got a pass – but he shouldn’t have. He boldly came out for marriage equality explicitly … in 2009. In the vice-presidential debate of 2004, he bristled – as did the public – at being confronted by the fact that he was hurting his own family on this issue. But at some point, the contradictions – and their deep moral consequences – had to emerge. And now they have in full bloom. Liz Cheney, not a homophobe in my personal memory, is nonetheless opposing her sister’s right to marry – anywhere. Actually, she is in favor of her sister and her wife being stripped of all legal protections the moment they come into their family’s home state. Let me put this more clearly: Liz Cheney is attacking her sister’s dignity and civil equality, in order to advance her political career. In a word, it’s disgusting.
It’s not made any better by Liz Cheney’s response:
I love my sister and her family and have always tried to be compassionate towards them. I believe that is the Christian way to behave.
To which I would like to respond on behalf of Mary and Heather and the rest of us: fuck your compassion. Just give your sister the basic equality and security for her own family that you have for yours.
At some point, even the most cynical of politicians has to understand that this issue is not abstract. It affects your own sons and daughters, brothers and sisters. You cannot publicly attack your own sister’s family and say you love her as well. It does not compute. And Liz Cheney does not even have the excuse of being of a different generation. She’s my generation. She knows better. She has seen her sister’s life up-close. So major props to Heather Poe, Liz’s sister-in-law, for calling her out:
Liz has been a guest in our home, has spent time and shared holidays with our children, and when Mary and I got married in 2012 — she didn’t hesitate to tell us how happy she was for us. To have her say she doesn’t support our right to marry is offensive to say the least.
Of course, principled differences of opinion are compatible with family values. Some members of my own extended family don’t agree with marriage equality. I live with that, but I’d be lying if I said it doesn’t sting. But they’re not actively campaigning on the issue and even trying to use it for political gain.
What you’re seeing here is the Republican elite’s hypocrisy finally being called out – in the most public way possible. By refusing to stay silent while their sister and sister-in-law acts as if it’s still 1996, Mary Cheney and Heather Poe are standing up for their own integrity. They are therefore now leaders of the gay rights cause – even though many on the gay left will doubtless give them no credit. Because this cause is not just a public and political one; it is a personal and moral one. And the ability to pretend that you can do one thing in public and another in private is becoming more attenuated by the day.
(Photo: Congressman Dick Cheney and wife Lynne pose for a photo with their two children Liz (L) and Mary and Basset Hound Cyrano at their home in Casper, Wyoming in March 1978. By David Hume Kennerly/Getty Images.)
Quote For The Day
“If you write about current affairs and you’re never wrong, you just aren’t sticking your neck out enough. Stuff happens, and sometimes it’s not the stuff you thought would happen. So what do you do then? Do you claim that you never said what you said? Do you lash out at your critics and play victim? Or do you try to figure out what you got wrong and why, and revise your thinking accordingly?” – Paul Krugman.
A New Evil Face
Nicholas Schmidle acquaints readers with Maulana Fazlullah, the new head of the Pakistani Taliban:
Fazlullah was an inspired choice, by the Taliban’s warped standards. He is young and ruthless, and has taken responsibility for a panoply of barbaric acts over the years: floggings, suicide
bombings, even the attempted assassination of Malala Yousafzai, a teen-age girl who survived gunshots to the head and neck, and who has become an even more driven advocate for girls’ education. (She recently addressed the United Nations and appeared on “The Daily Show.”) Last summer, his men kidnapped and beheaded seventeen Pakistani soldiers.
But what distinguishes Fazlullah from his predecessors is his evangelism. He is as much a rebel and a crusader—bent on imposing his harsh interpretation of sharia on others – as he is a terrorist. He was perhaps the first militant leader to declare jihad against the Pakistani government. When the Pakistani Taliban announced their existence a month later, they turned their guns on the state, toppling a long-standing relationship between elements inside the Pakistani government and jihadists in Pakistan and Afghanistan. Compared to their Afghan counterparts, the Pakistani Taliban have turned into a sophisticated group with global reach—they planned the failed attack on Times Square, in 2010 – as a result of their alliance with Al Qaeda. Still, some members are reportedly amenable to peace talks with officials in Islamabad. Fazlullah is not one of them.
He has not received a wholly warm welcome from the group; “several furious commanders from a rival clan stood up and left” when he was named the new leader. Colin Freeman considers the implications:
Fazlullah, despite his reputation as a hardliner’s hardliner, is considered a relative outsider within the ranks, as he hails from the Swat Valley rather than the Taliban’s traditional strongholds in Pakistan’s tribally-administered region. … “There are reports of serious infighting among them that might come to the fore in the near future,” said Saifullah Mahsud, director of the FATA Research Centre, a Pakistani think tank. While a failure to agree on a new leader could compromise the group’s operation effectiveness, it could equally lead to even more bloodshed as different commanders and factions embark on their own rampages. The group already stands accused accused of killing thousands of Pakistani civilians in recent years, as well as trying to impose sharia law in places like Swat.
Meanwhile, Karachi-based novelist Mohammed Hanif argues that Pakistan “seems to have lost the will to fight its old foe, Fazlullah, and his followers”:
When [Fazlullah’s predecessor Hakimullah] Mehsud was killed, instead of celebrating or letting out quiet sighs of relief, politicians and journalists reacted as if they had lost a favorite son. He had killed many of us, but we weren’t craving vengeance; we were ready to make up and cuddle. Why does Pakistan’s political and military élite celebrate the very people it is fighting? The logic – or its absence – goes like this: Hakimullah Mehsud was our enemy. But the United States is also our enemy. So how dare the Americans kill him? And how dare they kill him when we had made up our minds to talk to him?
The popular narrative in Pakistan holds that the Taliban’s fight is simply a reaction to American drone strikes: it’s a war between American kids sitting in front of LCD screens eating their TV dinners and our own men in the north, who are better Muslims than we are. The Pakistani logic seems to be that if America stops killing them, they’ll stop killing us. But the truth is that the Taliban leadership has made no such promises. They have only said that if the government stops drone strikes, and stops coöperating with America’s war in Afghanistan, they would be willing to talk. But what would they talk about? The little problem they have with Pakistan is that it’s an infidel state – almost as bad as America, but with some potential; they believe that they can somehow make us all better Muslims. Our Taliban are simply saying, “Save us from the U.S. drones, so we can continue to kill you infidels in peace.”
Pakistan’s rulers have developed a strange fetish for lionizing its tormenters. Watching the proceedings in Pakistan’s parliament last week, after Mehsud’s murder, you could have mistaken it all for a Taliban meeting. “This is not just the killing of one person,” Pakistan’s interior minister, Chaudhry Nisar Ali Khan, said. “It’s the death of all peace efforts.” It was mentioned, but only in passing, that since Pakistan had proposed talks with Mehsud in September, the peacemaker and his allies had killed an Army general, blown up a church filled with worshippers, and killed hundreds of other civilians. … In their collective hankering for one true Sharia, the leaders of Pakistan’s political and security establishment – and their American backers – have long since lost their bearings.
(Photo by Thir Khan/AFP/Getty Images)
“A Reef Of Dead Metaphor”
That’s how linguist Guy Deutscher characterizes all language. Prospero’s R.L.G. elaborates:
Most of the time we do not realise that nearly every word that comes out of our mouths has made some kind of jump from older, concrete meanings to the ones we use today. This process is simple language change. Yesterday’s metaphors become so common that today we don’t process them as metaphors at all. Primal man, in inventing language, would have only used concrete terms he could stub his toe on, like tree and rock. So tree is not a metaphor, and rock is not a metaphor. As far back as the OED can tell us, they (in their physical meanings) are not metaphorical extensions of some other word.
But if “tree” and “rock” aren’t metaphors, nearly everything else in our vocabulary seems to be.
For example, you cannot use “independent” without metaphor, unless you mean “not hanging from”. You can’t use “transpire” unless you mean “to breathe through”. The first English meaning of a book was “a written document”. If we want to avoid all metaphorised language (If we want to be “literal”), we must constantly rush to a historical dictionary and frantically check that there is no concrete meaning historically antecedent to the one we hope to use. In every language, pretty much everything is metaphor—even good old “literally”, the battle-axe of those who think that words can always be pinned down precisely.
Previous Dish on the uses and misuses of “literally” here, here, and here.
The Dish 