March 2013 – Page 81

The Addict’s Disease

Russell Brand describes why he had to give up drugs completely:

Drugs and alcohol are not my problem — reality is my problem. Drugs and alcohol are my solution.

If this seems odd to you, it is because you are not an alcoholic or a drug addict. You are likely one of the 90 per cent of people who can drink and use drugs safely. I have friends who can smoke weed, swill gin, even do crack, and then merrily get on with their lives. For me this is not an option. I will relinquish all else to ride that buzz to oblivion. Even if it began as a timid glass of chardonnay on a ponce’s yacht, it would end with me necking the bottle, swimming to shore and sprinting to Bethnal Green in search of a crack house.

Harbrinder Kaur (C), 22 and her father Kashmir Singh (L), who were allegedly beaten by police, arrive with brother Gurjinder Singh (R) to speak to the media at Usman village near Tarn Taran district about 25 kms (15 miles) from Amritsar, India on March 6, 2013. Taking a serious view of the alleged beating, Chief Minister Parkash Singh Badal today ordered a magisterial probe into the incident. The young woman and her father were allegedly beaten by policemen in Punjab’s Tarn Taran district when they sought to lodge a complaint against some persons who teased her and passed vulgar comments in public. By Narinder Nanu/AFP/Getty Images.

Are Evangelical Latinos Up For Grabs?

Not really. Nate Cohn disagrees with Jeb Bush’s advice:

Bush’s book offers this advice for Republicans: “Get religion.” He adds, “What is most striking about Hispanic religious beliefs is their attachment to ‘renewalist’ faiths—Pentecostal, evangelical, and charismatic,” he adds. But Hispanics aren’t as socially conservative as this assumes. Hispanics, by a 59-30 margin, think society should accept homosexuality, which is slightly higher than the general population’s 58-33. Even 38 percent of Hispanic evangelicals think homosexuality should be accepted, compared to just 29 percent of white evangelicals.

Elizabeth Dias explains why Latinos are attracted to Evangelicalism and Pentecostalism:

Many Latino Catholics, especially in Latin America, also identify with evangelical-like and Pentecostal-like practices and incorporate them into the Catholic mass. In the United States, Latino Catholics often attend evangelical services because they are conducted in Spanish and incorporate cultural elements—like food and dance—from their home countries. “Most Latinos are becoming Protestants within their ethnic identity and not as part of an assimilation process,” explains Juan Francisco Martínez, professor of Hispanic studies and pastoral leadership at Fuller Theological Seminary, in his book Los Protestantes.

Previous Dish on Jeb’s new book here.

The Dish Model, Ctd

In the spirit of transparency that we promised for the new independent Dish, above is a screenshot from the first month of affiliate revenue generated by the occasional Amazon links we insert for books mentioned in Dish posts. For years, under The Atlantic and Daily Beast, the Dish has linked to Amazon, so this isn’t a new practice by any means. Now that we are an independent site and have to meet our own uncertain budget, we might as well collect the pennies on the dollar for the items purchased on the site. As you can see, the first month brought in $1,253.91 – hardly a windfall. At that rate, if we end up making in the neighborhood of $15,000 for the year, it would just about cover our health insurance costs for both interns ($6,396 a year each).

We recently aired a debate that Hairpin fostered over whether blogs should link to Amazon. Here’s our reasoning:

The vast majority of Dish readers already use Amazon to purchase books online, so we see it as a convenience to provide a link. And in line with our long campaign against dead-tree publishing, we only link to the e-book versions of the titles we mention, despite them being cheaper and thus generating less revenue for the Dish. Also, only one staffer is in charge of inserting the Amazon links after posts and their book mentions are already drafted, as to not incentivize anyone to add mentions for the sake of generating affiliate revenue. Maria Popova of Brain Pickings has a similar view on the subject, as conveyed through Felix Salmon:

[Popova] doesn’t consider her affiliate links to be advertising, and she still says on her tip jar and on her donations page that the site is ad-free. Here’s how Popova sees the difference:

I’d be writing about the books I read anyway, whether or not they “generate a sale,” and that’s not true of an ad, which simply wouldn’t exist then.

There is a certain logic to this. It’s even reasonable to say that she’d be linking to the Amazon page for each book anyway; I, for instance, link to Amazon most of the time that I write about a book, without any affiliate link. In that sense, even the link to Amazon is a natural part of what one expects from a blog, and is not intrusive advertising which is only there because it generates revenue for the advertiser.

On the other hand, the fundamental property of advertising is that it advertises, not that it’s intrusive or gratuitous. (In glossy luxury magazines, for instance, the advertising is a necessary and fundamental part of the editorial product, just as much as it is the main source of income for the publisher.) So it’s understandable that many people, including Amazon, consider affiliate links to be advertising (as opposed to, say, some kind of biz-dev relationship). What’s more, many such links — especially when they’re accompanied by photographs of the product in question, and live permanently in the right rail of a website — are unambiguously advertisements.

It’s easy to overstate the importance of this point. The question here is just whether Popova can or should continue to describe her site as “ad-free” if she uses Amazon affiliate links: it’s not some kind of existential threat to her dual-income model.

I think it’s ad-free if it doesn’t have any advertisements or advertorials. So I consider us ad-free as well, even though we get a fraction of the money from Amazon than Maria. A much more craven approach can be found at Instapundit. He writes whole posts entirely for Amazon revenue purposes, and there’s absolutely no distinction between them and other posts. Check this post from today. Or this.

The Facts On Fracking

Lisa Margonelli regrets that “we are stuck in a bipolar discussion that casts fracking as either a panacea for the economy or as death to the environment”:

Well-regulated, fracked natural gas could be a plus for the environment—particularly if it were coupled with a ban on coal. The extraction of coal via mountaintop removal is extraordinarily damaging to the environment. Power plants that burn coal emit more radiation into neighborhoods around them than do nuclear power plants, and fine particle pollution from coal-powered plants costs 13,000 lives a year, while producing an enormous quantity of greenhouse gas emissions. Coal, arguably, really does equal death. Fracking is not pretty, but there is more than one principled environmental conversation to have about it.

Relatedly, Lynne Peeples highlights opposition from anti-fracking groups to Obama’s nominee for Secretary of Energy, MIT professor Ernie Moniz:

Moniz, director of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology Energy Initiative, has chaired fracking studies funded by oil and gas companies and with members of industry as advisors. His team’s widely cited May 2011 report called natural gas the “bridge to a low-carbon future.” … “What Moniz has said appears to indicate that he does not understand climate science and the influence of fossil fuels,” said [Anthony Ingraffea, a professor of civil and environmental engineering at Cornell University]. “I find that scary. Either he is a repeating the industry mantra, which raises concern over an apparent conflict of interest, or he is not aware of the science. If he’s going to take the position, he better understand the best science.”

Brad Plumer provides more specifics on Moniz’s position:

He outlined his views at length during a 2011 Senate hearing on a report he co-authored, “The Future of Natural Gas.” “In broad terms,” Moniz testified, “we find that, given the large amounts of natural gas available in the U.S. at moderate cost … natural gas can indeed play an important role over the next couple of decades (together with demand management) in economically advancing a clean energy system.”

Here’s how this “bridge” is supposed to work: In the near future, cheap natural gas will elbow aside coal in the U.S. electricity sector. Since burning natural gas for electricity emits about half the carbon-dioxide that burning coal does, this will curtail U.S. emissions a bit. (Indeed, that’s already happening.) That, in turn, buys us some time to make the more arduous shift to even cleaner forms of energy, like solar or wind or even nuclear.

The View From Your Window

New York, New York, 4 pm

Hewitt Award Nominee

“That’s right, you, the American voter, have become Mr. Obama’s voodoo doll, and he is jabbing you all over with sharp pins and placing demonic hexes on you right now as you read this. This is gonna hurt and you are going to feel it! He wants you to feel writhing pain and he wants you to associate that pain with the leaner government espoused by his political opponents — as well as the majority of American voters. In four short years, Obama has gone from hopeful orator promising a bright new future to economic terrorist, a spending jihadist,” – Charles Hurt, The Washington Times. Award glossary here.

Commerce In A Can

Kevin Ashton looks at what goes into producing a can of Coke. From his conclusion:

The number of individuals who know how to make a can of Coke is zero. The number of individual nations that could produce a can of Coke is zero. This famously American product is not American at all. Invention and creation is something we are all in together. Modern tool chains are so long and complex that they bind us into one people and one planet. They are not only chains of tools, they are also chains of minds: local and foreign, ancient and modern, living and dead — the result of disparate invention and intelligence distributed over time and space.

Corporate Feminism And The Class Divide

Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg’s not-yet-released book Lean In is already spurring controversy [NYT]:

In her view, women are also sabotaging themselves. “We hold ourselves back in ways both big and small, by lacking self-confidence, by not raising our hands, and by pulling back when we should be leaning in,” she writes, and the result is that “men still run the world.” Ms. Sandberg wants to take women through a collective self-awareness exercise. In her book, she urges them to absorb the social science showing they are judged more harshly and paid less than men; resist slowing down in mere anticipation of having children; insist that their husbands split housework equally; draft short- and long-term career plans; and join a “Lean In Circle,” which is half business school and half book club.

Melissa Gira Grant argues that Sandberg’s book ignores most women:

[T]his is simply the elite leading the slightly-less-elite, for the sake of Sandberg’s bottom line. The “movement” Sandberg seeks to lead with Lean In resembles a social movement only so far as it supports the growth of her brand as leader. … It seems that the consciousness raised and solutions offered in Lean In Circles will be isolated to actions individual women can take to support their own ambitions and desires, rather than wondering about the ambitions and desires of, say, the women who keep house for the women spending their time “leaning in.” There’s simply no way for women to lean in without leaning on the backs of other women.

Deanna Zandt is similarly critical:

[P]lacing the onus on women to fix themselves up is problematic to the core. I’m all for assertiveness training and teaching women how culturally they aren’t as welcomed into conversations and power structures as men are. (Research shows that when women take up more than 30% of the conversation space, for example, they’re viewed as “dominating” the discourse.) But without simultaneously taking on the structures that keep those norms in place, women are both helping to reproduce those structures over and over, and are punished for challenging them.

Michelle Goldberg pushes back:

These attacks, largely divorced from anything Sandberg has actually written or said, mean that there’s already a lot of public misunderstanding of her book’s message. One would think she was peddling a multilevel marketing scheme, not the most overtly feminist mainstream business book ever written. True, she wants to work within the system rather than smashing it, and parts of her book, as she acknowledges, “will be most relevant to women fortunate enough to have choices about how much and when and where to work.” But so what? No book speaks to everyone, and leadership tomes by wildly successful male executives aren’t typically pilloried for ignoring the concerns of immigrant day laborers.

Jessica Valenti sees the criticism as representative of a more general problem within feminism:

What’s remarkable about these criticisms is that they’re not coming from the usual right-wing anti-feminists, but from feminists themselves. The feminist backlash against Sandberg, Facebook’s chief operating officer and a former vice president at Google, reveals a big and recurring problem within the movement: We hold leaders to impossible standards, placing perfection over progress. And a movement that does more complaining than creating is bound to fail. …

The view that Sandberg is too rich and powerful to advise working women is shortsighted; it assumes that any sort of success is antithetical to feminism. The truth is, feminism could use a powerful ally. Here’s a nationally known woman calling herself a feminist, writing what will be a wildly popular book with feminist ideas, encouraging other women to be feminists. And we’re worried she has too much influence? That she’s too . . . ambitious?

Sandberg’s view has been positioned opposite Anne-Marie Slaughter’s article “Why Women Still Can’t Have It All”, covered on the Dish here. Recent Dish on female breadwinners here, here and here.

The Paperwork Plutocracy

Reviewing Ben Kafka’s The Demon of Writing, Rob Horning captures the paradox of paperwork – the very bureaucracies initially created in the name of fairness and impartiality often become the scourge of the masses:

In a state where the DMV is the model institution, everyone is equal in that they are equally miserable. But paperwork also opens new avenues for the exercise of influence that are just as opaque as any earlier systems abused by elites. As documentation proliferates, so too do auditors auditing the clerks, and auditors auditing those auditors, and on and on to theoretical infinity. This network of data and overtaxed inspectors and processors has the effect of creating a miasma of competing claims for legitimacy, as well as ample opportunity for doling out preferential treatment, circumventing the law, subverting authority, serving oneself. Information becomes obfuscation, particularly under the pressures of “surveillance and acceleration,” which Kafka isolates as the contradictory demands of state power. The state needs to know more to function fairly, but with more information comes more urgency to process it all, yielding even more information to process and sending fairness further over the horizon.

Month: March 2013