Month: May 2013

In his book The Last Man In Russia, Oliver Bullough describes a Russia that is “dying from within”:

Russians have been on a 50-year bender, and not just men: anyone riding the Moscow subway can see well-dressed young women drinking beer from cans on their way to work. And the more Russians drink, the quicker they die and the less they replace themselves.

Russian life expectancy hit a high in the mid-1960s—69 years, the same as in the contemporary West. Since then, Westerners have added about a decade and a half to their average lifespans, while Russian life expectancy for males has shrunk to 63 and Russians of both sexes are five times more likely to die of “external” causes—murder, suicide, drowning, car crashes—than West Europeans. Birth rates cratered along with the Soviet Union; there were 148 million Russians in 1990; now there are 141 million. …

“If you deny people hope and love and friendship, then they sicken and despair,” [Bullough] writes. “They drink themselves to death, and they stop having children.”

Much of David Petraeus’ reputation lies with his vaunted “surge” in Iraq, which neocons hailed as the way forward to a multi-sectarian government. Senator John McCain keeps calling it a success. It was a success in taking advantage of a lull in an exhausted civil war – plus a lot of bribes – to get us out of there with some kind of dignity. But the civil war is now re-starting in earnest. Today alone, over 70 people were killed in sectarian bomb attacks.

(Photo: Iraqi medics attend to a wounded man at a hospital in Fallujah, west of Baghdad, on May 17, 2013 following a bomb blast in a coffee shop. Bombs targeting Sunnis, including two near a mosque and one at a funeral procession, killed 67 people across Iraq, officials said, after dozens died in two days of attacks on Shiites. By Azhar Shallal/AFP/Getty Images.)

Hats off to Labour tonight. They’ve seen through @timloughton‘s wrecking amendment and put the gay marriage reform before politics.

— Tim Montgomerie (@TimMontgomerie) May 20, 2013

 
The cynical wrecking amendment has gone down in flames – by 375 votes to 70. It’s a fascinating insight into the opposition to marriage equality on the far right. A conservative – yes, a conservative – was proposing to extend civil partnerships, i.e.e marriage-lite, to heterosexual couples rather than allow gay couples to be married. Such civil partnerships, if extended to everyone, as in France, would do much much more to undermine the institution of civil marriage than allowing gays to participate in the institution. It’s pretty obvious evidence that bigotry was behind this – a betrayal of core conservative principles in order to prevent gay equality.

Felix Salmon ponders the personal privacy consequences of Google Glass:

If Google Glass — and wearable computing more generally — takes off and fulfills its potential, it will change society’s norms about what is public and what is private. It is therefore entirely rational, whatever you think of the set of norms we have right now, to assume that they will end up moving towards something more well disposed towards the new technology.

Jeff Jarvis will welcome that move, and can come up with dozens of reasons why it would be a good thing rather than a bad thing. “There’s no need to panic,” he writes. “We’ll figure it out, just as we have with many technologies—from camera to cameraphone—that came before.” But let’s be clear here about how much weight is carried by that “we’ll figure it out”. Realistically, “figuring it out” means, in large part, changing norms: irrevocably moving the line between what is private and what is public. That might be a good thing, it might be a bad thing. But if you like the norms we have right now — or if you think they’ve already gone too far in terms of robbing individuals of their privacy — then you have every reason to worry about what the onset of wearable computing might portend.

I’ve no doubt Felix is right. I just have no idea how to counter it. Technologies cannot be unthought; and the products of it cannot be somehow confiscated. We just have to adjust – but the adjustment is ending any real zone of “privacy” as our parents and grandparents knew it. Withdrawing from the public space helps – but who can really do that? We are all naked now, as Jon Hamm has discovered. The only option is another technology: some kind of virtual loin cloth for those privates we want to reserve for ourselves.

Brad Plumer summarizes recent research that finds that “capitals that are more isolated from the rest of the state or country tend to be more corrupt”:

[W]hy would this be? There are a couple of theories here. The authors found that state capitals located in remote areas tend to receive less newspaper and media coverage. What’s more, voter knowledge about the goings-on in these isolated statehouses tends to be lower. And, as a result, voter turnout for state elections tends to be depressed.

Joshua Keating chimes in:

The authors also note that this is all very ironic, given that capitals were often initially moved away from major commercial centers in order to discourage corruption. … I wonder if part of the issue may be the ability to attract qualified — and not corrupt — civil servants. No offense to Albany or Abuja, but I’m guessing the governments based in Boston, or Denver, not to mention Paris and Tokyo, might have an easier time [attracting] the best and the brightest.

My take here.

The ABC News reporter is a “right-wing mole“? Please. Yes, Jon Karl came into journalism via the Collegiate program to bring more conservatives into the MSM. Personally, I think that’s a good thing. When he and I were at TNR together, I saw nothing in him but good sense, good humor, and ambition. And the alleged sins of Karl are extremely petty – and designed to pile on after his regurgitation of Republican summaries of emails that were, shall we say, slanted a little. But Jon apologized for being a little suckered and has always, so far as I can see, been a fair-minded reporter.

Yes, he’s not a left-liberal which means he may choose stories or emphases that liberals wouldn’t. But isn’t that a good thing? And isn’t it even better that a single MSM news source can include reporters of varying opinions and hold them all to the same standard?

Illah Nourbakhsh considers the most vulnerable jobs:

Robots will be able to fix your car poorly before they can fix it well. They will cook food that is bland and mealy before they garner a Michelin star. But they will take on middle-class jobs and win, not because of their qualitative merits, but because they look good in the antiseptic light of financial balance sheets. Take a look at the new robot Baxter, from Rethink Robotics. It is Baxter’s price tag—$20,000—that makes it potentially revolutionary. The return on investment for a company that replaces a single human employee is realized before year’s end. Does Baxter need to do everything the laid-off human could have done? Not quite. It just has to do enough to justify the replacement: one machine for one warm body’s fractional salary. …

Then there is a more threatening issue: robots are improving in performance far faster than humans. We are stuck with an evolutionary timetable that is glacial, whereas computer vision is rapidly moving from amoeba to insect. We face a future in which robots will be better than humans in entire job categories—that is simply a matter of time.

Previous Dish on the subject here.

EJ Graff notes that all the marriage equality states had employment non-discrimination laws in place beforehand. She sees a connection:

People change their minds about whether [gays] deserve recognition for our relationships only when they realize that they like us and our partners. Once they realize that the gays they ostensibly hate include Mary Beth in accounting and Jamal in HR, that hatred starts to soften. And once Mary Beth and Jamal know they can keep feeding their families once they’re out, they are more likely to feel comfortable introducing you to their partners at the grocery store or at church, and explaining how much a statewide DOMA would hurt their kids. Had nationwide job protections been in place since 1996, it’s possible to imagine we’d be even farther along with marriage in still more states, as more people realized they cared about their gay colleagues.

It’s possible. We have fought over priorities in the gay movement for decades. I was for marriage and military equality first – because it seemed to me that the federal government had no right telling private individuals not to discriminate when it was discriminating against gay people itself. I also believed that those two issues could reframe the debate in a way that recast gay people as who we really are: not so much sexual outlaws as family members with jobs and kids and often conservative values about service to the community. That reframing may now help pass federal non-discrimination laws.

What I have learned these past decades, however, is that you can have these debates in the abstract – but events, emotions, court decisions, and the uncontrollable rise of gay self-esteem scramble all attempts to keep them in line. A movement is never linear. It veers and rises and ebbs and flows with countless varying forces. But I did not realize the correlation between state nondiscrimination laws and marriage equality was quite as airtight as EJ has noted. And it’s eye-opening.