Month: February 2014

Ask Reza Aslan Anything: How Can A Muslim Write About Jesus?

That’s the question Fox News used against Reza, channeled here by a less interrogatory reader:

Reza is an Iranian-American writer and scholar of religions. He is the author of No god but God: The Origins, Evolution, and Future of Islam and, most recently, Zealot, which offers an interpretation of the life and mission of the historical Jesus. Previous Dish on Zealot here, here and here.

Our full Ask Anything archive is here.

Quote For The Day

“There have been seven disasters since humans came on the earth, very similar to the one that’s just about to happen. I think these events keep separating the wheat from the chaff. And eventually we’ll have a human on the planet that really does understand it and can live with it properly. That’s the source of my optimism,” – maverick British scientist (with a great track record), James Lovelock, on what he considers the pending catastrophe of climate change. Bonus money quote:

Enjoy life while you can. Because if you’re lucky it’s going to be 20 years before it hits the fan.

Update from a reader:

You link to a six-year-old Guardian piece showcasing Lovelock’s alarmism about global warming, but do you think your readers deserve to know that the same Lovelock, in 2012, said this: “‘I made a mistake’: Gaia theory scientist James Lovelock admits he was ‘alarmist’ about the impact of climate change.” (Also this: “James Lovelock walks back his alarmism on climate”). Sadly, I don’t expect your team to follow-up on this. All cheerleading, no critical thinking: that’s what I am used to get from the Dish coverage of this tremendously important issue.

Very Special K, Ctd

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Neuroskeptic examines new research on the therapeutic benefits of ketamine:

[Researcher Elias] Dakwar et al took 8 crack cocaine addicts who wanted to go clean. They gave them three injections (in a random order, within-subjects). These were ketamine 0.41 mg/kg, ketamine 0.71 mg/kg, and lorazepam [a benzodiazepine] 2 mg. The ketamine doses are, respectively, slightly lower than, and substantially higher than, the dose used in depression studies (0.5 mg/kg). …

The goal was to see whether ketamine increased the ‘motivation to quit’ crack. But Dakwar et al also used questionnaires to formally assess the psychoactive effects. The key finding was that both doses of ketamine caused much stronger ‘mystical experiences’ than lorazepam, as measured with the HMS scale. Participants reported feeling “a new view of reality”, “incapable of being expressed in words”, “a feeling of awe”… pretty impressive, basically.

Furthermore, there was a strong correlation between the intensity of the injection-induced mystical experience, and subsequent motivation to quit. This is consistent with (although not proof of) the idea that the clinical effect of ketamine in addiction is an indirect effect of its psychoactive properties, rather than a direct pharmacological effect.

Previous Dish on ketamine here, here, and here.

The Brittle Billionaire

Donald Trump is acting like he’s going to run for governor of New York. But McKay Coppins finds the reality TV star’s act wearing thin:

Standing by the press riser in the back of the cafeteria, I kept looking around to see if Trump’s comments were setting off the sort of frenzy he routinely generated in the political media during the 2012 campaign cycle. Instead, I saw a bored gaggle of blank-faced cameramen and sleepy local reporters begrudgingly there on their editors’ orders. Some chatted idly with one another, ignoring Trump’s speech entirely, while others swiped casually at their iPhones. I became mildly self-conscious when I realized I was the only reporter from a national outlet who had ventured outside the Acela corridor to see the Donald in action. All morning, I got the same question over and over from the local reporters. “You didn’t come all the way up here for this, did you?”

Kilgore calls the piece “the long-overdue obituary of Trump’s pseudo-political career.” The Donald was not pleased:

The profile has already cost one Trump aide his job, 32-year-old political consultant Sam Nunberg. Trump told the New York Post that Nunberg promised him that Coppins was “a friend of mine” who’d write “a fair story.” Trump promised him that if the piece turned out to be “a wise-guy story, you’ll be fired.” It was, and he was.

Standing Up To Hollywood Standards

Ellen Page came out at an HRC event on Friday. Harriet Williamson argues for why we should care:

The normalization of homosexuality by famous names even makes it harder for young people to bully their LGBTQ peers. I wish Ellen Page had been out when I was a scared twelve-year-old who knew she had to get a boyfriend to fit in and stop the taunts of ‘ugly lesbian bitch’.

Alyssa applauds another part of Page’s coming-out speech, in which she criticized Hollywood’s “crushing standards” of beauty and success – for women and men, gays and straights alike:

When Page said that these standards “serve no one. Anyone who defies these so-called norms becomes worthy of comment and scrutiny,” she’s making an important jump. LGBT actors and actresses, and LGBT people who have to live in the world shaped by Hollywood products, may have a great deal to gain by tearing down these standards. But their heterosexual peers will benefit, too. Maybe their gains will be smaller: maybe they’ll be able to go out of the house without makeup, or they won’t have to make themselves sick preparing their bodies for a part. But whatever the potential benefits, we all have a common interest in a world where there are more than one way to be beautiful, more than one kind of good life, more than one barometer for success. This isn’t Page’s cause, this is all of ours.

“Enhanced Interrogation” In North Korea

The latest UN Report on the hideous, butchering and torturing machine that is the North Korean regime is a helpful reminder of just which regime in the world is currently the worst. The totalitarianism, the mass starvation, the regional belligerence, the concentration camps … it’s all in the report, preposterously dismissed by China. And we might as well be realistic: the only outside power with the ability to change anything in that haunted wasteland is China. And the regime there is proving its callousness and indifference to basic humanity by continuing to carry water for the Kims and their generations-long mass murder of their subjects.

But it’s also distressing to see that the images of torture in North Korea look painfully familiar. They were drawn by a former inmate in these gulags of terror. Here are “stress positions”:

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Here is the cramming of a prisoner into a tiny box/tunnel so as to reduce him to the level of an animal;

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and here’s “long-time standing”:

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And yes, of course there is waterboarding. Torture regimes rarely leave water out of their methods:

The torture chamber was equipped with a water tank, in which suspects could be immersed until the suspect would fear drowning. The room also had wall shackles that were specially arranged to hang people upside down.

Now look: in no way on earth am I equating the US’s history of torturing of prisoners in wartime with the uniquely foul, domestic, and widespread torture conducted by the totalitarian monsters in Pyongyang. What I am merely insisting is that what the US did was torture within the widely accepted, internationally and domestically defined use of the term; that our righteous fury at North Korea’s brutality has been compromised by our own complicity in the same torture techniques; and that the US government has never made even the slightest inclination to hold anyone in authority accountable for the war crimes.

I am not anticipating any justice in the near future. Democracies cannot bear very much reality. But can we please dispense with the lie that the Bush administration did not torture terror suspects?

Can we finally consign the term “enhanced interrogation” to the ash-heap of history?

Ukraine Reignites, Ctd

Analysis and commentary from the blogosphere to follow. Recent Dish coverage of the violence in Ukraine here. More context from early December here.

(Hat tip: Max Fisher, who rounded up “the 16 essential Twitter accounts to follow Ukraine’s unfolding crisis”)

What’s The Best Way To Get Clean? Ctd

In response to the reader who wrote that “AA works 100 percent of the time for people who are 100-percent committed to the program,” another writes, “Like much of AA’s homespun wisdom, that statement is completely untrue, yet very helpful at the same time”:

Most meetings begin with a reading that states: “Rarely have we seen a person fail who has rigorously followed our path.” Who knows how true that really is, but when you’re desperate to stop drinking, hearing that can give you hope. I have no idea if I could have gotten sober on my own. I have no idea if AA is the best approach. Clearly it isn’t the only way, and Bill Wilson himself never suggested that it was. What I do know is that when I was desperate and had no idea how I could stop drinking, AA members gave me hope. They had been where I was and were in a better place now. I’ll always be grateful to AA for that.

Another reader:

People in recovery understand that the statement that AA “works 100 percent of the time for people who are 100-percent committed to the program” is like saying that if you enter a room, you are going to stay in that room, unless you leave it. It’s not meant as a claim of a perfect record of keeping sober everyone who has ever gone to a meeting. It’s meant as a short, easy to remember slogan that just might keep someone from leaving the room when they are having a really bad day.

Anyone who has been in recovery for a while will tell you honestly that they know they are always about to leave the room, and possibly lose their sobriety. This isn’t a damning indictment of the ineffectiveness of the program; it’s a real-time understanding that there are no guarantees in life and no short-cuts to true self-awareness, and being in denial about that is what fucked up your life in the first place.

You will never, ever, hear anyone put themselves forward as an official spokesperson for AA, whether to promote the program, make claims about its effectiveness, or make any statements of what AA endorses or refutes. The whole point of the “anonymous” part of AA is to keep AA out of any public or political controversy. To argue against what AA “says,” or what the 12 steps unfairly mandate, is to misunderstand what AA actually is – a loose network of groups of people who get together, regularly, anonymously, to talk to each other. That’s it. That’s all AA is. The 12 steps are a framework that gives the conversation some structure, but it’s not a creed or contract. Everyone is free to interpret them in their own way, and use them however they see fit – as long as their way worksfor them.

Another refocuses the discussion:

The reader who wrote about his roommate becoming a smoker and sugar junkie illustrates a point that I haven’t seen discussed in this thread: Addiction is both a mental and physical process. This is why so many people who come into the rooms struggle to find serenity: They switch one addiction for another. The process of getting high – whatever the drug or activity – activates all sorts of biochemical triggers all by itself independent of the substance or activity’s effects. It’s Pavlovian.

George Carlin gave an interview to Playboy years ago where he talked quite brilliantly about this: how the ritual of cleaning his dope before he rolled a joint was just as comforting to him as the “high” itself and an integral part of the process. This is why people associated with 12-step recovery often say that “We’re a nation of addicts.” All one has to do is spend 30 minutes watching TV to see how advertising pinpoints and perpetuates this “mental craving” that is also a part of the addiction cycle. We’re taught from birth that some “thing” can assuage whatever bad or uncomfortable feelings we have. The addict is wired to want, and then need, more and more regardless of the consequences.