Month: April 2014

Yglesias Award Nominee

“[A]s a queer employee of the Mozilla Foundation, this stuff isn’t even an abstraction to me. Perhaps most of all because of my acute awareness that my mother’s marriage to my beloved stepfather would have been illegal under anti-miscegenation laws not repealed in their home state until they were overturned in 1967 by Loving v. Virginia. It is because I have a real stake in the issue, and because my own views on the matter are so clear, that my own ambivalence this week has been strange to me. …

Several of my colleagues have called for Brendan’s resignation. I have not done so, despite my strong feelings on the issue, in large part because of my conviction that the open internet is not and cannot be a progressive movement or a liberal movement or even a libertarian movement. In the climate-change fiasco here in the US, we’ve seen what happens with a globally important issue becomes identified with a single political point of view. We can’t let that happen here: the open internet is not more important than gay rights or any number of other progressive causes, but it should and must be a broader movement. The moment we let “open internet” become synonymous with progressive causes—inside or outside Mozilla—its many conservative supporters will be forced into an impossible position. … I don’t see there’s much to gain by asking Brendan to resign,” – Erin Kissane, prior to the forced resignation yesterday.

The Best Of The Dish Today

The Queen And Duke Of Edinburgh Visit Rome And The Vatican City

A pro-circumcision fanatic – you can read his endless rants against the beleaguered foreskin here – managed to get the Mayo Clinic to endorse mandatory genital mutilation for infant boys. Hide your kids! Then he ups the ante some more, declaring that opposition to genital cutting is equivalent to being against vaccines for children. Seriously. He wants to paint the opposition to circumcision up there with anti-vaccine denialism? Please. I strongly favor universal HPV vaccination, for example, along with all the appropriate vaccines for serious disease. They massively improve one’s health prospects and do not alter a core part of a human being’s body without his consent. The question is whether the slight and contested medical benefits of circumcision outweigh the mutilation’s effects, and whether permanently dulling a man’s sexual sensitivity is something we have a right to impose on boys and men without their consent.

As it is, American boys are still being mutilated without their consent in very large numbers (well over 70 percent). And Canada, for example, has no problem sparing infants the knife:

The Canadian Paediatric Society, which outlined its position in 1996, says that “the overall evidence of the benefits and harms of circumcision is so evenly balanced that (the CPS) does not support recommending circumcision as a routine procedure for newborns.” And the CPS policy appears to reflect circumcision rates in Canada. A February 2013 study in the medical journal Canadian Family Physician put the circumcision rate in Canada at 32 per cent.

Are Canadian men suffering for being left alone? Our health decisions should be ours’ alone – not some crusading doctor’s attempts to tell us what’s good for us, before we even have a chance to demur. Update from a reader:

You’re misunderstanding the nature of scientific publishing. There is no endorsement from Mayo. The journal “Mayo Clinic Proceedings” is a high quality peer-reviewed medical journal published by the Mayo Clinic, but anyone can submit articles. An article being accepted for publication does not imply that the publisher necessarily agrees with it. It just means that they executed the peer review process, so it should be at least competent and well argued, whether true or not. So you’re over-reacting. But that’s why we read your blog!

Earlier today, I spiked the ball a little bit after Tom Daley proved me right – and all the pomo liberals wrong – about his sexual orientation. Ann Friedman, who made a bet with me on this, still refuses to concede she lost. Weak. Lame. The conversation about race and America continued to and fro. Lawrence Lessig gave us a lesson in corruption after the Supreme Court made Sheldon Adelson even happier. Michael Lewis defended Flash Boys from its critics (buy the riveting book here). And I charted the rise and rise of the European far right – now, in Britain as well as France.

The most popular post of the day was “The Hounding Of A Heretic.” Runner up: “Surrender, Ann Friedman!”

See you in the morning.

(Photo: Queen Elizabeth II meets Pope Francis at the Paul VI Hall in Vatican City on April 3, 2014. By Vatican Pool/Getty Images.)

The Hounding Of A Heretic, Ctd

It turns out that Eich might have saved his job had he recanted, like all heretics must. But given the choice of recanting, he failed. Hence the lighting of the fires:

Throughout the interviews, it was not hard to get the sense that Eich really wanted to stick strongly by his views about gay marriage, which run counter to much of the tech industry and, increasingly, the general population in the U.S. For example, he repeatedly declined to answer when asked if he would donate to a similar initiative today.

Instead, he tried to unsuccessfully hedge those sentiments and, perhaps more importantly, did not seem to understand that he might have to pay the inevitable price for having them. Thus, something had to give — and it did.

He did not understand that in order to be a CEO of a company, you have to renounce your heresy! There is only one permissible opinion at Mozilla, and all dissidents must be purged! Yep, that’s left-liberal tolerance in a nut-shell. No, he wasn’t a victim of government censorship or intimidation. He was a victim of the free market in which people can choose to express their opinions by boycotts, free speech and the like. He still has his full First Amendment rights. But what we’re talking about is the obvious and ugly intolerance of parts of the gay movement, who have reacted to years of being subjected to social obloquy by returning the favor. Reihan notes the use of the word “integrity” about Mozilla:

Let me restate Swisher’s observation: had Brendan Eich decided to apologize — had he decided to say that he had come around on the issue, and had he added that his donation to the Proposition 8 campaign was a profound mistake that he would regret for the rest of his life, and which he will atone for by making a large donation to one of the organizations pressing the case for same-sex civil marriage — he could have spared himself all of this trouble. So while Mitchell Baker talks about protecting the integrity of Mozilla, she might spare a word or two for the integrity of Brendan Eich, or rather she and her colleagues might reflect on it.

This is a repugnantly illiberal sentiment. It is also unbelievably stupid for the gay rights movement. You want to squander the real gains we have made by argument and engagement by becoming just as intolerant of others’ views as the Christianists? You’ve just found a great way to do this. It’s a bad, self-inflicted blow. And all of us will come to regret it.

The in-tray is inundated with your dissents, which we will air in full tomorrow, since it will some time to find the strongest counterpoints. Only a small percentage of emailers are as disgusted as I am:

This really frightens me. Eich may well be wrong – very wrong, in fact – but he has a right to his opinion, and the fact that the Internet threw a hissy fit certainly doesn’t justify firing him. There’s no freedom of speech if you can’t be employed while holding your opinion. And he even made it clear that he wasn’t going to change any of Mozilla’s benefit policies or the like! This wasn’t going to affect anybody in any way. This is entirely about his right to hold his opinion.

This is particularly depressing to me because the tech industry has generally been fairly open-minded. I wouldn’t have expected this from them.

Another reader:

Thanks much for posting that. It makes me glad I popped 50 bucks for the subscription. For a brief time there, I thought I was the only one arguing the case against intimidation tactics. I was actually called a “Quisling” by one self-righteous ninny in another blog’s comments section for saying that the use of intimidation is a bad strategy in pursuing SSM and gay rights.

I’m sure you’ve been called much worse, as have I, but that really got to me. I’ve been fighting for SSM almost as long as you have. And now that we’ve got it, and I’m married, I find it deeply disturbing to see this sort of nonsense spewing out of the left. I used to think epistemic closure was mostly a problem for the right. I’m coming to know how deeply wrong I was.

One more:

I don’t spend my money at Chik-fil-A because I don’t like the idea of it being funneled into an anti-equality organizations. I don’t buy Barilla because their CEO explained that they don’t make their products for me, which I assume means they don’t need my money. I don’t watch Duck Dynasty because – well, I never did. But this is a horse of different color. I don’t want to be party to purges and I sure as hell don’t want to give the likes Sarah Palin the satisfaction of an “I told you so” moment. Snap out of it people! We’re winning! We don’t need to do this!

Face Of The Day

Screen shot 2014-04-03 at 12.19.05 PM

For Cocks: The Chicken Book, Ernest Goh went to chicken beauty pageants:

[Goh], a thirty-five-year-old photographer from Singapore, first encountered these competitions when traveling across Malaysia in 2013. Goh, who is interested in how humans perceive animals, set up a photo studio on location, and began photographing the chickens with the intent of discovering, as he writes in a statement about the work, “who they were, not what they were.” Goh met with chicken enthusiasts and breeders, who, as Goh describes, “often regard the chickens as warriors ready for battle.”

He focused on one particular breed:

Goh selected the Ayam Seramas breed of chicken for his series, who are known for their beauty. He sets places each creature against a black background and allows their exquisite coloring and patterned feathers shine. These photographs highlight their outward appearance as well as their quirky personality, as the cock their heads and strut their stuff.

Goh’s books are available for sale here. More of his work here, which the Dish has featured before.

Turkey’s Democracy Blackout?

Marc Champion discusses the possibility that fraud was a factor in last weekend’s Turkish municipal elections:

The suspicions of many Turks were raised on election day, by a series of statistically improbable electricity blackouts that according to local news reports occurred in 40 cities across more than 20 Turkish provinces during Sunday’s vote count, in some cases forcing hand counts by candlelight.

Energy Minister Taner Yildiz has blamed a cat, which got into a substation and shorted out the electricity in Ankara. Other outages were caused by storms and snow, he said. Still, the image of a “lobby” of stray feline kamikazes fanning out across a country that stretches from Bulgaria to Iran to short electricity substations has gripped the imagination of Turkey’s social media users. Conspiracy theories are rampant.

Since then, the main opposition Republican People’s Party, or CHP, has produced bags of discarded opposition ballots that it says were found in one constituency, as well as numerous discrepancies between written ballots and their digital entries elsewhere.

Dan Berman, however, doubts that a clean vote would have produced a significantly different outcome:

[I]f the AKP played dirty, and probably stole some of the key close races, the overall picture is neither as implausible as that in Iran, nor as easily explained by the irregularities that appear to take place. Despite the failure of the official website, results were released to the media in real-time, and despite high opposition expectations, at a national level fell at about the middle point of the expected range of results, with the AKP managing between 43% and 44% at about the median of its performance in the last local polls in 2009, and the National Assembly elections of 2011. As a consequence, while I have doubts that the elections were fair, and even less confidence in the Ankara and Antalya results, I have almost no doubt that a plurality of Turks who went to the polls on Sunday cast their ballots for the AKP, and I strongly suspect the same was true in Istanbul, where the final margin, over 700,0000 votes out of 7 million cast, seems large enough to render redundant the tactics used to achieve it.

But Lisel Hintz views the manipulation as part of a bigger problem:

From foreign spies to terrorists to necrophiliacs, being in the opposition camp in Turkey doesn’t look pretty. This delegitimizing rhetoric appeared again during the elections, with Erdogan deeming opposition forces “worse than Assassins,” referring to medieval groups that would murder their rivals to produce instability. It is this factor – the absolute unwillingness by Erdogan and his government to attribute legitimacy to any form of opposition – that best explains the electoral manipulation Turkey is experiencing. For a prime minister who declared to those objecting to his style of rule during Gezi: “We will see at the ballot box,” there was no room for allowing an opposition he can’t comprehend or respect to take the seats of power in key cities such as Ankara and Istanbul. His victory speech, vowing that those who opposed him will “pay the price,” was positively chilling in this respect.

On a larger scale than the electoral irregularities and their ongoing contestation, it is this larger issue of legitimacy of opposition, and the knee-jerk reaction of demonizing anyone that defies or disagrees with the AKP’s will that poses the greatest obstacle to democratization in Turkey.

Earlier Dish on Turkey’s elections here.

Can Comics Copyright Comedy?

Peter McGraw and Joel Warner explain how comedians handle intellectual property disputes:

While the law doesn’t provide much in the way of protection for comedians, [legal scholars Dotan] Oliar and [Christopher] Sprigman found that today’s comics do maintain an informal set of rules. If two comics come up with a similar joke, for example, it’s understood that whoever tells it first on television can claim ownership. Similarly, if two comedians are working on material together, batting ideas back and forth, it’s generally agreed upon that if one comedian comes up with a setup and the other the punch line, the former owns the joke.

Those who don’t follow the rules can face escalating repercussions. First they’re subjected to badmouthing; then they get blacklisted from clubs. Finally, if the unacceptable behavior continues, it’s understood that things might get physical. While none of the comics Oliar and Sprigman interviewed admitted to participating in or witnessing fights over stolen jokes, many had heard stories, and they accepted such violence as a possible, if remote, outcome. As one comedian told the researchers, “ … the only copyright protection you have is a quick uppercut.”

Fisking Maduro

Francisco Toro debunks Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro’s NYT op-ed, focusing on his specious claim that Hugo Chávez and his movement “created flagship universal health care and education programs, free to our citizens nationwide”:

Yes, both the school system and the hospital network were overstretched, underperforming, and in need of reform by the time Chávez came to power in 1998, and yes, chavismo‘s reforms of both systems have been broadly popular. There’s an interesting conversation to be had about the successes and failures of those reforms.

But that conversation can’t happen when the government insists on a wholesale falsification of history, simply erasing the long, rich history of health and education reforms that in 1999 bequeathed Chávez the large and ambitious, albeit flawed, health and education systems that Maduro oversees today.

Maduro’s op-ed is strewn with similar whoppers, like his commitment to labor organizing rights, U.S. involvement in the 2002 coup, the vitality of Venezuelan democracy, and a call for “peace and dialogue.” None of these lines are new, either. Time and again, chavismo doesn’t so much bend the historical record as simply ignore it, and government propaganda employs words to mean the diametrical opposite of what the dictionary says they mean.

José Cárdenas calls Maduro’s professed desire for “dialogue” with protesters pointless:

Maduro doesn’t need a staged dialogue to resolve the crisis; the grievances are known to anyone who has read an article about Venezuela in the past year. Even he can figure that one out. First, he should demobilize and disarm the paramilitary groups and cease with the incendiary rhetoric against his fellow citizens. Then he could unilaterally quell the tensions by committing to credible and irreversible reforms that would restore to those who disagree with the government the institutional channels to express dissent. This would mean reforming the subservient Supreme Court, the electoral authority, the legislature, and the media, while at the same time reducing the state’s stranglehold on the private sector so it can start to replenish empty consumer shelves.

The problem is that such reforms are anathema to Maduro’s Cuban minders, who exert inordinate influence over his decisions — a dynamic that remains one of the protestors’ primary grievances. The Cubans know that they, along with the $6 billion a year in Venezuelan giveaways to the mendicant Castro brothers, are hugely unpopular and rightly see an end to such benefits, including two-thirds of the island’s oil needs, as an existential threat. To cede any ground to the opposition directly threatens the survival of the Castro regime. The violence will continue in Venezuela because the Cubans cannot have it any other way.

Meanwhile, the Catholic Church has turned on the government:

On Wednesday, the Venezuelan Episcopal Conference, the council of the nation’s bishops that speaks for the Catholic Church, condemned the Maduro government’s implementation of an “authoritarian” agenda and questioned its “democratic profile.” In a communiqué, the bishops declared that the government “applies brutal repression on political dissidents” and seeks to attain peace by using “threats, physical or verbal violence, and repression.”

Church leaders also rejected the abusive judicial repression and persecution of opposition politicians. And, they criticized the lack of adequate public policies to address impunity, insecurity, and “attacks on domestic production,” which has led to a serious deterioration of economic conditions.

Beyond The Condom And Banana

Rachel Giese insists that teen boys need better sex ed:

Sex educators report that young straight men are the most frequently ignored demographic when it comes to sexual health. Since girls and women overwhelmingly bear the consequences of unwanted pregnancies, violence, and discrimination, sexual health initiatives around the world tend to focus on their needs (one exception being AIDS awareness campaigns targeted at men). It comes as no surprise, then, that boys often find these female-slanted programs irrelevant and boring, and may even come to think that they have no responsibility for their own sexual health or their partners’. This lack of education and expectation, coupled with the shoulder-shrugging cop-out that “boys will be boys,” carries serious repercussions. …

Studies indicate that boys are less likely than girls to seek clinical sexual health care, because they feel embarrassed and afraid to look stupid or unmanly. When they do receive medical attention, doctors are less likely to raise the issue of sexual health with them than with girls. Meanwhile, as teenage pregnancy in Canada continues to decline, sexually transmitted infections are climbing. More than two-thirds of chlamydia cases reported in this country occur among those aged fifteen to twenty-four. In the United States, the same age group accounts for nearly half of the 19 million new cases of STDs each year. This suggests that while girls are using contraception to prevent pregnancies, boys, who have more control over the use of condoms, are not wearing them consistently to prevent the spread of infections.

Et Tu, Josh? Ctd

Ryan Chittum responds to my criticism of TPM’s new advertising strategy:

Here’s the thing: Native ads are just advertorials by another name, and advertorials have long been published by news organizations of the highest standards, including The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, and The New Yorker. Those “special advertising sections” are the native ads of print, and they’ve been there for decades. … In a perfect world, journalism would be paid for entirely by readers and publications’ interests would align with them and them alone. But while Andrew Sullivan and Consumer Reports can make a go of that, 99.9 percent of journalists and their organizations cannot.

I don’t disagree. But those advertorials were never designed to look as much like the rest of the magazines or newspapers, and were labeled “advertorial” or “advertising”. And they were embedded in physical products where you could directly compare them with the actual copy elsewhere, highlighting their difference. Online, a web page is easily detached from its context (85 percent of Buzzfeed’s pages are viewed with no context from the home-page) and so far more susceptible to being viewed as legitimate editorial, rather than a fake article, especially when the framing is identical to a regular page. Chittum argues that the “much more dangerous aspect of advertising is the self-editing or outright censorship big advertisers can prompt on the news side”:

Tobacco companies’ products killed 100 million people in the 20th century, most of them after scientists proved they caused mortal diseases. … Journalism was so addicted to tobacco advertising that the press at least sometimes censored itself when covering the cigarette companies. The New Republic, for instance, a few years before Sullivan got there, squashed an investigation on Big Tobacco’s insidious media strategy because Marty Peretz foresaw “massive losses of advertising income.”

Time, also around the same time in the 1980s, deleted anti-tobacco references from an advertorial pushing healthy living, and a spokesman actually said this to the Chicago Tribune:

“Time, as does Newsweek, has a lot of cigarette advertising. Do you carry material that’s insulting to the advertiser?”

And that was when the media was minting money. With the press now in a far weaker position, the temptation to self-edit is surely stronger. That’s potentially a far bigger problem than native advertising, particularly when the latter is well disclosed.

I agree that it’s a big problem, and likely to become much worse. That’s why we highlighted the extraordinary fact that journalists at Time Inc. now report directly to those on the business side seeking ads. Both are awful – and will contribute to a nadir in trust for anything in journalism, if they haven’t already.