Month: April 2014

Dan Savage reacts to the announcement that the ACA hit its enrollment target of 7 million:

Great news! And Republicans—who will never offer a Republican alternative health-care plan and who will never acknowledge that Obamacare used to be the Republican alternative to the kind of single-payer health care plan preferred by liberals, progressives, and sane countries everywhere (countries like Canada, Germany, France, Israel, and Vatican City)—are gnashing their teeth.

Chait details how that GOP intransigence reveals a deeper divide between the parties:

One of my longstanding fixations, going back almost a decade now, is that we make a mistake when we think of liberalism and conservative as symmetric ways of thinking. On economic policy, at least, they are asymmetric. Liberals believe in activist government entirely as a means to various ends. Pollution controls are useful only insofar as they result in cleaner air; national health insurance is valuable only to the extent that it helps people obtain medical care. More spending and more regulation are not ends in and of themselves. Conservatives, on the other hand, believe in small government not only for practical reasons — this program will cost too much or fail to work — but for philosophical reasons as well.

A new political science paper by Matt Grossman and David Hopkins bears out this way of thinking about American politics. The authors find a fundamental asymmetry between the Republican and Democratic coalitions. They examined survey results and other data among voters, activists, and elites, and found that Republicans express their beliefs about government as abstract ideology (big government is bad) while Democrats express their beliefs in the form of benefits for groups. The differences are enormous [as the above chart from the paper demonstrates.]

This, he argues, is why Republicans “have expressed from the beginning a theological certainty that Obamacare will fail.” Steinglass also tries to understand ACA opposition:

For the most part … opposition to Obamacare now is based on two things.

At one level, it’s a question of partisanship. Republicans have turned “Obamacare” into a word that much of the country finds inherently distasteful. No matter how well the system performs, it’s too late to reverse those associations. At another level, many dislike the basic transaction at the heart of universal coverage: richer people have to basically pay for poorer people’s health-insurance. In Kentucky, for example, Republicans are avidly working to reverse the state’s Medicaid expansion, even though the federal government pays for the entire thing initially, with the state expected to kick in 10% in the future.

Ponnuru, yet again, calls for conservatives to stop awaiting the ACA’s failure:

The likelihood of replacement would be higher if there was an alternative that didn’t take away people’s insurance — one that promised to cover roughly as many people as Obamacare does, or even more. Letting people on Medicaid buy into the market by converting much of the program into tax credits, for example, would be more viable than just kicking its new beneficiaries off the rolls. Opponents of Obamacare should always have been thinking along these lines. Now they have less and less choice.

After South Dakota’s governor signed into law a new ban on sex-selective abortion last week, Tara Culp-Ressler denounced it as “an unnecessary abortion restriction that reinforces racial stereotypes about the Asian American community”:

In fact, this type of legislation is a solution in search of a problem. While female infanticide is an issue in some parts of the world, there’s absolutely no evidence that the Asian American or Pacific Islander (AAPI) individuals who live here in the U.S. are having abortions based on gender. There is no epidemic of sex-selective abortion among the AAPI community, and passing legislation to “fix” this nonexistent issue simply ends up damaging women of color. Ultimately, these laws scrutinize Asian American women based solely on their race.

Jonathan Coppage demurs, saying the Guttmacher paper Culp-Ressler cites for “no evidence” doesn’t really support that claim:

The policy review paper acknowledges the evidence, but calls it limited and inconclusive. Yet the two leading studies cited by Guttmacher policy review author Sneha Barot, and subsequently most of the authors relying on her paper, are neither especially limited nor inconclusive.

Drawing on U.S. Census data and published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Science, study authors Douglas Almond and Lena Edlund of Columbia University open their discussion, “We document son-biased sex ratios at higher parities in a contemporary Western society. We interpret the found deviation in favor of sons to be evidence of sex selection, most likely at the prenatal stage.”

Now, as the second study‘s author, Jason Abrevaya, explains in American Economic Journal: Applied Economics, prenatal sex selection could conceivably be a result of using more advanced reproductive technologies, like IVF or sperm sorting. In practice, the high expense and rarity of such procedures means that almost all prenatal sex selection most likely takes place by abortion. He concludes his study, “This study has offered evidence consistent with gender selection at later births within the United States.”

Walt Hickey employs the Bechdel test to argue that Hollywood’s exclusion of women makes no economic sense:

[T]here’s a wide-ranging perception in Hollywood that audiences — in the U.S. and abroad — simply don’t care for women in leading roles and that movies for and about men are more likely to have better cross-market appeal than movies about women. The theory is that “women will go to a ‘guy’s movie’ more easily than guys will go to a ‘woman’s movie,’” said Michael Shamberg, who produced “Pulp Fiction” (1994), “Django Unchained”(2012) and “Garden State” (2004).

This assumption is up for debate; we found that films that pass the Bechdel test tend to do better dollar for dollar than those that don’t — even internationally. …

The total median gross return on investment for a film that passed the Bechdel test was $2.68 for each dollar spent. The total median gross return on investment for films that failed was only $2.45 for each dollar spent. And while this might be a side effect of films with lower budgets tending to have higher returns on investment than films with higher budgets, it’s still a strong indicator that films with women in somewhat prominent roles are performing well.

Alyssa applauds:

This is exactly the kind of analysis that I suggested data-driven journalists could profitably contribute to entertainment reporting back when FiveThirtyEight.com launched. And it is exactly the sort of data that backs up the anecdotal evidence that those of us who would like to see more female characters, and more kinds of stories about women, have been brandishing at Hollywood for years. If skeptics of women-centered stories are able to brush off examples like the billion-dollar box office for “Frozen” as some sort of fluke, maybe long-range data like Hickey presents here, and that which [journalism professor Stacy] Smith is assembling, can start to turn this titantically misguided assumption around.

The Dish prize goes to Oakland A’s pitcher Sean Doolittle:

After the game last night, I decided it was time for a change. New season, new look! Keepin it clean in 2K14! pic.twitter.com/1xHssTSxH8

— Sean Doolittle (@whatwouldDOOdo) April 1, 2014

His reassurance is after the read-on:

April Fools! I took the previous pic in Jan ’13 specifically for this joke! Been setting you guys up this whole time! pic.twitter.com/PvhxWEZvvA — Sean Doolittle (@whatwouldDOOdo) April 1, 2014

Lots of readers are pushing back against the following claim from David Sessions:

Bruno was killed because he flamboyantly denied basic tenets of the Catholic faith, not because religious authorities were out to suppress all “freedom of thought.”

One reader:

If the church is gracious enough to declare that it does not deny all freedom of thought, but still manages to murder you for denying the wrong tenet, pray tell, what freedom do you have if you’re at risk for declaring anything? All you have is the freedom to be afraid and live in fear.

So, was Bruno really killed because he was … flamboyant? If you can lose your life by challenging the Church’s basic tenets, at what point is it sane or just for the church to declare that it’s not suppressing all freedom just because murder is not the response for doing so? The struggle to make the church seem rational or sane is ludicrous. Bruno was killed because he didn’t think correctly. This is about totalitarianism. Faith has absolutely nothing to do with it. Very few heroes of the Enlightenment were atheists because they would have been killed before they could influence anyone. It doesn’t seem improbable that many of the clergy who were responsible for the Enlightenment would have remained in the clergy if their lives were not at risk for leaving it.

Another adds:

Bruno may have been a mean son-of-a-bitch, but those expounding revolutionary thoughts tend to be difficult to get along with. As Cosmos writer Steve Soter noted in a response to Discover’s critique, Bruno was an “extremely difficult person,” but “so was Isaac Newton, who devoted as much time to alchemy and biblical numerology as to physics. But that has no bearing whatever on the value of his good ideas.”

Another goes into greater depth:

First, the Church long suppressed the reasons cited for Bruno’s execution. Second, these reasons reveal that Cardinal Bellarmine executed Bruno explicitly with the charge that Bruno said the Earth orbits the Sun: “The idea of terrestrial movement, which according to Bruno, did not oppose the Holy Scriptures, which were popularized for the faithful and did not apply to scientists.” Bruno was murdered precisely because the Church sought to suppress freedom of thought. Anyone who doubts this should read the historical account of Bruno’s execution, which Cosmos did not describe because it is too violent and horrible to relate to a primetime audience:

As the parade moved on, Bruno became animated and excited. He reacted to the mocking crowds, responding to their yells with quotes from his books and the sayings of the ancients. His comforters, the Brotherhood of St. John, tried to quiet the exchange, to protect Bruno from yet further pain and indignity, but he ignored them. And so after a few minutes the procession was halted by the Servants of Justice. A jailer was brought forward and another two held Bruno’s head rigid. A long metal spike was thrust through Bruno’s left cheek, pinning his tongue and emerging through the right cheek. Then another spike was rammed vertically through his lips. Together, the spikes formed a cross. Great sprays of blood erupted onto his gown and splashed the faces of the brotherhood close by. Bruno spoke no more. …

As the fire began to grip, the Brothers of Pity of St. John the Beheaded tried one last time to save the man’s soul. Risking the flames, one of them leaned into the fire with a crucifix, but Bruno merely turned his head away. Seconds later, the fire caught his robe and seared his body, and above the hissing and crackling of the flames could be heard the man’s muffled agony.

– Michael White, The Pope and the Heretic : The True Story of Giordano Bruno, the Man Who Dared to Defy the Roman Inquisition 

This violent suppression of knowledge cannot be wished away by denying the historical record. Even Cosmos’s cartoon history of Bruno’s execution is accurate, relevant, and important to know.

Another gets snippy:

I suspect that you dislike Cosmos because Tyson attacks superstition head-on in every single episode, unapologetically and using rigorous science as his weapon. Our media is filled with seemingly infinite positive references to religion every single day. Forgive me if I have zero sympathy for you if a single fact-based, supernaturalism-free mini-series makes you so uncomfortable. From where I sit – in a world where billions of people believe in idiotic ideas disproved long ago simply because hoary books promising eternal life tell them they must do so – we need more like Cosmos, and quickly.

That is simply untrue. I find the series’ candid defenses of the scientific method refreshing. It just made me wince at its cheesiness. Another considers the miniseries a work of art:

Cosmos, in its current form or in Sagan’s original, isn’t designed to teach science or history to its audience. That would be an impossible task, given the scale of the material that’s being presented. The most important thing that a program like this needs to do is to create a sense of wonder and amazement at the universe that we live in. It’s not the cartoons or the awkwardly patronizing host that keep me tuning in. Rather, it’s the beautiful renderings of our universe – deep space, vast galaxies, black holes, solar systems, micro-organisms – that I find both thrilling and exciting.

There are a few things that Cosmos needs to do, on a strictly narrative level: it needs to define terms, explain context, and demonstrate ideas. The first part is relatively boring, but essential. You can’t very well talk about the time and space without defining “light speed” or explaining what an Astronomical Unit is. The second part is where most of the Cosmic complaints seem to come from, and that’s fair. But it’s the third area where I think the series really shines. The images and animations do such a fantastic job of simply showing the audience what something is that you can almost turn off the sound and just marvel at it.

Watching Cosmos won’t make you a “master of the universe.” That’s not the goal. What it should do, though, is whet your appetite by showing you how much there is out there, how little we know, and how important it is that we keep trying to learn more. It’s a success, if you ask me.

I think it’s only fair to revisit this after I’ve watched a few more episodes of the series. They’re DVRed. Update from a reader:

I just thought I would weigh in on Cosmos through the eyes of a parent of a nine-year-old. My nine-year-old son has been tuning in to the show with me every Sunday night, and for him it is full of the wonder that one of your readers described. Now he’s a science-oriented kid to begin with (my husband is a biologist), and somewhat precocious at that, but Cosmos has a great deal to offer him. It gets his mind going and imagining all the things that could be, it makes him want to expand on the ideas that Tyson is presenting, he talks non-stop through the commercials. He sees nothing but wonder in all of it.

At one point during the first episode I asked him why he thought some people might not like to learn about the universe, was it because it made them feel small or not important? He replied: “They shouldn’t feel that way! There are so many interesting things out there, and they might be able to discover one of them!”

So Tyson and crew seemed to have pitched this just right for a young mind to cultivate a broader interest in science. At the same time, I am filling in some gaps in my complete ignorance of planetary physics, so I can hold my own in conversations with my son. It might seem simplistic to people more sophisticated in some aspects of these disciplines, including the biographies of the scientists and of Bruno, but it is serving a purpose to engage people with science who might not otherwise have reason to consider the Cosmos at all.

I guess it’s hard to do something that can truly capture the imagination of a nine year old and that satisfies a curmudgeon like myself.

I’m sorry if some were confused a little by my last post on the TNC-Chait debate (a bad case of pronoun vagueness). If I’m being completely honest – and Coates makes such honesty more possible by such intense vulnerability and candor in his own prose – I still haven’t recovered from TNC’s last post. I don’t even know quite what to do with it. But I’m going to sit with it for a while, turning it over in my head, wondering if I need to re-visit a huge amount of my previous convictions and understandings. It makes me uncomfortable. It makes these abstract debates real. It’s what writing can do.

We can and should have much more debate about how to tackle the culture of poverty, period. Ross today points out that there have indeed been discussions of white poverty on the right, and that the current state of play is indeed focusing on white poverty as much as black poverty, in fact, seeing both as a function of a relatively new kind of pan-racial culture of poverty that is entrenching social disadvantage and inequality:

The story that some of us on the right, at least, would tell about that crisis is one that’s actually reasonably consonant with Coates’s grim account of the African-American experience on these shores. Beginning in the 1960s, we would argue, a combination of cultural, economic and ideological changes undercut the institutions — communal, religious, familial — that sustained what you might call the bourgeois virtues among less-educated Americans. Precisely because blacks had been consistently brutalized throughout their history in this country, they were more vulnerable than whites to these forces, and so the social crisis showed up earlier, and manifested itself more sweepingly, in African-American communities than it did among the white working class and among more recent immigrants …

We don’t have a black culture of poverty; we have an American culture of poverty. We don’t have an African-American social crisis; we have an American social crisis. We aren’t dealing with “other people’s pathologies” (the title of Coates’s post) in the sense of “other people” who exist across a color line from “us.” We’re dealing with pathologies that follow (and draw) the lines of class, but implicate every race, every color, every region and community and creed.

And what can we do about that? In many ways, the relentless pragmatism of Obama is the only response. If we know that certain behaviors do indeed lead to worse outcomes, and if we can somehow encourage more productive ways of living, then we surely should, regardless of the burden of history and white supremacy. To surrender to total determinism is too bleak. There is, of course, an ocean of injustice in that “regardless”. But the fate of a minority is not to live in a world in which racial difference (or any distinguishing difference) is erased, but one in which it can be fought against. Interminably. Always. And in the full knowledge that racism and homophobia and sexism and so much else will never end.

It was, to take a proximate example, deeply unfair that gay people had to assert our basic humanity, to explain ourselves as human beings first to heterosexuals, to jump through hoops that were and are deeply humiliating, to be vulnerable in ways no straight person needs to be, to insist simply that we are capable of love and family, and not intrinsically morally subhuman, because our natures somehow compel us to iniquity. There have been times when the double standards have been close to psychologically crippling.

Not so long ago, the lives of gay men were not regarded as equal to straight ones, and the society reacted at first with simple complacency as hundreds of thousands of us died in agony in front of them. When I arrived in America, I had to sign an immigration form declaring that I was not a homosexual. For almost two decades, I had to fight for a chance just to stay in America because this gay disease marked me for deportation, if detected by the authorities. My marriage was trumped by absurd defenses of “public health” and remained vulnerable years after it happened. The spiritual, psychological, emotional desolation of those years made me who I am, for good or ill.

And yet, somehow, a critical mass of gay people were able to master their utterly justified rage to insist on progress and justice and fairness. We have come a long way – but even this week, we read of a new law in Mississippi that would empower individuals to fire or refuse to serve or interact with any homosexual on the grounds of religious belief. We see state-backed pogroms against gays in Russia and untold terror in Uganda and Nigeria. We know, as surely as African-Americans know, that this prejudice, this hatred, will course through humanity for as long as humanity exists on the planet.

I feel sure that TNC sees the necessity of perseverance even if it is deeply unfair, even maddening, and even if, as I believe, the predicament of an African-American in a country built on slavery is deeper than that confronting gays. I guess at some level, that is where my religious faith kicks in. Perhaps it is only psychologically possible to resist evil even knowing that evil will often have the last word on earth if there is some spiritual dimension to relieve the pain and injustice in your soul. Rationally, what King and others did may not have been humanly possible without a faith that prevents you from going mad. It never surprised me that the civil rights movement was a religious movement at its core. How could it have endured without it?

But Coates is not a spiritual leader; he is a writer. And a writer does not need – and should not try – to offer a solution. He is entitled to describe the predicament, to voice the darkness, and has no obligation to put this to practical or pragmatic ends. Which is why Ta-Nehisi’s latest post is, to my mind, as important as anything he has written in this debate:

I am a writer. And that is not a hustle. And this is not my “in” to get on Meet The Press, to become an activist, to get my life-coach game on. I don’t need anymore platforms. I am here to see things as clearly as I can, and then name them. Sometimes what I see is gorgeous. And then sometimes what I see is ugly. And sometimes my sight fails me. But what I write can never be dictated by anyone’s need to feel warm and fuzzy inside.

Amen. And I am simply glad to be a reader. Or perhaps not glad as such. Just deeply uncomfortable in the face of honesty and argument and perspective. And thinking, like TNC, and thanks to TNC. And not done.