Month: May 2014

by Jonah Shepp

In case you missed the meme, young people around the world have taken to making videos of themselves dancing around their cities and countries to the tune of Pharrell Williams’s “Happy” and posting them on YouTube. Anyone who isn’t already sick of the song can watch kids dance and lip-sync to it in Paris, in Okinawa, in Amman… Cute and eminently harmless, right? But apparently not in Tehran, where some kids got arrested for it:

Iran‘s state-run national TV on Tuesday broadcast a programme showing men and women, apparently Pharrell fans from Tehran, confessing on camera. They were supposedly involved in a video clip based on Pharrell’s song. The original has been viewed almost 250m times on YouTube and has inspired people from all over the world to make their own version of the video, which shows people dancing in the street to the song.

Human rights activists have repeatedly condemned what they see as the state TV’s common fashion of airing confessions made under duress, usually misrepresented as interviews. It was not clear if Pharrell’s fans in jail in Iran had access to their lawyer before appearing on television. They have not yet been tried. In recent years, many activists and political prisoners have appeared on the Iranian national TV making confessions.

John Allen Gay notes that the reaction to the video is part and parcel of Iran’s culture war:

Many had noted the risks taken in the original video—women without veils (though wearing wigs), men and women dancing together. And while the Rouhani administration has tried to strike a conciliatory tone on the culture front, full openness has not been forthcoming. A very active band of conservative agitators has been busy pushing against any sign of change. Just this week, Iranian actress Leila Hatami (star of the Oscar-winning A Separation) was in hot water after she shook hands with, and then was kissed on the cheek by, the president of the Cannes Film Festival. Senior Iranian leaders regularly speak of the central importance of culture in the Islamic Republic’s survival. That’s a perpetual source of friction in a country with thousands of years of rich civilizational history (stretching back long before the arrival of Islam) and a strong literary tradition. Iranian art once plumbed the depths of the mind and the soul. Now it’s risky to make a music video whose message is simple, almost childish: that joy is still possible in Iran.

Jason Rezaian examines how this squares with Rouhani’s professed desire to give a little on freedom of expression:

By making these arrests, other centers of power could be sending a reminder to Rouhani that controls on media are likely to stay in place and are not under the executive’s power. According to his own words, if it were up to Rouhani, social media and other communication outlets that are currently blocked would be opened up. But it is not up to him. While many think of Iran’s power structure as a monolith, it is anything but, with many checks and balances, some of them official and some blurrier.

While the video seems innocuous enough, several laws of the Islamic Republic of Iran were apparently broken. Among them: women appearing without hijab head coverings, dancing to Western pop music, and using an illegal Web site to disseminate an unlicensed video. All of these offenses regularly go ignored in Iran. But this time around, it could be the fact that the video is part of a global pop culture trend and it that it had taken off, with tens of thousands of views, that prompted Iranian authorities to take action.

Recent Dish on censorship in Iran here.

by Matthew Sitman

Dostoevsky and Tolstoy are Vladimir Putin’s two favorite writers – but the wrong one has influenced his understanding of Russia’s role in world affairs:

Dostoevsky believed that Russia’s special mission in the world is to create a pan-Slavic Christian empire with Russia at its helm. This messianic vision stemmed from the fact that Dostoevsky thought Russia was the most spiritually developed of all the nations, a nation destined to unite and lead the others. Russia’s mission, he said in 1881, was “the general unification of all the people of all tribes of the great Aryan race.”

This sort of triumphalist thinking was anathema to Tolstoy, who believed that every nation had its own unique traditions, none better or worse than the others.

Tolstoy was a patriot—he loved his people, as is so clearly demonstrated in War and Peace, for example—but he was not a nationalist. He believed in the unique genius and dignity of every culture. One of the hallmarks of his writing from the beginning was his capacity to uncover the full-blooded truth of each one of his characters, no matter their nationality. In his Sevastopol Tales, which were inspired by his own experiences as a Russian soldier fighting against the combined forces of the Turks, French, and British in the Crimean War of the 1850’s—in the very region recently re-annexed by Russia—Tolstoy celebrates the humanity of all his characters, whether Russian, British, or French.

Unfortunately, amid all the spiritual turmoil following the fall of the Soviet Union, Russians have tended to cling more to the starker, messianic vision of Dostoevsky than the calmer vision of universal humanity Tolstoy espoused, finding the latter perhaps a tad too democratic, humanistic, and soft for their hardened tastes. After all the tragedies of 20th century Russian history, and the humiliations of the past 20 years in particular, many ordinary Russians are seeking unequivocal proof of their national worthiness—indeed superiority—among the family of nations.

by Jonah Shepp

Jordain Carney and Stacy Kaper call the broken veterans’ health system “a failure with many silent fathers,” including Congress, the VA leadership, and the past ten presidential administrations:

In many ways, the Obama administration is paying for the negligence of past administrations, dating all the way back to President John F. Kennedy, who authorized the decade-long use of Agent Orange in Vietnam. But it wasn’t just Kennedy. Under President Johnson, Agent Orange was the dominant chemical used during the war. President Nixon halted its use, but a long line of presidents either refused to acknowledge the damage done or failed to address it.

President Carter’s VA created the Agent Orange registry, where veterans who were worried about potential side effects could be examined. But four years later, a GAO report found that 55 percent of respondents felt that the VA’s Agent Orange examinations either weren’t thorough or they received little or no information on what long-term health impacts exposure could cause. … The government’s long-standing failure to address the damage done to veterans by Agent Orange mirrors the larger failure of the VA. It spans generations and party affiliations, and every effort to fix it comes with unintended consequences.

But Tuccille claims that the VA hospitals’ wait list problem is just what happens when you have socialized medicine:

This should surprise nobody. Canada’s government-run single-payer health system has long suffered waiting times for care. The country’s Fraser Institute estimates “the national median waiting time from specialist appointment to treatment increased from 9.3 weeks in 2010 to 9.5 weeks in 2011.”

Likewise, once famously social democratic Sweden has seen a rise in private health coverage in parallel to the state system because of long delays to receive care. “It’s quicker to get a colleague back to work if you have an operation in two weeks’ time rather than having to wait for a year,” privately insured Anna Norlander told Sveriges Radio[.] An article in The Local noted that “visitors are sometimes surprised to learn about year-long waiting times for cancer patients.”

Joan Walsh finds it pretty rich that Republicans in Congress are trying to make political hay out of the VA’s problems while doing nothing to fix them:

There’s real trouble at the VA, but there’s bigger trouble for the Republican Party, which purports to love veterans but does little to help them. Thom Hartman recently ran down the list of pro-veteran measures the GOP has blocked. Earlier this year Senate Republicans filibustered a bill to boost VA funding by $21 billion and restore military pensions cut in the Murray-Ryan budget deal. They opposed President Obama’s $1 billion jobs bill to put unemployed vets to work in 2012. They’ve killed bills to help homeless veterans and promote vets’ entrepreneurship.

And in the current crisis, there’s yet to be a genuine GOP answer to the problems at the VA, beyond anti-Obama grandstanding. Do they want to voucherize veterans’ health care, like they do Medicare? Abolish the VA entirely? “Privatize” it, whatever that would mean?

John Dickerson also asks, “Does anyone have faith that this outrage will be answered by serious action?”

by Patrick Appel

Jonnelle Marte examines a new study that uses GPA to predict future earnings:

A report published Monday in the Eastern Economic Journal by researchers from the University of Miami found that a person’s grade-point average in high school not only indicates the person’s chances of getting into college and whether he or she will finish college or graduate school. It could also be an indicator of how much that person will earn later in life.

Indeed, for a one-point increase in a person’s high school GPA, average annual earnings in adulthood increased by about 12 percent for men and about 14 percent for women, the report found. (Men and women were looked at separately since women have lower average earnings than men, making about $30,000 on average in adulthood compared with the average of $43,000 for men.)

Bryce Covert focuses on the gender gap:

The team of University of Miami researchers found that a one-point increase in GPA means a 12 percent boost in earnings for men and a 14 percent boost for women. Even so, there’s a big gender gap in total earnings. A woman who got a 4.0 GPA in high school will only be worth about as much, income-wise, as a man who got a 2.0. A woman with a 2.0 average will make about as much as a man with a 0 GPA. The data also show that average high school GPAs are significantly higher for women, but men will still end up having significantly higher income later on.

It also found that high school grades can indicate the likelihood of going to college, and that a one-point increase doubles the chances of completing a degree for both genders.

Last week, Philip N. Cohen put these kinds of studies in context. He used the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth to compare the “Armed Forces Qualifying Test scores, taken in 1999, when the respondents were ages 15-19 with their household income in 2011, when they were 27-31.” He found “a very strong relationship—that correlation of 0.35 means AFQT explains 12 percent of the variation in household income”:

But take heart, ye parents in the age of uncertainty: 12 percent of the variation leaves a lot left over. This variable can’t account for how creative your children are, how sociable, how attractive, how driven, how entitled, how connected, or how white they may be. To get a sense of all the other things that matter, here is the same data, with the same regression line, but now with all 5,248 individual points plotted as well (which means we have to rescale the y-axis):

Each dot is a person’s life—or two aspects of it, anyway—with the virtually infinite sources of variability that make up the wonder of social existence. All of a sudden that strong relationship doesn’t feel like something you can bank on with any given individual.

by Chris Bodenner

In case you have the song stuck in your head too:

A reader is worried about TMI:

There is a reason you leave out the discussion of sexual pleasure in the sex talk with your kids: they are KIDS!  They still think the other gender is yucky.  Even when people kiss, kids are grossed out.  You should get a jump on the game and tell them the facts of life BEFORE they are interested in sex.  After I told my son the facts he stated “I’m NEVER doing that!”  My daughter’s response was “That sounds really uncomfortable.”  The basic facts are so preposterous to them they would never believe that people do it for fun!

Another reader notes:

Several year ago, the Unitarian Universalist Association and the United Church of Christ developed a series of sexuality programs that provide age-appropriate information for children, adolescents, and adults called “Our Whole Lives”. For example, the 27-session program for grades 7 thru 9 dedicates a class session to lovemaking and pleasure.  This curriculum also dedicates a class session to masturbation, including the myths and facts about masturbation (e.g. the fact that masturbation is one of the safest sexual activities that a younger adolescent can engage in).

Another:

Three quick anecdotes:

1) Mom told me flat out, “Well, it feels really, really good. Of course God made it feel really really good! If it was boring like brushing your teeth, no one would ever get around to making babies!”

2) The first non-parental person whose opinion on the subject made me TRUST them was my Sunday school teacher in high school, who also said flat-out, “Sex is FANTASTIC. You’re going to love it, trust me!” (And then went on to explain how we should be married first, but still … it was so refreshing to hear someone tell the truth!)

3) As a kid, I knew my dad had a vasectomy because it was all part and parcel of my adoption story – Mom and Dad had children before me who died stillborn, and that was apparently going to keep happening (this was the 1960s), so dad got “fixed” and they adopted. Then when I was about nine, we had a male cat who got “fixed”, and while petting him, I discovered he had an erection. I went to Mom: “Hey, I thought when we ‘fixed’ him, he couldn’t do that anymore.” And Mom laughed really hard and turned a bit red, and said, “Well, no, what man would sign up for THAT?!” – which is when I realized we weren’t talking about the cat anymore …

Another anecdote from a reader:

My middle school science teacher (at my Catholic school) always made it a point, when we got to intercourse and reproduction, to tell us that “God made sex fun for a reason.” Whether you replace that with “nature,” “evolution,” “spaghetti monster,” or “Allah,” the point stands. I never really appreciated how progressive that was, much less in a Catholic school in the South, but the more time goes on the more I respect what she did. She was a phenomenal teacher all-around, and a big part of that was complete honesty with her students. What’s the best way to make humans reproduce? Make the method of doing so a complete blast!

Keep up the good work. I’m on my second year of subscription and have no regrets!