Month: December 2014

by Will Wilkinson

Here is one of the most spectacular shifts in public opinion in our lifetime.

What explains this?

Don’t ask the psychologist and social scientists who study political opinion. They don’t know.

One family of influential theories says that our political opinions are “motivated” by certain deep-seated emotional needs. According to one version, the “system justification theory” of Jon Jost, variation in the need to justify the status quo distribution of goods and power in society determines whether one has a broadly liberal or conservative worldview. In other versions of the needs-based theory, our opinions are said to be fixed by the degree to which we are or are not dominated by a need to preserve comforting illusions, or, alternatively, the need to manage uncertainty and fear.

A related line of inquiry posits that variations in political opinion arise from ingrained differences in personality and moral sensibility. Jonathan Haidt’s “moral foundations theory” is probably the best-known. Variation on the six foundations of the moral sense explains whether you have a liberal, conservative, or libertarian cast of mind. All these theories imply that our “values” and corresponding political views reflect idiosyncrasies of personality more than material interests. Indeed, the current consensus view among political psychologists and public-opinion researchers is that, contrary to older tradition in economics and political science, self-interest explains very little about our political alignments and commitments.

What is often overlooked is that both old-fashioned self-interest theories and new-fangled personality-based theories of political opinion are pretty much useless in accounting for the sort of sea change in opinion captured by the chart above. Was there a wild change in people’s interests between 1996 and now? No. Did the distribution of personality types in the American population undergo a rapid transformation. No. It’s a lot simpler than that. People changed their minds.

Until recently, the prevailing belief in our culture was that homosexuality is a sort of mental illness and that it’s practice threatens the integrity of  the family and, thereby, the integrity of the entire social order. Almost anyone  who has adopted these beliefs, whatever their temperament or interests, is going to want to think that it is in his or her interests, and in the interests of society generally, to officially discourage homosexuality. But when large numbers of people stop believing, as a matter of empirical fact, that there is something unhealthy or socially dangerous about homosexuality, opinion about its “justifiability” – and about the justice of denying equal rights to gay and lesbian couples – changes without any corresponding change in anyone’s underlying psychology or interests. Indeed, support for gay marriage has accelerated and opposition has weakened most rapidly as the old speculative worries are disproven by the anodyne, homey reality of families headed by officially-sanctioned same-sex couples.

Beliefs matter. Public opinion will always reflect factional interest and the range of temperaments. But we have no magical ability to intuit what’s in our interests; we can only ever act on beliefs about our interests. And moral personality may be more or less fixed, but the things that dispositionally conservative or liberal happen to believe change a great deal over time as beliefs about the world change. I’m of the generation that was in young adulthood in 1996, at the start of that Gallup chart, when opposition to gay marriage seemed insurmountable. Over the past two decades I’ve seen conservative-minded friends go from profound moralized disgust about homosexuality to shrugging indifference as their beliefs around the nature and consequences of homosexual behavior have drifted with the cultures. My father’s generation went through something similar with respect to mixed-race relationships. Now it’s true that we are imperfectly rational creatures, and that there is a great deal of “motivated cognition” – a tendency to believe what we find comforting to believe. But I think it’s clear enough that these are frictions that can be overcome, and often are overcome. This is a cause for hope.

One of the great issues of our day is prison reform. America imprisons a larger share of its population than any other country on Earth. The main reason for this is that, over the last few decades, thanks in large part to the War on Drugs, we have changed sentencing guidelines such that more crimes are met with prison sentences, and sentences for most crimes have become longer. It can seem that the American carceral state is so dug in that it is impossible to change it. But I think it is largely a matter of belief. At some point in the past, we came to believe that we were too soft on crime – that punishments were unjustly and dangerously lax – so we made them harsher. To turn things around, we’ve simply got to change our minds again. Punishments are too harsh. Millions of Americans who do not deserve to be put in cages are put in cages, and millions who deserve to put in cages for a time are kept there for far too long, often ruining their entire lives. This is an appalling injustice, even aside from the appallingly unjust racial bias in the system. This should be intolerable for country culturally committed to an ideal of liberty. But we can change it. We’re not locked in by a confluence of interests or by intractable features of the tough-on-crime conservative personality. Americans simply need to believe that such long prisons sentences are wrong. Americans need to believe that crime-rates are at a historic low, that high incarceration rates are not the main reason why, and that they and their children will not be endangered by reforms that restore proportionality, judicial discretion, and justice to sentencing.

Now, some progressives are fixated on the idea that a vague set of systemic social forces they call “neoliberalism” is responsible for the American gulag state – and everything else wrong the world. The implication is that things can’t get better until we throw over neoliberalism (whatever that is) and replace it with a rarely-specified utopia of social justice. This is pernicious nonsense. Rather than move us closer to social justice, the all-or-nothing, everything-is-connected holism of the anti-neoliberals pushes us instead toward fatalistic complacency and impotent shotgun gestures against “the system.” Andrew’s focused, reasoned arguments in favor of gay marriage in time caught on and now Andrew is married. This should be our model. If Andrew and Jon Rauch and all the others who doggedly, patiently, and rationally made the case for gay marriage had instead chosen to rage against the comprehensive injustice of the machine and the cold hypocrisy of the American heart, it never would have happened. You can’t change the system by changing beliefs about the system. You change the system one issue, and one constellation of convictions, at a time.

by Dish Staff

Frank Rich feels that that Sony’s hand was forced:

We are witnessing, in Alan Dershowitz’s phrase, the “Pearl Harbor of the First Amendment.”

But this story is far bigger than the threat to the First Amendment. And the vituperation being aimed at Sony for canceling the film’s release — coming from both the left and the right — is a sideshow that misses a bigger point. Before Sony capitulated, every major movie theater chain in the country had pulled out of showing The Interview. The Wall Street Journal reported that the nation’s largest cable company, Comcast, would have refused to show the film — and no doubt would have been joined in this veto by all the other cable and satellite providers if Sony had considered such a distribution alternative. So if Sony canceled a film that couldn’t be shown anyway, was that a cancellation or just a certification of reality? If Sony is a coward, they all are.

Stephen Carter defends Sony and the theaters:

Despite all the calls for Sony to stand up to the blackmail in the name of artistic freedom, it seems to me that the criticism is misdirected. Nothing will detect and respond to the reality of fear as swiftly as a market, and here the market has spoken. The relevant market actors are moviegoers. Theater owners are guessing that with “The Interview” in their multiplexes, holiday audiences will stay away in droves. From everything.

I’d like to think the owners are mistaken. I’d like to think that were “The Interview” in the theaters, millions of us would flock to the mutiplex and watch a movie – any movie – as an act of protest, to show the world we aren’t afraid. But I can’t say that in predicting the opposite the theater owners have made a wrong call. And if they’re right, so is Sony.

Douthat fears that such financial incentives will hurt movie-making:

[F]or studios already inclined to recycle comic book villains and reboot Reagan-era properties and resurrect Captain Jack Sparrow from here to eternity, the fate of Sony — whose post-hack problems go well beyond the lost revenue from “The Interview” — will offer just one more reason to stick with the tentpoles, one more reason to play it safe with superheroes, one more reason to pause before greenlighting an original story and say, “okay, but maybe if the villains were neo-Nazis instead?” (And that’s just until the neo-Nazis find a hacker of their own …)

Alyssa Rosenberg wonders “whether we’re just offloading responsibility for our increasingly violent and polarized conversations about media on to a convenient villain.” She contends that “Guardians of Peace just took advantage of a style of conversation about culture that too often devolves into threats of violence”:

[A]ggrieved groups of any type don’t even need a tech genius. Even if Sony is mainly canceling “The Interview” primarily out of hopes that it will stop the Guardians of Peace from releasing more stolen data rather than about specific fears of an attack, “exhibitors are worried about legal liability if violence breaks out at one of the film’s screenings,”Brent Lang explains in Variety. White supremacists show up as villains everywhere, from action movies like “White House Down” to prestige television dramas like “Breaking Bad.” They also plot real-world violence, like a 2008 plan to assassinate Barack Obama during his campaign for the presidency. If someone out there wants to push back against racists’ status as bogeyman of the moment, they just need to threaten to shoot up a movie screening or a premiere.

by Dish Staff

Readers join Dish staffers in sharing their stories:

Around age 5, my father took me to the mall for some shopping and the ritual Santa visit. Whatever it was he needed to buy, the journey was unsuccessful on that front, and we traveled directly to another mall to try again. Of course, there was at this second mall another Santa, one with somewhat different facial features and proportions. I quickly deduced these could not both be Santa, and, QED, Christmas was a fraud.

Pinned with the sudden outburst of my doubts, Dad didn’t miss a beat. “Well of course Santa can’t be at every mall,” he said nonchalantly.  “He’s a busy guy, making toys. He has a lot of helper Santas he sends out to find out what people want for Christmas. They’re called ‘subordinate Clauses.'”

Maybe he’d been waiting his whole adult life to make that pun. Maybe it came to him in a brilliant flash. Needless to say I didn’t get it for many more years. But I bought the substance when it counted, and the benevolent illusion was preserved.

Not for this reader:

I believed in Santa until I was five or six. Then I learned about gravity, and I wasn’t sure how the sleigh could fly, since reindeer don’t have wings or jets. The more I thought about the logistics of Santa, the more they bothered me. How did Santa get around the world in one night? The Polar Express, which I loved, implied that he didn’t even get started until after midnight, and that made the whole thing seem even more implausible.

This story has an unexpected twist:

I have an older brother, by 3 years. As with most older brothers, mine delighted in ruining anything I believed in or liked.

Knowing this, one year my dad took my brother aside and told him, “I know you don’t believe in Santa anymore, but don’t ruin it for your brother.” As my dad tells it, my brother’s bottom lip started quivering, and with tears in his eyes, he looked up at my dad and said, “There’s no Santa??” He was certain my brother no longer believed and felt so guilty for ruining his eldest son’s Christmas that year.

Another reader:

Santa was revealed to me as an empty suit the Christmas I was 5. We were at my grandparents house when the adults informed me that Santa had decided that I should open my presents before Christmas morning (I have no idea why other than they just wanted open presents early) so he was making an express delivery. This announcement was followed by a big ho ho ho on the porch that sounded just like my uncle and my gifts magically appeared. I got suspicious.

But I still wanted to give him the benefit of the doubt, so the next year I wrote my Santa letter and asked him for a Dancer Ballerina doll, which I got, only to have her twirl one time and break. My mother told me that they must have made a mistake in Santa‘s workshop, so Rudolph would probably fly back in a day or two to take it back so the elves could repair the ballerina’s twirl. But the next day I found the box she came in – in my mother’s bedroom hidden under some quilts, and the sticker on it didn’t say North Pole; it said Sears. And I was done.

Weird thing though: I didn’t tell my parents for another year or two. They seemed to get such a kick out of Santa that I didn’t want to ruin it for them.

Another:

I don’t have any recollection of losing my faith in Santa, but I do have a quick anecdote about my daughter, now eight. Mid-October, as we are eating dinner, she asks, “So, when are you and Mom going to give KJ (older brother) and me The Talk“? The capital letters were quite clear in her speech. Having already explained to her how she arrived on this world, I was a little confused.

“What talk?”

“The talk where you tell us there is no Santa Claus, you’ve been buying all the presents, and then lying to us so we wouldn’t ask you for more?”

“Oh. Next year.”

“Cool.”

Another got both Talks at once:

I believed in Santa for an almost embarrassingly long amount of time. I was 13 years old when my mother sat me down and informed me that if I was going to start learning about sex, I might as well learn the truth about Santa. The problem for me was a combination of too clever parents (I was regularly required to put toys and clothes  out on the porch in early December for Santa to “recycle” so that when my younger siblings or cousins received them it wouldn’t be weird), and a stubborn need to believe in magic that has unfortunately followed me into adulthood. Well, that, and as I repeated told my classmates, “My parents are way too poor to buy that stuff, so Santa has to be real.”

Another older believer:

I was relatively late to the game of realizing Santa wasn’t real (I think I defended his existence to numerous doubtful friends).  But my realization happened as a result of just thinking too hard one car ride with mom.  I started to think that if Santa were real, my capacity to receive presents would be limitless – I could have not only a Nintendo, but every game they ever produced.  I mean, if he’s got these elves making toys and magical powers, why couldn’t I receive everything I possibly wanted?

I realized that deep down I knew this was impossible, that there were economic restraints on Christmas.  So I just turned to my mom and said “there’s no Santa is there,” and she replied “no.”  And that was the end of it.

(Image via Cess Padilla)

by Dish Staff

Given how little trade most of the world does with North Korea, further economic sanctions aren’t really an option:

Peter Singer, mercifully, rules out war:

We didn’t go to war with North Korea when they murdered American soldiers  ​in the 1970s with axes. We didn’t go to war with ​North Korea when they fired missiles over our allies. We didn’t go to war with ​North Korea when one of their ships torpedoed an alliance partner and killed some of their sailors. You’re going to tell me we’re now going to go to war because a Sony exec described Angelina Jolie as a diva? It’s not happening.

As Will noted, Chait recommends that the government make Sony whole. Ambinder disagrees:

I wondered online if Sony could argue somehow that it is too big to fail — that if the attack is tied to a country, then perhaps the company can be indemnified from lawsuits arising from its own alleged neglect. The answer is no.

Going forward, Congress might consider some sort of risk pool for companies that meet strict standards and still find themselves the victim of state-sponsored hacking. Sony does not seem to have met those standards. It was low-hanging fruit. Sony will have to eat its losses, because saving Sony from embarrassment is not in our national interest. But securing open access to the internet for American companies is now considered to be a critical national security issue.

Bloomberg View’s editors think “Sony and other corporations can’t expect the U.S. government to respond to every attack on their behalf”:

However embarrassing and costly to the studio, the hacking represents a cybercrime, not an act of cyberterrorism directed at civilians or vital national infrastructure. (By the same token, threats against theaters showing a Hollywood comedy that mocks Kim Jong Un hardly compare with the vows of annihilation that constantly pour out of North Korean state media.) Companies need to improve their own defenses.

They ask, “What level of attack would prompt a U.S. counterstrike?”

There’s no need for any new red line to be drawn here. It would only help the Kim regime calculate the risk-reward ratio for its cybermischief. Ambiguity can help deter North Korea from attempting anything more serious, such as an attack on the U.S.’s critical infrastructure.

It’s worth keeping in mind that certain individuals, like Kim Zetter, still have doubts that North Korea is responsible for the attack:

Nation-state attacks aren’t generally as noisy, or announce themselves with an image of a blazing skeleton posted to infected computers, as occurred in the Sony hack. Nor do they use a catchy nom-de-hack like Guardians of Peace to identify themselves. Nation-state attackers also generally don’t chastise their victims for having poor security, as purported members of GOP have done in media interviews. Nor do such attacks involve posts of stolen data to Pastebin—the unofficial cloud repository of hackers—where sensitive company files belonging to Sony have been leaked. These are all hallmarks of hacktivists—groups like Anonymous and LulzSec, who thrive on targeting large corporations for ideological reasons or just the lulz, or by hackers sympathetic to a political cause.

Barbara Demick listens to another skeptic:

“There is such a level of vindictiveness toward Sony that it feels more like an ex-employee or a business dispute,” Martyn Williams, a long-time North Korea watcher, who has taken a contrarian view on the attack, said. Williams believes that the hackers could be using North Korean software, or possibly imitating North Korean tactics, to cover their own tracks. He notes that the Guardians of Peace hackers didn’t mention “The Interview” before this week. He also believes that a recent message on a text-sharing Web site that threatened moviegoers and invoked 9/11 was unlikely to have come from North Korea. “North Korea is definitely capable of annoying its neighbors, but to make these kind of threats, saying ‘Remember 9/11,’ I don’t think North Korea is so stupid,’’ Williams said.

On the other hand, today the FBI officially blamed North Korea for the hack.