Author: Andrew Sullivan

The Religious Left

EJ Dionne says that when it comes to religion, “liberals and Democrats have a far more complicated task of coalition management” than Republicans do:

[A recent Public Religion Research Institute/Brookings Institution] analysis found that 56 percent of Republicans were religious conservatives and 33 percent were religious moderates. Only 5 percent were religious progressives and just 6 percent were nonreligious. Democrats, by contrast, were all over our analytical map: 28 percent were religious progressives, 13 percent were religious conservatives, 42 percent were religious moderates and 17 percent were nonreligious. Among self-identified political liberals, the proportion of nonreligious [self-identifiers] was even larger: 31 percent of liberals were nonreligious. …

Two things are thus true simultaneously: Nonreligious Americans are a very important part of the liberal constituency, yet the majority of liberals have ties to religion.

Ed Kilgore adds:

Now, the growing number of “non-religious” among young people in this country is a familiar topic. But this survey reinforces the little-understood reality that among the majority of “Millennials” who do have a positive religious identity, religious progressives outnumber religious conservatives significantly (23 percent to 17 percent), while religious moderates weigh in at 38 percent, exactly their percentage among the population as a whole. Interestingly, the median age of religious progressives is 44, while that of religious conservatives is 53.

No Victim Here

sydney_leathers_porn-620x412

Further evidence against the Brown-Quinn thesis that millennial women are somehow not full, eager participants in the sexting culture:

When Anthony Weiner’s latest sex scandal broke last month, 23-year-old sexting partner “Sydney Leathers” was painted as the latest naive girl manipulated by a powerful politician. Leathers thought that she and Weiner were “in love,” gossip site The Dirty reported. The two “spoke on the phone daily” for six months. “Weiner played with her emotions and mind.” The Dirty branded Weiner a “sexual predator.” Leathers was his victim.

[Yesterday], Leathers took to xoJane to reverse the narrative. “I enjoy my sexuality, and it doesn’t make me anything other than what I am: a young woman who’s enjoying her life to the fullest and going on plenty of adventures with willing partners,” she wrote. Leathers says she was the one who manipulated her powerful sext partner. “Anthony Weiner was a weird science experiment. I wanted to see how far it could go. How far could I push it? How long could it go on?”

Connor Simpson has more on what Leathers has been up to, including the above image:

You may cringe when you see Sydney Leathers posing in a bikini for the New York Post or taking her clothes off for Vivid Entertainment, but at least she’s owning the spotlight the scandal has given her. Leathers writes that she’s “made certain choices, some of which involve my sexuality,” on XOJane this morning. That she’s exploiting a narcissistic politician for her own ends is a fascinating development in the sex scandal narrative, because that’s not usually how this story plays out. …

Sydney Leathers is a bit of a revolutionary in comparison to Lewinsky [who avoided the spotlight]. She can go out and probably make somewhere close to $1 million from Vivid Entertainment (an estimate) for taking her clothes off and masturbating on camera. She can get paid an undisclosed sum to pose in a bikini for The New York Post while the tabloid makes fun of her appearance. She can reach out to a company that sells leather skirts to be their new spokesmodel, because, duh, of course Sydney Leathers would advertise leather. She can get paid, based on estimates from the Who Pays tumblr and fellow writers on Twitter, between $50 and $150 for an XOJane essay about seducing politicians. Sydney Leathers can share an agent with Tan Mom because Sydney Leathers wants to be a D-list celebrity, and she’s getting exactly what she wants.

Tracy Clark-Flory reviews Leathers’ Vivid “sex tape”, clarifying that it’s “more accurately described as a video of her soft-core photo shoot.” She adds:

[Leathers] is indeed following a decidedly American narrative of the “fallen woman.” Her post-scandal power isn’t in asserting that she’s more than a sexting mistress; it’s in essentializing herself as that. Her redemption, such as it is, is in making herself available to men — all of them.

And that is totally her choice. Money quote from the “sex tape”:

My first sugar daddy was someone who kind of just helped me pay the bills. I was several years younger. He helped me with rent, helped pay for my car – just normal things like that. He would kind of spoil me. The funniest part about that situation is that I kind of made him think that something would happen eventually – and nothing actually did. And that went on for three years. It was the most exciting part of my life at the time.

(Image from Vivid Entertainment)

Al-Qaeda’s Rallying Call

Eli Lake and Josh Rogin report on the purported intel behind recent terror alerts that closed US embassies across the Mideast and Africa. Intelligence officials say the US got wind of an impending attack by intercepting a conference call between al-Qaeda HQ and its affiliates in Iraq, Pakistan, Nigeria and elsewhere:

“This was like a meeting of the Legion of Doom,” one U.S. intelligence officer told The Daily Beast, referring to the coalition of villains featured in the Saturday morning cartoon Super Friends. … [D]uring the meeting, the various al Qaeda leaders discussed in vague terms plans for a pending attack and mentioned that a team or teams were already in place for such an attack.

Max Fisher explains that a new planned attack may have been due to al-Qaeda’s own fractured politics:

Something to keep in mind about al-Qaeda and its affiliates is that they’re separated by thousands of miles, not to mention differing priorities, personnel and, potentially, missions and ideologies. Especially now that Osama bin Laden is gone, there’s not quite as much tying them all together. Zawahiri is ostensibly in charge of all of those affiliates, to some degree. But Watts suggests that the group structure may be fracturing, and with it the ability of Zawahiri and “al-Qaeda Central” to lead.

In this theory, the Yemen plot would be a way for Zawahiri to reassert his leadership and to revitalize the part of the al-Qaeda network over which he has the most control. That could be about more than just Zawahiri jockeying for more of a personal role: It could also be about holding together the broader al-Qaeda network, which has always had infighting but may actually be on the verge of splitting in two.

The Economist questions the logic of the US closing embassies and publicly announcing the foiled attack:

It is also not yet apparent why the White House opted to make such a dramatic public statement of its concerns rather than use the information to disrupt the plot. Not only is there a significant economic cost from the consequent delays to travel, but according to intelligence sources there are potentially major security drawbacks as well. First,

al-Qaeda has been given precious information about American surveillance capabilities that will help it keep its communications more secure in future. Secondly, the plotters might have a “plan B” up their sleeves that the intelligence agencies have as yet no knowledge of. Thirdly, it goes strongly counter to the administration’s previous claims that, thanks to its efforts, al-Qaeda’s ability to carry out complex operations against Western targets had declined to such an extent that it was on the brink of strategic defeat.

Friedersdorf remains generally skeptical of the story:

As with the Bush Administration’s color-coded terror alerts, I can’t help but wonder if the State Department warning and this week’s news stories about renewed threats from Al Qaeda are being hyped. To what extent does this week’s news reflect changes in that threat, and to what extent is the American public being manipulated, or else misled so that Team Obama can manipulate Al Qaeda? There’s just no way to know. It wouldn’t shock me if the closure of diplomatic facilities abroad is entirely threat based… or if the threat were being exaggerated to undermine the growing Congressional backlash to NSA surveillance. Or to give Team Obama cover for a surge of drone strikes in Yemen, despite that recent drone speech.

Meanwhile, Max Read puzzles why, after all the fuss about Snowden, intelligence officers are leaking this national security info to the press.

A Climate Success Story

Ben Richmond relays some rare good news about climate change:

The Montreal Protocol, already hailed by Kofi Anan as “perhaps the single most successful international agreement to date,” can add another feather to its cap. In addition to slowing the growth of, and then shrinking, the hole in the ozone layer, the researchers have used computer models to demonstrate that without the reduction of CFCs, the environmental changes projected for the next decade – already expected to be really bad – would be twice as severe.

It certainly wasn’t part of the reason for ratifying the Montreal Protocol, which was aimed specifically at reducing the hole in the ozone layer over Antarctica, but it’s another positive result – collateral benefit, if you will. “We dodged a bullet we did not know had been fired,” said Richard Seager, a scientist at Columbia University’s Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory who coauthored the study.

The Church Tacks To The Center

Douthat recently speculated that Pope Francis might be able to move “U.S. Catholics away from a too-close entanglement with the fortunes and platform of the Republican Party.” Along those lines, John L. Allen Jr. notes that “Francis seems to be repositioning the church in the political center, after a fairly lengthy period in which many observers perceived it to be drifting to the right”:

Veteran Italian journalist Sandro Magister recently observed, “It cannot be an accident that after 120 days of his pontificate, Pope Francis has not yet spoken the words abortion, euthanasia, homosexual marriage,” adding that “this silence of his is another of the factors that explain the benevolence of secular public opinion.”

Yet Francis has imposed no such gag order on himself when it comes to other political topics, such as poverty, the environment and immigration. …

In Rome, the perception is that power brokers associated with moderate positions, such as Cardinal Oscar Rodríguez Maradiaga of Honduras, coordinator of the commission of cardinals, are on the ascendant, while those linked to neoconservative or traditionalist stances, such as Cardinal Raymond Burke of the United States, head of the Vatican’s supreme court, are in decline.

The church may not veer sharply in its political allegiances, but there seems a clear preference for the social Gospel over the culture wars.

How Long Do You Want To Live?

The answers Pew received:

Ideal Lifespan

Saletan expects that medical advances would change these numbers:

People don’t want to live past the age at which severe diseases and disabilities are expected. When respondents are asked how long they’d like to live, fewer than 10 percent choose 100 or older. Twenty percent want to live into their 90s. Thirty-two percent want to live into their 80s. Thirty percent don’t want to make it past 80. Why do most people want to die before they reach 90? Probably because being 90 sucks. But that’s true only because of the current rate of physical decline.

If resistance to life extension is based on the assumption that the extra years would be frail and painful, look out. That resistance will dissolve in the face of contrary evidence. If modern medicine learns how to slow aging, making the average 90-year-old feel as good as a 70-year-old feels today, people will recalibrate. Those who in our time would have preferred to die at 80 might be happy to live to 100.

The Low-Wage Breadwinner

James Surowiecki notes that, in the past, “low-wage work tended to be done either by the young or by women looking for part-time jobs to supplement family income”:

As the historian Bethany Moreton has shown, Walmart in its early days sought explicitly to hire underemployed married women. Fast-food workforces, meanwhile, were dominated by teen-agers. Now, though, plenty of family breadwinners are stuck in these jobs. That’s because, over the past three decades, the U.S. economy has done a poor job of creating good middle-class jobs; five of the six fastest-growing job categories today pay less than the median wage.

That’s why, as a recent study by the economists John Schmitt and Janelle Jones has shown, low-wage workers are older and better educated than ever. More important, more of them are relying on their paychecks not for pin money or to pay for Friday-night dates but, rather, to support families. Forty years ago, there was no expectation that fast-food or discount-retail jobs would provide a living wage, because these were not jobs that, in the main, adult heads of household did. Today, low-wage workers provide forty-six per cent of their family’s income. It is that change which is driving the demand for higher pay.

Surowiecki goes on to propose various ways to raise wages. Ryan Avent imagines the consequences of such actions:

We have a general sense for how this might play out. Economic historian Gavin Wright has described how the New Deal’s high-wage policies forced a complete reorganisation of the South’s low-wage economy. In agriculture and industry there was extensive upskilling and mechanisation, a process that launched the South on a path toward convergence with the rest of the American economy. That was very much a good thing. But it was a very different thing from a process in which wages rose for a set of low-wage workers alongside consumer adjustments. The workers that benefitted, for one thing, were often different from those that initially held the low-wage jobs. Whites displaced blacks in many cases, and the period coincided with a great migration of surplus low-wage labour from the South to the industrial cities of the Northeast and Midwest.

Are Mermaids The New Vampires? Ctd

A reader writes:

Well of course this discussion reminds me of the episode of Futurama where, in the lost city of “Atlanta”, Fry meets and falls for a mermaid. Of course the deal breaker is that she has fish parts instead of lady parts down below. I couldn’t find the clip from the deal breaker scene, but I did find this mashup with accompanying song that sums the episode up pretty well!

Another sends the above video:

There’s always a gay angle to mermaid sexuality … you’ve probably run across this guy? I think he’s kind of hot. And he’s really talented, because he makes the tails he wears and produces them for movie studios and theme parks.

Another tells a dirty joke:

After a year at sea, a sailor returns to his home port and walks into his favorite bar, and everyone turns to stare at him because his head has shrunk to the size of a grapefruit. Finally, one of his oldest friends asks him what has happened.  And the sailor tells this story:

“We were at sea, and it was fine weather with a fair wind,  and there wasn’t much to do that day, so I decided to do a little fishing. I felt this immense tug on the line, and when I reeled in my catch, what had I caught but the most beautiful mermaid in all the seven seas!

“And she said to me, ‘Mr. Sailor, sir, please, won’t you let me go!  I am a magical mermaid, and I can grant you your very fondest wish if only you’ll release me.’

“And so I said to her, ‘Well, Miss Mermaid, ever since I went to sea, I’ve had only one dream: to make love to a mermaid.  So if we can go below … ‘

“But she interrupted me, and said, ‘Alas, Mr. Sailor, I’m sorry, but that’s the one wish I can’t grant, because as you see, I’m a woman from the waist up, but I’m a fish from the waist down.’

“And so I said to her, ‘Well, that’s OK, Miss Mermaid.  Why don’t you just give me a little head?'”

Update from a reader:

Some friends were joking about the dick dock in Ptown and someone made a comment about all the semen that must be in the sand. Another quipped, “Where do you think mermaids come from?”

Why Is The White Vote Moving Right?

Douthat argues that “racial bias alone can’t explain why the president went from losing non-college-educated white voters by only 18 points in 2008 to being 40 points underwater with that same demographic today”:

The issue matrix matters as well, and over the last five years, this administration and this Democratic Party have consistently tried to mobilize new coalition elements in ways that have very predictably tended to alienate downscale whites.

And that strategy has worked! Energizing “ascendant” constituencies while pushing working-class whites toward the Republicans has represented a form of “positive polarization” for the Democrats, since it’s left them with a presidential-level majority that they did not enjoy before. But like any successful gambit, it’s also created vulnerabilities. The Democrats may not longer need that many working class white votes to win, but they probably can’t actually afford to lose them in a 70-30 split. And in the normal course of political events, it would be entirely reasonable for the opposition party to look at a president’s collapsing ratings with a demographic his party has mostly written off, and focus on that group as a target of opportunity in the next few election cycles.

Isaac Chotiner pushes back:

In one sense, of course, Douthat is right: Obama and the Democrats have turned off white voters with issues like gun control, and with a liberal record on social issues such as abortion and gay marriage. But these issues are not racial issues; it is not as if Obama and the Democrats are, say, trying to pass laws disenfranchising white voters, or prominent Democratic lawmakers are making offensive statements about what white Americans will or won’t contribute to the future of the country.

On the other side of the aisle, Republican racial polarization has taken the form of trying to pass voter ID laws that are clearly aimed at reducing minority turnout, and powerful Congressional Republicans are using a legitimate debate about immigration to make disgusting, racially-charged remarks.

Chait tackles another aspect of Douthat’s post.