Author: Andrew Sullivan

Ask Michael Hanna Anything: Blaming America

In our final video from Michael, he explores the complicated, often paradoxical perceptions that many Egyptians have toward US influence over their government. He also follows up with some pushback on the idea that US influence in the Middle East is somehow in decline:

Michael Wahid Hanna is a Senior Fellow at The Century Foundation, where he works on issues of international security, international law, and US foreign policy in the broader Middle East and South Asia. He appears regularly on NPR, BBC, and al-Jazeera. Additionally, his Twitter feed is a must-read for anyone interested in Egyptian politics. Our ongoing coverage of the current events in Egypt is here. Michael’s previous answers are here. Our full Ask Anything archive is here.

Chart Of The Week, Ctd

John Roman emails the Dish:

Many thanks for featuring my data. I noted the critiques you highlighted and wondered if I might respond. A reader was concerned that the small number of cases that look like the Zimmerman 11case nullify the analysis. To clarify, the 23 cases are cases where there is a single victim, a single shooter, they are strangers, neither is law enforcement, a handgun was used and the shooter was older than the victim. It’s not a sample of those kinds of cases – it’s every single one in the five years of FBI data. To generate the data in the chart, I ran a regression model, which includes about 5,000 other cases that did not share all of those attributes, so the overall sample is about 5,000, not 23, which is great for a social science dataset. There is no data about income in the dataset and unfortunately nothing about the setting where the shooting occurred (residence, business, street), but I controlled for everything else available.

The bottom-line is, I would have preferred to have conducted the data analysis your readers were looking for, but those data simply are not available anywhere. And I agree with them that my analysis is not sufficient to make any causal statements.

However, I do note that in a criminal justice system rife with disparities – blacks are disproportionately more likely to be stopped and frisked, to have the cars searched at a traffic stop, to be convicted and to receive longer sentences – this disparity dwarfs them all. So, it’s certainly worth discussing.

Robert VerBruggen joins the discussion:

I saw your post about the Stand Your Ground chart from the Urban Institute, and I just wanted to note a few other points I made at RealClearPolicy. Specifically, the overall racial difference (i.e. white-on-black homicides being more likely to be ruled justifiable in all states, SYG or not) might be explained by two factors – one, according to FBI data, black/white violent crimes are more likely to involve black offenders and white victims, so whites are presented with more opportunities to commit justifiable homicides against blacks than vice versa; and two, whites are more likely to own guns, so they’re more likely to have the means to commit justifiable homicide when they have the opportunity.

Why Do We Buy TV In Bulk?

Derek Thompson argues that, for the TV industry, “live sports is the keystone keeping the roof from collapsing”:

Networks have recognized that sports has unique social currency in live viewing, and they’ve stormed the marketplace in the last few years, throwing egregious sums of money in exchange for exclusive deals. Those costs are trickling up. As Patrick Hruby explained, “big time sports are taking a minimum of $84.90” out of each family’s budget even if they don’t care about sports. This amounts to a “sport tax” on families forced to pay for something they don’t watch. Cable companies sensing this backlash are starting to resist new sports networks. There is even chatter about what would happen if sports existed on a separate “tier” that untied the Gordian Knot of TV.

In a follow-up, he finds that TV a la carte is likely to be more expensive than the bundle. Relatedly, Meghan Neal believes that Google could threaten the cable companies:

Google’s certainly been lining up the resources to offer an All Access television experience. It has original programming on YouTube, TV shows and movies on Google Play, and the Google TV software (albeit in need of a redesign) to aggregate and manage the content while also looping in online streaming sites like Netflix and Hulu.

That’s a decent hand, but Google Fiber is the ace up the sleeve. The high-speed broadband and digital cable service is available in select cities, already offers a robust lineup of channels, including, for an extra fee, HBO. As of now most people still have to pay Comcast or Time Warner for broadband internet, which incentivizes their cable packages. If the fiber-optic network spreads nationwide, it’ll be the biggest threat to the cable giants in decades.

Kirsten Salyer adds:

Just don’t cancel your cable subscription yet. Google had discussions with media companies about a similar service about two years ago, without luck, and it’s not clear how far along plans are today, or when it would launch. There’s no guarantee Google could get the licensing deals it would need to put together a service that could compete with cable and satellite providers. Media companies might be reluctant to upset existing contracts in favor of a new online service and are generally more likely to give the best prices to providers with large numbers of subscribers.

“Even If You’re A 300-Lb Black Kid, You Still Wanna Be Calvin” Ctd

raccoon1

This post sparked a somber memory from a reader:

I was 32 years old when my little brother, just 28, died suddenly from injuries he sustained in a fall while hiking in early March, 1987. I was surprised by the comfort I found in this Calvin and Hobbes series from the same month and year, where Calvin finds an injured raccoon and tries to save him, and how he articulated exactly what I was thinking about my own real loss: “But he’s not gone inside of me” and “What a stupid world.”

Update from a reader:

I also remember that particular sequence in C&H vividly. And the key: Watterson never shows us the baby raccoon. We fill that in emotionally ourselves, with someone or something we loved and lost.

The Campaign To Sell Obamacare

Yglesias emphasizes its importance:

The people most in need of health care services will presumably be the most motivated to sign up expeditiously on their own. From a humanitarian viewpoint, that’s fantastic. From a program stability viewpoint, however, it’s a bit of a problem. The state officials running marketplaces—and the federal ones running the marketplaces in the large number of GOP-controlled statesthat have refused to set up their own marketplaces—face the challenge of enrolling enough young and healthy people to create balance. The Congressional Budget Office estimates that out of the approximately 20 percent of the population that’s currently uninsured or insured on the individual market, about 7 million people will sign up for an exchange plan in Obamacare’s first six months. The administration believes that in order to make the math work, out of that 7 million, about 2.7 million enrollees should come from the 18-to-30 age bracket.

To get the job done, they have essentially three arrows in their quiver: campaign-style demographic targeting, partnerships with people outside the formal federal health care apparatus, and substantial subsidies.

Ezra Klein and Sarah Kliff detail the administration’s strategy:

Can the federal government convince young, healthy people to buy health insurance?

[David] Simas [director of public-opinion research and polling for President Obama’s reelection campaign] is focusing his formidable analytical resources on understanding this group. He begins clicking through a Powerpoint that holds reams of data on these young adults. “What do we know about them?” he said. “They’re overwhelmingly male.” Click. “They’re majority nonwhite.” Click. “One out of every three lives in California, Florida or Texas.” Click. “We have census maps breaking this down into the smallest geographic units.”

A couple more clicks and Simas is showing which television channels they like to watch (Spike TV, among others), which social media platforms they use (Twitter and Facebook), and who they listen to (“No surprise. It’s mom.”). “We can figure out the message that works best for this group,” Simas said.

The focus on young, minority voters. The heavy reliance on microtargeting. The enthusiasm about nontraditional communications channels. The analytics-rich modeling. It sounds like the Obama campaign. And administration officials don’t shy away from the comparison.

Ask Frederic Rich Anything

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Frederic Rich is an American lawyer and the author of a new novel, Christian Nation, which imagines an America in which McCain won the 2008 election and subsequently died, making a certain former half-term governor the president. From the publisher:

When President McCain dies and Sarah Palin becomes president, the reader, along with the nation, stumbles down a terrifyingly credible path toward theocracy, realizing too late that the Christian right meant precisely what it said. In the spirit of Philip Roth’s The Plot Against America, one of America’s foremost lawyers lays out in chilling detail what such a future might look like: constitutional protections dismantled; all aspects of life dominated by an authoritarian law called “The Blessing,” enforced by a totally integrated digital world known as the “Purity Web.” Readers will find themselves haunted by the questions the narrator struggles to answer in this fictional memoir: “What happened, why did it happen, how could it have happened?”

To submit a question for Fred, simply enter it into the Urtak survey after answering all of the existing questions (ignore the “YES or NO question” aspect and simply enter any open-ended question). To vote, click “Yes” if you have a strong interest in seeing him answer the question or “No” if you don’t particularly care.

Who Is Aleksey Navalny?

Julia Ioffe’s profile is well worth a read:

“He’s a natural-born politician,” Masha Lipman, a prominent Russian political analyst, told me at the time. “If Russia were a country with an open-field political competition, he’d be assured of a brilliant political career. He might even become a Presidential candidate.”

But this wasn’t Navalny’s main asset. Unlike every other person in opposition politics during the Putin era, Navalny understood that Putin was not Russia’s main problem. Rather, the problem was the post-Soviet culture of greed, fear and cynicism that Putin encouraged and exploited. Navalny carefully distanced himself from the shrill, old-guard Western-friendly liberals—“hellish, insane, crazy mass of the leftovers and bread crusts of the democracy movement of the eighties,” he called them—who simply participated in Putin’s cult of personality in reverse, for it is also cultish to believe that one man is responsible for all the evil in your country.

Masha Lipman reviews Navalny’s accomplishments:

Navalny had managed to do what nobody else had: he beat the system Putin had put in place to effectively bar any unwanted figure, group, or party from entering the political realm. He built a following in a country where mass-media outlets are under tight government control. He took on Russia’s high-ranking officials and large companies. He encouraged others to act. Don’t just rage and grumble over the government lawlessness and corruption, he would say; do what I’m doing—pore over the official postings on government procurement, and you’ll find plentiful evidence of corruption. He thus gave those who joined his effort a sense of “We can get them”—rare in a country where “Nothing depends on us” is the pervasive perception.

Racism And Richard Cohen’s Reality, Ctd

More readers talk about overcoming their discomfort of neighbors of a different race:

I’d like to add my $.02 to the thread, from personal experience.  Years ago, I was assaulted in my apartment in L.A.  At least ten of my white friends either assumed or asked if my attacker was black. I told them no – the only black guy around was my big, scary-looking neighbor who rushed to my rescue when he heard me screaming.  When the attacker was caught, he turned out to be (a) a serial rapist, suspected in hundreds of crimes and (b) a white, married Mormon.  I hadn’t thought much about racism up to that time, but the lesson couldn’t have been more clear, and I’ve never forgotten it.

Another reader:

A few years ago, I lived in and around NYC jumping from sublet to sublet with two travel suitcases and one condition: $500 rent. This brought me to a plethora of places I had never experienced in college: Harlem, the Bronx, Queens, etc. And my Mom was terrified. And honestly, I was too. A child of the ’80s, I had grown up with the firmly held belief that New York was a war zone. This was on top of the fact that I lived in closet spaces that had a curtain (or hung up sheet) in place of a door.

But money was tight, so I just buckled up. And after a few months, it barely even registered. I felt safe – safer than I had ever been. At first, I wrote my parents off as paranoid, but over time I began to realize that things just used to be a lot worse.

Having said that, I’ve never erased the dread that seeps in when I find myself on an empty street – late at night – with a stranger my brain identifies as poor, male, and non-white. But there’s a difference between having that fear and acting on it – and certainly institutionalizing it. I could concede to Cohen that his idealized version of racial profiling could reduce even more crime, but like terrorism, there is a point where pure, practical security infringes upon liberty and justice for all.

Another:

I currently live in Crown Heights, a notable, new and exciting (and “gentrifying” – wink, wink) part of Brooklyn.

There’s still lots of black people here, and I hope it stays that way. There’s some tension in that regard, but I like to think the twenties to thirties-something white folk (and rough white equivalents – Asians/Indians like myself) and the black folk of all ages get along pretty well. There’s one bar in particular around here that’s known as a very mixed spot and it’s always a great time and no one – white or black, Asian or Jew – fears being shot. New York’s gun laws must help – so too, I will admit, the city’s policing tactics. NYPD is everywhere, but not in a very conspicuous way. It’s very smart, and I honestly admire their tactics, in this regard at least.

Some of the black people in my neighborhood are undoubtedly “thuggish” to the outside world. Sometimes they stand in groups of 8-10 dudes, maybe a few chicks, and they are not dressed in corporate attire. I’m not going to pretend some uneasiness didn’t cross my mind the first few times I walked through such groups of people. But I got over those feelings very quickly and now it’s like whatever. Sometimes I hear echoes of those feelings whenever my parents ask me if living in Brooklyn is safe, which makes me cringe every time I hear it. Granted, I’m a tall brown dude myself. But all the white girls I know, including my roommates, travel pretty long distances on foot at night without any trouble.

So I understand the feeling Richard Cohen is describing, but so do most people, and we all got over the feeling very quickly. That’s why Ta-Neishi is so spot on with calling it banal racism. Yes, we all sometimes feel afraid around people who are unlike us. That’s almost the most uninteresting point ever made. The interesting part comes in learning to overcome that feeling.

Another:

There is a video that has been making the rounds lately, and if memory services, The Dish featured it [we did]. It’s of Dustin Hoffman being interviewed about his role in Tootsie. He makes the point that society’s stereotypes about what a woman should be had “brainwashed” him into cutting himself off from meeting many, many interesting people. That idea also applies to race.

In the past two weeks in Denver, I have been checking out at a grocery store and a Target, and black ladies were the checkers. They were warm and I just felt that they were very loving people. When I was younger I had a lot of black male and female friends, mostly acquired by playing sports. I loved being around these friends. I don’t know what it was, but they were just warm and full of heart and funny. Not that my other white friends weren’t also, but it was different.

Now that I am a middle-aged white guy with a family, I find that the opportunities for those friendships are simply not as easy. It’s like after school – high school and college – my path just does not cross with blacks. And I really miss them and that opportunity.