Author: Andrew Sullivan

A Vehicle Of Freedom

Adrienne LaFrance praises the bicycle for its contribution to women’s rights:

The [1890s bicycle] craze was meaningful, especially, for women. Both Susan B. Anthony Screen Shot 2014-06-27 at 2.02.15 PMand Elizabeth Cady Stanton are credited with declaring that “woman is riding to suffrage on the bicycle,” a line that was printed and reprinted in newspapers at the turn of the century. The bicycle took “old-fashioned, slow-going notions of the gentler sex,” as The Courier (Nebraska) reported in 1895, and replaced them with “some new woman, mounted on her steed of steel.” And it gave women a new level of transportation independence that perplexed newspaper columnists across the country. …

“The woman on the wheel is altogether a novelty, and is essentially a product of the last decade of the century,” wrote The Columbian (Pennsylvania) newspaper in 1895, “she is riding to greater freedom, to a nearer equality with man, to the habit of taking care of herself, and to new views on the subject of clothes philosophy.” Yes, bicycle-riding required a shift away from the restrictive, modest fashion of the Victorian age, and ushered in a new era of exposed ankles – or at least visible bloomers – that represented such a departure from the laced up, ruffled down fashion that preceded it that bicycling women became a fascination to the (mostly male) newspaper reporters of the time.

The bicycle still serves as an inspiring symbol for female liberation; see our coverage of the 2013 Saudi film Wadjda.

(Cartoon from the June 23, 1895 issue of The [L.A.] Herald, via Chronicling America: Historic American Newspapers)

Laying Down Landmines

The US announced on Friday that it would stop producing anti-personnel mines, in a possible move toward finally joining the 15-year-old Ottawa ban treaty:

This new announcement builds on previous commitments, the White House said in a fact sheet accompanying the announcement, “to end the use of all non-detectable mines and all persistent mines, which can remain active for years after the end of a conflict.” In layman’s terms, in the past administrations have chosen to draw the line between so-called “dumb mines,” which last indefinitely, and “smart mines” that deactivate on their own. While the Clinton administration refused to sign onto the Ottawa Convention, it did decide to ban its use of “dumb mines” everywhere but on the border between North and South Korea, already destroying 3.3 million AP mines back in 1999. At present, the U.S. is estimated to have approximately 9 million self-destructing anti-personnel mines in its stockpile.

Beauchamp looks back at how our military commitment in Korea has kept us from signing the treaty thus far:

Why is Korea such a big sticking point for the US?

In very simple terms, North Korea vastly outnumbers its southern neighbor in troops. The North Korean military is almost double the size of its South Korean counterpart (roughly 1.2 million to 700,000). The massive quantity of landmines planted in the DMZ, in the US’s view, would considerably slow down any attempt by the North Korean military to rapidly overwhelm the South by dint of sheer numbers.

In the 1990s, many of those landmines were American-owned mines, not Korean. So if the US had accepted a treaty commitment to dismantle its mine stock, it would have had to dismantle weapons it believed were deterring a North Korean invasion. Today, though, South Korea technically controls all of the mines — not the US. However, joining the Ottawa Convention would prohibit any US-led forces from military cooperation with nations that use landmines during wartime. Considering that there are 30,000 US troops in South Korea, signing the treaty would severely constrain the US’s ability to work with South Korea.

The political point-scoring has, of course, already begun:

On Friday, Rep. Buck McKeon, R-Calif., chairman of the House Armed Services Committee, issued a statement calling the effort to replace landmines with new technology “an expensive solution in search of a nonexistent problem.”

“Once again, the President makes an end-run around Congress and demonstrates his willingness to place politics above the advice of our military leaders,” McKeon said. “His announcement today is perfect for a feel-good press release but bad for the security of our men and women in uniform. … McKeon said President Obama “owes our military an explanation for ignoring their advice and putting them at risk — all for a Friday morning press release.”

To Be A Christian In The “Islamic State”

Well, you may be able to imagine. Andrew Doran and Drew Bowling report on the plight of Mosul’s terrified Christians:

On June 23, the Assyrian International News Agency reported that ISIS terrorists entered the Iraqi Refugees in Erbilhome of a Christian family in Mosul and demanded that they pay the jizya (a tax on non-Muslims). According to AINA, “When the Assyrian family said they did not have the money, three ISIS members raped the mother and daughter in front of the husband and father. The husband and father was so traumatized that he committed suicide.”

Although few reports from ISIS-occupied Iraq can be corroborated, the group’s record of torture chambers, public executions, and crucifixions lends credibility to nightmarish accounts from the ground. Since the fall of Mosul, a litany of evils has replaced the liturgies of the Christians there: a young boy ripped from the arms of his parents as they ran from the ISIS advance and shot before their eyes, girls killed for not wearing the hijab.

Small wonder that since the fall of Mosul, tens of thousands of defenseless civilians have fled the ISIS onslaught, including the region’s Christians, whose presence on the Nineveh plains dates back to the earliest centuries of Christianity. Most have left their homes with nothing but the clothes on their backs.

Meanwhile, some Iraqi Christians are turning to Putin as a possible savior:

“Russia proved through history that it’s the only defender of Christians,” said Ashur Giwargis, who heads the Assyrian Patriotic Movement (APM), which for two years has energetically lobbied the Kremlin to support an independent Assyrian Christian state in northern Iraq. Until recently, the Beirut-based exile and his colleagues, who are scattered among the global Iraqi diaspora, had little to show for their efforts, but in January, as Western-Russian tensions escalated over Ukraine, Giwargis was summoned to Moscow to meet government officials. …

There are few assurances that Russia—which is already held in low regard by much of the Arab World for its stance on Syria—will further jeopardize its relations across the region by throwing its weight behind Iraq’s Christians. Nor, for that matter, does APM’s courting of Putin necessarily command serious support among many Iraqi Christians, of whom only 10-15 percent favor its pro-active approach, according to several church officials.

But the APM’s fishing for alternative patrons is illustrative of the tremendous anger many Eastern Christians feel towards the West for its perceived indifference to their plight.

(Photo: A Iraqi girl fleeing from the city of Mosul arrives at a Kuridish checkpoint. ISIS has captured major roads and town in central Iraq. June 12, 2014. By Sebastiano Tomada/Getty Images.)

Hobby Lobby Wins: Reax II

Our early roundup of blog commentary is here. My initial take on the ruling is here. Your thoughts are here and here – and we’re compiling many more. From the next wave of blog commentary, Amy Davidson seizes on several quotes from Ginsburg’s dissent and anguishes over the majority decision:

Alito sees all the substance in how put-upon the owners of corporations feel. In oral arguments, Kennedy openly worried that companies would somehow be mixed up with abortion, and one suspects that his sense that abortion is a distinctly volatile, morally charged subject was part of why he acquiesced here, and why seems to believe, against all reason, that this decision is narrow. Women’s health is treated as something troublesome—less like other kinds of health care, which a company should be asked to pay for, than as a burden for those who have to contemplate it.

Soraya Chemaly is on the same page:

Ninety-nine percent of sexually active women will use birth control at some point in their lives. The Court’s decision displays the profound depth of patriarchal norms that deny women autonomy and the right to control our own reproduction—norms that privilege people’s “religious consciences” over women’s choices about our own bodies, the welfare of our families, our financial security and our equal right to freedom from the imposition of our employers’ religious beliefs. … This religious qualifier was narrowly construed to address just this belief and not others, such as prohibitions on vaccines or transfusions. It is not a coincidence that all three female members of the Court and only one man of six dissented from this opinion.

Drum is also bummed:

This is not a ruling that upholds religious liberty. It is a ruling that specifically enshrines opposition to abortion as the most important religious liberty in America.

But McArdle doesn’t buy such sweeping statements:

Here’s a representative tweet from my feed this morning: “So let’s all deny women birth control & get closer to harass them when they’re going in for repro health services. BECAUSE FREEDOM.” Logically, this is incoherent, unless you actually believe that it is impossible to buy birth control without a side payment from your employer. (If you are under this tragic misimpression, then be of good cheer! Generic birth control pills are available from the drugstore for about $25 a month.) Otherwise, according to the reasoning of that tweet, I am being denied something every time my employer refuses to buy it for me: cars, homes, Hummel collectible figurines. …

Now, there are women out there for whom a few dollars a month is a crippling expense, but I venture to say that few of them are salaried workers getting health insurance from closely held corporations with deeply religious owners; most of them will be hourly workers on Medicaid.

Suderman counters critics of the court’s view that “corporations are people”:

The key to Alito’s ruling arguably comes down to just two words: “a person’s.” The big question isn’t whether the contraception mandate violates the religious freedoms of some faceless corporate entity entirely separate from the individuals who own that company—it’s whether the requirement would violate the free exercise of religious for the particular people who founded and now run the company. As Alito writes in his opinion, “A corporation is simply a form of organization used by human beings to achieve desired ends….When rights, whether constitutional or statutory, are extended to corporations, the purpose is to protect the rights of these people.”

Ilya Somin adds on that score:

Even the dissent by Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg partially recognizes this, since she accepts that [the Religious Freedom Restoration Act] does apply to nonprofit religious corporations, such as those established by churches. The latter, of course, are no more natural “persons” than for-profit corporations are. In modern society, people routinely use corporations for a wide range of activities. Numerous employers, churches, schools, newspapers, charities, and other organizations use the corporate form. When they do so, their owners and employees should not have to automatically check their constitutional and statutory rights at the door.

Meanwhile, Aaron Blake notes something I mentioned last night: the court’s metric of “closely held” – defined by the IRS as companies in which five or fewer individuals own more than half the stock – affects about 90 percent of all businesses and about 50 percent of all employees. Blake then asks:

But does that mean the employers of half of all Americans will suddenly nix contraception coverage?

Of course not. According to a Kaiser Family Foundation poll, 85 percent of large employers had already offered contraception coverage before Obamacare mandated it. And while Hobby Lobby fought that mandate, so far few other large companies have joined them. … [T]here is little reason to believe that tens of millions of American women will suddenly see their contraception coverage come to an end.

And for those who do lose their coverage, Danny Vinik reminds us that “employees of closely held corporations may receive contraceptive coverage anyway”:

That coverage would likely mimic the workaround developed in 2012 by the Department of Health and Humans Services. That regulation exempted nonprofit religious institutions like hospitals and charities (churches were already exempt) from adhering to the contraceptive mandate. However, it required insurance companies to offer contraceptive coverage free of charge to those employees. This workaround, the Obama administration argued, ensured that religious institutions were not directly participating in offering contraception to their employees.

In fact, Alito essentially recommends that workaround in his ruling. Cohn takes that one step further to argue that “the obvious solution to this dilemma is to take health insurance away from employers altogether” and give it to “the government or tightly regulated insurers”:

But the people and groups who oppose government’s providing insurance directly tend to be the same people who object to the contraception mandate. That’s not a coincidence. While I don’t doubt the religious objections to birth control are sincere, I do think they are masking another belief conservatives bring to this debate: As a general rule, conservatives don’t think government should be compelling them to pay for other people’s medical expenses.

As Beutler puts it, “Ironically, and appropriately, the ruling probably prefigures a call for a greater, not smaller, government role in the health care system.” Still, any such workarounds probably won’t satisfy companies like Hobby Lobby:

To take advantage of the exemption, a closely held company owned by religiously devout individuals must file a form, specified by the government, in order to trigger the legal duty of the “middle man” to provide the coverage as a stand-in for the company or its owners. Federal government lawyers have made it clear in court, over and over again, that the “middle man” will not have any authority to step in unless the company or its owners file that government form claiming an exemption for the mandate. Some whose religions tell them to have nothing to do with some forms of birth control (often on the premise that they amount to a form of abortion) believe that even the filing of that formal declaration is itself an act of participation in the provision of those very services for people on their payroll.

And that argument is winding its way through the courts:

At least 51 nonprofit lawsuits have been filed against the administration’s policy by groups that say the accommodation still forces them to violate their religious beliefs since they have to arrange for the contraception coverage. Some of those challenges have reached the appellate court level, and just this past New Year’s Eve, Justice Sonia Sotomayor temporarily blocked the administration from enforcing the requirement against the Little Sisters of the Poor, a group of Colorado nuns.

As SCOTUSblog pointed out over the weekend, two more religious-affiliated groups on Friday asked for a similar protection from the contraception rule. “It is now nearly a certainty” that the Supreme Court will take up the nonprofit challenges to the contraception requirement next term, according to SCOTUSblog.

The Best Of The Dish Today

I’m grateful for your many emails on the Hobby Lobby ruling. Almost all of them are dissents. And there’s one core point that we didn’t underline today that’s worth noting. When you consider this a “narrow” ruling because it is restricted to “closely-held” companies (i.e. those with “more than 50 percent of the value of its outstanding stock owned directly or indirectly by five or fewer individuals at any time during the last half of the tax year” and “not a personal service corporation”), you find that over 90 percent of companies in this country fit the bill. That’s not-so-narrow in the broad scheme of things. Alison Griswold notes:

According to a 2009 research paper from NYU Stern School of Business, these corporations account for 52 percent of private employment and 51 percent of private-sector output in the country.

Will they all decide they cannot furnish certain medications, based on religion? Of course not. But they could. And when the potential scope of this sinks in, and especially if more than a few companies start curtailing their female employees’ health coverage for religious reasons, I’d say you’re going to have a very divisive reaction.

Which raises the politics of this. I’d say it’s terrible for the right in everything but the short term. It may fortify the base, but the fact that this decision focuses exclusively on medications for women, and not for men, will surely fortify the other base even more. Even if you worry about religious liberty, why does religion in 21st Century America always seem to be about policing the sex lives of everyone but straight men? That may not be the intent of the ruling, but it is somehow always the effect. It’s not good PR. And neither is this attitude:

I have a feeling that the lack of any female votes in the majority will also sink in. If the Republicans want to add fuel to the Democrats’ charge of a “War on Women”, they just got a tank of gasoline. And this could even be a real fault-line in upcoming national politics. Bobby Jindal is now running as the religious freedom candidate; Hillary Clinton will be the first woman candidate for president with bells on. She has already declared the ruling “deeply disturbing.”

I’d say the gender gap just widened a bit more; and the Democrats – especially young and single women – have just been given a reason to turn out this November and in 2016. As often with culture war battles, the winners can easily become losers. And I don’t need to remind the right that those who have no problem with contraception are a growing, big majority demographic and those opposed to contraception are a tiny and declining one. If you’re going to take a stand on religious conscience, why does it have to be restricting women’s choices in their insurance coverage?

In non-Hobby Lobby news, we noted Facebook’s creepy manipulation of  users’ emotions – all for your own good, you understand; Putin got his comeuppance as Ukraine signed a trade pact with the EU; and I penned a mediation on our age of libertarianism – and its growing impact on foreign policy.

The most popular (well, read, anyway) post of the day was Why Am I Not So Alarmed By Hobby Lobby? followed by Jesus vs John Galt. I can’t help wondering if part of the Court’s rationale isn’t somehow informed by American conservatism’s bizarre and disturbing attempt to create a Randian Christianity.

Many of today’s posts were updated with your emails – read them all here.  You can always leave your unfiltered comments at our Facebook page and @sullydish. 15 more readers became subscribers today. You can join them here – and get access to all the readons and Deep Dish – for a little as $1.99 month.

See you in the morning.

Hobby Lobby: Your Thoughts, Ctd

The in-tray remains full of your insights. One reader writes:

Your first reader’s reaction – that it’s troubling the Court made a point to protect only an evangelical Christian belief – is really interesting. This whole case hinges on construing the Religious Freedom Restoration Act, and RFRA was a direct legislative response to very similar reasoning in Smith v. Oregon.

In that majority opinion, Justice Scalia said Smith had no constitutional right to exercise the religious practice in question (use of 1024px-Peyote_Cactuspeyote in a Native American ritual). Or rather, he said the state of Oregon’s interest in preventing abuse of peyote outweighed Smith’s religious freedom. He made a point of saying part of the balancing act was the fact that the religion Smith adhered to was not widely practiced, and therefore very few people’s religious rights were trammeled by Oregon’s law.

The dissent put the question to Scalia: what happens if a state outlaws use of sacramental wine in the interest of preventing alcohol abuse? Scalia’s explicit reply was: oh please, that will never happen because Catholicism, and other denominations, have so many adherents. Such a law could never be supported democratically, so the issue would never arise. He stood the Religion Clauses on their head; they weren’t there to protect religious minorities from the democratic will of “overweening majorities”; they were there to do just the opposite. Many, many people found that outrageous, and Congress (very much including Democrats) passed RFRA as a direct rebuke to Scalia’s opinion.

So, Hobby Lobby is now the second modern case I know of that singles out a widespread religious practice for protection, while denying it to similar practices of smaller faiths. And this case did it while being decided on the basis of legislation passed as an explicit disavowal of that first case. That’s a nifty bit of bendy logic to pull off, and a bit of a “fuck you” to the legislative branch.

Another reader reiterates the fair and important point that this was not about contraception as such, but contraception believed to be a form of abortion:

You stated: “The notion that the executive branch has the right in wartime to seize an American citizen and torture him into incoherence strikes me as a more important question than whether someone can have access to free contraception if her employers disapprove.”

What this ignores, and what most of the responses to the SCOTUS ruling on the Hobby Lobby case ignores, is that the thing that makes this more important to the religious right is that these people think the morning-after pill kills babies (and they believe this even of intrauterine devices); whereas the enemy who is tortured into incoherence is (1) still alive, in most cases, and (2) the corporate entity may be paying for it at a remove, but their taxes are not labeled as “for torturing prisoners.” I’m not defending their crazy views, mind you; but unless we realize that they really, really think this, and that’s what they’re upset about, I don’t see any way of effectively putting this to rest, the way we pretty much have done with blood transfusion refusers and snake handlers.

I hope at least some liberals grasp that being required to finance something you believe to be murder is a legitimate area of conscientious objection.

We’re All Libertarians Now (Except David Brooks)

GERMANY-HISTORY-WALL

[Re-posted from earlier today]

In a characteristically astute and bracing essay, Mark Lilla recently remembered – with mixed feelings – “the grand drama of political and intellectual life from 1789 to 1989.” It strikes me as an important piece, because it comes at a propitious time to regroup and rethink recent history a bit more seriously. The world really did change in 1989, finally ending a period of two centuries of ideological struggle – a struggle that gave meaning and structure to billions of people on both sides. By the 1990s, the organized, intellectual armies of right and left effectively and slowly peeled away from a battlefield in which democratic capitalism (with varying levels of social welfare) had triumphed by default.

And I think Mark is specifically emphasizing: by default. Yes, the right, in many ways, won the philosophical argument. But the right’s victory left us domestically with a profoundly unreflective libertarianism:

Whatever ideas or beliefs or feelings muted the demand for individual autonomy in the past have atrophied. There were no public debates on this and no votes were taken. Since the cold war ended we have simply found ourselves in a world in which every advance of the principle of freedom in one sphere advances it in the others, whether we wish it to or not.

The core idea of this post-ideological new age was simply expanding the freedom of the individual – and it was embraced economically by the right, socially by the left, and completely by the next generation of pragmatic liberaltarians. Here’s what Mark posits as the core of the libertarian ethos:

This outlook treats as axiomatic the primacy of individual self-determination over traditional social ties, indifference in matters of religion and sex, and the a priori obligation to tolerate others. Of course there have also been powerful reactions against this outlook, even in the West. But outside the Islamic world, where theological principles still have authority, there are fewer and fewer objections that persuade people who have no such principles. The recent, and astonishingly rapid, acceptance of homosexuality and even gay marriage in so many Western countries—a historically unprecedented transformation of traditional morality and customs—says more about our time than anything else.

Think also of the astonishing speed with which marijuana seems on its way to legalization.

One thing I’d emphasize: this outlook also deeply informs our view of the world and America’s place in it, in ways we are less familiar with. Just as government or some governmental authority Berlin During The Cold War: Then And Nowaxiomatically shouldn’t curtail an individual’s right to do what she wants and be who she wants, so a super-power, even a benevolent one, has no right to dictate the choices and fate of any other individual country, however despotic and evil its regime might be. This libertarian foreign policy is observed even in the breach. There is, for example, nothing to stop Putin from annexing Crimea – but he loses international standing and is increasingly isolated as a consequence. Ditto Israel’s constant excesses in the occupied West Bank; it goes on ad infinitum, but so too will Israel’s pariah status as a result. And, of course, the cause célèbre of this entire movement is the Iraq War, a catastrophe now regarded as utterly illegitimate by everybody on the planet, apart from a few Cheney dead-enders and Tony Blair.

In fact, the only addendum I would add to Mark’s argument is that libertarianism has had a much bigger impact in foreign policy than we care to admit.

To wit: if your axiomatic worldview is live and let live, and it permeates all your non-thinking prejudices, then interventionism abroad has a much higher bar to meet than in the past when it was justified by a dangerous and global state enemy or by a firm belief in a world-historical mission. In the wake of the triumph of the West in the 1990s, this was not obvious. So we over-played a somewhat triumphalist hand, expecting Western values, having vanquished Soviet and Nazi ideology, to spread spontaneously around the globe. So we pressed NATO to the Russian border, expanded the EU to 28 states, charted maps of democracy’s invincible rise across Asia and then, in a fit of hubris, actually decided to force it upon Iraq and Afghanistan of all places as a panacea to all the Islamic world’s ills as it struggles fitfully to come to terms with modernity.

We know better now – but that lesson means that the bar for intervention is future is likely to be extremely high. Legitimacy matters – and in the last ten years or so, America has lost most of its international legitimacy, whether the neocons and liberal interventionists recognize it or not. The question is: how do we respond to this? And there are, it seems to me, a liberal and a conservative option.

The liberal one is to fight back in defense of universal values, American droit de seigneur (also known as American exceptionalism), and democratization as a sacred duty. Which is why, when push comes to shove, David Brooks is a liberal. His column in response to Lilla’s essay uses a peculiar word – “spiritual” – to define his crusade:

Such is life in a spiritual recession. Americans have lost faith in their own gospel. This loss of faith is ruinous from any practical standpoint. The faith bound diverse Americans, reducing polarization. The faith gave elites a sense of historic responsibility and helped them resist the money and corruption that always licked at the political system. Without the vibrant faith, there is no spiritual counterweight to rampant materialism. Without the faith, the left has grown strangely callous and withdrawing in the face of genocide around the world. The right adopts a zero-sum mentality about immigration and a pinched attitude about foreign affairs. Without the faith, leaders grow small; they have no sacred purpose to align themselves with.

So in response to the end of ideology, Brooks wants a new-old one, a national commitment to “universal democracy” (undefined) that is sacred. If we don’t have that faith, we are somehow reduced. I guess I’m just being an atomized individual, but my own “counter-weight to rampant materialism”, for example, is Christianity. But this faith is, for David, insufficient. It doesn’t strengthen the nation! I must join some Berlin During The Cold War: Then And Nowcollective, secular spiritual mission to complete my life and one, moreover, that goes out into the wider world to find monsters to destroy or countries to civilize. The fact that this ideological mission is deeply out of step with this moment in world history and has just been discredited on a massive, comprehensive scale sails past the need for it to exist in Brooks’ mind. Which is my best read on the cognitive dissonance in the column.

But there is another, saner response to this, and Lilla points the way. It is to re-exercize the intellectual muscles that created and then defended the idea of democratic capitalism – and to use them, first of all, to address the democratic deficits in our own too-often bought-and-paid-for republic, to build and defend intermediate institutions that check individualism’s acidic power – families, churches, neighborhoods, school-boards, sports leagues, AA meetings. And so we match gay freedom with gay marriage and military service, embracing libertarianism but hitching it to institutions that also connect it to the community as a whole. Abroad, the sane response to our political and intellectual moment is to abandon the crude idea that democracy – purple fingers and all – is all that matters, and direct our attention at the specific things that make a difference in very different societies, and away from the grand principles and systems that cannot be imposed by force or even constant suasion.

Lilla puts it this way:

The big surprise in world politics since the cold war’s end is not the advance of liberal democracy but the reappearance of classic forms of non-democratic political rule in modern guises. The break-up of the Soviet empire and the “shock therapy” that followed it produced new oligarchies and kleptocracies that have at their disposal innovative tools of finance and communication; the advance of political Islam has placed millions of Muslims, who make up a quarter of the world’s population, under more restrictive theocratic rule; tribes, clans, and sectarian groups have become the most important actors in the post-colonial states of Africa and the Middle East; China has brought back despotic mercantilism. Each of these political formations has a distinctive nature that needs to be understood in its own terms, not as a lesser or greater form of democracy in potentia. The world of nations remains what it has always been: an aviary.

For which you need an aviarist, not an ideologue.

Even though it seems foolish to deny that most countries still seem headed over time toward Western norms (Fukuyama remains basically correct), in the here and now, all sorts of hybrids are forming and will form, as they always have. Our goal in foreign policy is to understand them better by using the vast apparatus of political philosophy bequeathed to us by our Western canon, and tapping into our collective reserves of diplomatic and military experience, and adjust accordingly. That means bracketing the simple democracy-spectrum and looking for how to deal with various forms of oligarchy, kleptocracy, or emerging democratic society. Now and again, a little nudge might help (see the Balkans in the 1990s). But for the most part, the changes we want will happen without us (Tunisia, anyone?), and the places where we simply act as if the world were a blank page ready to be filled by democracies (Israel, Libya, anyone?) will turn out to be a case study in the frequent destiny of good intentions.

What Mark is saying, it seems to me, is that only conservatism, properly understood, can rise to the challenge of governance in this post-ideological age. And conservatism in America is, alas, as widely misunderstood as it is routinely ignored.

(Photos: 1) Roses stuck in a gap of the memorial of the Berlin Wall on November 9, 2013 on occasion of the 24th anniversary of the fall of the Wall. By Stephanie Pilick/AFP/Getty Images. 2)In the first composite image, a comparison has been made between Berlin in the 1960s and Berlin now in 2014. In the color photo above traffic, cyclists and a horse-drawn carriage carrying tourists make their way across the intersection of Friedrichstrasse and Zimmerstrasse at former Checkpoint Charlie on April 1, 2014 in Berlin, Germany. In the black and white photo Soviet tanks (behind) and U.S. tanks confront one another at the same location on October 26, 1961. By Keystone-France/Gamma-Keystone via Getty Images. 3) In the second composite image, the color photo shows a man walking a dog past the memorial to the Church of Reconciliation, which was demolished by East Berlin authorities to make way for a widening of the Berlin Wall, in Bernauer Strasse on February 25, 2014 in Berlin, Germany. In the black and white photo people in West Berlin look at an early version of the Berlin Wall in front of the church at the same location sometime in 1961 or 1962. By Imagno/Hulton Archive via Getty Images.)

Dr Zuckerberg Will Treat Your Moods Now, Ctd

https://twitter.com/kissane/status/482728344656809984

Jesse Singal thinks naiveté is partly to blame for all the anger over Facebook’s emotion experiments:

On the one hand, it’s understandable to have a visceral reaction to secretly being the study of a psychological statement — yeah, there’s something creepy about this. But on the other, when you actually look at how Facebook’s news feed works, the anger is a bit of a strange response, to be honest. Facebook is always manipulating you — every time you log in. Your news feed is not some objective record of what your friends are posting that gives all of them equal “air time”; rather, it is shaped by Facebook’s algorithm in very specific ways to get you to click more so Facebook can make more money (for instance, you’ll probably see more posts from friends with whom you’ve interacted a fair amount on Facebook than someone you met once at a party and haven’t spoken with since).

So the folks who are outraged about Facebook’s complicity in this experiment seem to basically be arguing that it’s okay when Facebook manipulates their emotions to get them to click on stuff more, or for the sake of in-house experiments about how to make content “more engaging” (that is, to find out how to get them to click on stuff more), but not when that manipulation is done in service of a psychological experiment. And it’s not like Facebook was serving up users horribly graphic content in an attempt to drive them to the brink of insanity — it just tweaked which of their friends’ content (that is, people they had chosen to follow) was shown.

Michelle N. Meyer extensively explores the motivations of the researchers and comes away sympathetic to their work. One reason? Manipulation is part of life:

Even if you don’t buy that Facebook regularly manipulates users’ emotions (and recall, again, that it’s not clear that the experiment in fact did alter users’ emotions), other actors intentionally manipulate our emotions every day. Consider “fear appeals”—ads and other messages intended to shape the recipient’s behavior by making her feel a negative emotion (usually fear, but also sadness or distress). Examples include “scared straight” programs for youth warning of the dangers of alcohol, smoking, and drugs, and singer-songwriter Sarah McLachlan’s ASPCA animal cruelty donation appeal (which I cannot watch without becoming upset—YMMV—and there’s no way on earth I’m being dragged to the “emotional manipulation” that is, according to one critic, The Fault in Our Stars).

She does concede, however, that the study’s subjects should have been told they were involved rather than left to learn about it in blog posts like this one. Brian Keegan agrees with Meyer that this kind of ethical gray area is everywhere:

Somewhere deep in the fine print of every loyalty card’s terms of service or online account’s privacy policy is some language in which you consent to having this data used for “troubleshooting, data analysis, testing, research,” which is to say, you and your data can be subject to scientific observation and experimentation. Whether this consent is “informed” by the participant having a conscious understanding of implications and consequences is a very different question that I suspect few companies are prepared to defend. But why does a framing of “scientific research” seem so much more problematic than contributing to “user experience”? How is publishing the results of one A/B test worse than knowing nothing of the thousands of invisble tests? They reflect the same substantive ways of knowing “what works” through the same well-worn scientific methods.

He goes on to argue that Facebook and social scientists should be collaborating more, not less. Along those lines, Tal Yarkoni wonders if users realize how much they benefit from such research:

[B]y definition, every single change Facebook makes to the site alters the user experience, since there simply isn’t any experience to be had on Facebook that isn’t entirely constructed by Facebook. When you log onto Facebook, you’re not seeing a comprehensive list of everything your friends are doing, nor are you seeing a completely random subset of events. In the former case, you would be overwhelmed with information, and in the latter case, you’d get bored of Facebook very quickly. Instead, what you’re presented with is a carefully curated experience that is, from the outset, crafted in such a way as to create a more engaging experience (read: keeps you spending more time on the site, and coming back more often). …

[W]ithout controlled experimentation, the user experience on Facebook, Google, Twitter, etc. would probably be very, very different–and most likely less pleasant.

Alan Jacobs fumes over that post:

Yarkoni completely forgets that Facebook merely provides a platform — a valuable platform, or else it wouldn’t be so widely used — for content that is provided wholly by its users.

Of course “every single change Facebook makes to the site alters the user experience” — but all changes are not ethically or substantively the same. Some manipulations are more extensive than others; changes in user experience can be made for many different reasons, some of which are better than others. That people accept without question some changes while vigorously protesting others isn’t a sign of inconsistency, it’s a sign that they’re thinking, something that Yarkoni clearly does not want them to do.

Most people who use Facebook understand that they’ve made a deal in which they get a platform to share their lives with people they care about, while Facebook gets to monetize that information in certain restricted ways. They have every right to get upset when they feel that Facebook has unilaterally changed the deal, just as they would if they took their car to the body shop and got it back painted a different color. And in that latter case they would justifiably be upset even if the body shop pointed out that there was small print in the estimate form you signed permitting them to change the color of your car.

Elsewhere, law professor James Grimmelmann hopes the outrage will spark a wave of reform for how companies practice “invisible personalization”. To that end, Poniewozik insists that it’s time for Facebook to grow up:

Suppose The New York Times, or ABC News–or TIME magazine–had tweaked the content it displayed to hundreds of thousands of users to see if certain types of posts put readers in a certain frame of mind. The outcry would be swift and furious–brainwashing! mind control! this is how the biased media learns to manipulate us! It would be decried as not just creepy but professionally unethical. And it’s hard to imagine that the publication’s leadership could survive without promising it would never happen again.

He concludes that “as one of the biggest filters through which people now receive news[,] Facebook has as much ethical obligation to deliver that experience without hidden manipulation as does a newspaper.” This chart we posted recently drives that point home.

Was 1994 The Greatest Year In Hip-Hop?

And Pater Tosiello highlights a handful of retrospectives rolled out for the 20th anniversary:

Chief among the honorees has been Nas’s Illmatic, a debut whose 20th birthday has been celebrated with a two-disc reissue, accompanying tour, three-part Fuse special, and feature-length documentary. The two-decade anniversary of Outkast’s debut Southernplayalisticadillacmuzik brought about the long-awaited onstage reunion of members Big Boi and Andre 3000. Elsewhere, Bone Thugs-N-Harmony has embarked upon a tour commemorating the 20th anniversary of their debut EP Creepin on ah Come Up, and Warren G announced plans for a follow up to his multi-platinum selling 1994 debut Regulate…G Funk Era. Mobb Deep’s new release The Infamous Mobb Deep confusingly shares a title with their breakthrough album and includes a second disc of outtakes from 1994 studio sessions. A few months late to the party, Onyx released their first album in a decade, Wakedafucup, with a title inspired by their debut Bacdafucup, and The Wu-Tang Clan has reported internal strife around their already-delayed album planned for the 20th anniversary of Enter the Wu-Tang (36 Chambers).

But Tosiello finds the anniversary “insanely awkward”:

For each tour and retrospective, middle-aged musicians must assume the personae of their teens and early 20s, overlooking two decades worth of artistic output.

Nas has been beckoned to recite Illmatic’s 10 tracks dozens of times this year at venues ranging from the Kennedy Center with the National Symphony Orchestra to the Preakness Stakes’ InfieldFest. If these performances have highlighted Illmatic’s timelessness, they’ve also reasserted the consensus that Nas has yet to surpass his debut.  In selecting Coachella for their reunion, Outkast joined a bill mostly composed of electronica artists and a young audience in part predated by Southernplayalisticadillacmuzik. Of the new Mobb Deep record, Pitchfork’s Jayson Greene wrote, “the album is exactly the sort of hastily tossed-off, forgettable project that legacy acts will sometimes tack onto can’t-miss releases.”

The focus on 1994 also highlights rap’s precarious position today. Hip-hop sales swelled corresponding with the pre-Napster boom at the turn of the century, but in the intervening years rap lost a significant market share. Forty-three of Billboard’s year-end Top 200 Albums were rap records in 2004, but in 2013 only 25 cracked the Top 200. Last fall the 10th annual Rock the Bells Tour, a hip-hop specific concert series that saw the reunions of ’90s icons the Fugees and A Tribe Called Quest, was cancelled due to slow ticket sales. Upon the cancellation, planned performer Kid Cudi tweeted, “Hip hop shows aren’t exciting… People wanna smile and dance.”

“It’s like remaking the same classic movies over and over,” J-Zone says of the recent nostalgia wave. “People are running out of ideas and instead revisiting stuff for interesting content.”