Author: Andrew Sullivan

Ain’t No Party Like A Military Party

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Venezuela’s supreme court decided last week that military participation in pro-government rallies was not only permissible, but actually a good thing. Juan Nagel decries the ruling for “dramatically eroding what is left of democracy, bringing Venezuela back to its nineteenth-century roots when warlords ruled the land”:

The Venezuelan Constitution clearly establishes the military as a non-partisan entity. According to Articles 328 and 330, active service members “have a right to vote,” but they cannot participate in “acts of propaganda or political partisanship, and they cannot proselytize.” This, apparently, is not clear enough for Venezuela’s highest court. In complete opposition to the text, the court ruled that active military participation in partisan acts “is a high water-mark for democratic participation.” The ruling goes on to hail the use of the military in partisan activities as “a progressive act geared toward the consolidation of civilian-military union.” … The ruling basically sets into law what has been a fact in chavista Venezuela: that the military is the armed faction of the governing party.

He contextualizes the court’s WAR IS PEACE ploy to show how dangerous it really is:

Keeping the military impartial was an important part of Venezuela’s democracy. The military guards all elections in Venezuela, doing everything from manning voting centers to handling voting material. They are also charged with ensuring safety in and around voting centers. Now that they are part of the governing party, how can anyone in the opposition be sure that results will be respected? Asking the military to take care of elections is like asking your dog to guard a stash of freshly cooked bacon.

That may be the only way president Nicolás Maduro can win an election at this point, considering how the country is falling apart:

[R]ampant scarcities of food and basic goods, sky-high inflation, and staggering crime rates have chipped away at Maduro’s popularity, reducing them to record lows. In early February, a rash of street protests and barricades paralyzed the nation, and were violently suppressed by state authorities in a series of crackdowns that saw several notable opposition leaders incarcerated. The resulting negative publicity led even previously supportive international media outlets, such as the The Guardian to become more critical, and when Hollywood stars began chiming in against his government, the 2014 Academy Awards were pulled from the Venezuelan television lineup for the first time in 39 years.

And now this: in the middle of a triumphalist speech for “national journalists day,” broadcast by law on every Venezuelan television and radio station, the lights suddenly went out on Maduro—and on much of the country. Much of Caracas, and areas in nearly all of Venezuela’s other 22 states was affected the country’s aging and poorly maintained power grid struggled to get back online.

(Photo: Venezuelan acting president Nicolas Maduro (2nd-L) and state governor Adam Chavez (L) receive military honors before heading for a campaign rally in the state of Barinas, Venezuela on March 30, 2013, ahead of the presidential election on April 14. By Juan Barreto/AFP/Getty Images)

Cooling Off With Compost

A simple farming technique could help mitigate the effects of climate change on crops:

The technique in question is called “no-till farming,” and it simply involves leaving the debris from previous crops on the surface of the fields rather than plowing the fields and exposing the soil underneath. Observations of test agricultural fields indicate that no-till practices have several effects. To begin with, the debris tends to retain moisture, which limits evaporation; since evaporation cools the surface, this tends to have a warming effect. But this warming is extremely limited on the hottest days, when the intense heat drives evaporation even when plant debris is present.

The agricultural debris also has an effect on albedo, the amount of sunlight that gets reflected back from the Earth’s surface. After a rain storm, the tillage was about as dark as the soil underneath it. But on drier days, the plant material reflected significantly more sunlight than the soil. This effect was amplified further on the hottest days, which are typically cloud-free, which allows the reflected sunlight to escape into space.

The View From The Zoo

Monuments National Park

Daniel Kukla photographs the murals designed by zookeepers to mimic the animals’ landscapes of origin:

Obviously the addition of foliage and a mural depicting the savannah don’t fool captive critters into thinking they’re in the wild, but the illusion isn’t for them. It’s for us. That’s why Kukla’s images, though beautifully shot and visually gripping, also are unsettling. “They’re kind of bleak,” Kukla says of the scenes he’s documented. “I really chose to highlight some of the more bizarre.”

The stated goal of most zoos is wildlife research and public education. For either to be possible, a captive animal must adapt to life within a confined space. Attempts to make that enclosure appear more natural, regardless of its size, help the viewer forget about this part of the arrangement.

See more of Kukla’s work here and his Kickstarter for an expedition to the Arctic here.

Kurdistan’s Moment? Ctd

The president of Iraqi Kurdistan, Massoud Barzani, has indicated that the Kurds intend to remain in control of Kirkuk, which peshmerga forces occupied earlier this month to defend it from the jihadist scourge:

Speaking at a press conference on June 27 with British Foreign Secretary William Hague in the Kurdish region’s capital, Irbil, Barzani said Kirkuk’s status “now is achieved.” Hague was visiting Irbil as part of a trip to Iraq aimed at convincing Iraq’s Shi’ite, Sunni, and Kurdish political leaders to bridge their differences. Britain and the United States are both urging the creation of a national-unity government that is “inclusive” and can quell sectarian tensions threatening to pull the country apart.

Barzani’s remarks, meanwhile, have fueled concerns that it may already be too late to patch up the divisions within Iraq. Kirkuk — an ethnically diverse city in northern Iraq — is part of disputed territory in northern Iraq that the Iraqi Kurds have wanted to incorporate into their autonomous region for decades. Successive governments in Baghdad have refused to put the oil-rich territory under the exclusive control of authorities in the Kurdish autonomous region. Such a move is also opposed by the city’s Arab, Assyrian, and Turkoman populations.

Meanwhile, the cause of Kurdish independence has found a supporter in Bibi Netanyahu:

In a speech to a Tel Aviv thinktank, Netanyahu said that the rise of both al-Qaida-backed Sunni extremists, as well as Iranian-backed Shia forces, had created the opportunity for “enhanced regional cooperation”. He said Jordan, which is facing a growing threat of spillover from conflict in neighboring Iraq and Syria, and the Kurds, who control an oil-rich autonomous region of northern Iraq, should be bolstered. “We should … support the Kurdish aspiration for independence,” Netanyahu told the thinktank, going on to call the Kurds “a nation of fighters [who] have proved political commitment and are worthy of independence”.

Israel has maintained discreet military, intelligence and business ties with the Kurds since the 1960s, seeing in the minority ethnic group a buffer against shared Arab adversaries.

Recent Dish on Kurdistan here, here, here, and here.

How Crippled Is Afghanistan’s Democracy?

In Daniel Berman’s view, the rift created by Afghan presidential candidate Abdullah Abdullah’s allegations of widespread irregularities favoring his rival Ashraf Ghani casts the country’s entire future into doubt:

While it seems almost certain now that Ghani has/will win, with recent rumors putting his AFGHANISTAN-ELECTION-UNRESTtotal as high as 59%, the United States and NATO, perhaps distracted by Ukraine, have done little or nothing to respond to Abdullah’s blackmail. This is worrying because behind it lies a more serious threat. With the impending withdrawal of American forces and fears of a Taliban resurgence among Tajiks, Afghans affiliated with the former Northern Alliance have begun rearming, placing their future in their own hands rather than with Kabul’s. In many ways Abdullah’s candidacy is being sold as their last overture to national unity; the victory of a Pashtun candidate, even one as  liberal as Ghani may well be treated as a signal to withdraw from the national government in Kabul.

The result would be devastating, the current events in Iraq enacted on a smaller scale. Without the need to conciliate non-Pashtuns, the national government would become increasingly infiltrated by pseudo-Taliban elements, likely backed by the Pakistani ISI. This in turn would reinforce the Tajiks in their determination not to have anything to do with it. This political death spiral can still be prevented by American pressure. But the opening to do so is vanishing rapidly. And if America’s focus remains dead set on Iraq, it may well find itself implicated in a second Civil War.

Last week, Leela Jacinto plumbed the depths of the controversy:

[T]he figures the Abdullah campaign has been citing are initial, regional IEC tallies. Preliminary runoff results are only due on July 2, and final results on July 22. The sheer ferocity of Abdullah’s premature response has sparked questions over whether the former mujahideen-era leader is simply trying to cover up his loss. Reports of the ongoing vote count suggest that Ghani has made a surprise comeback after finishing behind Abdullah in the April 5 first round.

Ghani contends that a successful voter mobilization campaign ahead of the latest vote is responsible for the last-minute surge in ballot casting. That could be true. Or it could just be a cover-up for dubiously magnified figures. With suspicions feeding the Kabul rumor mills, there have even been mumblings that the Taliban did not stage attacks on election day because the Pashtun militant group favors a Ghani victory. There’s no proof of this, of course. And even if it were true that the Taliban has an insidious, unacknowledged stake in favoring one candidate over another, it may not necessarily be disastrous for Afghanistan.

Ashley Jackson just hopes the election authorities can sort out the mess:

In my conversations with Afghan friends and colleagues in Kabul over the past few days, no one disputes that there has been widespread fraud and many are disillusioned with the way the process has played out. Few think the accusations should be brushed under the rug. But they also think it is up to the election bodies, with the international community’s support, to investigate and address discrepancies — however long it takes.

So far, the international community is sounding the right notes with the deputy head of the U.N., Nicholas Haysom, affirming the protestors’ rights but urging calm. Karzai has also voiced support for the U.N. in mediating the crisis, but this is ultimately a dispute that must be settled by Afghans.

(Photo: Supporters of Afghan presidential candidate Abdullah Abdullah shout slogans during a demonstration in Kabul on June 27, 2014. Abdullah led thousands of demonstrators at a noisy rally through Kabul, upping the stakes in his protest against alleged election fraud that has triggered a political crisis. Abdullah has vowed to reject the election result, saying he was the victim of massive ballot-box stuffing in the June 14 election with vote counting reportedly putting him far behind his poll rival Ashraf Ghani. By Shah Marai/AFP/Getty Images)

Hobby Lobby: Your Thoughts

Readers are far less sanguine about the ruling than I was. One writes:

You should be appalled, not reassured, by the Supreme Court’s ruling on Hobby Lobby precisely because it’s such a narrow ruling. The Court has ruled that only the religious views of abortion opponents count. The views of other religions do not count – Jehovah’s Witnesses (no blood transfusions), Orthodox Jews (no vaccinations on the Sabbath), Christian Scientists (no doctors, period). The narrowness of this ruling not only exposes it as the most blatantly political since Bush v. Gore, it is also the most blatantly Catholic – the result of having five Catholic conservatives in the majority.

Another reader thinks the narrowness of the decision is misleading:

I’m surprised that language in the majority opinion is read so credulously. The underlying reasoning in an opinion is more important than bald statements like “this opinion doesn’t mean that our reasoning can be taken to its logical conclusion.” Yes it does. That’s why we keep winning handily every time Lawrence v. Texas and its progeny (Windsor) comes up. Lawrence explicitly said “this case is not about gay marriage.” Scalia’s dissent howled that it in fact does – and he was right. Lawrence led directly to Windsor and every court that has considered the issue has cited Windsor (and its predecessor, Lawrence) for the proposition that marriage equality is a constitutional mandate. Pretending that Alito’s one throwaway sentence in this opinion somehow immunizes the reasoning from being applied to other areas looks to me like a refusal to grapple with the actual reasoning of the opinion.

About those other areas:

All the “reassuring language from Alito” you quoted specifically says that his opinion only addresses the contraceptive mandate because mandatory coverage of blood transfusions and vaccines weren’t a part of the case. He didn’t actually shut the door on another closely held company making a RFRA claim that mandatory coverage of blood transfusions or vaccines abridges religious freedom. If anything, he’s swung the door wide open for these kinds of cases. I could easily see a company make the argument that a person getting HIV is being punished by God for sinful behavior and treatments like Truvada abrogate punishment for that.

And the ramifications could continue:

I’m no lawyer, but I don’t understand why the objection to the compulsion of a small-business owner who is also a Jehovah’s Witness to provide transfusion coverage (or the compulsion of a Scientologist to provide his employees mental health coverage) would be any less legitimate.

Another reader:

What happens to women who take birth control for noncontraceptive reasons? Should Hobby Lobby be required to comply with the law for these women since they are not violating any religious beliefs? If so, would a woman have to promise Hobby Lobby she won’t use birth control for contraception to get covered? How would that work exactly? And by that same logic, is Hobby Lobby then exempt from having to provide other medications that have contraception as a side effect? Like chemo, for example?

But Hobby Lobby never opposed most kinds of contraception, including the pill. As we noted earlier:

The company objects to paying for morning-after pills and inter-uterine devices, but freely provides insurance that covers tubal ligation, birth control pills, condoms, diaphragms and contraception delivered via a patch or ring inserted into the cervix. More than 80% of all contraception users in the U.S. rely on these methods.

Update from a reader, who catches a typo in that excerpt from Kate Pickert:

Vaginated Americans – even the worst spellers among us – would note the inherent comic hopelessness of any such things as “inter-uterine devices” before letting that misprint meet the pixels of day (it should be “intrauterine” of course). Powerful as sisterhood gets, there is no device to link us up at the uteri.

Heh. Another reader:

I see others have already tread this ground, but I fail to see how Alito’s “caution” that

this decision concerns only the contraceptive mandate and should not be understood to hold that all insurance-coverage mandates, e.g., for vaccinations or blood transfusions, must necessarily fall if they conflict with an employer’s religious beliefs.

… is in any way reassuring, because of the underlying principle that this decision, and Citizens United represents. It has granted limited liability corporate entities individual rights. The fact that a company is closely held or publicly traded should be immaterial; a corporation is not an individual, and therefore shouldn’t be granted rights ascribed to individuals by our constitution.

In fact, the only way the Religious Restoration of Freedom act applies to Hobby Lobby or any other corporation is if you explicitly decide that when Congress wrote a law protecting individuals, they implicitly meant corporations, too. But Congress doesn’t write laws that way; they know the difference between these two.

But if that’s the way that so-called conservative jurisprudence wants to go, they also need to consider this: If there’s no separation between the individual religious beliefs of business owners/controllers and their operations, why should there be any separation of liability. I’d like to see the legal logic that says you can have one without forfeiting the other.

Another:

I share your view of the opinion.  Although I haven’t read the whole thing yet, the holding is much narrower than it might have been.  It may also be a Trojan horse for the shareholders of corporations like Hobby Lobby.  As things stood before the opinion, shareholders enjoyed nearly absolute immunity from liability provided by the shield of the corporate entity.  The fundamental exception has been in cases where a corporation, usually as a result of commingling of funds, can be deemed the “alter ego” of its shareholders, or a group of shareholders.

What happens now when a corporation, through its policies and actions, becomes liable as a result of its execution of the religious biases of its shareholders?  Does the corporation become the alter ego for that limited purpose?  The full opinion probably carves out an exception to the exception to provide ongoing confidence in the integrity of the corporate entity theory. However, I think a creative plaintiff might argue that the justification underlying the holding (in certain closely-held corporations religious belief of the owners may be attributed to the corporation for purpose of compliance with certain statutory mandates) opens the door to liability.  In availing itself of a special, statutory immunity by virtue of assuming the religious beliefs of its owners, the corporation AND the owners become liable for torts arising from actions taken in the name of those religious beliefs.

Who knows?  Stranger things have happened in the wake of “narrow” opinions.

Dr Zuckerberg Will Treat Your Moods Now

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Above are the results of a controversial study in which Facebook altered the News Feeds of its users in order to determine if “emotional states [could] be transferred to others via emotional contagion, leading people to experience the same emotions without their awareness.” Robinson Meyer explains:

For one week in January 2012, data scientists skewed what almost 700,000 Facebook users saw when they logged into its service. Some people were shown content with a preponderance of happy and positive words; some were shown content analyzed as sadder than average. And when the week was over, these manipulated users were more likely to post either especially positive or negative words themselves. …

Many previous studies have used Facebook data to examine “emotional contagion,” as this one did. This study is different because, while other studies have observed Facebook user data, this one set out to manipulate it.

Meyer notes that the experiment was “almost certainly legal”. But Katy Waldman doubts anyone could argue that users really consented:

Here is the only mention of “informed consent” in the paper: The research “was consistent with Facebook’s Data Use Policy, to which all users agree prior to creating an account on Facebook, constituting informed consent for this research.” That is not how most social scientists define informed consent. … So there is a vague mention of “research” in the fine print that one agrees to by signing up for Facebook. As bioethicist Arthur Caplan told me, however, it is worth asking whether this lawyerly disclosure is really sufficient to warn people that “their Facebook accounts may be fair game for every social scientist on the planet.”

Katie Collins notes:

In the Code of Ethics and Conduct published by the British Psychological Society, it is stated that psychologists should: “Ensure that clients, particularly children and vulnerable adults, are given ample opportunity to understand the nature, purpose, and anticipated consequences of any professional services or research participation, so that they may give informed consent to the extent that their capabilities allow.”

Adrienne LeFrance reports that the study did go through an institutional review board – a tool used by the scientific community to assess the conduct of researchers when their experiments involve humans. The approval was “on the grounds that Facebook apparently manipulates people’s News Feeds all the time”. Ha! Laurie Penny rings the alarm:

Nobody has ever had this sort of power before. No dictator in their wildest dreams has been able to subtly manipulate the daily emotions of more than a billion humans so effectively.

There are no precedents for what Facebook is doing here. Facebook itself is the precedent. What the company does now will influence how the corporate powers of the future understand and monetise human emotion. Dr Adam Kramer, the man behind the study and a longtime member of the company’s research team, commented in an excited Q & A that “Facebook data constitutes the largest field study in the history of the world.” …

Emotional engineering is, and always has been, Facebook’s business model. It is the practice of making itself socially indispensable that has ensured that, for many millions of people, Facebook has become the default front page of the internet. Their newsfeed is literally that – it’s the first place many of us go to find out what’s been happening in the world, and in the worlds of those we love, those we like, and those we once met at a party and got an awkward friend request from two weeks later.

Bershidsky reminds us that Facebook’s ongoing daily behavior isn’t exactly beyond reproach either:

An algorithm called EdgeRank scores each post on a number of criteria; such as how frequently a News Feed owner interacts with its author and the quality of that interaction (a comment is more valuable than a “like”). The higher-ranked posts go to the top of the feed. That’s why a typical user doesn’t see everything her friends are posting — just what Facebook decides she’d be interested in seeing, plus paid advertising (which is also supposed to be targeted). You can tweak the settings to make posts appear in their “natural” order, but few people bother to do it, just as hardly anyone ever reads Facebook’s data use policy: buried among these 9000 words, there is a sentence that says research is a legitimate use. … Facebook manipulates what its users see as a matter of policy.

Kashmir Hill raises an eyebrow at the site’s response to the backlash:

Mid-day on Sunday, Facebook data scientist Adam Kramer who helped run the study also commented on it through a post on his Facebook page. … Kramer says, essentially, that the reason he and his co-researchers did this study was to make Facebook better. “[W]e care about the emotional impact of Facebook and the people that use our product,” he writes. “We felt that it was important to investigate the common worry that seeing friends post positive content leads to people feeling negative or left out. At the same time, we were concerned that exposure to friends’ negativity might lead people to avoid visiting Facebook.”

Kramer sounded a wee bit apologetic: “In hindsight, the research benefits of the paper may not have justified all of this anxiety.” He said that Facebook is working on improving its internal review practices for approving experiments like this and that it will “incorporate what we’ve learned from the reaction to this paper.”

Meanwhile, Charlie Warzel flags some pointed criticism on whether the study was even effective:

Dr. John Grohol, founder of the psychology site, Psych Central said he sees there two major flaws in the study, starting with the use of its sentiment analysis tool, Linguistic Inquiry and Word Count application (LIWC 2007). It’s a software program linguists and others psychologist commonly use in their research and it’s a well-understood tool that’s been pretty widely use but it was never designed to be used for small bits of text. …

Furthermore, Grohol said, the study, while focused on exploring emotional contagion, doesn’t actually measure the moods it’s trying to capture. “They never went to Facebook users and had them fill out a mood questionnaire. Instead the authors were making strange judgement calls based on content of status updates to predict a user mood,” he says, noting that the authors would likely need some other tool or survey to accurately gauge something as complex as emotional state.

And Cowen wonders if we should even care:

Clearly plenty of ads try to manipulative us with positive emotions, and without telling us.  There are also plenty of sad songs, or for that matter sad movies and sad advertisements, again running an agenda for their own manipulative purposes.  Is the problem with Facebook its market power?  Or is the the sheer and unavoidable transparency of the notion that Facebook is inducing us to pass along similar emotions to our network of contacts, thus making us manipulators too, and in a way which is hard to us to avoid thinking about?