Author: Andrew Sullivan

Greg Beato rehashes the internet addiction debate:

On a pound-for-pound basis, the average World of Warcraft junkie undoubtedly represents a much less destructive social force than the average meth head. But it’s not extreme anecdotes that make the specter of Internet addiction so threatening; it’s the fact that Internet overuse has the potential to scale in a way that few other addictions do. Even if Steve Jobs designed a really cool-looking syringe and started distributing free heroin on street corners, not everyone would try it. But who among us doesn’t already check his email more often than necessary? As the Internet weaves itself more and more tightly into our lives, only the Amish are completely safe.

There’s a difference between loneliness and solitude:

Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry complicates a recent post by Douthat:

What Shirky says, I think — or at least what I think — is that the MySpace and lolcats sphere of the internet is useful not necessarily (or not only) in itself but as a gateway drug to a culture of consuming and producing content. Content that, like content through all of human history, will be 99% dreck and 1% genius, the only difference between now and the 19th (or 9th) century being that most of the dreck (though certainly not all, and certainly large bits of the genius) weren’t published because of the limits of technology.

What Shirky says (or at least what I believe) is that MySpace and lolcats make you more likely not less to go on, through serendipitous link-wanderings, to read, say, The American Scene, which in turn makes you more likely to read, say, Dos Passos. And because lolcats and MySpace are participative — you don’t just consume content, you create it —, these people are also more likely to write interesting things. Because they’re already writing every day. And I think it’s potentially equally Marie-Antoinettish to respond “Well, the kind of people who read lolcats aren’t going to want to read real culture!” Says who? Why not? Because they’re part of the lolcats-and-MySpace set?

The Economist revisits the incarceration debate:

Using more recent data, Bert Useem of Purdue University and Anne Piehl of Rutgers University estimate that a 10% increase in the number of people behind bars would reduce crime by only 0.5%. In the states that currently lock up the most people, imprisoning more would actually increase crime, they believe. Some inmates emerge from prison as more accomplished criminals. And raising the incarceration rate means locking up people who are, on average, less dangerous than the ones already behind bars. A recent study found that, over the past 13 years, the proportion of new prisoners in Florida who had committed violent crimes fell by 28%, whereas those inside for “other” crimes shot up by 189%. These “other” crimes were non-violent ones involving neither drugs nor theft, such as driving with a suspended licence.

Yglesias advocates the Kleiman approach.

Ambleside, England, 6 pm

Texas In Africa makes her case in more detail. Jason Stearns differs. Chris Blattman moderates:

My fear: oodles of energy get directed to the minerals issue, armed groups re-balance their portfolio, and not much changes in the way of rebel finance. “Conflict cows” doesn’t sell so well, and so Enough declares victory, seizes the next sexy issue … the US will continue it’s 50-year policy of supporting dodgy dictators in Kinshasa, all the while wondering why things never seem to get better; and the eastern Congolese go about their business of evading rapers and abductors.

Blattman gets some pushback here and here.

Digging deeper into this Pew study, Kalsoom Lakhani ferrets out a contradiction:

Many Muslims in Pakistan say there is a struggle between groups that want to modernize their country and Islamic fundamentalists (44 percent), and of those who see a struggle, most identify with the modernizers (61 percent). At the same time though, a solid majority of Pakistanis polled said they would favor making gender segregation in the workplace a law in the country (85 percent), as well as punishments like whippings and cutting off of hands for crimes like theft and robbery (82 percent), and stoning people who commit adultery (82 percent).

So what explains this obvious paradox between people who side with modernization but simultaneously support punishments like stoning and flogging? According to Peter Mandaville, professor of Government and Islamic Studies at George Mason University and author of Global Political Islam, this reflects "a mistaken tendency to conflate modernization with the adoption of liberal social and religious values. When many Pakistanis think of "modernizing" their country, they think primarily in terms of economic development and technology — both of which can comfortably coexist alongside conservative religious attitudes."