Andrew Sullivan

Sanity Breaks Out On The Right On Bergdahl

Put Krauthammer‘s and Brooks’ columns together today and you have – finally – a sane conservative response to the unsavory necessity of the Bergdahl deal. There are several core arguments. First, the importance of leaving no soldier behind as a critical rampart of national solidarity and military tradition. Second, the tough, rough and cold-hearted calculus of exchanging POWs as something that commanders in chief have to do from time to time. Third, the use of executive power here, as I have argued, as about as defensible a use of it as any. Krauthammer is very good on this:

Of all the jurisdictional disputes between president and Congress, the president stands on the firmest ground as commander in chief. And commanders have the power to negotiate prisoner exchanges.

Then on the question of Bergdahl’s conduct itself, the obvious response is to get the man home, investigate fairly and exhaustively, and subject him, if necessary, to military justice. I suppose Krauthammer feels the need to placate the spittle-flecked with this line:

If he’s a defector — joined the enemy to fight against his country — then he deserves no freeing. Indeed, he deserves killing, the way we kill other enemies in the field, the way we killed Anwar al-Awlaki, an American who had openly joined al-Qaeda.

But the sequence of events is right. There’s no way to investigate a possible deserter or defector until you have him stateside. The right cannot have it both ways: either he should be disciplined as a traitor or he should be left behind to the Taliban’s clutches. You have to choose – which, of course, the GOP never does.

So what are we left with, after all this sturm and drang? I’d say one genuine criticism – that the announcement of the POW exchange was far too celebratory, and that the tone was seriously off.

And it’s hard not to agree with that. It may have been an accident of circumstance – the family readily available. Or a function of genuine sentiment of a commander-in-chief for the parents of a soldier lost for five years. But it was dumb and smacked of some notion of political gain for a necessary act of war.

What is Obama’s long-term strategy on this? That’s the shoe that hasn’t dropped. But he’s set a precedent: the departure from Gitmo of five prisoners not cleared for release. Once that bar has been set and the ugly reality of having to end this failed war becomes more widely felt, the possibility of releasing innocent prisoners or those deemed low-level functionaries (at best) becomes, perhaps, a little more feasible. Slowly but surely, the president is fulfilling his election promises: economic recovery (with the workforce now back to its pre-recession level), the end of both wars, universal healthcare, action on climate change, and a civil rights revolution for gays. Is it too much to dream that, eight years after his executive order was stymied by a scaredy-cat Congress, in the closing of Gitmo, Obama may have been saving the best for last?

Against Grading Colleges On Their Perks

Pivoting off the Dish’s conversation regarding college rankings, Freddie rails against “the Gyms, Dorms, and Dining Halls school of recruiting top students to your college”:

It’s a truly misguided waste of resources from an educational standpoint, and a massive mistake, but it’s also perfectly rational from the standpoint of administrators trying to attract the most competitive students: these things work. Having the best faculty doesn’t work. Having a great graduation rate doesn’t work. Placing lots of students in jobs doesn’t work. What works is the “Club Med plus classes” approach. I have a lot of friends in the academy, in many different schools and positions, and what my admissions officer friends tell me is that internal surveys and research find again and again that students on visits comment on those facilities — gyms, dorms, and dining halls — more than any other aspect.

He goes on to argue that, “if our discussion of student loan debt and the cost of college is to be useful, we have to start to interrogate how undergraduates themselves contribute to these problems”:

Clearly, these students are part of a larger system that has failed many of them and many of the people like them, and ultimately accountability resides with the whole system. But it’s remarkable how much pushback I get from the very students who risk being saddled with huge student loan debt in their near future. When I wrote that piece about Purdue’s gym, I got praise and encouragement from professors, from administrators, and even from Purdue president Mitch Daniels himself. The people who didn’t like it were Purdue undergrads. I got quite a few nasty emails when that piece came out, from undergrads. The general sentiment was to ask, so you think we don’t deserve a good gym? I simply responded that it seemed sensible to me to build, say, a $15 million gym and save the $75 million to keep tuition down, maybe build a new English building to replace our current crumbling monstrosity. There was a total disconnect from the fact that a $90 million gym represents a huge opportunity cost, one that ultimately, they pay for, even if the gym was funded largely by outside funding.

Creative Destruction Is So Cute, Ctd

A reader begs to differ with this one pushing for driverless buses:

My spouse, who does transportation planning consulting, tells me that driverless or not, buses (and subways, etc.) must have a person on board who is responsible for keeping order and handling emergencies. This role is currently filled by the bus driver. A switch to self-driving buses will not reduce labor costs because that person still needs to be on the bus.

I think that the future of public transportation are fleets of small, self-driving cars, backed by sophisticated scheduling and routing software. Riders register their commutes, the car shows up at the right time where you want it, and drops you off where you need to be. Buses will never achieve this level of service. Using the blunt instrument of “boardings per day” as a metric, the self-driving cars will blow the buses out of the water. Also, there’s no reason why this couldn’t be a for-profit endeavor. In fact, Uber is already talking about it.

I should also add that buses are expensive to purchase and maintain. As the price of small, driverless cars comes down, it will start making economic sense to prefer the fleets of self-driving cars over buses. Especially if they’re electric, which is a foregone conclusion.

The above video shows what appears to be the first driverless bus, featured in a Singaporean newscast uploaded five months ago. Update from a reader:

I live and work at Nanyang Technological University, Singapore (featured that video you posted). Every day I pass numerous signs warning me to be on the lookout for these infamous driverless shuttle buses. But I have yet to see one of these elusive buses; all I ever see are the numerous campus shuttle buses with real human drivers. Clearly, this is something that must not be quite ready for prime time.

America Moves At A Glacial Pace

Which is one reason why Ezra fears the Arctic’s glaciers will become a thing of the past:

The American political system is designed to move slowly. The Founders feared haste, and so they made it, except in the rarest circumstances, impossible. As Sven Steinmo and Jon Watts wrote in their seminal essay “It’s the Institutions, Stupid“, “the game of politics in America is institutionally rigged against those who would use government — for good or evil. James Madison’s system of checks and balances, the very size and diversity of the nation, the Progressive reforms which undermined strong and programmatic political parties and the many generations of congressional reforms have all worked to fragment political power in America.”

But most issues can wait. … If climate change were an issue like health-care reform or the budget deficit I wouldn’t be a pessimist. My skepticism that we will act with sufficient force soon doesn’t translate into a belief that the world won’t want to act with force later. But climate change has a “game over” quality to it. Once we’ve filled the atmosphere with 800 or 1,000 parts per millions of carbon dioxide the consequences are out of our control.

For The Narcissist In Your Life

New research suggests a way to get them to feel empathy:

Psychologists have long thought that narcissists were largely incorrigible—that there was nothing we could do to help them be more empathetic. But for a new study in the Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, [Erica] Hepper discovered a way to measurably help narcissists feel the pain of others. …

Hepper and her co-authors asked a group of 95 female undergrads to take the same narcissism quiz, and then later to watch a 10-minute documentary about Susan, a victim of spousal abuse. Half were told to try to put themselves in Susan’s shoes (“Imagine how Susan feels. Try to take her perspective in the video…”), while the others were told to imagine they were watching the program on TV one evening. The subjects who were told to take Susan’s perspective were significantly more likely to score higher on empathy. In fact, the more narcissistic they were, the more the trick seemed to work.

“I think what’s going on here is that people who are low on narcissism are already responding to people—telling them what to do it isn’t going to increase their empathy any further,” Hepper said. “But the higher on narcissism you get, the less empathy [you feel]. By instructing them to think about it, it activates this empathic response that was previously much weaker.”

Drone Schooled

Last year, Corey Mead sat in on an Air Force drone pilot training class:

Patrick, a senior instructor who spent years piloting drones and engaging in “super secret squirrel stuff” in Afghanistan, led the class. Tall, angular, and pale, with a jutting nose and a wide, quick smile, he was relentlessly energetic, alternately instructing and cajoling the students. “The first thing to think about,” Patrick told the class’ two students—Paul, a pilot, and Justin, a sensor operator—“is the intent of the attack: what does the attack controller, or whoever’s in charge, want to happen on the ground?” The Air Force requested that I use first names only in exchange for weeklong access at Holloman as part of my research for a book on the future of warfare.

And the future, I learned, is like the past: In matters of war, there is tension between what members of the military feel is right and what their work requires. I observed this in the discord between trainers’ rhetoric about how much they disliked killing people—they repeated this to me frequently—and their unabashed excitement, also expressed frequently, about the times they were able to launch strikes and kill “bad guys.” Hating killing, but enjoying the chance to kill. The competing impulses may have seemed irreconcilable, but they were everywhere.

About an hour into class, Patrick told his students that different units would allow them different degrees of control over their attacks. “Sometimes you’ll be handcuffed,” he said. “They’ll say, ‘Run in from this specific angle, and drop a guided bomb unit on that specific point of impact.’” Other times, he said—and this is more enjoyable—“They’ll go, ‘I want you to kill those guys right there,’ and you’ll get to tailor your options to what makes sense to you.”

The Best Of The Dish Today

Thank God for Shep Smith. Meanwhile, his organization is publishing dubious accounts of Bergdahl’s captivity with the sensationalist headline “EXCLUSIVE: Bergdahl declared jihad in 2010, secret documents show.” Read further into the speculation and you find that this could have been Stockholm Syndrome and that Bergdahl also succeeded in escaping at one point and was subsequently kept in a metal cage “like an animal.” Quite why this soldier’s experience and conduct over five long years since he left his base should be hashed over in bits and pieces by the media before any serious investigation has even begun is, well, it’s not beyond me. It’s obviously about ramping the hysteria up to eleven.

But dealing with a case like Bergdahl is something for grown-ups, not Fox News. And there are powerful competing impulses, but the most potent one in the US tradition is surely getting the POW home first. Any investigation can come after. Then there is the simple question of ending hostilities and trading POWs. Somehow, prime minister Netanyahu is treated as a statesman even after he recently released over a thousand prisoners of war in return for one member of the IDF, while president Obama’s tough and not-pleasant call at the winding down of a conflict is somehow a source if interminable outrage. How ugly we can get at times.

Today, I vented some more about the mass grave for illegitimate children in Ireland. Re-reading the post, and some of its tortured sentences, I can see how emotional I am about this. But in the wake of the immeasurable silent pain of so many children for so many years in the sex abuse crisis, to witness another form of barbarism against children in the heart of my own church … well, it’s one of those things that really does shake the foundations of one’s commitment to an organized religion. And maybe it’s because it’s in a part of Ireland where my own grandmother was born and grew up, and about a particular strain of Irish Catholicism that I know only too well – but it’s one of those news events that are hard to get past. It will sink slowly into our consciousness, the way the sudden revelations at Abu Ghraib did, and hint at so much more darkness beyond.

Four less depressing posts: Modo-proofing edible pot; the fathomless human time-suck of Gangnam Style; new frontiers in online cheesiness; and a realist take on Putin’s “win” in Ukraine.

The top three posts of the day were all on the Palinite Tendency and Bowe Bergdahl – with the latest here, and the first here.

See you in the morning.

“The Irish In Me”

A reader writes:

I think there is something very important that gets glancing attention in your post on the Irish 800. And that is, there must have been many who knew about it.

Of course many knew about it. There is complicity by the population as a whole and it isn’t just Catholicism. Mind you now, I love the Irish. I’ve Irish in me. I say this being an American woman, talking to Irish women, knowing Irish women, observing, but from my very distant culture. There have been small changes in Ireland in the last 30 years, but … there is a place women must know, and it’s weird. It is far different than an American woman’s place.

In the 1990s, the 90s, for God’s sake, a proper woman wouldn’t order a pint in a pub, or sit in a pub itself. She sat in the snug and ordered a “glass”. So when I came there, I did it too. You wouldn’t look a strange man in the eye, or say hello on the street. That was for the man beside you to do. Friendly yes, extremely friendly. But never between the sexes. Strangers on the street, men, would do this weird little head tip to each other, and you would trot beside your own man, unnoticed, no “How are yeh.” At first visit, when I saw the head tip, I did it too, thinking I was being friendly, like we do back in the States–our two finger wave above the steering wheel on the two lane highways out here. I got caught doing the head tip by my male companion and it was like I was some upper class kid trying to throw up a gang sign in the poor part of town. “What the hell are you doing?” Understand that in my part of the Midwest, you just looked everyone in the eye and there just wasn’t this thing about being a woman. Just not. Looking people in the eye smiling and saying hi here is being polite, not stuck up. And there has never been some weird part of the bar that was the only place girls could go to, and only order a girl drink.

In Ireland, if you didn’t comply with these little norms, you were a slut. Or certainly an embarrassment.

Has Ireland changed? A bit.

However, in the year 2012, I visited relatives in rural western Ireland whose teenage daughter got pregnant. She wasn’t shipped off, she stayed home, had the baby. I came for tea. We talked of everything, but the baby. The baby sat in the room, and no one remarked about it. It was as if there was some creature making a bothersome noise, like an errant animal, and NO ONE TALKED ABOUT HOW THAT CREATURE GOT THERE.

I think about that poor girl, pregnant at 14, who in her tiny village would have had no access to contraception and very little sense of birth control. To get birth control would be to find someone to give you a lift 5 hours away, to Galway City. The likelihood of a girl like that being able to get away, to travel that far, just to do that, get birth control…well it just would never happen. I presume there was a boy involved, no one said anything. Dun da bheal. Shut yer mouth. She will never live it down. Never. Her life is over in that village. She will have to leave in order to have a decent life. Anytime she comes home for a visit, the talk will start up.

My husband used to fantasize from time to time about moving to Ireland and I just couldn’t. I have a daughter. The very thought just made by chest tighten with anxiety. I find that environment terrifying. There isn’t the equivalent, even if you are Catholic, in the States. There is somewhere to go. You have options. You can get contraception. People will acknowledge there is a baby, if you do get pregnant. Your life is not over. It isn’t Catholicism. It is dun da bheal.

The children of the slatterns, those 800, well that was dun da bheal as well. The cruelty of it is astonishing, because honestly, the Irish LOVE children, they dote on mine when we go over. But the 800, they were evidence of a great damning shame. They were the mewling creature in the room that one should just not notice.

Bad Behavior On The Soccer Field

It doesn’t pay off:

In the World Cup, the countries that most regularly get dealt red and yellow cards are some of the least successful to have entered the tournament.

Just looking at the number of cards given to a single team since 1970—when the current penalty system was first introduced—Argentina comes out on top with 99 yellow cards and seven reds. But Argentina is a perennial qualifier and has played 54 matches in that time. Quartz has crunched the numbers on a more telling metric: the average number of cards doled out to teams per game. The result: None of the top 20 offenders on our list has reached a World Cup final, at least since the card system began.

It looks like underdogs commit more penalties out of carelessness or desperation.

In other World Cup statistical analysis, Andrew Bertoli links participation in the World Cup to state aggression:

The results show that going to the World Cup increases aggression substantially. The countries that barely qualified experienced a large spike in aggression during the World Cup year. The difference in the aggression levels between the two groups is statistically significant and very unlikely to have been caused by chance (p<0.01). The estimated treatment effect is also much larger for (1) countries where soccer is the most popular sport and (2) non-democracies, which have a history of using sports to generate public support for their aggressive foreign policies.

The qualifiers not only took military action more often than the non-qualifiers, but the actions they took tended to be more violent.

The Economist instead focuses on World Cup politics in Brazil, the host country:

Mega-sporting events, [Brazil’s Dance with the Devil author Dave Zirin] writes, have become “neoliberal Trojan horses, preying on our love of sports to enforce a series of policies that would in any other situation be roundly rejected”. World Cup euphoria, he argues, has given the Brazilian government cover to pursue a radical agenda of austerity, privatisation and the mass eviction of slum-dwellers.

Mr Zirin’s indictment of massive sporting events certainly has merit. The Brazilian reality, however, is not as neat as he would have it. The country’s difficulties with staging global showcases long precede its supposed neoliberal turn. In 1922, when hosting an exhibition in Rio de Janeiro, the government forcibly relocated many slum-dwellers in its eagerness to present a modern face to the world. The last time Brazil hosted the World Cup, in 1950, critics objected that the money would be better spent on schools and hospitals.

Mr Zirin is too quick to find external causes for Brazil’s internal problems.

The Pain Of Painting

For Matisse, writes T.J. Clark, “painting was agitation”:

He said to more than one admirer late in life – no doubt intending to frighten, but still, I think, essentially telling the truth – that in order to begin painting at all he needed to feel the urge to strangle someone, or lance an abscess in his psyche. There ought to be a better way. ‘Paintings seem to be finished for me now’: he is writing in 1945 to his daughter Marguerite, who was recovering at the time from the horror visited on her in a Gestapo prison at Rennes. ‘I’m for decoration – there I give everything I can – I put into it all the acquisitions of my life. In pictures I can only go back over the same ground.’ …

Painting, in Matisse’s case, had always equalled Nature. Certainly confronting Nature – passing it under his fingers – had proved to be delight as much as interrogation: a rustling and smoothing of things into the skein of colour that was painting, so he believed, and that painting had to fight continually to keep in being, up front. But doing so was inseparable from the murderous urge, the mud and flies, the grimace, the exacerbation – ‘the accomplishment of an extremist in an exercise’. ‘He took in front of nature,’ as an early critic had it of Cézanne, ‘the attitude of a question mark.’