Author: Andrew Sullivan

Today’s Online Journalism Update

Finally, a headline worthy of our age:

Why Is Gawker’s Top Story A Four-Year-Old Post About Vajazzling?

Not to be outdone by this one:

Boy Sentenced To Jail Because Of Large Penis

We also have news that Buzzfeed is now changing its presentation of ads-disguised-as-journalism by labeling them “promoted by” rather than “presented by” and originating with a “brand publisher” rather than a “Buzzfeed partner”. You may ask: what the fuck is a “brand publisher”? But that very bullshit is integral to the whole money-grubbing grift, isn’t it? The destruction of the English language is integral to the entire empire of adlisticles. And, as always with inherently corrupt enterprises like Buzzfeed, the alleged improvement is actually a deeper shade of con:

Gone is the not-yellow background, replaced by a small, actual yellow box with the words “promoted by.” Thing is, when you now look at their homepage, this new box layout makes the ad content blend in even more.

You can go about your day now.

A Villain With A Heart Of Gold

Bilge Ebiri isn’t sold on Disney’s multi-dimensional villains, epitomized by Angelina Jolie’s performance in Maleficent:

Disney’s recent move away from classic villains is, on some level, a good thing, in that it allows them to delve into some heretofore unexplored types of relationships, and to find psychological complexity where once there was none. But I can’t help but feel like something has been lost as well. The Evil Queen, Maleficent, the Coachman, Shere-Khan. We didn’t spend a lot of time getting to know them. They were mysterious, elemental, totemic. And so, we could fill them with our own fears. They were charismatic enough that we brought our own complexity to them. These bad guys also put our heroes into sharper focus: Try to imagine Snow White without the Evil Queen, Peter Pan without Captain Hook.

Devon Maloney also has misgivings about Maleficent:

Role reversals in fairy tale retellings like these, when wielded well, are tools of rehabilitation. They provide an alternative to boorish archetypes and flat concepts of “good and evil,” and they prompt children (and adults as well) to consider the nuances of morality. But rather than restructuring the stories, these new retellings simply swap the characters around. (In a great criticism of Frozen writer Kip Manley calls that structure “the Rules.”) Villains wind up with the exact same traits as their “good” nemeses; no discomfiting outlier behavior for them. Evil—actual, absolute evil—is always obliterated. Good women remain feminine and kind, and always morally understandable, as they should be, and the villainess almost always regrets the qualities that made her an outcast. By the end, she’s been absorbed into the very “happily ever after” template the retelling purported to subvert.

The Palinite Tendency And Bowe Bergdahl, Ctd

Gawker discovers some background for the Twitter outrage:

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That’s only two years between indicting Obama for not bringing the guy home and indicting him for rescuing him! And there’s way more where that came from. And Michael Hastings, of course, predicted the political circus two years ago:

According to White House sources, Marc Grossman, who replaced Richard Holbrooke as special envoy to Afghanistan and Pakistan, was given a direct warning by the president’s opponents in Congress about trading Bowe for five Taliban prisoners during an election year. “They keep telling me it’s going to be Obama’s Willie Horton moment,” Grossman warned the White House. The threat was as ugly as it was clear: The president’s political enemies were prepared to use the release of violent prisoners to paint Obama as a Dukakis-­like appeaser, just as Republicans did to the former Massachusetts governor during the 1988 campaign. In response, a White House official advised Grossman that he should ignore the politics of the swap and concentrate solely on the policy.

“Frankly, we don’t give a shit why he left,” says one White House official. “He’s an American soldier. We want to bring him home.”

And they did. And this is the Willie Horton moment we’ve all been waiting for. Stay classy, GOP.

How Many Obamacare Subsidies Are Wrong?

Data discrepancies afflict around 2 million Obamacare enrollments:

The biggest concern is that some people may have received too high a subsidy, meaning they’d be asked to repay the excess or lose their coverage.

Obama administration officials said they believed most of the inconsistencies will be cleared up over the summer, but said they’d developed a system to “turn off” benefits for people who aren’t eligible. “The fact that a consumer has an inconsistency on their application does not mean there is a problem on their enrollment,” Julie Bataille, the Department of Health and Human Services’ spokeswoman said. “Most of the time what that means is that there is more up-to-date information that they need to provide to us.”

Philip Klein is alarmed:

2.1 million represents a lot of sign-ups. Even if a “vast majority” of instances are easily resolved, that could still leave hundreds of thousands of cases in which individuals received incorrect subsidy determinations. If individuals received extra subsidy money, it would mean that they would have to pay it back in the following tax year. A higher-than-expected tax liability could become a mess for lower-income Americans who budgeted for the year based on certain assumptions.

Cohn is less concerned:

The idea is to verify applicant information, in real-time. And mostly that’s what happened during open enrollment, at least once all of the consumer websites were working. But because the process is so complicated—and because people’s life circumstances sometimes change—the information that people supplied didn’t always match up with federal records. That was particularly true for income, since the data hub checked applications against (two-year-old) tax returns and (one-year-old) payroll stubs. Somebody who recently lost a job or got a new one, or went through a major life change like a divorce, or whose income simply varies a lot from year to year, could easily supply income information that was totally accurate but simultaneously at odds with the government’s latest data.

The Affordable Care Act anticipates situations like these and addresses them. Rather than hold up those applications, creating a huge backlog and potentially scaring away people seeking insurance, Section 1411 of the law allows applicants to complete the enrollment process even if the information they submit doesn’t match up properly. In such cases, people may “attest” to the accuracy of the information they provided. If the data mismatch is about citizenship or residency—or if it is about income and of greater value than 10 percent—these people receive official notices, requiring them to provide new information or show that the original, submitted information is correct.

A Rebuke From Within Against Obama’s Syria Policy

In an interview on Tuesday, former Ambassador to Syria Robert Ford let loose with harsh criticism:

Ford, who served from 2010 to 2014, basically thinks that Obama was warned that Syria was going to hell, and did nothing to stop it.  “We have been unable to address either the root causes of the conflict in terms of the fighting on the ground and the balance on the ground, and we have a growing extremism threat,” the ambassador said. “We warned even as long as two years ago that terrorist groups” would take advantage of the chaos in Syria to build a base of operations — a warning that, of course, turned out to be correct.

He also doesn’t see the deal removing most of Syria’s chemical weapons as making up for…much of anything, really. “There really is nothing we can point to that’s been very successful in our policy except the removal of about ninety-three percent of some of Assad’s chemical materials. But now he’s using chlorine gas against his opponents.” According to Ford, the State Department believed “as much as two years ago” that the US needed to give much stronger support to friendly, non-extremist Syrian rebels. Support the right guys, the argument goes, and the terrorism problem doesn’t loom so large.

Greg Scoblete takes down Ford’s argument for arming the “right” Syrian rebels:

Ford blithely brushed off the question of how the U.S. would ensure custody of those weapons by assuring us that the U.S. government had “information on reliable groups” whose “agenda was compatible with our national security interests.” Of course, even if the U.S. did have a finely tuned understanding of various rebel groups and how they would act if they were to receive large shipments of U.S. weapons (a skill that Washington has curiously failed to manifest elsewhere) this is hardly the only argument against arming factions in Syria’s civil war.

A more serious objection is that backing one side to “victory” does nothing more than implicate the U.S. in the creation of yet-another failed state. Ford, and those cheering him on, have a [surprisingly] naive faith in the power of Syria’s rebel groups to not only depose Assad but to stand up a relatively cohesive and secure state in his wake. Where is this faith coming from? It couldn’t be from Iraq or Libya, where the U.S. directly and indirectly toppled regimes only to see chaos flower in the aftermath. The U.S. directly implanted a government in Afghanistan at the cost of billions of dollars and is now leaving the country at the mercy of a still-potent insurgency.

Larison piles on:

Ford unintentionally draws attention to some of the main reasons why it has never made sense to arm any part of the Syrian opposition. First, there is no such thing as a truly “reliable” group in these conflicts. No matter how agreeable a group’s stated agenda and ideology may appear, the U.S. gains no meaningful influence and control over the groups that it arms, and it cannot rely on these groups to do anything except pursue their own goals. In the short term, that may seem expedient because they claim to have similar goals, but that guarantees nothing later on. The main problem isn’t that the U.S. lacks information about the groups requesting weapons, though it might, but that it doesn’t know what will happen if it succeeds in promoting regime change by proxy.

But Walter Russell Mead agrees with Ford that Obama’s reluctance to intervene in Syria has created international security problems:

Twelve thousand foreign fighters, 3,000 of whom come from Western nations, have entered Syria as jihadists since the war began. The prospect of experienced terrorists with Western passports, native accents, and ties to local communities returning home to the United States and Europe presents a daunting security challenge. … The Soufan Group, an international intelligence and security firm, offered a stark warning this weekend that, as a result of the Syrian war, al-Qaeda “is probably in a better position now than at anytime since October 2001.” On Tuesday, Bashar al-Assad held sham elections that sent a clear signal to the world that he was bound and determined to remain in power. Ford is just the latest of many Washington figures, professional as well as political, Democrat as well as Republican, to decry the President’s weakness in response to the ever-worsening crisis. Will he now act? Can he?

Beinart weighs Ford’s views alongside the similar argument that Vali Nasr makes in his book, The Dispensable Nation:

The Ford-Nasr critique is hardly self-evident. Nasr assails the White House staff for putting domestic politics too much at the center of foreign policy. But Obama’s refusal to take bigger foreign-policy gambles may reflect an accurate assessment of the domestic mood. (It’s noteworthy that the one time Obama did take a big overseas risk—the raid on Osama bin Laden—it was in pursuit of a goal Americans truly cared about). …

Either way, the Ford-Nasr critique deserves more attention because it’s the one most likely to influence Hillary Clinton, who was more supportive of arming Syria’s rebels than Obama, more supportive of a larger Afghan surge and, according to Nasr, more supportive of talks with the Taliban earlier on in the conflict. Intellectually, Clinton has been more influenced by the Balkan Wars than Obama has, and less by the trauma in Iraq. And her self-declared doctrine—“smart power”—which envisages the coordinated use of different aspects of American might, is closer to what Ford and Nasr are proposing than to the Obama Doctrine: “Don’t do stupid shit.”

How Not To Forget An Atrocity

Keating observes that China’s tightly enforced collective amnesia about Tiananmen Square doesn’t extend to Hong Kong:

In contrast to the tense silence on the mainland, the commemoration of Tiananmen was very much in evidence in Hong Kong, where as many as 150,000 people attended a candlelight vigil [yesterday].  … Hong Kong is currently undergoing the dual and seemingly contradictory processes of becoming more closely integrated with mainland China while theoretically transitioning toward having a fully elected democratic government. But China and Hong Kong together aren’t just “one country, two systems”—another favorite slogan—they seem to be one country with two memories, and two very different understandings of recent history.

In addition to the regularly scheduled vigil, Rachel Lu reports on a smaller, more politically charged event that also took place in the city yesterday:

The organizers of the new gathering — two groups called Civic Passion and the Proletariat Political Institute — claim to espouse a complete rejection of the Chinese Communist Party and its rule, rather than holding out hope for reconciliation, reform, or redress of past wrongs. The large banner hoisted on the stage read in Chinese: “Don’t Need [Chinese Government] to Redress June 4” and “Want the Demise of the Communist Regime.” The new gathering only turned out a small fraction of the attendance at its storied counterpart in Victoria Park. The organizers claimed more than 7,000 were present, but police estimated approximately 3,060.

Simon Denyer visits Hong Kong’s new Tiananmen Square museum:

In a tiny fifth floor room in an office building in Kowloon, Hong Kong, a museum was set up in April to commemorate the events of June 4, 1989, better known by some as “Tiananmen Square.” It has already already attracted about 6,000 visitors since it opened. Only a few dozen people can fit into the 800-square-foot exhibition space at a time, but by the end of Wednesday, about 400 visitors had come. Johnny Li, a 26-year-old staff member, said about 40 to 50 percent of visitors come from mainland China. “Some are surprised because they didn’t know the history of June 4, but some already know, and share and discuss with other people in the museum,” he said.

Simon Denyer points out that the anniversary comes at a time when Hong Kong’s ties to the mainland are severely strained:

Under the terms of the territory’s handover from British rule in 1997, China promised significant autonomy under the “one country, two systems” model. At the time, many here were happy to see the British go, but that sentiment has since gradually eroded. China has promised the territory universal suffrage and genuine democracy in 2017, when the job of chief executive, the most powerful political role in Hong Kong, next comes up for grabs.

But many here fear that Beijing will fix the contest, to ensure one of its local allies wins. There are also growing concerns that China is gradually diluting Hong Kong’s cherished civil liberties and media freedom, while a massive influx of tourists and immigrants from mainland China has caused growing local resentment. The resentment undermines any hope Beijing might have of persuading the people of Taiwan to ever join mainland China under a similar “one country, two systems” model, and it is a constant reminder of a democratic spirit among Chinese people that refuses to go away.

Catholicism’s Crimes Against Humanity, Ctd

In Ireland, there are stirrings for a full investigation into the staggering news that a former home for unmarried mothers and their children was effectively a death camp for infants, and close to 800 were buried in a septic tank. It’s important to note that we have not yet had a thorough investigation of the site, formal confirmation of all the alleged tiny corpses, or the kind of inquiry that could answer many as-yet-unanswered questions. But it’s notable that no one in the church or civil authorities have simply denied the account. The order of nuns responsible for this grotesque atrocity, and its subsequent cover-up, are apparently consulting with their bishop.

There are now calls to investigate all the sites once run by this sadistic, wicked order in order to discover how many children were neglected, abused and thrown away like so much trash. I’d say that’s a start. In my view, the entire order should be shut down by the Vatican until we have a much better understanding of these crimes, who knew about them, and when. There should also surely be a thorough attempt to find anyone still connected with this cover-up for investigation and possible prosecution. Like war crimes, these horrifying abuses should know no statute of limitations.

Meanwhile, it simply staggers me to find bloggers deflecting blame away from the church. So we find this:

What’s troubling to me is the insistence that the abuse that occurred at The Home is “Catholic” abuse. It also troubles me greatly that people are using hatred of Catholicism as an excuse for those who saw these starving, neglected children and did nothing to intervene. This easy scapegoating of Catholicism removes everyone’s responsibility and any need to make change for children suffering today. There is no rational reason for identifying this as “Catholic” abuse.

Pardon my language but yes there fucking is. These children were treated as sub-human because Tuam Crosstheir births violated a Catholic doctrine that there can be no sex outside of marriage. The young women – denied contraception, of course – were equally subject to horrifying stigmatization, hatred, and inhumane rules that took their children away from them. None of this would have ever taken place without this doctrine, and the insistence that it be enforced without exception and relentlessly. No society has ever lived up to this standard, but in Ireland, where the church was fused with the state, they gave it about as good a try as possible. And in order to enforce it, in order to inculcate shame at the deepest level imaginable to prevent human love, passion and sex breaking out, cruelty was necessary. Whenever a society attempts to impose without exception an impossible abstraction on fallible human beings, such cruelty will always be necessary. You can check the roster of totalitarian and theocratic regimes for the results.

Rod Dreher comes back with the argument that the effective imposition by society, church and state of the no-sex-outside-marriage does not have to lead to atrocities like these. And since we have such a teaching still propagated and we no longer have this kind of horror in the West, he obviously has a point. But from the point of view of those who imposed this regime for much of the 20th Century in Ireland, this argument indicts itself. Today, without ruthless stigmatization of women who have sex outside marriage or of gay men and women, we have much higher levels of sex, illegitimacy, and perversion. From the point of view of the sexual sadists who imposed this regime, their worldview stands vindicated. See, they would argue. Sex is so primal a desire that the only way to get human beings to conform to the only valid Catholic norm, you have to brutalize gay people and women who have had sex before marriage. Or more to the point, you have to make illegitimate children, their mothers and gay people invisible. If their existence were confirmed, if it were even manifested in their own communities, then the entire edifice of Catholic sexual teaching would implode.

After all, isn’t that why Rod has pursued the Benedict option in our allegedly decadent society?

Without this kind of enforcement of sexual orthodoxy, our public square is riddled with examples of grotesque sin: gay people not only having sex but also marrying each other; young women exploring their sexuality with self-confidence and curiosity, protected by contraception; young men and women marrying later after many sexual partners; and an online sexual world where all kinds of options unknown even to Dante are instantly available. “See!” the ghosts of Tuam past would say. “These are the wages of sin. Our world was brutal and cruel and foul, but it prevented more sin than the current regime.” And in their understanding of sin, in which throwing hundreds of child’s bodies into a septic tank is a necessary evil but masturbating is wicked, they surely have a point.

Now do all regimes of theocratic sexual orthodoxy become this callous? Well, when you look at societies which are still like Ireland once was, where church and state were fused, you see much of the same horror: the dehumanization and subjugation of women, female genital mutilation, male genital mutilation, and the brutal murder of gay people. Does Rod not see a pattern here? And the entire fiction of a more virtuous past is only made possible by literally making its victims as invisible as those infant bodies in a septic tank. The countless gay lives of intense psychic pain, the innumerable heart-breaks, the forced separation of mothers and children, the brutalization of innocents, and the immiseration of people whose only crime was to experience their own bodies in ways unsanctioned by authority: these are all buried in order to retain the lie that this sexual ethic is the only virtuous one.

There are sane and good arguments to be had about the best form of sexual and emotional life as an ideal and as a reality. But the absolutist paradigm in which any sex outside marriage is anathema is such an impossible standard for most that it will fail if not enforced with the kind of brutality seen in Ireland in the 1940s or Iran in the 2010s. My contention is that the rigidity of this standard is inextricably tied up with cruelty. And that cruelty is far, far greater a sin, than surrendering to our deepest nature, hurting no one. That’s the lesson I get from Jesus’ words to the adulteress at the well. That’s the lesson I get from the Gospels as a whole. Love one another; and forgive one another. And these before everything else; mercy before everything else; love before anything else.

That septic tank is one massive rebuke to all of that, which no rationalizing can rescue.

(Photo: The High Cross in the town square of Tuam, County Galway, circa 1990. By RDImages/Epics/Getty Images.)

The Price We Paid For Bergdahl

Zack Beauchamp profiles the five Taliban commanders we freed in exchange for our POW:

Internal Pentagon reports label all of them “high risks” to the United States. These Screen Shot 2014-06-05 at 12.25.56 PMGuanatanamo dossiers, helpfully reviewed by Daily Beast reporters Eli Lake and Josh Rogin, suggest that some of them have links to al-Qaeda and Iranian plots against American troops in Afghanistan.

Independent experts are somewhat skeptical of these claims. [Afghan Analysts Network’s Kate] Clark, for one, calls the documents on the five inmates “peculiar, opaquely sourced and peppered with factual errors.” The “claims made in the Guantanamo Bay tribunals and in press reports sourced to un-named US officials,” she says, “frequently do not stand up to close inspection.” But even if we throw the US intelligence reports completely out the window, this prisoner swap should still be troubling. Even Clark concedes there’s good reason to believe [Mullah Mohammad] Fazl committed war crimes.

Eli Lake relays concerns from the intelligence community that Qatar, where the five detainees are being transferred, will accidentally-on-purpose lose track of them:

[T]here are other reasons U.S. intelligence officials are worried about Qatar. The emirate is a good place to raise money for terrorist organizations. Late last year, the Treasury Department placed sanctions on Abdul Rahman Omeir al-Naimi, a Qatari history professor and human rights activist, for raising hundreds of thousands of dollars for al Qaeda’s affiliates in Iraq, Somalia, and Yemen.

In March, David Cohen, the undersecretary of the treasury for terrorism and financial intelligence, said in a speech to the Center for a New American Security that while Qatar is a longtime U.S. ally, it also has “for many years openly financed Hamas, a group that continues to undermine regional stability.” Cohen also referenced press reports that indicated Qatar’s support for extremists in Syria. The State Department’s latest report on counterterrorism says that while Qatar has cooperated with the United States in some important areas of counterterrorism, its efforts to stop fundraising for terrorist groups have been inconsistent.

Like Greenwald, Sean Davis suspects that Bergdahl was just the administration’s cover for closing Gitmo:

It was never about Bowe Bergdahl. Make no mistake: judging by the behavior of the White House as this story has unfolded, the Obama administration’s primary goal was not the return of likely deserter (and rumored defector) Bowe Bergdahl. The primary goal was making it easier to finally shut down Guantanamo Bay, a 2008-era campaign promise that President Barack Obama was regularly mocked for failing to keep. Bowe Bergdahl was just the perfect political cover, or at least he was supposed to be.

Allahpundit is on the same page:

The “euphoria” Obama expected after Bergdahl’s release was supposed to be the perfume masking the stench from sending five lethal degenerates back into the jihadi ranks as a prelude to closing Gitmo entirely. Remember, he said in his State of the Union address in January that this was the year he wanted the prison shut down; that was one month after the ransom idea for Bergdahl had been dropped. Having resolved to exploit his lame-duck status to the fullest in 2014 and proceed with shuttering Gitmo, he recognized that Bergdahl would be better used as a consolation prize in handing over Taliban leaders than as part of some dubious ransom deal.

Bazelon criticizes Obama for his willingness to let these high-risk Gitmo prisoners go while dozens of others remain locked up indefinitely despite having been ruled innocent and harmless:

[W]hat about the suffering of Jihad Ahmed Mujstafa Diyab, the Syrian held in Guantánamo for 12 years without a trial, a man on the 2010 list of recommended transfers, who is being strapped against his will into a chair so a feeding tube can be forced into his nose and down his throat? The government doesn’t want to send Diyab back to Syria in the middle of the war there. Uruguay has offered to take him and five other detainees. Yet they’re still in Gitmo. As Andy Worthington writes at PolicyMic, for the 78 men cleared for transfer who remain imprisoned, “the release of the five Taliban prisoners is unlikely to cause anything but despair.”

P.M. Carpenter focuses on the nomenclature pundits are using to describe the “worst of the worst”:

Are the freed Taliban “warriors” terrorists? Were they prisoners of war? Are they jihadists? [the WaPo’s Kathleen] Parker conflates the three as though there are no distinctions to be bothered with, or troubled by. Yet the distinctions are critical ones; there’s a vast gulf in meaning between “prisoner of war” and “terrorist,” and even between terrorist and “jihadist.” … President Obama released prisoners of war, precisely as George Washington did. Such clarity might not kill the right’s outrage–would anything?–but it would contribute to more calm in the mainstream debate, which, at the moment, is hopelessly muddled and all over the road.

Will Saletan defends making the deal on the same basis:

Sgt. Bergdahl was not a noncombatant. He was a prisoner of war, captured on the field of battle. Therefore, by definition, his capture wasn’t terrorism. Negotiating for his release, trading enemy combatants for our own combatant, isn’t a concession to terrorism. It’s conformity with the long-standing tradition of exchanging POWs.

According to Sen. Ted Cruz, “The reason why the U.S. has had the policy for decades of not negotiating with terrorists is because once you start doing it, every other terrorist has an incentive to capture more soldiers.” That’s ridiculous. Terrorists didn’t invent the capture of soldiers. It’s a basic military objective, with a standard option to trade the enemy’s soldiers for yours. The reason not to negotiate with terrorists is to discourage the seizure of civilians, not the seizure of soldiers. So Obama’s critics are wrong to believe that negotiating for Bergdahl sends a dangerous message to terrorists. But they’re also ignoring the message his abandonment would have sent to our troops, their families, and prospective military recruits. It would have betrayed our pledge that if you’re captured in service to our country, we’ll free you.

But a Taliban commander close to the negotiations confirms that the Bergdahl trade makes his compatriots more eager to capture American soldiers:

“It’s better to kidnap one person like Bergdahl than kidnapping hundreds of useless people,” the commander said, speaking by telephone on condition of anonymity because he is not authorized to speak to the media. “It has encouraged our people. Now everybody will work hard to capture such an important bird.”

The commander has been known to TIME for several years and has consistently supplied reliable information about Bergdahl’s captivity.

Previous Dish on Bergdahl here, here, here, and here.

MoDo-Proofing Edibles

Gillespie offers a qualified defense of MoDo’s pot column:

Dowd’s column—and her admirable willingness to talk frankly about her experience in all its inglory—raises real issues about the process by which pot legalization will be vetted. The fact is, there’s a societal learning curve that’s every bit as real as individual learning curves. It takes a while, and oftentimes a lot of trials and errors, for a society to figure out how to deal with major changes (divorce, gender and racial equality, etc.).

The sooner we acknowledge that the end of pot prohibition will require a lot of conversation about what works well and what doesn’t, the faster than the new normal of “marijuana on Main Street” will be accepted for the huge leap forward in freedom and peace that it really represents.

Jon Walker suggests that “the ‘Maureen Dowd test’ be the new, unofficial metric by which [edibles] regulations are judged”:

If legalization advocates want to avoid a potential political backlash the regulations don’t just need to be sensible and easy for a regular person to understand, they need to be idiot-proof. They need to be so clear that even someone who goes to buy edibles with a Maureen Dowd level of ignorance can’t say they misinterpreted the instructions.

The Colorado legislature has already approved new laws intended to do just that. While some people might find it annoying that future labels may have extra large instructions, edibles won’t come in certain shapes, and that packaging will need to clearly separate individual doses; that is what is necessary to make something idiot-proof.

Alyssa is more sympathetic:

She got much higher than she wanted to because she made the not-unreasonable assumption that a candy bar was a single serving, eating the whole thing in one go. “A medical consultant at an edibles plant where I was conducting an interview mentioned that candy bars like that are supposed to be cut into 16 pieces for novices,” Dowd explains that she finds out later. “That recommendation hadn’t been on the label.”

It is one thing for experienced consumers to scoff at Dowd’s lack of knowledge. But she is not going to be alone, and asking for labeling or instructions is not unreasonable. Similarly, new marijuana consumers may look to analogous delivery mechanisms and social rituals when they are smoking joints for the first time, and expect that they ought to treat joints exactly like cigarettes.

Charles Pierce recalls “two less-than-pleasant experiences with marijuana and both of them involved eating the stuff rather than smoking it”:

These two episodes taught me two things — a) that, in terms of how quickly it hits you and how hard it hits you, eating dope is radically different than smoking it and, b) the only way to cope with the difference is to get the hell out of where you are and get out into the world in one way or another until your head settles down. The worst thing you could possibly do is determine that you will have your first serious marijuana experience by gobbling down an electric candy bar and then sitting there alone in your hotel room while waiting for the newspaper taxis to appear at your door, waiting to take you away.

Weissmann uses the the column to argue that “the cannabis business is probably the sort of industry that would be better off dominated by big, name-brand manufacturers”:

It’s perfectly fine to have government-mandated product testing. But it’s even better to have companies that mass produce a highly standardized product and are willing to invest in the technology to get it right every single time. From a safety perspective, you want a Hershey’s or Entenmann’s of edibles, rather than a hodge-podge of pot boutiques and small companies distributing locally. At the very least, we’d be better off with companies the size of large craft brewers, which tend to be more attentive to quality control than their tinier cousins, in part because they have the money to spend on it.