Author: Andrew Sullivan

Quote For The Day

“When I give talks about interrogations and torture, people always ask me why I have a problem with it. I understand – I was all for torture right after 9/11. I would have tortured the hijackers myself if they were still alive, and if I had been able to find them. I wasn’t thinking very rationally. Then I started learning about terrorism and I met the people who had been tortured, and I realized how wrong I was – and naïve. Believing in torture means you aren’t looking at the facts on the ground–you are just believing in some kind of fantasy about how to fix the world,” – Tara McKelvey, author of Monstering: Inside America’s Policy of Secret Interrogations and Torture in the Terror War.

Yes, that’s exactly the right adjective to describe Dick Cheney, beneath all the blather and bullshit: naïve.

Putin’s Euro-Nightmare, Ctd

Anti-gay Russians are upset about the Eurovision victory of bearded drag queen Conchita Wurst:

Some of the most vitriolic posts online have involved men sharing photographs of themselves shaving in protest against Wurst. Rapper Aleksandr Stepanov, known as “ST,” uploaded to Instagram pictures of him shaving, with the message, “I pass the baton,” and the hashtag, “Prove that you’re not Conchita” (#докажичтотынекончита). Anton Korobkov, a popular pro-Kremlin blogger, also posted a “selfie” while shaving.

A tweet example of the bizarre shaving protest:

Russian officials are joining in the homophobia:

Nationalist politician Vladimir Zhirinovsky told Rossiya-1 state television: “There’s no limit to our outrage. It’s the end of Europe. It has turned wild. They don’t have men and women any more. They have ‘it’.

“Fifty years ago the Soviet army occupied Austria. We made a mistake in freeing Austria. We should have stayed.”

Alrighty then. Some Russians want to boycott the competition:

In what would surely be a historic retreat from Europe—and a flagrant breach of continental norms—several Russian organizations are calling for a boycott of Eurovision 2014. This because, in the words of St. Petersburg legislator Vitaly Milonov, Eurovision has become a “Europe-wide gay parade.”

But this is far from a consensus view. Alan Renwick calculates the points awarded to Austria by country:

[D]ifferences in popular attitudes seem to be much less marked than the overall points suggest.  Only one country – Estonia – put Austria lower than fifth in the popular vote.  Conchita ranked within the top three not just in most of western Europe, but also in Russia, Azerbaijan, Armenia, and Georgia.  The average points she would have won had only the popular votes counted would have been 8.0 in the former Soviet Union excluding the Baltics, 7.3 in the other former communist countries, and 10.0 in the rest.  So the differences are really quite small.

Donetsk And Luhansk “Vote” For “Independence”

Jamie Dettmer reports on the plebiscites that pro-Russian separatists held in eastern Ukraine yesterday:

The separatists used all the now familiar techniques—including weeks of armed and thuggish intimidation, the abductions and murder of opponents, multiple voting, pre-filled ballot papers, adding names to an incomplete electoral roll and allowing anyone who turned up at a polling station with a Ukrainian passport in hand to cast a ballot.

In the circumstances the separatists were restrained with their referendum result: an 89 percent majority for secession and 10 percent against on a 74.7 percent turnout. A Soviet-style majority but not as unabashed as Crimea’s supposed 97 percent secession triumph in March.

In neighboring Luhansk, one of the poorest Ukrainian regions, where similar plebiscite tactics have been employed, the leader there, Valery Bolotov, at least had the decency to appear to go through the motions of actually counting votes, and so a result will be declared later Monday. No one is in doubt about which way that vote will go, either. Luhansk separatists hint their turnout was even higher yesterday—79 percent.

Separatist leaders in both regions are now saying they will not participate in the presidential elections scheduled for May 25 and will seek to become part of Russia:

Denis Pushilin, the self-styled governor of the “People’s Republic of Donetsk” said the presidential election “will not happen” in the Donetsk region, AFP news agency reported. A separatist leader from Luhansk also said the presidential vote will not be held in the region. “As of today, we are now the Republic of Luhansk, which  believes it to be inappropriate and perhaps even stupid to hold a presidential election,” Russia’s RIA news agency quoted him as saying. …

Only Russia is likely to recognise the “People’s Republic of Donetsk” and the Kremlin has already said it “respects the expression of the people’s will” there. On Monday, however, the Kremlin made it clear that Moscow has no intention of immediately annexing the regions. Russian President Vladimir Putin’s office urged the Ukrainian government to engage in talks with representatives of eastern Ukraine that could be brokered by the Organisation for Security and Cooperation in Europe.

The referendum results, of course, contrast sharply with independent polling:

A poll released last week by Pew Research found that 70 percent of respondents in the east – and 58 percent of Russian-speaking eastern respondents – wanted Ukraine to remain whole. Only 18 percent of easterners, and 27 percent of eastern Russian-speakers, said the eastern regions should be allowed to secede.

The Pew findings appear to roughly match an April poll on attitudes in southeastern Ukraineconducted by the Kyiv International Institute of Sociology (KIIS). Both found high dissatisfaction with Kiev’s governance, but little appetite for outright independence.

Sunday’s referendums only took place in the two easternmost regions of Ukraine. The two earlier polls considered attitudes in a much larger portion of eastern Ukraine – 11 regions by Pew, eight by KIIS. However, for the referendum results to square with the earlier polls, support for secession would have to be miniscule outside of the Lugansk and Dontesk regions.

But Berman notices that the international press has covered the votes as though they were legitimate:

Ukraine rebels hold referendums in Donetsk and Luhansk, says the BBC. Ukraine: pro-Russia separatists set for victory in eastern region referendum, is how the Guardian reports such a shocking prospect. Ukraine regions hold sovereignty vote, announces the Boston Globe. Ukraine’s eastern regions vote on self-rule, notes the Hindu. As for coverage of the results, Yahoo was big offender with its headline, Voters Turn Their Backs on Ukraine, given that we have little more idea of what the voters in the region want than we did a week ago.

Notice anything? Regardless of the content of the articles, the basic presumption has been to note the controversy about the referendums, provide several interviews with yes voters, and maybe note for a second or two the glaring problems with the process, which the Guardian sneaks into the middle of it’s piece. Nonetheless, the vast majority of the coverage has taken the referendums seriously as a major event, even though in many of the cities such as Mariupol, the rebels only control a single building, and had only four ballot boxes set up for a city of 500,000.

Bershidsky looks at the bigger picture:

It’s not the referendums or the Russian military threat that Ukraine, and its Western neighbors, should worry about now. Moscow sympathizes with the rebellion, but deposed president Viktor Yanukovych’s friends need it much more than Putin needs another headache. In an interview with Russia’s state-owned Rossiyskaya Gazeta, Pavel Gubarev, one of the rebels’ leaders, unexpectedly accused many of his comrades-in-arms of taking money from Rinat Akhmetov, Ukraine’s richest man and a long-time Yanukovych ally. Politicians from Yanukovych’s Regions Party have recently stepped up calls for the withdrawal of Kiev’s troops from eastern Ukraine. The losers of last winter’s revolution are hoping to turn the east into a successful version of the Vendee, the province that rose up against the Great Revolution in France in 1793.

Kiev needs to concentrate on counteracting that.

The Wrongful Convictions We Can’t Test For

John R. Lott Jr. defends the death penalty partially on the grounds that “DNA evidence has improved its accuracy in trials over the past couple of decades, as it has become more commonly used.” Balko counters that “it’s a mistake to look at DNA testing as a panacea”:

[DNA testing] isn’t relevant in the vast majority of criminal cases, so we can’t rely on it to catch our mistakes. It’s really more of a wake-up call. Death penalty supporters who say we can just sit back and rely on DNA testing to save us are putting forth a dangerous proposition. At some point, we’ll either have found all of the wrongful convictions that can be exposed by DNA testing, or the remaining wrongly convicted in those cases will all have died. From that point forward, we won’t hear about exonorations nearly as often. DNA testing will go a long way toward preventing wrongful convictions, but — and this is important — only in the small set of cases for which DNA testing is dispositive.

Here’s the scary part: If we haven’t fixed the problems with the criminal justice system by then, we’ll continue to have the same rate of wrongful convictions in non-DNA cases that we have today. But at that point, we’ll be much more likely to plod along with a false sense of confidence, because we’ll no longer have a transcendent technology to remind us that we sometimes get it wrong.

Marriage Equality Update

Wikipedia’s marriage map has been updated to reflect the Arkansas ruling:

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Joe Jervis, who is heavily covering Arkansas, notes that the map “might change today if the Arkansas ruling is stayed.” Lyle Denniston unpacks the ruling:

The judge likened the denial of equality to homosexuals to the denial of equality to racial minorities, and summoned up for comparison the Supreme Court’s discredited ruling in the Dred Scott case in 1857 saying that black people “had no rights or privileges but such as those who held the power and the government might choose to grant them.”

He also relied upon the Supreme Court’s 1967 decision in Loving v. Virginia, striking down Virginia’s ban on interracial marriages.  He closed his opinion with these remarks about the woman involved in that case: “It has been over forty years since Mildred Loving was given the right to marry the person of her choice.  The hatred and fears have long since vanished and she and her husband lived full lives together; so it will be for the same-sex couples.  It is time to let that beacon of freedom shine brighter on all our brothers and sisters.  We will be stronger for it.”

Dale Carpenter looks at the national picture:

There are now more than 70 lawsuits involving same-sex marriage pending in courts around the country. A dozen federal district courts have issued opinions in favor of same-sex marriage since last summer’s Supreme Court decision striking down the Defense of Marriage Act in United States v. Windsor. Five federal appellate courts are now considering the issue.

A photo of the happy couple who got the first marriage license:

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Kids These Days!

Steven Pinker wants you to cut them some slack:

Every generation thinks that the younger generation is dissolute, lazy, ignorant, and illiterate. There is a paper trail of professors complaining about the declining quality of their students that goes back at least 100 years. … I know a lot more now than I did when I was a student, and thanks to the curse of knowledge, I may not realize that I have acquired most of it during the decades that have elapsed since I was a student. So it’s tempting to look at students and think, “What a bunch of inarticulate ignoramuses! It was better when I was at that age, a time when I and other teenagers spoke in fluent paragraphs, and we effortlessly held forth on the foundations of Western civilization.” Yeah, right.

Here is a famous experiment.

A three-year-old comes into the lab. You give him a box of M&Ms. He opens up the box and instead of finding candy he finds a tangle of ribbons. He is surprised, and now you say to him, “OK, now your friend Jason is going to come into the room. What will Jason think is in the box?” The child says, “ribbons,” even though Jason could have no way of knowing that. And, if you ask the child, “Before you opened the box, what did you think was in it?” They say, “ribbons.” That is, they backdate their own knowledge. Now we laugh at the three-year-old, but we do the same thing. We backdate our own knowledge and sophistication, so we always think that the kids today are more slovenly than we were at that age.

Update from a reader who disagrees with Pinker:

No, three year olds do not “backdate” their knowledge. They answer incorrectly because they have not developed what is known as “Theory of Mind” – they are unable to understand fully that others see the world through their own perspective. They do not yet understand that others do not know, necessarily, what they know. Therefore they assume everyone knows it is full of ribbons – they do, so why wouldn’t another kid? Same for understanding that their knowledge has changed (or perhaps even fully understanding what a question like “What did you think was in the box bvefore you opened it?” actually means.  He’s three. This question is complicated and asks him to fully understand what thought is, how it changes over time, what “before” means relative to now, etc. This same kid may easily think everything not right now is tomorrow or yesterday).

A clever and elegant-looking argument.  But it’s not really true. And cannot be applied to an adult’s memory of what he/she was like at 16.

Another reader:

Kids These Days have been sliding inexorably toward delinquency, indolence, and immodesty for at least 1000 years. From the autobiography of the Benedictine monk Guibert of Nogent (c. 1055-1124):

O God, Thou knowest how hard, how almost impossible it would be for women of the present time to keep such chastity as [my mother’s example]; whereas there was in those days such modesty, that hardly ever was the good name of a married woman smirched by ill report Ah! how wretchedly have modesty and honour in the state of maidenhood declined from those times to these, and both the reality and the show of a mother’s guardianship shrunk to naught! Therefore coarse mirth is all that may be noted in their manners and naught but jesting heard, with sly winks and ceaseless chatter. Wantonness shews in their gait, only silliness in their behaviour. So much does the extravagance of their dress depart from the old simplicity that in the enlargement of their sleeves, the straitness of their skirts, the distortion of their shoes of Cordovan leather with their curling toes, they seem to proclaim that everywhere shame is a castaway A lack of lovers to admire her is a woman’s crown of woe. On her crowds of thronging suitors rests her claim to nobility and courtly pride. There was of old time, I call God to witness, greater modesty in married men, who would have blushed to be seen in the company of such women, than there is now in married women; and men by such shameful conduct are emboldened in their amours abroad and driven to haunt the marketplace and the public street.

Another points to another old passage:

When I read threads like this (Pinker etc.) I’m always reminded of Baldassare Castiglione (1478-1529). His Book of the Courtier (Part II) pretty much nails it:

I have often considered not without wonder whence arises a fault, which, as it is universally found among old people, may be believed to be proper and natural to them. And this is, that they nearly all praise bygone times and censure the present, inveighing against our acts and ways and everything which they in their youth did not do; affirming too that every good custom and good manner of living, every virtue, in short every thing, is always going from bad to worse.

And verily it seems quite contrary to reason and worthy to be wondered at, that ripe age, which in other matters is wont to make men’s judgment more perfect with long experience, should in this matter so corrupt it that they do not perceive that if the world were always growing worse, and if fathers were generally better than children, we should long since have reached that last grade of badness beyond which it is impossible to grow worse.

The View From Your Window

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Denver, Colorado, 8.10 am. “Middle of May. 30 degrees. Sigh.” Similar scenes after the jump:

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Boulder, Colorado, 6.40 am

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Denver, Colorado, 10.48 am. “That’s the setup for America’s Ninja Warrior in Civic Center Park, along with May snow.”

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Frisco, Colorado, 8.24 am. “Happy spring from a loyal reader in Colorado!”

Aimless Aviators

A team of researchers has determined that noise from man-made electronics disrupts the internal compass of songbirds:

The team laboriously erected a grounded aluminium cage around the robins’ hut and connected it to an electrical supply. When the birds were exposed to background electromagnetic noise in their unscreened huts, they flew in random directions. When the Faraday cage was on, their compass started working again. “It was like flipping a switch,” says [researcher Henrik] Mouritsen.

It was an astonishing result, and one that Mouritsen knew he needed to check carefully. As he writes, “seemingly implausible effects require stronger proof’’. Many small studies have claimed that man-made electric and magnetic fields could affect animal biology and human health, and many people have anecdotally claimed that they’re highly sensitive to such fields. But whenever scientists investigate those claims through proper experiments—double-blind trials with a large sample size—the effects vanish. (Here’s a good PDF summary of the evidence.) …

This has nothing to do with wi-fi, mobile phones, or power lines. By deliberately adding electromagnetic fields inside the grounded huts, the team showed that they were sensitive to frequencies between 2 kilohertz and 5 megahertz. With that range, the culprits are likely to be either AM radio signals or fields produced by electronic equipment in the university, although it’s hard to narrow the source down any further.