Author: Andrew Sullivan

A reader says the call for a kinder, gentler atheism is long overdue:

Bill Maher, Richard Dawkins, and other New Atheists are like gay dudes in assless chaps dancing on a dildo float. They put their atheism in everybody’s face and make no apologies. While I understand why New Atheists do that (I sometimes metaphorically put them on when faced with the worst in religious lunacy), they aren’t changing minds with their tactics. It will be the mundane atheists who live across the street or work in accounting or coach your kids’ soccer team who will eventually make the religious realize that there is nothing amoral or sinister about people who don’t concern themselves with deities. It’s hard to fear somebody when you know they have to buy toilet paper and cornflakes just like everybody else.

Another sets a good example:

I know people who have been through grievous life events – the loss of a child, loss of a parent at a young age – and according to their belief system, they will see that person again some day. My grandmother lost a son to a drowning at a young age, and she would always say that when she got to heaven, she would at last understand why he had been taken.

Why would I want to aggressively go around telling people that none of that is likely to happen, that their loved one is just as dead as a squirrel on the road? That may be my belief, but I don’t know it to be a fact. Life is difficult enough – why take away a source of comfort to some? It’s not my goal to convert other people to my beliefs any more than it’s your goal to convert other people to being gay. All I would like is acceptance.

But another argues that society needs both pleasant and pissed-off atheists:

Religious leaders have slandered atheists for centuries as being evil incarnate, and we need quiet kind atheists to show that one can not only be good without God, but also the sweetest, most inoffensive person on the planet. But you need in-your-face New Atheists as well. You need these people to challenge the posting of the 10 Commandments in schools, courthouses, and town halls. You need these people to point out that U.S. law is based on English Common Law, which in turn is based on pagan Roman law. You need these people to expose people to the arguments against religion so it isn’t accepted fact that the supernatural is real or that Christianity was born in its current form straight from Jesus.

I’d also like to challenge the notion that nobody was converted to Atheism by the New Atheists. It was the works of Sam Harris and Richard Dawkins that provided the final push for me on my journey from a skeptical Christian to a loud, proud atheist. Now I suspect that your reader is right that their works will fail to convince a devout Christian. Heck, I’ve seen you, Andrew, acknowledge historical and scientific truths that directly contradict your beliefs, only to brush them aside to claim a “higher truth” that cannot be proven. The ultra-rationalist New Atheists will never win you or other devoted believers over. However, they can and do win over people who are already skeptical of their beliefs.

Previous Dish on the need for atheists to come out here, here and here.

Yesterday, Russian President Vladimir Putin claimed that Russian forces had withdrawn from the Ukrainian border and urged separatists in Donetsk and Luhansk to postpone a referendum on autonomy scheduled for Sunday (a call they rejected today). Marc Champion is cautiously optimistic that Putin is starting to see reason:

Here is what I hope his statement signifies: First, that Putin doesn’t want to invade Ukraine. It has always seemed unlikely that invasion was his goal, but with forces ready on the border, it could never be ruled out. (Indeed, although Putin said today that Russian troops had withdrawn from the border, NATO officials said they had not.) …

I hope, secondly, that having decided not to invade Ukraine, Putin also doesn’t want to trigger a civil war there. Putin will be well aware that a disputed status referendum can act as a trigger for conflict. The spark for the war in Bosnia, for example, was a 1992 referendum on independence from Yugoslavia that Bosnian Serbs were bound to lose, because they were less numerous than Bosnian Muslims and Croats.

But Ioffe doesn’t buy it:

Putin isn’t really hiding a very good reason for postponing the referendum.

He asked “representatives of southeast Ukraine and supporters of federalization to hold off the referendum scheduled for May 11, in order to give this dialogue the conditions it needs to have a chance.” (emphasis mine) Because eastern and southern Ukraine is not Crimea, and it is not at all clear that, were a referendum held in just four days, the results would come out in Russia’s favor. The unpopularity of the new government in Kiev here has not translated to favoring he idea of independence or joining up with Russia. Polls put the number at just 30 percent of people in the region supporting annexation. To get the right result, Russia would have to pull off a stupendous amount of fraud, thereby risking a massive backlash—and further violence—in these regions.

New numbers from Pew back her up:

The poll, from Pew Research’s Global Attitudes Project, shows that a vast majority — 77 percent — of those polled want the country to remain united, compared to only 14 percent who want to allow regions of the country to secede. The split between attitudes in the east of the country, where most of the Russian-speaking population resides and has faced unrest from pro-Russian separatists for the last two months, and the Kyiv-backing west are readily apparent in the breakdown of the question: 93 percent of western Ukrainians want to keep the country together, compared to 70 percent in the east. That number dips lower to 58 percent when Russian speakers are split out, but still constitutes a majority.

Daniel Berman suspects Putin is actually trying to call attention to the referendum:

[D]espite having specifically scheduled their own referendum for May 11th, two weeks before national elections, neither Western governments, nor the media have taken the bait. The obsession has remained on Ukraine’s own elections on the 25th; accusations against Putin have focused on his efforts to disrupt those elections. No one seems to have expected much from this Sunday’s vote, or feared much from its aftermath. The idea that a 99% or so vote for union with Russia would immediately be followed by annexation has not seriously been raised. In such a circumstance, Russians troops following up such a vote with an occupation of the Oblast would be seen as an invasion, no different than a move on Kiev.

Clearly therefore the referendum gambit was not working for Putin, and this explains his request for a delay. At best, not only does Putin come across as a reasonable figure working towards a settlement; rescheduling the referendum will provide another opportunity, along with additional time to build up expectations about its significance. In the worst case, if he fails to achieve the delay, he has still refocused international attention on it, increasing its importance, and hopefully its significance.

Bershidsky doubts the separatists will be able to pull off a credible vote anyway:

The referendum, and a similar one planned in the neighboring region of Lugansk, was a ridiculous idea from the start. The rebels do not have the skills, the numbers or the control necessary to organize a real vote. All they have managed to do is to print some highly ornamented ballots. With the Ukrainian military, police and national guard conducting a bumbling “anti-terrorist operation” in the rebellious regions, not even the semblance of peaceful balloting is feasible. Russia recognized the farcical secession referendum in Crimea in April, because a high degree of local support was there for all to see. In Donetsk and Lugansk, the referendum is such a bad idea that even Russia won’t touch it with a barge pole. …

Putin’s move is not being offered as a trade for concessions. His gambit is, more likely, meant to open an important line of questioning about what exactly the West needs from him if Russia is to avoid serious economic sanctions.

Keating downplays the other part of Putin’s statement, about moving the Russian troops away from the border:

[G]iven that the existence of these troops, where exactly they’re located, and what they’re doing have been matters of dispute throughout this crisis, Putin’s latest assurance may not mean very much. It would also seem to contradict earlier statements suggesting that the military units in the area had already returned to base or hadn’t been there in the first place, though all of these statements have been somewhat ambiguously worded.

I’m not sure how much the location and composition of these troops will really matter. Russian may not need to actually use them—at least in the short term—given that pro-Russian separatists likely assisted by Russian special operations forces seem to be doing a perfectly fine job resisting Ukrainian government efforts to regain control over the country’s southeast.

Several more readers share their stories:

I have a “Dish Double” for you! First, thanks for your recent series on Truvada. Somehow I hadn’t been aware of the Truvada PrEP. I’m a 47-year-old gay man who is HIV negative but I had recently found myself engaging in riskier behavior. After all these years, condom-fatigue had set in and with AIDS becoming a manageable disease, the fear that once kept me from indulging in barrier-free sex has passed.

Don’t get me wrong; I was and am not seeking to become positive. I just was finding myself in a position where the idea of using condoms forever was no longer an option for me. In other words, I’m a perfect candidate for a Truvada PrEP regimen.

Which brings me to the view from my Obamacare.

I’m one of the people who was not able to keep my old insurance policy and is now paying more than double each month for my policy. I should mention a few things about my old policy. When I first purchased it back in 2002, I was 35 and had never had any major health issues, so it seemed like a great policy. The premiums were low. Sure, it had a $3500 deductible and no prescription coverage, but so what. I was young and healthy.

Until I wasn’t.

Just before I turned 40, I experienced some medical issues that resulted in hospitalization and ongoing care. Everything is fine now, but for about six months I was seeing doctors once a week. While my insurance did cover most of it, I still faced some large bills due to the deductible and prescription costs. The experience revealed the severe limitations of the policy. It was basically a catastrophic coverage plan. Of course now that I was the proud new owner of a “pre-existing condition”, it was the plan I was stuck with up until this year.

The view from my Obamacare is that my new policy has a premium that is a bit more than twice what my old insurance cost. My new policy also has prescription coverage and a very low deductible. I added things up and with my new policy, I am expecting to save thousands of dollars each year. My Obamacare may cost me more in premiums but it will offer significant savings elsewhere.

Which brings me to my “Dish Double”. After your articles about Truvada, I made an appointment with my doctor to see about starting a PrEP regimen. My doctor was immediately open to it. I had the required blood tests and my doctor called in the prescription. When I went to pick it up, I was expecting the worst. I wasn’t sure if my new Obamacre would cover it but If I had to pay the full $1,700 monthly cost I would. It was just too important to me. When I got to the counter, I discovered that my monthly cost for Truvada is …

$15

Right now the view from my Obamacare is fantastic, and as of last week I’m on the pill.

Another is paying even less:

I’m just writing to say that thanks to the recent thread on the Dish, I just took my first dose of Truvada for PrEP. There are a lot of reasons I’d been skeptical of it in the past, and my HIV risk these days is not nearly what it was when I was, say, 23. But I’m still single and gay and sexually active. I use condoms, but on those occasions where it doesn’t happen for whatever reason, I can quit torturing myself for the next two weeks worrying. I do not expect it to change my behavior (although time will tell), but it will liberate me from these cycles of excruciating worry.

So thank you. Bonus: It is costing me precisely $0.

Update from a reader:

Thank you for your post on gay men’s health. I feel compelled to say that I definitely relate to the 47-year-old man who wrote to you. As a 47-year-old man myself, I am also considering going on Truvada. I think we need to have an adult conversation in the gay community about widespread use of this drug as a HIV-prevention strategy, rather than just relying on someone just using the same, tired 30-year-old safer sex campaign, and wagging his finger at younger gay men saying “use a condom every time”. Even if I go on Truvada, I still plan to use condoms for there are other STIs out there that I don’t want any more than HIV.

That said, “condom fatigue” is a REAL issue in HIV prevention campaigns in the gay community. When many of us were working on safe sex campaigns in the 1980s, most of us never imagined we’d STILL be telling people to simply “use a condom” three decades later. I know gay men of my age who had been practicing “safer sex” for twenty to thirty years and eventually just got sloppy with safer sex, a handful of whom then seroconverted even after two straight decades of having safe sex. Truvada might have been of help to them.

Also, with crystal meth use being a tragic problem in the gay community, if Truvada can help spread the stop of HIV in these cases, where the crystal overwhelms any safe sex message, and most people I meet nowadays who have seroconverted admitted to drug use as a contributing factor, how can we not spread this drug as widely as possible?

For those who say that Truvada will only encourage unsafe sex, I laugh at them as much as those who preach abstinence-only birth control; both are people who have no connection with real life or the real world.

Another dissents:

So we’ve heard over and over again in the press coverage concerning Truvada PreP that it doesn’t lead to riskier behavior. This evidence comes from a single study (though it was conducted on a variety of gay male populations around the world). Your two emailers in the Obamacare post, and my own experience so far in the gay community, give the lie to this claim (at least for gay men in the US). I’m not saying I disagree with PreP – but it is simply dangerous to be anything less than honest about what PreP means to many gay men like your reader with “condom fatigue” who will now engage in riskier behavior because of the protection of Truvada. There is danger down this road …

All of your Views From Your Obamacare are here.

(Photo by Yoon S. Byun/The Boston Globe via Getty Images)

Nate Cohn claims that, if “the country’s growing diversity dooms the modern Republican Party, then Florida will be the first exhibition of the party’s demographic death spiral”:

The problem for Republicans is that Mr. Obama was a terrible fit for the state’s eclectic mix of white voters. The Florida Panhandle is full of the culturally Southern white voters who rejected Mr. Obama, as they did across Dixie. Mr. Obama also struggled with older whites over age 65, who represent 30 percent of the state’s white voters, and among Jewish voters, who represent about 15 percent of self-identified white Democrats in Florida. Mr. Obama’s strengths — like his appeal to young, socially progressive voters in well-educated metropolitan areas — lack pull in Florida.

All of this will be reversed if the Democrats nominate Hillary Rodham Clinton, who is a good fit for the state’s odd combination of Southerners, New York expats and older white voters. Mrs. Clinton doesn’t even need to outperform Mr. Obama among Florida’s white voters anyway, as she’ll benefit from four more years of demographic change.

Ben Highton clarifies the GOP’s 2016 disadvantage:

While swing state trends look good for the Democrats, the same is not apparent in the rest of country.  In the remaining states, there is more movement toward the Republicans than the Democrats.  In the 23 safely Republican states, continued movement toward the Republicans is occurring at a rate about 25 percent faster than the average movement toward the Democrats in the 14 safely Democratic seats.  In fact in 10 of the 12 states that are changing fastest, the movement is toward the Republicans, not the Democrats.  However, these trends have virtually no influence on the chances of victory in a presidential election because with a winner-take-all system like the Electoral College, additional votes in a state that is already safe for one party are “wasted.”

His model finds that “that to have a 50 percent chance of winning the Electoral College the Republicans would have to win the popular vote by a margin of between one and two percentage points.” Jonathan Bernstein ponders the Democrats’ apparent advantage in the Electoral College:

I’m increasingly convinced this is something real, and it’s a pretty big deal. As Ben says, that large a bias would almost certainly have flipped the 2000 election to the Democrats; other elections close enough to have been affected by a bias this large would include 1976, 1968, and 1960 (if the losing party had been helped by an Electoral College bias of this size).

If these results hold up through 2016, expect the parties to begin flipping their positions on the Electoral College, perhaps very rapidly.

https://twitter.com/HalaJaber/statuses/464052929620869120

Syrian rebels have ceded the central city of Homs to the regime:

Rebels are attempting to portray the deal less as a military defeat and more as a strategic compromise. Anti-regime activists say that besieged residents have been so weakened by the siege, which has caused chronic shortages of food there. “Revolutionaries inside have nothing at all. You would think it’s impossible for them to survive, but they did for two years,” says Samer al-Homsi, a 27-year-old activist in Homs who goes by a pseudonym to protect his identity. “At this point, they are facing sure death so it’s best for them to leave and maybe resume the fight later. For them it does feel like a victory that they’ve managed to survive.”

In practical terms, the deal appears to offer the best possible outcome for the rebels considering their position, says Syria analyst Noah Bonsey of the International Crisis Group. “Given that rebels lacked the means to gain ground within the city or to secure their exit militarily, this safe passage holds clear value.” Still, says al-Homsi, the capitulation will be a permanent “lump lodged in the rebels’ throats. Homs was known as the capital of the revolution.”

The regime is being unusually magnanimous:

As part of the truce, rebels were allowed to leave the besieged city peacefully under the supervision of regime forces and UN delegates; they were also permitted to keep their personal weapons. The rebels promised to open a safe passage to allow for food and medical aid to reach the government-controlled enclaves of Nubul and Zahraa outside the northern city of Aleppo, another big battleground. For months, rebels had blocked access to these two cities.

To uphold its end of the deal, the government promised to grant amnesty to 50 people who defected from the regime to the rebel forces in Homs. The government also promised not to arrest the rebels once they reached regime checkpoints; earlier this year, a more limited evacuation led to the detainment of several rebels at checkpoints.

Juan Cole explains the strategic significance of the city:

The rebel strategy last year this time was to take Homs (they held part of the city) and its hinterland, towns like al-Qusayr. The rebels, mainly Sunni Arabs and increasingly leaning toward extremist groups, hoped to use their dominance of Homs to cut Damascus off from both Latakia and from the Lebanese ports. At the same time, they intended to take the airports, including small military ones, so as to prevent resupply by air from Russia and Iran. Damascus would be under siege and gradually would weaken and ultimately surrender.

The rebel plan was defeated by several regime responses.

A reality check:

According to classified briefings on legislation that would lower visa restrictions on Israeli citizens, Jerusalem’s efforts to steal U.S. secrets under the cover of trade missions and joint defense technology contracts have “crossed red lines.” Israel’s espionage activities in America are unrivaled and unseemly, counterspies have told members of the House Judiciary and Foreign Affairs committees, going far beyond activities by other close allies, such as Germany, France, the U.K. and Japan. A congressional staffer familiar with a briefing last January called the testimony “very sobering … alarming … even terrifying.” Another staffer called it “damaging.”

The Israelis have responded forcefully to this – by denying that they spy at all and – surprise! – by accusing the writer, Jeff Stein, of being an anti-Semite. Stein responded today with more reporting, including this gem from a source at a congressional briefing on Israeli spying in 2013:

“I was in this briefing — there were several,” … a former congressional aide told Newsweek. “The one I was in had senior staffers from foreign affairs, the full committee, the subcommittee … from judiciary, Republicans and Democrats, senior leadership staff. I don’t think there was anyone in there who didn’t work for a member that wasn’t ardently and publicly pro-Israel,” he said. “And afterwards, we were saying, ‘No way. You’ve got to be fucking kidding.’” The evidence of Israeli spying was overwhelming, he said. Visa waivers was off the table. “The voices in the room,” the aide recalled, were, “‘There’s just no way that this is possible.’”

Oh yes there is.