Author: Andrew Sullivan

Only A Fraction Of College Men Are Rapists

Marcotte stresses that the high rates of sexual assault on college campuses don’t mean there are as many assailants as you might assume:

Let’s be clear: No one is saying that the high rates of victimization among college women mean that all men are rapists. That 1 in 5 college women have been assaulted doesn’t mean that 1 in 5 men are assailants. Far from it.

A study published in 2002 by David Lisak and Paul Miller, for which they interviewed college men about their sexual histories, found that only about 6 percent of the men surveyed had attempted or successfully raped someone. While some of them only tried once, most of the rapists were repeat offenders, with each committing an average of 5.8 rapes apiece. The 6 percent of men who were rapists were generally violent men, as well. “The 120 rapists were responsible for 1,225 separate acts of interpersonal violence, including rape, battery, and child physical and sexual abuse,” the researchers write. A single rapist can leave a wake of victims, racking up the numbers rapidly, as the victim surveys are clearly showing.

Update from a reader:

Can I possibly be the only one just flabbergasted by the line in this post that “only about 6 percent of the men surveyed had attempted or successfully raped someone”? The idea that 6 guys out of a group of 100 being rapists is a small number shocks the hell out of me. I am a straight white male with a college fraternity background I am not particularly proud of, but even with that life experience, had you asked me to guess the percentage of guys who had actually raped or attempted to rape a woman, I would have suggested some tiny fraction less than 1%. I mean, who the hell RAPES someone? I accept the positive aspect of the larger point – that the number of rapists is smaller than the number of victims – but that seems obvious to me, and way less shocking (and frankly depressing) than the “good” news that “only” 6/100 guys is a rapist.

Recent Dish on campus rape here and here.

Testosterone Ad Absurdum

It still amuses me to read blank-slate lefties insisting that gender difference is a function of culture alone. To me, it’s the same kind of scientific know-nothingism that you find on the right with respect to evolution. Note I’m not saying that culture has nothing to do with it – that would be know-nothingness of a reverse kind. But the power of testosterone as a hormone should never be under-estimated.

And the funny thing is: testosterone exists across the entire animal kingdom and correlates very highly with what we think of as culturally masculine attributes: physical strength, risk-taking, competitiveness, ego and the constant desire to fuck. So when I came across this fascinating article on the marsupial, antechinus, I had to chuckle. During the mating season, the males’ testosterone levels go through the roof. The result is sexual mayhem:

Males relentlessly bound from partner to partner, as massive hormone releases in their bodies cause their immune systems to crash and their fur to fall out. They bleed internally. Some males even go blind, yet still stumble around the leaf litter hoping for one last tryst. In a few short weeks, every single male lies dead, leaving the females to raise their offspring …

While [testosterone] mobilizes all the sugars in the antechinus’ body so it doesn’t need to feed for the three-week orgy, it also glitches the mechanism responsible for regulating the production of cortisol, a stress hormone that in small amounts results in bursts of energy and higher pain tolerances. With runaway levels of cortisol, though, the males’ bodies literally begin to fall apart. Bone density plummets and blood-sugar levels go nuts. Their immune systems essentially degrade to worthlessness, as open sores form and never heal.

That’s a dystopian vision of untrammeled maleness if ever there was one. It reveals what we cannot deny about our nature almost as baldly as it wants us to keep it under control.

Escalation In Ukraine

The Ukrainian military has launched its first offensive against pro-Russian separatists, conducting operations around the eastern city of Slavyansk:

The Ukrainian Defence Ministry said two Mi-24 attack helicopters had been shot down by shoulder-launched anti-aircraft missiles while on patrol overnight around Slaviansk. Two airmen were killed and others wounded. Other Ukrainian officials and the separatist leader in Slaviansk said earlier that one airman was taken prisoner. A third helicopter, an Mi-8 transport aircraft, was also hit and a serviceman wounded, the Defence Ministry said. The SBU security service said this helicopter was carrying medics. …

The SBU said the deadly use by the separatists of shoulder-launched anti-aircraft missiles was evidence that “trained, highly qualified foreign military specialists” were operating in the area “and not local civilians, as the Russian government says, armed only with guns taken from hunting stores”. Ukrainian officials said their troops overran rebel checkpoints and Slaviansk was now “tightly encircled”.

Kevin Rothrock thinks through what might happen next:

Irregular militia marching on Slaviansk and other southeastern cities in Ukraine could present Kiev with a tricky legal situation. Though Moscow exercises de facto control over Crimea, the national government refuses to recognize Russia’s annexation, complicating Kiev’s classification of any combatants marching into the Ukrainian mainland from Crimea, which formally remains a part of Ukraine. Would these soldiers be Russian troops? Or are they more Ukrainian “terrorists,” as Kiev now identifies combatants throughout the southeast?

In other words, the Kremlin might project its power into Ukraine’s mainland by encouraging, and perhaps arming, Crimean militia, who in turn would advance on Slaviansk. In theory, Moscow might succeed, if only semantically, in “laundering” an armed intervention in this way.

Meanwhile, as the following video, photos, and tweets illustrate, clashes have erupted in the city of Odessa, with at least seven 38 people reported dead and many more injured:

https://twitter.com/MaximEristavi/status/462243274808627201

https://twitter.com/PaulSonne/status/462282086729383937

The Ground Game Only Goes So Far

Voter Turnout

Nate Cohn drives that point home:

Much of the optimism on Democratic turnout stems from Mr. Obama’s successful turnout operation in 2012, or from experiments showing large increases in turnout when voters receive targeted mailers or contacts. But political scientists and campaign operatives found that even Mr. Obama’s impressive ground operation was worth less than one point in his presidential elections. And those experiments are usually conducted in extremely low turnout elections, like a local mayoral race, in which there are many more marginal voters. Finding people who are potential voters but not existing voters in a national election is harder.

Even Democratic operatives know the limits of the ground game. In a New Republic cover article that otherwise suggested that a strong turnout operation could solve Democratic problems, Guy Cecil, executive director of the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee, conceded that field operations would “only solve our problem if the election is a close one.”

Charlie Cook expects Democrats to have a rough election:

[A]n array of new polling from a variety of sources suggests that Democrats have no reason to be encouraged at this point. Things still look pretty awful for the party. Especially meaningful to consider is that—no matter how bad the national poll numbers appear for Democrats—eight of their nine most vulnerable Senate seats this year are in states that Mitt Romney carried in 2012. Further, nine of the most competitive 11 Senate seats in both parties are in Romney states; the numbers in these states will likely be considerably worse than the national numbers.

Liberals vs Affordable Housing

Noting that the slumlord Donald Sterling “has profited enormously from the tendency of liberal cities in California to limit housing permits,” Reihan asks why the left sees a higher minimum wage as more important than expanding the housing supply:

Even if you believe that a higher wage floor will have absolutely no impact on employment levels or on net job growth, it seems sensible to first focus on limits on housing supply. If you believe that a higher wage floor might lead to the exclusion of some non-trivial number of less-skilled workers from the formal labor market, the case for focusing on limits on housing supply is even stronger, as it’s not at all clear that relaxing these limits will hurt anyone at all … Some homeowners might have to sacrifice spectacular views as they are surrounded by new housing developments. Yet this hardly seems like a compelling reason to force low-income households to pay much higher rents to be within easy commuting distance of employment opportunities. It turns out that for affluent liberal voters living in picturesque cities, it is cheap to back minimum wage hikes that might reduce employment levels for the less-skilled or raise prices for the kind of people who frequent quick-service restaurants and other establishments that employ low-wage workers while it is very dear to back policies that will increase housing supply.

Douthat sees this issue as a rare opportunity for some left-right convergence:

Reasonable people can disagree, but on the merits, if you care about working class opportunity and mobility, there is at least some public policy justification for policies (like a minimum wage set at $7.25 rather than $10.10) that try to maximize low-wage hiring even if it means some of those workers will rely on safety-net programs. Where the policies that protect and enrich the petits rentiers class are concerned, however – and seriously enrich literal rent-collectors like Donald Sterling – no such opportunity-enhancing justification exists. So when the urban left organizes around an agenda that targets low-wage employers and leaves the petits rentiers alone, it’s both embracing policies whose costs might exceed their benefits and leaving more deserving targets untouched.

This is why the anti-cronyist, anti-rentier, libertarian-populist idea that many conservatives have raised of late, both in response to all the Piketty excitement and as a reformist case in its own right, deserves more than just a dismissive sneer from egalitarian liberals.

Book Club: Can Christianity Survive Modernity? Ctd

Readers take stock of the conversation:

Your original question, “Can Christianity survive modernity?” has two dimensions to it, only one of which is addressed in Ehrman’s book. That’s the question of how modern scholarship sees the scriptural and historical record of Jesus and his age. But another, how-jesus-became-godoverlapping issue is also brought to bear by modernity. The Christian tradition about who Jesus was, and how his Divinity can be defined, is bounded by a very particular set of notions about God that in an earlier era were either forcibly isolated from the rest of the world’s religious cultures, or only passively separated by the limits of those times.

But in the modern age, when vast amounts of historical knowledge of not just Christianity, but the rest of the world is readily available, we now know what multiple branches of Hinduism thinks, what the various sects of Buddhism understand, what Bahai believes, what Taosim grasps about the nature of the cosmos, what shamanism discovers, even what secular mystical and hallucinogenic experience has to offer, and and so on. The modern mind isn’t just confronted with scholarly knowledge of Christianity’s real past; it’s also confronted by a whole range of experiential and conceptual knowledge about God, Divinity, and ultimate reality, including of course modern science itself. And the two can’t be separated anymore. That’s the dilemma of Christianity’s confrontation with modernism in a nutshell.

Another:

In arguing that Ehrman’s book does not “effectively debunk Christianity’s core claims in modernity,” I am struck by how elastic and indefinite the responses of you and your readers of faith are as to the notions of truth and Christian doctrine generally.   That is not meant as criticism, just an observation. One reader valued “the messiness and contradictions in the gospel accounts” as a virtue itself.  Another reader said the “literal truth or untruth [of the story of Christ] is of little to no interest,” and the practicing Catholic reader believes that the foundational doctrines of his church are “of course” not accurate because the truth of Jesus’s life and message can’t be known.  An earlier reader explicitly bookclub-beagle-tradvised you “to consider steering clear of words like ‘truth.'”

Is it then the better question to ask “whether postmodernism can save Christianity?”  And does the new historical research require a postmodern religious approach?  If so, what are the implications of that? It could strengthen and deepen Christianity’s core message and appeal.  But maybe not.  It seems certain to be consequential though.  Will this approach favor liberal Protestant faiths but pose a greater challenge to the more institutional Catholic Church?  If Christian doctrinal truths are admittedly unknowable and subjective to both Gospel writers and readers, does that mean that choosing between different Christian denominations is ultimately only a matter of personal comfort and/or inertia?  Or might this approach – as fundamentalists would argue – logically and inevitably weaken Christianity’s claim against competing faiths?

Another:

I’m an engineer and a recent convert to Catholicism (although I was always careful to say that I followed Dorothy Day, not Paul Ryan).  I know that my conversion process was not rational.  My overwhelming experience of something I can only call Grace has shattered every conviction I had about who I was, who/what God was, and my place in this universe.

I get impatient with those, on both sides, who try to use evidence to prove or disprove religious concepts. A scientist used modern tissue analysis as proof that a Eucharistic Miracle happened.  I felt that same impatience reading Ehrman’s book. None of these investigations have any relevance in comparison to my lived experience of Christ.

It’s not that I don’t think such investigations have value. I just see them as belonging to a realm of inquiry that is disconnected from my relationship with God.  If the Eucharistic Miracle turns out to be pig blood or the disciples had hallucinations of Jesus brought on by grief, it just doesn’t change anything about what happens when I pray.  It seems to me that a faith resting on such proofs is disconnected from the Source of faith.  For myself, I am better off learning how to tap into that Source more deeply and regularly.

I recently went on a pilgrimage to Assisi, the home of St. Francis and St. Claire.  They were declared saints soon after their deaths. Many artifacts of their lives were preserved within the lifetimes of those who knew them, and the town itself has been a place of pilgrimage ever since.  Pilgrims can be assured that the artifacts are real. When you walk the streets of Assisi, you are walking in the paths of the millions of pilgrims who came there to worship, contemplate and pray.  Even my agnostic husband felt the presence of so many souls seeking peace.

On the same trip, we saw a piece of wood that St. Helena claimed to be part of the table from the Last Supper, now preserved in the papal basilica of St. John Lateran.  She found it in the early 300s.  Who knows if it’s real?  For 1700 years, the faithful have venerated it as a connection back to the last peaceful moments Jesus had with his community of disciples, moments we recall every time we celebrate the Eucharist.

That veneration makes it holy.  The pilgrims make Assisi holy.  We make Christ holy. First the disciples and then the 2,000-year-old Christian community of the faithful experienced Jesus as someone extraordinary.  Jesus brought a powerful message that has come down through the ages and drawn millions of souls towards a stronger connection with the Source of faith, and more just, loving and care-taking relationships with each other.  How could the manifestation of such a person not be celebrated as miraculous?

Another:

You wrote, “I cannot rationally reconcile the divine and the human as single concept. But my faith, my personal experience of Jesus, forces me to accept it.”

And in so doing you are essentially recapitulating the experience of the disciples and the church. They tried every other explanation for what they had seen and heard, and none of them captured the length and breadth and depth and height of this man’s life.  So they were forced to come up with a formulation that made no sense, because it was the only thing that MADE sense.  Like the scientists who have to hold the absurd formulation that light is BOTH a particle and a ray, because only under those circumstances can they actually use their mathematics to make the equations correspond with the observed facts.

Credo quia absurdum. 

A Poem For Friday

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“Metamorphosis” by Nina Cassian:

How long is it since
deer antlers grew on my forehead
and, on my behind, a salamander’s tail?

Today,
I am neutered,
or become a domestic fowl.
I submit to conventions,
I eat regularly—
and I sleep—
my beak in my feathers.

(From Continuum: Poems © 2008 by Nina Cassian. Used by permission of W.W.Norton & Company. Photo by Crista Rowe)

Will Reefer Rock The Vote?

Alexandra Gutierrez argues that ballot initiatives, including one on marijuana legalization, could hand Democrats an Alaskan Senate seat:

Three initiatives that were supposed to appear in the August primary have been bumped to the general election. So now, on top of deciding whether they want reelect a Democrat in a year where Republicans could seize control of Congress, Alaskans will be voting on initiatives to increase the minimum wage, to allow the sale of marijuana, and to make it harder to build an unpopular open-pit mine near the world’s largest salmon run.

Any one of those initiatives could be seen as a gift to Democrats. Together, they could boost turnout by up to 5 percent, according to political scientist Caroline Tolbert.

But Harry Enten doubts the marijuana initiative will play a big role:

[A] closer look at the evidence suggests Begich might not stand to benefit. Overall, past marijuana ballot measures haven’t meant that more young people come out to vote. This year’s senate race in Alaska would likely have to be very close for the marijuana ballot measure to make a difference.

Lastly, Bernstein points out that, if “there’s one thing certain about public policy issues, public opinion and vote choice, it’s that we don’t know why we vote the way we do”:

Issues may matter on the margins, and it’s possible that an issue will push marginal voters to show up at the polls (though we should be careful, it may be that whatever issue one’s party focuses on will do the trick). But the relationship isn’t straightforward. And just asking people about it won’t help us understand.

Great* News On Jobs

jobslsotinpostwwiirecession

The headline number on this morning’s jobs report – 288,000 jobs added in April – looks pretty good on its face:

The hiring spree surpassed most analysts’ expectations and is the strongest showing in more than two years. Businesses added workers across a broad array of sectors, including business services, retail and construction. The unemployment rate plunged to 6.3 percent — the lowest level since 2008 — though part of that was due to workers leaving the labor force.

The upbeat report provided a convincing counterpoint to data released earlier this week that revealed economic growth was virtually flat during the first quarter. Many analysts attributed that weak reading to the unusually cold winter and argued that a spring thaw is already underway. The Labor Department also increased its estimates of hiring during the previous two months by 36,000 net jobs. Wall Street opened higher on the news.

The chart above, via Joe Weisenthal, shows that we have almost made up the job losses from the recession. But as Neil Irwin points out, there’s a huge downside:

The number of people in the labor force fell by a whopping 806,000, wiping out the February and March gains and a bit of January as well.

The labor force participation rate fell by 0.4 percentage points to 62.8 percent, returning to its December level. And the number of people reporting they were unemployed fell by 733,000, which sounds good on its surface, but paired with the similar-sized decline in the labor force points to job seekers giving up looking rather than finding new employment.

It would be irresponsible to draw any definitive conclusions from a single month’s data, but this isn’t the only area in which this report has some soft underbelly. Both hours worked and wages were unchanged. If the economy is to ever expand more robustly, it will require workers to make more money, giving them the income to buy more goods, services and houses; in April at least, there was no progress on wages.

David Leonhardt adds that the business and household surveys are extremely divergent:

The monthly survey of businesses showed that the economy added 288,000 jobs last month — and 238,000 on average over the last three months, the best such pace in more than two years. The monthly survey of households showed that the economy actually lost 73,000 jobs; the only reason the unemployment rate fell is because people dropped out of the labor force, no longer looking for work and thus not counted as officially unemployed.

It’s tempting to try to combine the two surveys into one neat package and claim that the economy added jobs, albeit not enough to bring people back into the labor force. But that’s not right. If you believe the household survey, the economy lost jobs. If you believe the business survey — which is much larger than the household survey — job growth was quite strong. They cannot both be right.

Drum advises against freaking out about the declining labor force participation rate:

blog_civilian_labor_force_participation[T]here are two things to keep in mind: (a) the participation rate has been shrinking steadily for a long time, and (b) it’s a pretty volatile number from month to month. The chart below shows both things. The participation rate has been steadily shrinking since 2000, and it’s been shrinking even faster ever since the end of the Great Recession. And the big drop in April? As you can see from the tail end of the chart, the participation rate hasn’t actually changed since October. It’s just been bouncing up and down.

Bottom line: Don’t take the April numbers too seriously. The long-term trends are important, but there’s so much noise in the month-to-month numbers that you can’t draw too many conclusions from them.

What’s to explain the decline? Patrick Brennan thinks it could be Obamacare:

If the early-February CBO report that predicted that in a few years, 2.5 million fewer Americans will be working than otherwise would because of the Affordable Care Act is right, that’s going to start showing up in a big way this year. In one sense, this is a good thing: Many people have access to affordable health insurance outside of holding a job for the first time. But when we’re worried about a secular decline in labor-force participation, this is a worrying trend.

Another explanation: We could be seeing the delayed effect of the expiration of unemployment benefits for those out of work for (about) 27 weeks or more. You might expect that to be the argument laid out by supporters of extending those benefits, though I haven’t seen much of it.

Oh Peggy

She is now comparing Pope John Paul II to Barack Obama in terms of leadership. Guess who wins! For some reason, she fails to acknowledge that under John Paul II, thousands of children were raped by members of the organization John Paul II ran, and the machinery he was in charge of not only failed to stop this, but actively perpetuated it and covered it up. Nowhere in her column does this come up – it’s yet another reality (like American torture) she wants to walk swiftly past (“Some of life has to be mysterious”). Noonan goes on to say:

Great leaders are clear, honest, suffer for their stands and are brave. They conduct a constant dialogue.

Whatever else one can say about the pontificate of John Paul II, the idea that it was about a constant dialogue is absurd. Under John Paul II and his orthodoxy-enforcer, Joseph Ratzinger, the scope for any dialogue within the church was essentially ended. Whole areas of theological debate were ruled impermissible; discussions about faith and morals were also discouraged and any hints of heterodoxy, i.e. thinking, were monitored and punished. John Paul II’s papacy was capable of detecting the most trivial form of theological dissent and punishing it relentlessly, while it found itself miraculously blind when it came to the endless rapes and abuse of children and adolescents that we know now were endemic.

This wasn’t leadership; it was the abdication of basic moral responsibility for the church John Paul II ran. And these were not only crimes of commission but also of omission. A monstrous figure like Marciel Macial was lionized by John Paul II even as he sold drugs, was a bigamist,  abused countless young men, and even raped his own son. Cardinal Bernard Law was rewarded for his own disgusting cover-up of child-rapists with a sinecure in Rome.

Of course, it’s sometimes hard to pin down what the fuck Noonan is saying because her favorite word is “seems.” Never “is” – but “seems.” The world is always described through her own fuzzy, soft-focus lens, where no objective truth can really penetrate. And so you stumble upon the only actual substantive claim she makes in the column:

How wonderful it would be to see an American president appreciate all the possibilities of becoming a great energy-producing nation—all the new technologies and jobs, all the rebound they’d bring. To have a leader who feels and conveys a palpable joy in the transformative nature of this new world.

Here’s what Obama recently said about “becoming a great energy-producing nation—all the new technologies and jobs, all the rebound they’d bring.” It’s from the State of The Union this year:

One of the biggest factors in bringing more jobs back is our commitment to American energy. The all-of-the-above energy strategy I announced a few years ago is working, and today, America is closer to energy independence than we’ve been in decades.

One of the reasons why is natural gas – if extracted safely, it’s the bridge fuel that can power our economy with less of the carbon pollution that causes climate change. Businesses plan to invest almost $100 billion in new factories that use natural gas. I’ll cut red tape to help states get those factories built, and this Congress can help by putting people to work building fueling stations that shift more cars and trucks from foreign oil to American natural gas. My administration will keep working with the industry to sustain production and job growth while strengthening protection of our air, our water, and our communities.

Here is the SOTU from 2013:

Today, no area holds more promise than our investments in American energy. After years of talking about it, we’re finally poised to control our own energy future. We produce more oil at home than we have in 15 years. We have doubled the distance our cars will go on a gallon of gas, and the amount of renewable energy we generate from sources like wind and solar — with tens of thousands of good American jobs to show for it. We produce more natural gas than ever before — and nearly everyone’s energy bill is lower because of it.

Open your eyes, Peggy. There is world outside your 1980s nostalgia-fest. And it’s as different from your reality as “seems” is from “is”.