Author: Andrew Sullivan

Frum and I debate the question:

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Reihan opposes full commercial legalization because he fears it will harm the poor and black:

To say that we ought to legalize marijuana because marijuana doesn’t hurt anyone is to discount the fact that legalization will cause a collapse in the price of marijuana and that this price collapse will lead to an increase in consumption that will have unpredictable, and uneven, consequences. Right now, the uneven consequences of marijuana criminalization are particularly insidious. Though incarceration for marijuana consumption is rare, the enforcement of marijuana laws harms poor people far more than rich people, and black people more than non-black people. It seems likely, however, that a post-legalization world would also harm poor people more than rich people, and black people more than non-black people, albeit via different channels. In both cases, it is people raised in chaotic households, people who suffer from poor impulse control, and people who live in violent, high-poverty neighborhoods who will suffer the most. That is why the way we regulate marijuana should be informed by an effort to protect these populations. Full commercial legalization is not the best way to do that. And if you find this notion paternalistic, well, you’re on to something. The reason I oppose full commercial legalization is that I have enormous faith in the ability of entrepreneurs to stimulate demand, and I think it is absolutely right and appropriate for governments, ideally local and state governments, to be able to apply the brakes.

I don’t think it’s crazy to think that legalization will increase marijuana use. I think it’s highly likely – and that it’s something we need to think creatively about. But the data from nearly-legal California these past few years does not suggest the worst scenario Reihan worries about. He concedes that the cost of Prohibition is felt most acutely by the very populations he worries about. He favors rather small-scale Uruguay-style mom-and-pop and personal pot growing rather than commercialization. I’m afraid that rather lovely Jeffersonian idea won’t fly in modern capitalist America.

The possibility that there will be substitution of pot for booze is a real one – and that mix would be a terrific thing for poor families and kids. But that too is not really knowable in advance. My view is that the best response to these kinds of conundrums is federalism. We can watch Colorado and Washington closely; we can assess their responses to contingent and unexpected consequences (of which there will be some). We can see how this works on a small scale. When you’re dealing with this kind of social change, gradualism is necessary. That’s why I remain a federalist on marriage equality. These things take time – or rather they take their own time in the minds and souls of citizens.

Which is where I would challenge Damon Linker on his argument that neither marriage equality nor marijuana legalization are conservative positions.

If your view is that conservatism opposes all change, period, he’s right. But that’s a caricature. Burkean conservatism is defined in some part by the insight that sometimes you have to change something for the society to stay the same. When a new social cohort emerges – like out gay people in large numbers – you can ignore it, you can oppose any legal or social adjustment to the new reality, or you can try to integrate it into the current way of life of a society in a way that disrupts it the least. In my mind, opening the institution of civil marriage to gay people – and doing so gradually through federalism and public debate – is a quintessentially conservative position.

Ditto marijuana legislation. When a majority of Americans favor it, when the costs of Prohibition are wrecked lives by the hundreds of thousands, when that wreckage is racially biased to an insane degree, and when you can try things out slowly – first with medical marijuana and now with federalism – then this is a conservative position. Hey, even National Review (thanks to the legacy of WFB) supports it.

Conservatism is not about resisting all change; it’s about adjusting to constantly changing human culture in as careful and as humane and as realistic a manner possible. Of course we can disagree about whether this issue or that is the right one. But Edmund Burke, to cite the father of modern conservatism, favored much more freedom for the American colonists, serious reform of imperial malpractice. By Damon’s light, only reactionaries have a right to call themselves conservatives. I beg to differ.

“Gates 1996 and Gates 2014 are rather like America 1996 and America 2014. The first, ebullient, a tad triumphal, serenely confident that U.S. policymaking will be driven by countervailing democratic pressures both to express the will of the people and to secure order in the world as well as national security. The second, embittered, exhausted, fearful that the country has lost its capacity for problem-solving,” – Andrew Sprung.

The rich certainly seem to believe so:

[Researchers Michel] Kraus and [Dacher] Keltner found that the higher people perceived their social class to be, the more strongly they endorsed just-world beliefs, and that this difference explained their increased social class essentialism: Apparently if you feel that you’re doing well, you want to believe success comes to those who deserve it, and therefore those of lower status must not deserve it. (Incidentally, the argument that you “deserve” anything because of your genes is philosophically contentious; none of us did anything to earn our genes.)

Higher-class Americans may well believe life is fair because they’re motivated to defend their egos and lifestyle, but there’s an additional twist to their greater belief in a just world. Numerous researchers have found that upper-class people are more likely to explain other people’s behavior by appealing to internal traits and abilities, whereas lower-class individuals note circumstances and environmental forces. This matches reality in many ways for these respective groups. The rich do generally have the freedom to pursue their desires and strengths, while for the poor, external limitations often outnumber their opportunities. The poor realize they could have the best genes in the world and still end up working at McDonald’s. The wealthy might not merely be turning a blind eye to such realities; due to their personal experience, they might actually have a blind spot.

Freddie deBoer discusses how kids with characteristically black names become objects of derision:

Being born in 1981 and attending an elementary school that was about a third black, I grew up around many peers who had African or African-inspired names, names like Qualisha and Kamika and Kareem. The mid-80s was a period of racial optimism, in many ways, and a time when the black pride movement had become somewhat depoliticized but far more ubiquitous. I grew up among black children who, whether their parents were poor or middle class, were raised to feel pride in their African heritage, and who expressed that pride in their dress and the way they decorated their homes.

But even then, it was clear that black names were not valued.

I remember many times that substitute teachers would complain openly about their difficulty in pronouncing these “crazy” names. In my class one year, I had peers named Tamisha and Tashima. One sub, incredulous, asked them in front of the class if their parents had planned that out. I’m not quite sure what grade it was, but they couldn’t have been older than 7 or 8 or 9. Looking back, it’s a extraordinarily elegant way to degrade a pair of children, to mock their names, and with them, their identities. And it was also one of the countless little ways in which white kids like myself, whatever the good intentions of teachers and parents, were subtly indoctrinated to believe in black inferiority.

Like so much within racism, this disrespect towards black names carries with it the most important tool in an ostensibly post-racial but actually deeply racist culture: plausible deniability. That sub, I’m sure, did not think she was being racist. She was merely reacting to the oddity of those names! She was not ridiculing those children. She merely thought there was something uniquely funny about their names.

One of Freddy’s readers isn’t so sure:

There is some oversimplification going on in this post, along with a large grain of truth. A lot of middle-class black people also laugh at names like Sharkeisha and Latrina–but their own children might bear real African names like Kweku or Thandiwe. You can project self-loathing racism on them if you want. I wouldn’t. At lot of middle-class white people laugh at “soap opera names”: Madisons and the like. (If you look at such names on the SSN website, you’ll see that they go out of vogue in about 10-15 years–basically laughed out of existence.) To make the parallel more precise, I have heard another term for “soap opera names”: “trailer park names.” In either case, girls have it worse than boys. You can argue that Latrinas have it worse than Madisons, and you’re probably right. But I’m not sure I would build a charge of racism on such flimsy foundations, not when classism explains almost as much.

There is better evidence for name racism. It comes not from a weird black name like Sharkeisha, but rather a non-weird black name like Tyrone. Many more people laugh at Tyrone Jackson’s given name than Tyrone Power’s.

Sometimes a cigar is just a cigar. Sometimes a weird name is just a weird name.

Adam Alter explains why only 1 in 20 people would take him up on the offer:

Until recently, it was difficult to measure how painfully losses stung and for how long, but a recent paper suggests that the gamblers and teachers were wise to be cautious. Five European economists and psychologists measured how 50,000 German and British workers responded when their incomes rose and fell between 1998 and 2009. At the end of each year, the German respondents indicated how happy they were on a scale that ranged from “totally unhappy” to “totally happy.” The British sample completed the General Health Survey, which measured the presence of 12 signs of psychological distress.

Both groups were sensitive to changes in their income, but a loss of $1,000 was more than twice as damaging as a gain of $1,000 was helpful. I mentioned earlier that the people I surveyed were unwilling to play a fair gamble unless the prize for winning was two-and-a-half times greater than the punishment for losing – and that pattern resonates with the outcomes of the European study. The researchers were careful to consider a long list of factors that may have magnified the impact of losses, including the possibility that people who earned less had lost their jobs or marriages, or were caring for more dependents than were the people whose income had risen. The pattern held even when those factors were ruled out.

These results suggest that our collective fear of losses is grounded in wisdom: losing money really hurts us more than winning money helps.

They write essays like this one:

I am the ’70s child of a health nut. I wasn’t vaccinated. I was brought up on an incredibly healthy diet: no sugar till I was one, breastfed for over a year, organic homegrown vegetables, raw milk, no MSG, no additives, no aspartame. My mother used homeopathy, aromatherapy, osteopathy, we took daily supplements of vitamin C, echinacea, cod liver oil. I had an outdoor lifestyle; I grew up next to a farm, walked everywhere, did sports and danced twice a week, drank plenty of water. I wasn’t even allowed pop; even my fresh juice was watered down to protect my teeth, and I would’ve killed for white, shop-bought bread in my lunch box once in a while. …

As healthy as my lifestyle seemed, I contracted measles, mumps, rubella, a type of viral meningitis, scarlatina, whooping cough, yearly tonsillitis, and chickenpox, some of which are vaccine preventable. In my twenties I got precancerous HPV and spent 6 months of my life wondering how I was going to tell my two children under the age of 7 that mummy might have cancer before it was safely removed.

So having the “natural immunity sterilized out of us” just doesn’t cut it for me. How could I, with my idyllic childhood and my amazing health food, get so freaking ill all the time?

Kate Dries applauds the author:

[Amy] Parker’s republished article has clearly hit a nerve: it has over 80,000 Facebook likes and dozens of comments from people who also suffered from illnesses after not being vaccinated. That’s probably because Parker’s is a story that’s rarely heard. While the internet is full of anti-vaxxers who speak about the harm vaccines have done to their children, the stories of the people who have been harmed by not being vaccinated are far fewer. That’s because developed nations exist in a bubble where, until recently, the standard of behavior was to be vaccinated. Those who argue against it, as Parker explains, are taking advantage of their good fortune that the majority of people around them are vaccinated.

Previous Dish on vaccines here, here, here, and here.

Megan Mayhew Bergman wrestles with the ethics of her makeup use:

I know my beauty products are largely unnecessary. Furthermore, they’re often made from toxic or unsustainable materials like palm oil. The wrappers, jars, and tubes pile up in landfills and plastify the ocean. The micro-plastic exfoliation beads in soaps and scrubs wind up in otter stomachs. Chinese laboratories scald rabbit eyes with products and kill hundreds of thousands a year in testing.

Still, she can’t help but respect the power of transformation:

Makeup can also be the thing that helps a woman find her confidence. It can be an act of self-care. Vitiligo patients, burn victims, cancer patients, the pathologically shy woman, an acne sufferer: All might find a critical lift with makeup.

When my mother-in-law was dying of cancer, she was invited to do a photo shoot because of a national board she belonged to. She did not tell the photographer, who scheduled the session months in advance, that she had cancer, or that she’d lost her hair and eyebrows. She thought it was irrelevant. The makeup artist made her look beautiful that day, healthier. A veterinarian, she posed in a set of pale pink scrubs, surgery cap on, eyes bright. Later, after she’d passed away, the photographer sent us a large portrait of the best shot. It hangs in the animal clinic where my husband works; he looks at it every day. I don’t know how she felt inside that day, but in the picture, she’s radiant.

Update from a reader:

Here’s a simple and easy solution for this horrifying problem: buy products that say “no animal ingredients” and “no animal testing.” Whether you are buying shampoo, conditioner, toothpaste, skin lotion, dish detergent, shaving cream, soap, sunblock, or any other such personal care product, there are countless cruelty-free versions available. See here for easily searchable lists. Some of them will conveniently show the bunny label.

(Photo by Aurora CuaCua)