Category: The Dish

How To Forget An Atrocity, Ctd

On the 25th anniversary of Tiananmen Square, Chinese activist Hu Jia feels “completely hopeless” about the prospects for reform in his country:

You have to say that a lot of the CCP’s methods are successful. They use the propaganda ministry to obfuscate this country’s true situation. They brainwash people, and the legal system is in their hands. If you criticize them, there are so many ways to deal with you: jail camps, labor camps, detention camps, prison camps, black prison camps, mental asylum camps. They have so many ways. Each method can make you disappear for a few years. And they can even have you die in prison like Cao Shunli. She was someone who simply asking to participate in the United Nation’s human rights review process. Someone who foreign countries were watching out for, but she died. So think about that.

“It is possible,” Melinda Liu argues, “to draw a direct line between the regime’s successful suppression of the Tiananmen generation then and the assertive China we see today”:

What’s not well understood is that the Communist Party leadership believes it has to behave in this bullying manner abroad, in part as a way of satisfying the patriotic sentiments it set in motion to quell Tiananmen-era discontent. Thus, Americans and other foreigners who are wary of China’s future power would do well to observe this anniversary, if only as a way of comprehending the roots of China’s new confidence.

But Andrew Nathan and Hua Ze believe China’s paranoid security state displays weakness, not strength:

The need to sustain and progressively intensify repression is a sign that the June 4 crackdown did not solve China’s problems; it exacerbated them. The ruling Chinese Communist Party faced a fork in the road in 1989. It could have dialogued with the students, as party leader Zhao Ziyang advocated, forming a common front against corruption. But the prime minister, Li Peng, argued that dialogue could end the Party’s monopoly on power. The top leader, Deng Xiaoping, sided with Li and the rest is history.

Refusal to dialogue with citizens has marked the regime’s modus operandi since then. This explains why citizens lack trust in government when it comes to land seizures, corruption, and pollution. Recent demonstrations against the building of a chemical plant in Maoming, Guizhou, and against an incinerator project in Hangzhou are signs of this corrosive mistrust.

Considering China’s rise to geopolitical prominence, Will Inboden addresses what its authoritarianism implies for US foreign policy:

It may seem now like distant history, but 2009 witnessed the shared hopes of the Obama administration and Beijing to forge a “G-2″ economic partnership of China and the United States, with other countries of the region envisioned in cooperative supporting roles. Instead today brings a region fraught with tension, division, suspicion of Chinese hegemony, and fears by other Indo-Pacific nations of American weakness and retrenchment. These trends are exemplified by tense exchanges between the United States and China at regional security conferences, neo-imperial territorial claims by China and aggression against the maritime vessels of neighboring countries, and a percolating China-Russia condominium based on shared interests in energy, countering American power, and preserving authoritarianism.

It is that latter factor that connects contemporary Asia with the legacy of Tiananmen Square. Beijing’s willingness 25 years ago to massacre its own citizens, and refusal today to admit it, let alone atone for it, illuminates this uncomfortable reality: The internal character of the CCP drives much of its external behavior.

Evan Osnos remarks on how effective the CCP’s propaganda has been “in framing the violence in 1989 as insignificant in the grand scheme, because it came amid broader gains in human development”:

In the government’s only official acknowledgement of the anniversary, the Foreign Ministry spokesman Hong Lei said, “In the last three decades and more of reform and opening up, China’s enormous achievements in social and economic development have received worldwide attention. The building of democracy and the rule of law have continued to be perfected.”

The message has been delivered to young people, in particular. We often imagine that young Chinese know nothing about the events of 1989; reporters who ask students to identify the image of the “tank man” frequently get blank stares. But more than a few students know the details and have applied a shade to the history. Several years ago, I met Liu Yang, a graduate student in environmental engineering at Stanford, who grew up in China. We happened to be chatting on the day of the nineteenth anniversary of Tiananmen Square, and, as I later wrote in The New Yorker, I asked him what he thought of the incident. He said, “If June 4th had succeeded, China would be worse and worse, not better.”

Christopher Beam finds Chinese millennials hazy on the details of what exactly happened and why:

Everyone I talked to knew the basic outline: Student protests, government crackdown, innocent civilians shot dead. But they weren’t all sure why the protesters were so upset. Jenny, a sharp 25-year-old legal expert living in Beijing, guessed it had to do with corruption. Several people suggested that the students were being manipulated by outside forces, particularly foreign governments. “Do you believe in conspiracy theories?” one young woman asked me. “It wasn’t about ideas,” said Susan. “It was just a power struggle.”

You can’t blame them for being confused. The 1989 protesters themselves didn’t know exactly what they wanted. They complained variously about high inflation, corruption, and a lack of democracy. As Wu’er Kaixi, one of the student leaders, put it in one interview: “What do we want? Nike shoes. Lots of free time to take our girlfriends to a bar. The freedom to discuss an issue with someone. And to get a little respect from society.” Even if they’d agreed on a set of goals, they couldn’t agree how to achieve them: Some wanted revolution, while others pushed for incremental change.

Lastly, Ai Weiwei stresses that Tiananmen isn’t the only thing the Party has sought to erase from history:

Modern China’s forgetfulness did not start or end with Tiananmen. Even before the summer of 1989, dozens of darker, crueler incidents lay hidden in Chinese history. Today’s leaders cannot acknowledge their stated ideology before 1949, the principles that helped the Communists gain power over the Nationalist government: establishing a democratic and law-abiding society, ending the one-party system and having an independent judiciary. In 1989, the students in Tiananmen Square asked for those same things. Since then, they’ve become unmentionable.

During Chairman Mao’s lifetime, he started dozens of political movements, none of which have been re-examined by the party in a forthright way. Huge topics such as the Cultural Revolution and the Great Leap Forward lack any accepted accounting. Because there is no discussion of these events, Chinese still have little understanding of their consequences. Censorship has in effect neutered society, transforming it into a damaged, irrational and purposeless creature.

Catholicism’s Crimes Against Humanity, Ctd

To be honest, I have not been able to stop thinking about the atrocity just unearthed in Ireland, where 800 children were consigned to neglect, malnutrition and disease in an effective death-camp run by the Catholic church in Ireland – then dumped into a septic tank as a mass grave. This foul concentration camp was maintained until 1961. This abuse and incomprehensible evil went on for decades. Many must have known about it; the secrecy of the mass grave is proof that those overseeing this neglect knew it was unconscionable but sought to conceal rather than expose it; successive generations of leadership in the school were complicit; the men and women who worked there were complicit; the Church authorities, specifically the priests in charge, were directly responsible for the deaths of 800 children.

Does any serial murderer come close to this level of evil? The repeated treatment of children as sub-human because they were born out of wedlock until close to 800 were lying in rows, like some excavation of a Khmer Rouge atrocity: is there any parallel to this in our times outside of gulags and concentration camps? And all occurring in a quiet, picturesque Galway town – like some horror movie.

I blame the crippling, toxic, near-insane fixation on sexual sin as the core ideology at work here. A view of sex that is riddled with shame and disgust, in which simple human nature must be so expelled and exterminated it requires a secret mass grave to keep the lie in place. Rod Dreher cavils that my inference that it is the sex-phobia that is at the root of this evil is “mostly wrong, wrong, wrong, though wrong in a way we have come to expect.” He thinks believing that no sexual activity can ever take place outside of a procreative, monogamous marital bond is a perfectly workable idea, if not taken to extremes:

It is certainly not the case that observing Christianity’s sexual teachings inevitably leads to atrocities like that committed by the fanatical Irish nuns, and more than the idea that Christianity’s strong warnings against the corruptions of wealth must be resisted lest they lead to lynch mobs burning the wealthy at the stake.

It is undeniably true that to treat sexual impurity as if it were the worst sin distorts the Gospel. But the Sullivan solution, to treat it as if it were no big deal not only is a flat-out denial of the truth proclaimed by the Christian faith, but leads to the opposite kind of fanaticism, this one from the pro-sex side. You may find the bones of that fanaticism’s victims in many cases where those who partook of bathhouse sex and lay buried, dead from AIDS.

Let me just offer Rod a Biblical verse in response: “By their fruit you will recognize them.”

Here’s what the ideology of sex-hatred has wrought in the Catholic Church: gay men were emotionally shut down and traumatized by their own nature in their adolescence and then persuaded or driven to become priests to conceal their sexual orientation, after which their sublimated, fucked-up and distorted sexual identities lead them to rape thousands and thousands of innocent boys and youths; young women who dared to explore their own sexuality in the absence of any “evil” contraception are wrested from their homes and lives, forced into effective labor camps, had their children brutally taken from them, and then allowed to die in a mass grave. At what point will the perpetrators of this insane sexual phobia come to terms with what it practically means in the lives of millions?

Think of the lives ruined for lack of simple mercy; think of the sheer psychic pain and utter desolation so many gay men and women have had to endure for millennia; think of the awful marriages and dreadful sex lives and terrible parenting that emerges from this attempt to deny core facts about human nature; think of the women turned into subhuman pariahs for daring to explore sexual pleasure and intimacy. You can make excuses and excuses, but at some point, given this level of atrocity and evil, you have to say: all of this is a grotesque distortion, a merciless imposition of an abstract ideology completely immune to life as it is actually lived. To give human beings an absolutely impossible goal – and then punish, torment, persecute, dehumanize and destroy them when they fail to live up to it is the definition of insanity.

Yes, Rod, sex is not that big a deal; it is not central to the core claims of Jesus; its pathological repression has wrought such incredible evil and perpetuated such unimaginable abuse it must be re-imagined and re-conceptualized if Christianity is to survive at all. And look, after all, at what this cruel ideology has done in Ireland. It has destroyed the Church in one of its previously strongest redoubts.

The neurotic suppression of sexual need and pleasure is not a virtue. It is a pathology that leads directly to vice – to the corpses of eight hundred infants in a septic tank and to the shattered souls and violated bodies of two hundred deaf boys in Milwaukee. If that does not prompt a reassessment, what would?

The Country’s Belief In Creationism

Creationism

It’s held relatively steady:

The percentage of the U.S. population choosing the creationist perspective as closest to their own view has fluctuated in a narrow range between 40% and 47% since the question’s inception. There is little indication of a sustained downward trend in the proportion of the U.S. population who hold a creationist view of human origins. At the same time, the percentage of Americans who adhere to a strict secularist viewpoint — that humans evolved over time, with God having no part in this process — has doubled since 1999.

Hemant Mehta digs into the survey details:

[N]early a third of Millennials (ages 18-29) accepted evolution without God’s “guiding hand” compared to only 11% of Americans 50-64. The younger generation, of course, is already far less religious to begin with, so the correlation is strong. There’s hope for the future! But damn, what a grim present.

Relatedly, Dan Kahan recently proclaimed that creationist beliefs don’t indicate scientific illiteracy:

First, there is zero correlation between saying one “believes” in evolution & understanding the rudiments of modern evolutionary science. Those who say they do “believe” are no more likely to be able to be able to give a high-school-exam passing account of natural selection, genetic variance, and random mutation — the basic elements of the modern synthesis — than than those who say they “don’t” believe. In fact, neither is very likely to be able to, which means that those who “believe” in evolution are professing their assent to something they don’t understand.

Ronald Bailey adds:

Evidently many religious Americans can understand the scientists’ explanation for how evolutionary biology works while still believing in the special divine creation of Adam and Eve.

Hewitt Award Nominee

“Are you listening, Capitol Hill and America? The Bowe Bergdahl mess isn’t just a story about one deserter, but two. There’s the muddle-headed lowlife who left his post and brothers behind. And there’s the corrupt commander in chief who has jeopardized more American soldiers’ lives to “rescue” Bergdahl by bowing to the Taliban, while snubbing the surviving heroes and the eight dead American soldiers who lost their lives because of him. This cannot stand,” – Michelle Malkin, Dolchstoss princess, and living embodiment of what I described here.

A Problematic POW, Ctd

Idaho Hometown Of Released Army Solider Bowe Bergdahl Celebrates His Release

The president’s decision to exchange five Taliban leaders for Bergdahl continues to draw outrage, and not just from the Palinites. For instance, Ilya Somin doesn’t buy the White House’s legal rationale for not giving Congress advance notice of the deal:

The biggest problem with this argument is that the 30 day notice requirement contains no exception for “unique” circumstances where the President or the secretary of defense believe that obeying it might endanger a soldier’s life. The National Defense Authorization Act and other national security legislation contain numerous provisions that can be waived in appropriate circumstances by the president or the secretary. There is no such waiver or exception in the 30 day notice requirement.

If the president can get around the law anytime he or the secretary of defense believe that it might save a soldier’s life, then he could disregard almost any congressional restrictions on warmaking. For example, President Bush and Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld surely believed that their violations of congressional statutes barring torture of prisoners would help save soldiers’ lives. It is true that the president has the duty of “protecting the lives of Americans abroad and protecting U.S. soldiers.” But in pursuing those objectives, he must stay within the bounds of laws enacted by Congress, whether they be laws restricting torture, or laws restricting the release of brutal terrorists. Candidate Obama understood that when he rightly criticized President Bush back in 2008. President Obama, however, often seems to forget.

Protecting and rescuing an actual, endangered POW on the battlefield strikes me as exactly the kind of exception usually allowed for in executive actions. This was not some kind of ongoing policy; it was a decision to exchange prisoners, requiring secrecy and dispatch. We also find that the health of Bergdahl was a real question:

A secret intelligence analysis, based on a comparison of Taliban videos of Sgt. Bergdahl in captivity in 2011 and December 2013 that were provided to the U.S., found that the soldier’s rate of deterioration was accelerating. The latest video, provided to U.S. officials by mediators in Qatar, has never been publicly shown. Officials who have seen the video described Sgt. Bergdahl’s condition as “alarming.”

But Andrew Rudalevige sees Obama’s signing statement flying in the face of his past criticism of George W. Bush:

As part of the process of negotiating his release, the president decided to override a section US-POLITICS-OBAMA-BERGDAHLof the fiscal 2014 National Defense Authorization Act (Section 1035(d) for those keeping score at home) requiring that Congress receive notification 30 days in advance of a transfer of a Guantanamo detainee. When he signed the bill into law in late 2013, Obama issued a statement noting that while Section 1035 was “an improvement over current law,” “in certain circumstances, [it] would violate constitutional separation of powers principles. The executive branch must have the flexibility, among other things, to act swiftly in conducting negotiations with foreign countries regarding the circumstances of detainee transfers.”

Presumably the administration decided that this was one of those circumstances and — like the Bush administration before it — declined to enforce what it felt was an unconstitutional constraint on the president’s powers as commander in chief. This might be defensible — but it ran hard into those past promises.

In Drum’s view, a court ruling on these powers would be constructive:

This would be useful for a couple of reasons.

First, it would be a sign of whether Republican outrage is serious. If it is, they’ll file suit. If they don’t file, then we’ll all know that it’s just partisan preening. … This is fine if a dispute truly is political. But this, like many other so-called political disputes, isn’t. It’s a clear question of how far the president’s commander-in-chief authority extends and what authority Congress has to limit it. If Republicans truly believe Obama violated the law, they should be willing to go to court to prove it. And courts should be willing hand down a ruling.

Speaking of “partisan preening”:

Obama’s sudden willingness to buck Congress on releasing Gitmo prisoners raises some questions for Amy Davidson:

President Obama’s signing statement on the bill said that it might be unconstitutional if it kept him from acting “swiftly in conducting negotiations with foreign countries,” and, indeed, there is something constitutionally odd about a law designed to keep a specific list of people—some of whom, it can’t be said often enough, have been found not to be threats—imprisoned without trial.

But Obama should not get a pass on this. He has, in general, dealt with congressional attempts to keep him from closing Guantánamo, such as restrictions on spending certain funds to move prisoners, with a sort of learned helplessness, as if all his good will had faced an impassable wall. He has not tried to find the everyday limits of the various restrictions, or challenged them, substantively, in less hectic circumstances. Bergdahl has been a prisoner for years. What else, by that standard, might count as an emergency?

And Greenwald wonders how, in light of this decision, Obama can justify not closing down the facility entirely:

The sole excuse now offered by Democratic loyalists for this failure has been that Congress prevented him from closing the camp. But here, the Obama White House appears to be arguing that Congress lacks the authority to constrain the President’s power to release detainees when he wants. What other excuse is there for his clear violation of a law that requires 30-day notice to Congress before any detainees are released?

But once you take the position that Obama can override — i.e., ignore — Congressional restrictions on his power to release Guantanamo detainees, then what possible excuse is left for his failure to close the camp? … Obama defenders seem to have two choices here: either the president broke the law in releasing these five detainees, or Congress cannot bind the commander-in-chief’s power to transfer detainees when he wants, thus leaving Obama free to make those decisions himself. Which is it?

Meanwhile, the NYT reports that Bergdahl had left a note in his tent the night he went missing to say that he was deserting on purpose. Allahpundit sees another argument in favor of Bergdahl’s release collapsing:

Which would be worse: If Obama didn’t know about the note before making the swap, or if he did know and went ahead with it anyway? … There are vets in Bergdahl’s squad angrily accusing the guy of desertion and, more damningly, the parents of fallen soldiers blaming Bergdahl for their sons’ deaths. When you’ve got people as sympathetic as that hammering you in the media, the only smart play is “I’ll do anything to recover a missing soldier, period.” Message: I care.

But as I say, it’s not true: The White House would have had no problem leaving Bergdahl behind if the Taliban’s ask was Khaled Sheikh Mohammed instead of the five lower-profile savages we handed back to them.

Beutler finds this argument incomprehensible:

I hold no brief for Bergdahl, and take no issue with the Army launching an inquiry into the circumstances of his disappearance. But the inquiry wouldn’t be happening if the military hadn’t first secured his release. Having secured his release, they can now determine whether he deserves to be disciplined by the U.S. military. If you agree with the military’s leave-no-man-behind ethos, then this is the correct order of operations—even if the inquiry yields the most damning possible conclusions. Taking conservatives at their word—and here I’m talking about conservatives who weren’t recently pressuring the White House to do more for Bergdahl—they’re of the incoherent view that the agreed upon terms of his release weren’t worth it, and that those terms should have been proportional to an evaluation of his conduct that can only be conducted with any legitimacy now that the deal is done.

Amen. But Philip Klein decries what he sees as liberal hypocrisy:

Liberals spent a good part of the last decade excoriating anybody who suggested that they wanted Saddam Hussein in power or were pro-terrorist because they opposed the Iraq War, but this is exactly the same form of argument they’re employing by suggesting anybody questioning the deal wants to leave soldiers behind. In other words, they’re focusing on one result of the policy, without considering any of the costs. Unless liberals are going to argue that securing Bergdahl’s release was worth any price — even, say, giving nuclear weapons to the Taliban – by their own logic, they favor leaving soldiers behind.

I think extrapolating this kind of thing from one prisoner exchange – the only one in the longest war the US has ever fought – is more than a little disproportionate. There was also apparently some controversy within the administration over whether to release these particular detainees from Gitmo:

The question of the release of the five Taliban leaders was a recurrent subject of debate in the administration and was a key element of the behind the scenes effort by the State Department and the White House to negotiate a peace deal with the Taliban. The transfer of the five was discussed as a possible confidence-building measure to pave the way for a deal. The debates over their release were contentious, officials familiar with them say.

Those opposing release had the benefit of secret and top secret intelligence showing that the five men were a continuing threat, officials familiar with the debate tell TIME. But in the push from the White House and the State Department to clear the men, opponents to release found themselves under constant pressure to prove that the five were dangerous. “It was a heavy burden to show they were bad,” says the second source familiar with the debate.

And the fact that Bergdahl was held by the Haqqani network in particular, not just “the Taliban” as the White House says, complicates the question of whether we “negotiated with terrorists”:

In September 2012 Secretary of State Hillary Clinton approved an official U.S. State Department designation of the Haqqani network as a foreign terrorist organization. The Afghan Taliban has not been so designated. The Haqqanis are unpalatable for another reason: they keep close ties to al-Qaeda.

Given that Bergdahl was held by an officially designated terrorist group, doesn’t it follow that Obama negotiates with terrorists? Not exactly. The U.S. bargained the release via the Persian Gulf nation of Qatar, which served as an intermediary. “We appreciate the support of the government of Qatar in facilitating the return of our soldier,” White House national security council spokeswoman Caitlin Hayden tells TIME. “We did not negotiate with the Haqqanis.” In short: we dealt with the Qataris, and the Qataris dealt with the Haqqanis. Did we therefore deal with the Haqqanis? Technically, no. In spirit, yes.

Zooming out, Simon Engler says the release also had strategic value:

Saturday’s prisoner exchange with the Taliban was not meant simply to bring Bergdahl home.  The swap was initially developed in 2011 as a confidence-building measure aimed at encouraging broader talks with the Taliban. Since Bergdahl’s release, administration officials and the Taliban have poured cold water on the notion that the swap could signal an opening toward more substantive peace talks between the two.

But Bergdahl’s release at least demonstrates that small-scale negotiations are feasible — and that the Taliban’s representatives in Qatar are legitimately connected to its forces in Afghanistan.

However, Niel Joeck argues that if it was a strategic move, it was a bad one:

President Obama certainly must have weighed these costs [that trading Gitmo detainees for a prisoner would make the capture of Americans more likely] against likely benefits, but here the story gets both confusing and more problematic. His National Security Advisor, Susan Rice, said that the exchange serves U.S. national security interests, presumably meaning that it is part of a broader strategic approach. If it is, however, why did Hagel say it was done to save Bergdahl’s life? The administration’s message is mixed — did the deal have to be struck quickly to save his life? If so, how does that serve a broader strategy?

These misaligned statements therefore raise the question of the strategy in Afghanistan. The release was not discussed with President Hamid Karzai, but were either of the two candidates to succeed him consulted? If not, are we again sowing seeds of mistrust when we develop strategy without regard to the effect on allies?

David Axe, meanwhile, is outraged that Bergdahl is being blamed for the deaths of soldiers who tried to rescue him:

Two hundred and ninety-five coalition troops died in Afghanistan in 2008. Five hundred and twenty-one died in 2009. More than 700 perished in 2010. Bergdahl’s regiment was going to fight—and suffer casualties—regardless of whether planners tailored the unit’s operations to help gather intelligence on Bergdahl’s whereabouts. In fact, if you’re willing to blame Bergdahl for soldiers’ deaths, then you also have to attribute to him all the lives he “saved.” The slight shift in operations that reportedly occurred because of Bergdahl almost certainly kept U.S. units off of some remote roads and out of certain enemy-controlled villages. Attacks did not take place that might have otherwise.

And Republicans can hardly claim they’re not playing politics at all here, seeing as GOP strategists are helping Bergdahl’s critics get press. Previous Dish on the POW controversy here and here.

(Top photo: A sign announcing the release of Sgt. Bowe Bergdahl sits outside the Power House restaurant on Main Street June 1, 2014 in Hailey, Idaho. By Scott Olson/Getty Images. Bottom photo: Jani Bergdahl, the mother of Bowe, walks through the Colonnade with President Barack Obama to speak in the Rose Garden of the White House on May 31, 2014. By Mandel Ngan/Getty Images)

Social Network As Kingmaker

Jonathan Zittrain is concerned about Facebook’s ability to swing elections:

All sorts of factors contribute to what Facebook or Twitter present in a feed, or what Google or Bing show us in search results. Our expectation is that those intermediaries will provide open conduits to others’ content and that the variables in their processes just help yield the information we find most relevant. (In that spirit, we expect that advertiser-sponsored links and posts will be clearly labeled so as to make them easy to distinguish from the regular ones.) Digital gerrymandering occurs when a site instead distributes information in a manner that serves its own ideological agenda. This is possible on any service that personalizes what users see or the order in which they see it, and it’s increasingly easy to effect.

There are plenty of reasons to regard digital gerrymandering as such a toxic exercise that no right-thinking company would attempt it. But none of these businesses actually promises neutrality in its proprietary algorithms, whatever that would mean in practical terms.

The Scourge Of Women Laughing Alone With Salads, Ctd

A reader quotes Clive Thompson:

If everyone reading this article posted their best snapshots online, we could seed hundreds of thousands of free pictures of real things and real people in the real world. The true cure for stock photography is inside your camera phone.

This theory would imply that the reason stock photography is so cliche is because photographers aren’t supplying the right photos. The problem is that advertisers are saladlooking for cliche photos. They are looking for diverse people who look happy, authoritative, or whatever other image the advertiser is trying to convey. Photographers are just supplying what advertisers want.

Even if that weren’t the case, it’s not as simple as posting your photos on Flickr and setting the license. If the photo is for commercial use, as most stock photos are, then you have to have model releases from everybody in the photo. If you don’t, then whoever uses your photos would put themselves at risk for a lawsuit from the people in the photo.

Finally, this whole concept is hugely denigrating to photographers. It takes a tremendous amount of skill to create the kind of photos you see in stock art. A random person with their phone isn’t going to be able to produce similar quality work. It would be like saying that the solution to a broken news media is for everybody to post their independent journalism on Facebook (for free naturally).

Update from another reader:

Did Clive Thompson get paid for his rant about stock photos?

If so, then I have to wonder why he’s so willing to give away photos but not give away words. He completely avoids the ethical issues raised by his suggestion.

The reason stock photos are horrible and also ubiquitous is that people just don’t want to pay photographers, and some photographers have been reduced to playing a numbers game by generating endless generic photos. It reduces photography to a numbers game and is the equivalent of being paid by the click. (I realize some places have to deal with agencies, as the Dish does, but you aren’t posting the genuinely meaningless stock photos that are common elsewhere.) I worked with photographers for years, and I think firing photographers so we can look at stupid stock photos or amateur photos from Flickr was cheap and disrespectful, and suggesting that the unpleasant outcome of devaluing their work is somehow improved by using more free work from amateurs is even more insulting. True, there are many excellent amateur photographers, but there are many excellent amateurs pursuing many artistic hobbies. Thompson says that waiting for new-and-improved-stock photos by the pros will take too long, but that’s only because so many professionals have been dumped. Hire them back.

(Photo: A non-stock image from WLAWS)

Hathos Alert

“Then I felt a scary shudder go through my body and brain. I barely made it from the desk to the bed, where I lay curled up in a hallucinatory state for the next eight hours. I was thirsty but couldn’t move to get water. Or even turn off the lights. I was panting and paranoid, sure that when the room-service waiter knocked and I didn’t answer, he’d call the police and have me arrested for being unable to handle my candy. I strained to remember where I was or even what I was wearing, touching my green corduroy jeans and staring at the exposed-brick wall. As my paranoia deepened, I became convinced that I had died and no one was telling me. And then I wrote a column on Hillary,” – Maureen Dowd, almost.

On a more serious note, it has long since seemed to me to be reckless to have edible candy pot so readily available. It can entice children unless it’s kept in a very secure place; dosage can be much harder to gauge; and strength impossible to predict, especially for newbies like MoDo who are dumb enough to scarf a bunch without thinking too much. I have absolutely no objections to tightening up regulation of edibles considerably.

Has Fat Gotten A Bad Rap?

A new book claims so:

[The Big Fat Surprise author Nina] Teicholz describes the early academics who demonised fat and those who have kept up the crusade. Top among them was Ancel Keys, a professor at the University of Minnesota, whose work landed him on the cover of Time magazine in 1961. He provided an answer to why middle-aged men were dropping dead from heart attacks, as well as a solution: eat less fat. Work by Keys and others propelled the American government’s first set of dietary guidelines, in 1980. Cut back on red meat, whole milk and other sources of saturated fat. The few sceptics of this theory were, for decades, marginalised.

But the vilification of fat, argues Ms Teicholz, does not stand up to closer examination. She pokes holes in famous pieces of research—the Framingham heart study, the Seven Countries study, the Los Angeles Veterans Trial, to name a few—describing methodological problems or overlooked results, until the foundations of this nutritional advice look increasingly shaky.

Mashable interviewed Teicholz, who argues that “we’ve shifted too far in the carbohydrate direction”:

Mashable: So, is the takeaway that you can eat as much bacon, butter and steak as you want?

Teicholz: It sounds extreme when you put it that way. What the science really shows is that a high-fat diet is healthier than a low-fat diet. So the takeaway for me is that it’s fine as part of that high-fat diet to eat meat, cheese, milk and eggs. I think if 40% of your diet is fat, that’s fine.

In an excerpt from her book, Teicholz claims that, for “the first 250 years of American history, even the poor in the United States could afford meat or fish for every meal”:

Ironically—or perhaps tellingly—the heart disease “epidemic” began after a period of exceptionally reduced meat eating. The publication of The Jungle, Upton Sinclair’s fictionalized exposé of the meatpacking industry, caused meat sales in the United States to fall by half in 1906, and they did not revive for another 20 years.

In other words, meat eating went down just before coronary disease took off. Fat intake did rise during those years, from 1909 to 1961, when heart attacks surged, but this 12 percent increase in fat consumption was not due to a rise in animal fat. It was instead owing to an increase in the supply of vegetable oils, which had recently been invented.

David Katz calls Teicholz’s arguments “nonsense.” He insists that “more meat, butter and cheese will not promote your health“:

We are flying in circles. If we had reduced our intake of meat, butter and cheese by eating more vegetables, nuts, fruits and legumes — we might be living in a Blue Zone by now. But we didn’t and we aren’t. We just started eating more starch and sugar. As we all know, America runs on Dunkin’ — tell them what they’ve won, Johnny!

So now, we can add back meat, butter and cheese (the consequences to the planet be damned, apparently) — and then what? We’ll be back where we were when we first recognized we weren’t where we wanted to be. After all, if our meaty, cheesy, buttery diets had been making us lean, healthy and happy in the first place — why ever would we have changed them?

So it’s “more meat” for the myopic, who can’t see far enough back to realize we’ve been there, done that — and it didn’t work out so well for us last time. It’s “more cheese” for the chumps who don’t recognize that the next great diet is one we’ve tried before. In fact, the title of the book by the Wall Street Journal columnist is almost shockingly like the title of Taubes’ piece in the New York Times Magazine from 12 years ago. In 12 years, our progress is nicely captured by going from a “big fat lie” to a “big fat surprise.” We fly in circles, and our kids pay the price.

Getting The Frozen Shoulder

Elias Muhanna questions Disney’s decision to translate Frozen into Modern Standard Arabic:

Modern Standard Arabic is even less similar to regional Arabic dialects than the English of the King James Bible is to the patter of an ESPN sportscaster. … Why Disney decided to abandon dialectal Arabic for “Frozen” is perplexing, and the reaction has been mixed. Many YouTube viewers are annoyed, with some fans recording their own versions of the songs in dialect. An online petition has called for Disney to switch its dubbing back to Egyptian Arabic, plaintively wondering, “How can we watch ‘Monsters University’ in the Heavy Modern Arabic while we saw the first one in Egyptian accent that everybody loved…?”

How indeed? Or perhaps the real question is: Why? Why is Disney willing to commission separate translations of its films for speakers of Castilian Spanish and Latin American Spanish, European Portuguese and Brazilian Portuguese, European French and Canadian French, but is moving in the opposite direction when it comes to Arabic?

The Arabist suspects there is a business rationale:

I suspect it has more to do with the low profitability of Arabic dialect market segments (because of high rates of piracy, etc.) and the dominance of the [The Gulf Cooperation Council] market in business decisions about entertainment – and that market being used to [Modern Standard Arabic] being used as a standard for dubbing (they finance it, after all).