Category: The Dish

by Jessie Roberts

Insurers:

Outside of government agencies, the insurance industry is the primary funder of climate-change research.

A trade group is sponsoring studies on how climate change affects tornadoes and hail. Another is backing university research on land ecosystems in a warming world, especially forests and crops. A British company is focusing on hurricane intensity and temperature rise while an insurer in Bermuda researches cloud seeding to see whether the storms can be stopped before making landfall. A.I.G., for example, just released a climate report of its own, noting “a disproportionate increase in the number of extreme weather events” in North America. [Berkshire Hathaway CEO Warren] Buffett is right: in ten years, if not sooner, calculations are bound to change. Those paying for the best research will get it first and, when they see an immediate risk, they’ll immediately price it in. For their own survival and for the sake of their shareholders, they will have to. Insurance rates will go up. And, if the risk is deemed too high or regulators block massive rate increases, as took place in coastal Florida some years ago, insurers will exit the market.

If profits equal progress, however, the insurance industry is on the right track. While researching a book that I wrote on the topic, I found that, when Hurricane Andrew landed in Florida and Louisiana, in 1992, insurers were caught unprepared, disbursing $1.27 in claims for every dollar of premium earned, for a total of twenty-three billion dollars. Those insurers started paying attention, and raised rates accordingly. Total claims were almost twice that when Hurricane Katrina hit Louisiana thirteen years later—but insurers still came out ahead, losing just 71.5 cents per dollar of premium. Industry profits were forty-nine billion dollars that year. We continue to gamble with our environmental policies. But the insurance industry, year after year, keeps winning.

by Patrick Appel

The past few decades have lacked major antibiotics discoveries. Derek Lowe shifts blame away from the drug companies:

There’s a persistent explanation for the state of antibiotic therapy that blames drug companies for supposedly walking away from the field. This has the cause and effect turned around. It’s true that some of them have given up working in the area (along with quite a few other areas), but they left because nothing was working. The companies that stayed the course have explored, in great detail and at great expense, the problem that nothing much is working. If there ever was a field of drug discovery where the low-hanging fruit has been picked clean, it is antibiotic research. You have to use binoculars to convince yourself that there’s any more fruit up there at all. I wish that weren’t so, very much. But it is. Bacteria are hard to kill.

How McArdle sees the issue:

Antibiotic resistance is one of the few policy areas where everyone agrees that something should be done. Well, maybe except for some nutcases in the Voluntary Human Extinction Movement. Even more rarely, it is an area where we all agree on what we would like to see done. Unfortunately, the folks who actually have to do it seem to have no idea how to make it happen.

And you know what? That’s not an accident. If we knew how to find lots of great new antibiotics, this wouldn’t be a policy argument; we’d have lots of great new antibiotics, and we wouldn’t need to worry about resistance. The very existence of a policy issue tells you that it is difficult to solve, either politically or technically.

by Chris Bodenner

Several readers dissent:

Your selection of commentary on the rash of protests against commencement speakers seemed really one-sided and off base to me. Some of it was also dripping with contempt for the millennial generation. As a Rutgers alum who is currently an assistant professor at a large state university, I followed the Condi Rice story with interest and think the criticism of protesting students misses the boat.

Protest is a form of speech that is often the only available method of expressing dissent to those in power. As a college instructor, I’m thrilled to see politically engaged students speaking out against awarding honorary degrees and, in some cases, massive speaking fees (Rice was set to be paid $35K) to individuals who they believe do not represent their values. We can’t wag our fingers at millennials for being self-absorbed and then simultaneously criticize them for protesting powerful political figures, which is an inherently social and political act.

Also, at Rutgers, they protested and Rice decided to bow out. That’s a crucial distinction to me.

RU did not rescind its invitation; Rice decided not to attend. Myself, I’ll take vocal dissent over apathy every day of the week. And the likes of Condi Rice and Christine Lagarde should have thicker skin, show up to the event, and directly engage the substance of the dissenters’ point of view. Those dissenters are less powerful, less wealthy, and yes, maybe could learn something new from the engagement. But my sense is the Rices and Lagardes of the world are too privileged and too insulated to seriously entertain the notion of taking a little criticism. They’ll do the event only if everyone kisses their butt on their way to and from the podium.

Another reader makes another key distinction:

Commencement is unique. There is no opportunity for dialogue with a commencement speaker, no debating issues, no public forum where you can criticize them for their errors and try to get them to respond. Their very role of commencement speaker implies that an honor is being bestowed on them by the college, by that graduating class, for their accomplishments in the world outside the campus. And their role on the dais is to shed the value of their status on those about to graduate.

I applaud these students for making their voices heard. They have done the work and paid the price. It is not a false sense of entitlement to believe they do not have to put up with someone as commencement speaker they don’t believe is worth the honor. They are truly entitled to that. They have earned it. I nearly boycotted my own commencement in 1981 because the speaker was George Will. I wish I had had the courage of my convictions to do so at the time, and I salute these students for standing up and making their voices heard on this.

Another suggests that the would-be commencement speakers are the entitled ones:

I’m headed to my 40th Smith College reunion this weekend. I am disappointed that Christine Lagarde has withdrawn as speaker simply because some 400 or so people signed an online petition. Is that really all it takes? I fault Lagarde and the other withdrawing speakers more than the students who signed the petition. I mean really, I get asked to sign online petitions every day, and sometimes I actually do. It doesn’t take much effort, nor does it necessarily mean I’m going to take some further action, like, heaven forfend, hold up a protest sign at a speech or throw rotten tomatoes.

Lagarde’s excuse for withdrawing was that she wanted to “preserve the celebratory experience” of the commencement. There is no indication that there were any threats by petition signers to take any actions that would hamper the celebrations. A few protest signs, if there were going to be any, wouldn’t have done any harm. I feel that these last-minute withdrawals by Lagarde and the other speakers doing so are going to have a chilling effect on the exercise of future student protesters’ first amendment rights to voice their protests. They are in effect saying, “If you complain about me or the institution I represent, I’m going to pack up my marbles and refuse to play.”

If the college and the speaker feel the speaker has something useful to say to the students, they ought to be willing to say it and take a little flak if necessary. I think she’s a coward.

by Patrick Appel

Enten examines public opinion on capital punishment:

Overall, support for the death penalty is dropping in the U.S., but at a slow rate. When we look at the 70 polls on capital punishment in PollingReport.com’s database taken since 2000, we see that the drop has averaged only 0.4 percentage points per year. The trend suggests that, at this point, about 61 percent of Americans support the death penalty. Some polls (such as a 2013 Pew Research Center survey) put support lower, and some (such as the YouGov survey) put it higher.

If the trend continues, a majority of Americans will support the death penalty for an additional 30 years.

And there isn’t much reason to expect the trend to pick up speed anytime soon. Unlike issues such as same-sex marriage and marijuana, where a large age gap favors the more progressive position, young Americans aren’t all that more likely than older Americans to oppose the death penalty.

Meanwhile, David R. Dow explains why Texas leads the nation in executions:

As a law professor in Texas who, along with my team, has represented well over 100 death row inmates over the past 20 years, I am often asked why Texas executes so many people. This is what I say: Texas executes so many people because it executes so many people. I’m not being flip. What I mean is simply that killing people is like most anything else; the more you do it, the better you get. If killing people were like playing the violin, Texas would have been selling out Carnegie Hall years ago.

To understand how the adage that practice makes perfect applies to the execution of a prisoner, it is helpful to understand the stages and legal intricacies of a death penalty case. The law surrounding the death penalty is complex and often must be dealt with swiftly, as court deadlines and execution dates loom. The more familiar lawyers, government administrators, prison wardens, executioners and the many other relevant actors are with the process, the better they are at seeing it all the way through until its lethal end.

by Matthew Sitman

Reviewing Robert Zaretsky’s A Life Worth Living: Albert Camus and the Quest for Meaning, Ian Marcus Corbin attributes it to the writer’s “singular commitment to concrete reality” and “determination to not just think, but also to look“:

There is no way for a thinker—or indeed, a user of language—to eschew abstraction entirely, of course, but Camus was deeply attuned to the dangers of excessive abstraction. This may not sound particularly heroic, but it can be, and it certainly was in Camus’s day. Camus’s peers, mid-century French intellectuals, were all too susceptible to the raptures of abstraction. The Left Bank bien pensants were, with few exceptions, stalwart armchair Marxists, obliquely aware that the divine dream of the worker’s paradise was exacting a brutal toll on the actual humans of the Soviet bloc, but blissfully unmoved by this fact. Camus publicly, angrily, charged that their fixation on beautiful ideas made them insensate to the ugly cost such ideas imposed on the much-beloved proletariat. And indeed, it is now difficult—impossible—to think Camus wrong.

Zaretsky quotes the French philosopher Maurice Merleau-Ponty, who writes of the Stalinist horrors with chilling coolness, explaining that only the unfolding of history will “give us the final word as to the legitimacy of a particular form of violence.” Camus righteously fumes in response that “man has been delivered entirely into the hands of history … because we live in a world of abstraction, a world of bureaucracy and machinery, of absolute ideas and of messianism without subtlety.” Camus’s rejection of blood-draining Stalinist abstraction put him far out of favor with his peers, most notably his once-close friend Jean Paul Sartre, who publicly denounced him for his political apostasy.

Claire Messud picks up on another aspect of Camus’s thought – his complicated relationship to Christianity. She praises Sandra Smith’s recent translation of The Stranger for realizing the subtly religious aspects of his prose:

Camus, of course, was more complex in his atheism than we might commonly expect: he was an atheist in reaction to, and in the shadow of, a Catholicism osmotically imbued in the culture (of the French certainly, but of the pieds noirs in particular). The inescapable result is that his atheism is in constant dialogue with religion; in L’Étranger no less than in, say, La Peste.

Sandra Smith has, in her admirable translation, plucked carefully upon this thread in the novel, so that Anglophone readers might better grasp Camus’s allusions. Here is but one key example: the novel’s last line, in French, begins “Pour que tout soit consommé,...” which [Matthew] Ward translates, literally, as “For everything to be consummated.” But as Smith points out, the French carries “an echo of the last words of Jesus on the Cross: ‘Tout est consommé.’” Her chosen rendition, then, is “So that it might be finished,” a formulation that echoes Christ’s last words in the King James translation of the Bible.

Previous Dish on Camus here, here, here, and here.

by Chris Bodenner

A reader sees “a couple of glaring holes” in this monologue from Louie:

First, lots of fat girls have boyfriends. Maybe that one fat girl can’t get one she finds acceptable, and her frustration is well-expressed, but the idea that being a fat girl means you CAN’T get a boyfriend is simply false. This country is full of fat women (and fat men) who are dating and married and popping out fat kids. We have an obesity epidemic, remember?

Second, when she goes into the thing about how he can just talk into the microphone about being overweight and it’s adorable – well, yeah, but he’s a famous comedian. Again, it works great in the scene, and for those characters, but trying to generalize that point is insane. Lots of fat guys get girlfriends (just like lots of fat girls get boyfriends), but tons more fat guys have absolutely no success with women. They can’t all just get on stage and have a persona. Lots of them end up with crippling anxiety and social phobias because they can’t get an iota of positive female attention.

So, as usual with Louie, it’s an amazing show with a fresh perspective and characters that seem to intimate universal truths. But also as usual, under close investigation those universal truths turn out to be closer to polemics that are just really well-written. Louis CK doesn’t intend them to be philosophical arguments, but expressions of his own very narrow, very personal perspective, and we should read them that way.

Another is much less forgiving and makes some solid points:

Wow. What a pathetic mix of self-pity and self-indulgence. “How is that fair? And why am supposed to just accept it?” Should I mention the obvious: during this whole scene a number of people pass the whining lady actually running. Yes, exercising.

So, here is my reaction to this lady:

No, you are not supposed to just accept it. Stop whining about fairness, put a pair of sneakers on and start doing something about your weight if it is your real concern. And no, you don’t have to if it does not get in the way of your fulfilling, happy and productive life – but that’s not what you sound like. So if you excuse my bluntness, either make your inner peace with your fat arse or do something about it.

And no, I am not some arrogant prick with good genes. It requires constant efforts for me to stay fit, and it has been that way for my entire adult life. I am a middle-aged man whose weight has been fluctuating around the “dreaded” BMI of 25 separating “normal” from officially “overweight” for as long as I remember. For the last 2 years I managed to stay below that mark, but not through some genetic luck or “fairness”. As I said, I was not dealt particularly good genes as far the waist size is concerned. All it will take for me to go back over that BMI 25 waterline is stopping to pay close attention to what I put in my mouth and starting to skip my every-other-evening swims and Sunday soccer games. And it will not take long to get there, no more than a month.

And by the way, I work long hours. I have to – I am a sole bread-winner in the family. Heading back from work at 7 pm I always have a choice to make: go home, have dinner and relax, which sounds incredibly appealing every bloody evening, or get over it and head to the swimming pool for an hour first. Trust me, the latter is never an easy choice, and I routinely find excuses not to do it and yet I also know that it feels very rewarding afterward whenever I don’t listen to my own excuses.

I also realise that my choices are not for everyone: small children at home or a number of other very real priorities may skew the balance and make my personal “good” choices not so good for someone else. But my point is exactly that: for many of us with with “susceptible” waistlines the actual girth is merely a matter of priorities. If it really bothers you, make it a priority. If you’d rather spend that extra hour at home with kids and/or indulge in sweet treats – it’s a legitimate choice, but then don’t whine.

And by the way, you want to know what is really unfair as far as the dating market is concerned? Try talking to short men. Or better yet, short bald men. No, I am not bringing any personal complaints here: I am 5’9” – definitely not tall but not pathologically short either, and in any case I am happily married to a beautiful woman. Yet I observed on many an occasion the short end of the dating stick reserved for short men. I understand that for many women these are unconscious decisions rooted deeply in biology (height + full head of hair may signal some genetic superiority), but that does not make it any fairer to the recipients of such unconscious attitude. And guess what: we can’t change our height or simply regrow a full head of hair while the chances are, you actually can change your waistline. So just knock it off please.