Category: The Dish

Amanda Petrusich theorizes about why young people are more attracted to astrology than their elders:

While [Millennials are] hardly the first group to feel the draw of the unknown, it also makes sense that a generation that came of age with the whole of human knowledge in its pockets might find the ambiguity of astrology a little welcome sometimes. For people born with the web, information has always been instantly accessible, so astrology’s abstruseness – and, ironically, its promises of clarity regarding the only real unknowable: the future – becomes appealing. This generation’s predicament, as I understand it, has always felt Dickensian: “We have everything before us, we have nothing before us.”

But then I’m reminded, again, that inaccuracy, or, at least, a belief in the fluidity of truth, is at the heart of the present-day zeitgeist: Our news is often hasty and unverified, our photos are filtered and retouched, our songs are pitch-corrected, our unscripted television programs are storyboarded into oblivion, and most everyone shrugs it all off. Astrology might not offer the most accurate or verifiable information, but at least it offers information – arguably the only currency that makes sense in 2014.

Previous Dish on astrology here, here, and here.

Zack Beauchamp explains the Palestinian reconciliation agreement signed in Gaza yesterday:

According to the new deal, the two Palestinian factions would form a shared interim government within five weeks, and hold elections for Palestinian Authority President, PA legislative council, and Palestinian Liberation Organization council within six months. If implemented, the Palestinians would have a unified government for the first time since 2007. The Palestinian split had made peace negotiations extremely difficult, as Israel couldn’t make two separate deals with two separate Palestinian groups.

There’s some reason to believe the deal won’t hold. Hamas and Fatah came to similar agreements in both 2011 and 2012, but both of those fell apart. This deal doesn’t resolve underlying issues between the two groups, such as whether Palestinians should agree to a permanent peace deal with Israel or whether Palestine should be governed according to Islamic law. Those are pretty significant disputes.

Israel immediately cut off talks and announced reprisals:

The top-level inner cabinet of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s government “decided unanimously that it will not negotiate with a Palestinian government that incorporates Hamas, a terrorist organization that seeks the destruction of Israel,” a statement said after an emergency meeting that lasted throughout Thursday afternoon. Israel also said it plans to introduce economic sanctions against the PA — which will reportedly include withholding tax revenues collected by Israel on behalf of the PA.

Noting that past attempts at reconciliation have failed, Karl Vick thinks this announcement could be a tactical play:

The timing of the announcement, six days before the April 29 deadline for U.S.-sponsored peace talks, suggests Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas, who heads Fatah, may have chosen to push back against pressure from Israel and the U.S., which Palestinians see as insisting on new concessions. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu was angered by the latest announcement, declaring, as he did after the previous pacts, that Abbas “must choose. Does he want reconciliation with Hamas, or peace with Israel?”

By appearing to choose Hamas, Abbas wins points with the Palestinian public (which strongly opposes the factional rift), while perhaps also driving a wedge between the Americans and Netanyahu. “Is he hoping this will raise alarm bells in Washington, and they’ll go back to the Israelis and say, ‘We’ve got to offer him something’?” asks Mouin Rabbani, a senior fellow at the Institute for Palestine Studies. “Yes, the timing is suspicious.”

Jacob Eriksson exposes the cynicism of Netanyahu’s position:

Israeli prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, has said the Palestinian Authority president, Mahmoud Abbas (Abu Mazen), can have peace with Israel or peace with Hamas – but not both. But this logic is inherently problematic; an oft-heard criticism during the seven-year rift between Fatah and Hamas has been that the Palestinian Authority does not represent all Palestinians and so any agreement reached would not be able to be implemented.

But when the Palestinians do move to create a unified, democratically elected leadership that represents all their people and can negotiate meaningfully if it chooses to do so, Israel considers this a non-starter.

This is a convenient excuse for Netanyahu to disengage from negotiations that he was never seriously committed to in the first place.

Juan Cole piles on:

[T]he hostility of Israel and the US to a Palestinian internal reconciliation also derives from their desire to divide and rule. A united Palestinian front would make that strategy much less salient. If the 4.4 million Palestinians in the Occupied territories could speak with a single voice, they would nearly have the weight of the 5.5 million Israeli Jews.

The US spokesperson said that Israel cannot be expected to negotiate with a party that does not believe it has a right to exist. The hypocrisy and irony is thick. Israel doesn’t recognize the right of Palestine to exist. As for the demand that Hamas renounce violence, likewise, Israel has not renounced violent aggression toward the Palestinians, something it and its settler surrogates engage in daily. The fact is that parties to negotiations are often engaged in violence against one another (hence the negotiations) and often don’t recognize each other’s legitimacy at the start.

The same Pew survey that showed the French to be so accepting of extramarital affairs also offered a fascinating overview of global attitudes toward homosexuality. One reader’s take-away is that public support for gay people doesn’t always translate into gay rights:

Only 8 percent of respondents in Germany, my home country, find homosexuality “morally unacceptable,” while 37 percent of Americans hold that view. I would have guessed that there was a significant difference between Western European countries and the US, but I would not have expected the difference to be so stark.

So considering those numbers, you’d think we’d have marriage equality in Germany. We don’t. We have registered partnerships, a form of civil unions, and most rights coming with them had to be fought for in the courts in recent years. The political left is for marriage equality. Standing in the way of enacting it in parliament are Angela Merkel’s Christian Democrats. Before last year’s elections, Merkel was put on the spot by a gay voter in a televised town hall forum asking for adoption rights for gay couples. Merkel had to explain her opposition and she was clearly uncomfortable having to do so . One wonders if her opposition is heartfelt or merely a nod to her party’s religiously conservative wing.

The fact that whether homosexuality is viewed as morally acceptable or not does not necessarily go hand in hand with marriage equality is quite evident when looking at other countries.

Spain has marriage equality (6 percent believe homosexuality to be morally unacceptable); Italy does not (19 percent). Parts of Britain have marriage equality (17 percent); Australia does not (18 percent). Indeed, South Africa has had marriage equality (mandated by the country’s supreme court), and still 62 percent find homosexuality morally unacceptable.

Apart from marriage equality, these numbers could be an explanation for why it’s so easy to stir up anti-gay feelings in some countries such as Uganda. In Uganda, homosexuality (93 percent) trumps abortion (88 percent), extramarital affairs and gambling (80 percent each), premarital sex (77 percent), and divorce (76 percent) as the most morally unacceptable. Looking at some other African countries such as Kenya (88 percent) and Nigeria (85 percent), where this is also the case, it’s not at all surprising that politicians in some of these countries are using anti-gay laws in an apparent effort to redirect any animus away from them to a vulnerable minority.

That negative feelings about homosexuality don’t automatically have to lead to an anti-gay witch hunt is apparent when you look at the country where homosexuality is almost universally seen as morally unacceptable (98 percent): Ghana. Of the four countries (Uganda, Kenya, Nigeria and Ghana), Ghana is far and away the most democratic. While homosexual acts are still illegal there and it’s unlikely to change in the coming years, there don’t seem to be any measures on the horizon like those enacted in Uganda and Nigeria. Quite to the contrary, according to this report.

We learn something new from readers every day:

I enjoyed that link on the gynosome, but I think that your coverage of sexual orientation and biology focusing on things like bug penises miss issues about sexual orientation that genuinely fascinate biologists. The concept of “natural law” doesn’t really carry much weight with actual biologists, and it’s not all that surprising that there is an insect in which the female has a penis.

There are hundreds of species with these sorts of reproductive role reversals, including males who incubate eggs internally or even in their mouths, and in which female parental investment is limited. At this point, it’s almost trivial to point out that same-sex behavior and even same-sex parenting is common in nature, or that every possible variation on genitalia occurs somewhere in nature. Even in mammals, there are females with “penises.” Female hyenas have pseudo-penises bigger than those owned by males, and they swing their dicks with more élan and pride than the males do!

This is all entertaining, but it misses the deeper and more interesting question evolutionary biologists ask about homosexuality:

“Why does a trait that appears to reduce reproductive fitness persist?” There’s no moralizing about right or wrong in this question, just curiosity about how same-sex sexual attraction makes sense from the standpoint of natural selection, when it appears to lead to reduced reproduction on the part of those who have this trait. All of the unusual traits discussed above really do result in increased reproductive fitness. But same-sex sexual attraction itself? Now that’s a different and more interesting issue than the gender role differences and odd anatomy described above.

Biological speculation on this issue is based on a few assumptions. First, there is a strong indication that being gay is an inherent biological trait mediated by genes rather than a cultural variable or something that is socially constructed, given its apparent occurrence in roughly the same percentage across human populations at all times.

Second, it must not be maladaptive or it would not persist. I’d like to refer you to an older Scientific American blog post by a gay evolutionary biologist that outlines some of the thinking on this issue. I do hope you get a chance to read it, because one of my very few complaints about the Dish is that I wish you discussed science with more of the subtlety and depth of understanding with which you discuss faith.

(Image of a not-male hyena by Christine Drea)

Nate Cohn highlights the increasing political uniformity of Southern whites:

While white Southerners have been voting Republican for decades, the hugeness of the gap was new. Mr. Obama often lost more than 40 percent of Al Gore’s support among white voters south of the historically significant line of the Missouri Compromise. Two centuries later, Southern politics are deeply polarized along racial lines. It is no exaggeration to suggest that in these states the Democrats have become the party of African Americans and that the Republicans are the party of whites.

The collapse in Democratic support among white Southerners has been obscured by the rise of the Obama coalition. Higher black turnout allowed the Democrats to win nearly 44 percent of the vote in states like Mississippi, where 37 percent of voters were black. But the white shift is nearly as important to contemporary electoral politics as the Obama coalition. It represents an end, at least temporarily, to the South’s assimilation into the American political and cultural mainstream.

This all intensified under Obama. And none of this is really disputed. Those who see no racial aspect to this have to explain a huge fucking coincidence, do they not? Aaron Blake thinks black voters could decide who gets the Senate:

Six of the 16 states with the highest black populations are holding key Senate contests in 2014. A seventh — the most African American state in the country, Mississippi — is holding a contest that could get interesting if there’s a tea party upset in the GOP primary.

This is a highly unusual set of circumstances, especially when you consider that most states with large numbers of African American voters generally don’t hold competitive Senate races because they are safely red (in the South, generally) or blue (in the Northeast).

What’s more, black voters don’t just matter to a lot of races; they also matter to the most important races.