The Dish

You Are What You’re Named

Adam Alter offers an example of what he calls the “linguistic Heisenberg principle,” whereby naming something changes our perception of it:

People generally prefer not to think more than necessary, and they tend to prefer objects, people, products, and words that are simple to pronounce and understand. In 2006, my colleague Daniel Oppenheimer and I investigated the performance of hundreds of stocks immediately after they were listed on the financial markets between 1990 and 2004. We discovered that companies with simpler names that were easier to pronounce received a greater post-release bump than did companies with complex names. (I also wrote about this phenomenon for the New York Post.)

The effect was strongest during the first few days of trading, when investors had little information about the stock’s fundamentals and were more likely to be swayed by extraneous factors. (We also ran a series of additional analyses to rule out the possibility that the effect was driven by different naming trends across different industries, company sizes, or countries, and the possibility that successful stocks seem to have fluent names merely because they’re mentioned more often in the media.) Even stocks with pronounceable ticker codes (e.g., KAR)—the letter strings that investors use to refer to each stock—outperformed those with unpronounceable ticker codes (e.g., RDO) in the short run. An investor who placed a thousand dollars in the ten most fluently named stocks between 1990 and 2004 would have earned a fifteen-per-cent return after just one day of trading, whereas the same thousand dollars invested in the ten least fluently named stocks would have earned a return of only four percent.

What’s The End Game In Syria?

Hussein Ibish is actively hoping for “mission creep” in Syria in light of America’s new commitment of small arms:

For once, “mission creep” provides the hope of a successful outcome rather than a terrifying threat to a major foreign policy initiative. Typically, American hubris has meant overreaching, and “mission creep” has historically been synonymous with disaster. In this case, a new and uncharacteristic American risk-aversion has been crippling.

Crippling for whom? Not the US. Shadi Hamid figures Obama will have to up the ante soon:

The fact of the matter, and one the administration seems intent on eliding, is that the only way to help the rebels regain the advantage and force the Assad regime to make real concessions is with a credible threat of military intervention through airstrikes against regime assets and the establishment of no-fly and no-drive zones.

We’re told this is not Iraq – because it such a tiny intervention. Okay, then it’s Vietnam, in a country that is as chaotic as Iraq. Meanwhile, a new Pew poll released today shows that 70 percent of Americans are against intervention, though 41 percent of those opposed favor some form of humanitarian action:

The 20% of the public that favors arming anti-government groups in Syria also expresses concerns about the U.S. getting involved. More than half (56%) of those who favor arming rebels agree with the statement that U.S. military forces are too overcommitted to get involved in another conflict, and 55% agree that the opposition groups in Syria may be no better than the current government.

I’ve heard the ludicrous argument that the Obama surrender to the McCain-Clinton-Saudi position will somehow engineer a negotiated settlement with Assad. If anyone believes that, they need their head examined. The more you look at this, the more you realize that the only possible explanation for this is the president’s core weakness. No strategy; no end-game; and now, not even coherence.

“An Old Wound Which Must Be Healed”

That’s what Rouhani said today about the relationship between Iran and the United States. That old wound, one has to remember, really struck deep in 1953, when the CIA ousted Iran’s first democratically elected government, because it nationalized the Anglo-Persian oil company. Even then, Iran’s desire was to control its own energy supply. We know the rest of the story by now, however tone-deaf so many have become to the role of history in determining that country’s psyche and culture.

No, he did not signal a shift toward direct talks with the US, and offered no opening on the nuclear weaponry potential of the theocracy. But it truly was striking how conciliatory he was to the Sunni Saudi regime:

The priority of my government’s foreign policy will be to have excellent relations with all neighboring countries … We are not only neighbors but also brothers. Every year hundreds of thousands of Iranian pilgrims visit Mecca. We have many common points with Saudi Arabia.

And this is surely encouraging:

First, we are ready to increase transparency and clarify our measures within the international framework. Of course our activities are already transparent, but still we increase it. Second, we will increase the trust between Iran and the world.

Yes, I’m well aware that he is not Moussavi or Karoubi – but they also backed the nuclear program (as does the opposition as a whole). And to immediately knock down any hope for some engagement with Iran seems to me to be insulting the perseverance of ordinary Iranians. The fact of US-Iranian governmental distrust and even hatred is, in the face of that country’s great history and youthful energy, a true tragedy. Jon Snow, who was reporting from Tehran over the weekend, offers a succinct portrait of the country as he now sees it, particularly in relation to the Western stereotypes:

[B]eyond the bugs in hotel rooms, the arrests, and strange people taking photographs wherever you go, there is something continuously absorbing and intriguing about Iran that renders the paranoia it provokes entirely unbearable.

The country is spectacular, the people are approachable, friendly and remain westward-looking. Many are highly educated and skilled, and 6,000 years after the country began, they are still building. In short, they are people the west used to and should still do business with.

For all its faults, Iran remains a haven of peace, surrounded by wars in which the West is deeply involved, and set to become more so after Barack Obama announced his intention last week to arm the Syrian rebels. By midnight on Saturday the Chamran highway that leads to the centre of Tehran was sporting a noisy three-car-wide, five-mile queue of families desperate to join the celebrations.

Meanwhile, Golnaz Esfandiari rounds up a collection of recent statements by the newly-elected Rouhani, including, “Using the Internet, I must say, is one of my hobbies regardless of whether I need it.” Along those lines, there are reports that the video-chat services Skype and Oovoo have now been unblocked for the first time in many months, allowing Iranians in and outside of the country to once again speak more freely with each other.

We should have no illusions that Khamenei is still in charge. But in two consecutive elections, the Iranian people have reached out to the world. We can and should find a way to reach back. In my view, that means a pragmatic path toward seeking more and more transparency in return for a very gradual ratcheting down of sanctions. We may have to go one tiny step after another. But the Iranian people deserve a response that is more than cynical. Look at them these past few days or four years’ ago. How can one be cynical in the face of that?

Previous Dish coverage of the Iranian election here.

(Photo: Iranians supporters of moderate presidential candidate, Hassan Rowhani flash the sign of victory holding a portrait of him as they wait for the final results outside his campaign headquarter in downtown Tehran on June 15, 2013. By Behrouz Mehri/AFP/Getty Images)

A Criminal Factory

Brad Plumer spots new research suggesting that juvenile detention is counterproductive:

[T]o figure this out, Aizer and Doyle took a look at the juvenile court system in Chicago, Illinois. The researchers found that certain judges in the system were more likely to recommend detention than others — even for similar crimes. That is, it’s possible to identify stricter and more lenient judges. And, since youths were assigned to judges at random, this created a randomized trial of sorts.

What the researchers found was striking.

The kids who ended up incarcerated were 13 percentage points less likely to graduate high school and 22 percentage points more likely to end up back in prison as adults than the kids who went to court but were placed under, say, home monitoring instead. (This was after controlling for family background and so forth.) Juvenile detention appeared to be creating criminals, not stopping them.

The authors lay out a couple of reasons why this would be. Going to prison can obviously disrupt school and make it harder to get a job later on. But also, as other researchers have found, many people who end up behind bars end up making friends with other offenders and building “criminal capital.” Prison turns out to be excellent training for a life of crime.

Another troubling new report looks at sexual abuse in the country’s juvenile detention facilities:

Hundreds of teenagers are raped or sexually assaulted during their stays in the country’s juvenile detention facilities, and many of them are victimized repeatedly, according to a U.S. Department of Justice survey. The teens are most often assaulted by staff members working at the facilities, and fully 20 percent of those victimized by the men and women charged with protecting and counseling them said they had been violated on more than 10 occasions. …

The Justice Department survey—covering both secure juvenile detention facilities and group homes, the less restrictive settings into which troubled youngsters are often ordered—involved more than 8,500 boys and girls. In all, 1,720 of those surveyed reported being sexually assaulted. Allen Beck, the author of the report, said that the rates of staff-on-inmate abuse among juveniles are “about three times higher than what we find in the adult arena.”

But It Keeps Getting Worse …

I keep being told that the Christianist base of the GOP is calming down, they learned their lesson, they’re not that important, etc. Josh Barro said that in a recent Ask Anything. Ross and Reihan are always poo-pooing the notion. So why did everyone who’s anyone in the GOP turn up for Ralph Reed’s religion-fest last weekend? Rubio, Paul, Jeb, Ryan, to name four, along with the usual nutters. Even Rand Paul – the supposed libertarian – said that there was a “war on Christianity” being conducted by “liberal elites at home and across the world.” And Cain and Palin – two essentially ridiculous figures – are still taken seriously. Alleged sexual harasser Cain:

This train is running full speed down the tracks towards socialism and towards communism. Yes, I said it. Before we stop it and reverse it, we got to slow it down. That’s what we do in 2014.

The delusional fantasist Sarah Palin argued that the US was “becoming a totalitarian surveillance state.” Yep: totalitarian. And tomorrow, the House GOP will introduce the most restrictive anti-abortion bill proposed in a decade, after fetal-pain bills have been proliferating in the states. Marco Rubio recently argued that any attempt to address the issue of gay couples in immigration reform would mean it was over. The sheer contemptuous dismissal of any concern about the welfare of these human beings and citizens was striking.

I see no sign that Chris Christie isn’t right to seem to be sitting out 2016 in favor of 2020.

2012 was not a wake-up call. It was a snooze button.

Where They Met

I was reading about Chris Christie and Bill Clinton yukking it up at Clinton’s CGI event today, and stumbled upon this:

Mr. Christie and Mr. Clinton first met at the most recent wedding of Donald J. Trump, when Mr. Christie was United States attorney for New Jersey in the administration of then-President George W. Bush.

Look: I suppose I can understand why a rising Republican political star would think it might be smart politics to attend a big real estate mogul’s wedding. But a former president? And Trump? Every now and again, you get a reminder of how cheesy Bill Clinton always was and still is.

Hathos Alert

Gabe says, “There have been many phone conversations in many movies over the years, but it is widely agreed that this is the very best one”:

What’s A Bisexual Anyway? Ctd

A reader writes:

The only thing that surprised me about your reader’s letter (though it shouldn’t have) was that it came from a man. I have always believed, and almost all of my female friends agree, that women are, by their very nature, “bisexual” (unless they are gay), and that it is the rare woman who is 100% heterosexual. Women frequently have very intimate relationships with their female friends, and society generally does not think of those relationships as “sexual” ones. Yet, for most women, as studies generally show, intercourse and orgasm are not the most important aspects of sexual satisfaction. Rather, the emotional aspects of a relationship and the cuddling, holding, spooning aspect of physically intimacy with a partner are as important, if not more so. Couple that with the fact that the distance between a friendly hug and a sexual hug is not far, and the former can easily become the later.

To a large extent, I believe that the only reason that most women do not acknowledge their attractions to their girl friends or act on them is that it would be inconsistent with perceived notions of who we should and should not be attracted to, and a pervasive skepticism at the notion that someone can truly be sexually attracted to members of both genders.

Another:

I recently started using OK Cupid and I (as a 30-year-old straight guy) have been really surprised by the number of women who identify as bisexual. I don’t know what they mean by that, exactly, since it seems to mean different things to different people.

Another:

As a straight man with a bi daughter, it is my experience that both gays and straights are menaced politically by bisexuals. To gays, bisexuality is a threat to the absolutely-true-for-gays “born this way” argument which has been so successful in leveraging moves toward equality.

If there are really many bisexuals out there, many people who are born with a choice and ability to be with either sex, there’s a worry that the forces of oppression will use bisexuals’ ability to choose to cudgel gays and lesbians back into “choosing” to be straight. The activist question that gays ask of straights, “When did you choose to be straight?”, is only effective when straights don’t think they had a choice in how they express their sexuality. If lots of people realize they are partly bisexual, they’ll acknowledge increasingly that they DO have a choice, and maybe the fight for equality becomes harder as a result.

To straights, bisexuality is an even greater threat to the Manichean worldview that there are only two kinds of people in the world. The idea that maybe they could swing both ways is so terrifying that they have oppressed GLBT people for centuries to deny it. Yet the suspicion that maybe they ARE bisexual and CAN choose how they express their sexuality is why so many apparent straights have had a tough time buying the “born this way” argument for all its truth.

But if the Kinsey continuum of sexual orientation is an accurate descriptor of most people’s sexuality as I believe it is, leading to a realization that there are perhaps even MORE bisexuals in society than today’s survey indicates, then your need today to insist (while covering yourself with rhetorical caveats) that a lot of closeted gays and lesbians are only *saying* they’re bisexual will ultimately put you on the wrong side of history.

Another:

Like your reader, I’m sexually interested in both men and women. Though I haven’t a romantic relationship with a man, I wouldn’t rule it out. Unlike your reader, I identify as bisexual to friends, family, and partners. And it can be tough, especially in work or casual contexts, to balance the need for honest self-representation (most people assume I’ straight unless I clarify) with maintaining some level of privacy about my personal life.

I’m constantly asking myself: how close am I with these people? Have I become dishonest yet by not working in a declaration of my sexual orientation into the conversation? Does my boss need to know? My partner’s parents? The employees at the farm I volunteer at? And these are, for the most part, academic questions; I’m from an areligious family on the west coast, and the only person my coming out has ever, in my (blessed) experience, been a big deal to was me. I still struggle with these things, though it honestly feels like wasted energy a lot of the time.

Though I identify as bi (or queer if I’m talking to someone more familiar with the nitty gritty of current terminology), I know several men with sexual experiences similar to mine and your other reader who, looking at the sum of their sexual and romantic life, are quite comfortable identifying as straight. (What I haven’t ever encountered was a guy claiming to be bi, but apparently exclusively interested in men.) “Bisexual,” like most labels for human experience, is subject to interpretation. And like any other label, it is imperfect shorthand for the complexity and detail involved in the human experience.

I’m with your other reader: I just want to do who I want, marry who I want, and not get any shit for it. Fortunately, thanks to the struggles of an earlier generation, more of us have the opportunity to do just that.

Ask Fareed Zakaria Anything: Libya Was The Right Call

In the latest video from Fareed, he explains why he thinks Obama was right to intervene in Libya, and in a follow-up offers a hopeful progress report on the other Arab Spring nations:

Last week in Time, Fareed made his case for why the US should not get involved in Syria, including this distinction regarding the Libya intervention:

[U]nlike Libya, Syria is not a vast country with huge tracts of land where rebels can retreat, hide and be resupplied. Syria is roughly one-tenth the size of Libya but has three times as many people. Partly for this reason, the Syrian rebellion has not been able to take control of any significant part of the country. Nearly half of all Syrians live in or around two cities, Damascus and Aleppo, both of which seem to remain under the regime’s grip. Sporadic night attacks in other places recur, but they don’t expand.

Nor is it clear that the Syrian opposition is capable of unity. Popular opposition to Assad is neither broad-based nor organized. The Syrian National Council, the umbrella group of organized opposition, appears unable to unify behind a leader, agenda or set of goals. Rima Fleihan, a grassroots activist who escaped from Syria to organize the opposition, quit the council, telling the New York Times, “They fight more than they work.”

The geopolitics of military intervention is also unattractive. Whereas in Egypt and even Libya, all the major and regional powers were on the side of intervention or passively accepted it, in Syria that is not the case. Iran and Russia have both maintained strong ties to the Assad regime. Were the Western powers to intervene, it would quickly become a proxy struggle, with great-power-funded militias on both sides. That would likely result in a protracted civil war with civilian casualties that would dwarf the current numbers. To many observers the situation in Syria looks less like Libya and more like Lebanon, where a decades-long civil war resulted in over 150,000 deaths and a million displaced people.

Fareed also made the Lebanon connection in his Ask Anything answer on Syria. Fareed Zakaria GPS airs Sundays on CNN, as well as via podcast. Zakaria is also an Editor-at-Large of TIME Magazine, a Washington Post columnist, and the author of The Post-American World, The Future of Freedom, and From Wealth to Power: The Unusual Origins of America’s World Role. Our AA archive is here.