A Waking Dream

Rachel Feltman relays the findings of “the first [psilocybin] study to attempt to relate the behavioral effects to biological changes”:

According to a study published [Thursday] in Human Brain Mapping, the mushroom Psilocybin_27febcompounds could be unlocking brain states usually only experienced when we dream, changes in activity that could help unlock permanent shifts in perspective. … In fact, administration of the drug just before or during sleep seemed to promote higher activity levels during Rapid Eye Movement sleep, when dreams occur. An intriguing finding, [study co-author Robin] Carhart-Harris says, given that people tend to describe their experience on psychedelic drugs as being like “a waking dream.” It seems that the brain may literally be slipping into unconscious patterns while the user is awake.

Carhart-Harris elaborates on his findings:

While the psychedelic state has been previously compared with dreaming, the opposite effect has been observed in the brain network from which we get our sense of “self” (called the default-mode network or ego-system). Put simply, while activity became “louder” in the emotion system, it became more disjointed and so “quieter” in the ego system.

Evidence from this study, and also preliminary data from an ongoing brain imaging study with LSD, appear to support the principle that the psychedelic state rests on disorganised activity in the ego system permitting disinhibited activity in the emotion system. And such an effect may explain why psychedelics have been considered useful facilitators of certain forms of psychotherapy.

In other words, the sense of self and selfishness that we deploy routinely in our practical and daily lives can be attenuated with psiloybin. Feelings of empathy, connectedness, and calm take their place. It’s not permanent, but merely seeing the world from this mountaintop can change your perspective in the foothills and valleys of ordinary existence. It is not for nothing that psilocybin’s effects have often been very similar to those of long-term intensive meditation and prayer. The Dish, for these reasons, has extensively covered the therapeutic and spiritual benefits of psilocybin over the years. But over at Patheos, Gene Veith looks at the new study with a jaundiced eye:

[It’s] is being hailed as revealing positive benefits. What interests me is what the scientists Fresh Colombian magic mushrooms legally on sale in Camden market London June 2005and the media consider to be beneficial.  The active ingredient in the mushrooms makes people more emotional, puts them in a continual dream-like state, turns down their higher cognitive abilities (that is, makes them less rational), and dissolves their ego, making them less “narrow-minded.” Note that in our postmodern culture, such assaults on the mind are all considered good things!

An assault on the mind! It is rather its fuller and deeper opening up away from “the deadliness of doing.” Or, as Carhart-Harris puts it, it “increases the breadth and fluency of cognition” rather than stunting it. It is what the mind, properly understood, was made for.

(Photo: Fresh Colombian magic mushrooms. By Photofusion/Universal Images Group via Getty Images. GIF of the psilocybin compound via Wiki.)

The Revenge Doctrine

The situation in Israel and Palestine continues to escalate, with Israel going all-in on its latest offensive in Gaza to quell renewed Hamas rocket fire:

The Israeli military announced the call-up of 1,500 reservists and the deployment of two infantry brigades along the Gaza Strip. Convoys of trucks carrying Israeli tanks and armored personnel carriers were seen on the highway headed south Tuesday. … Over the last 24 hours, Hamas and other anti-Israel militant groups in Gaza have fired more than 100 mortar rounds and rocket shells at Israel. More than a dozen were intercepted by Israel’s U.S.-supported Iron Dome missile-defense batteries, but many others fell on Israeli soil. Most of the rockets landed in open fields, but some hit structures.

Yishai Schwartz remarks that the torture-murder of Muhammad Abu Khdeir by alleged Jewish extremists last week is a symptom of a growing pathology in Israeli society:

[I]deas have power, and it would also be a mistake to write these murders off as the insane acts of deranged lone wolves. The perpetrators were deranged, but they were not alone. The same pathologies that animated Kahane’s followers and that Wieseltier identified decades ago have not disappeared. Radical nationalism, militant millenarianism, and social resentment—often tinged with the fundamentalism of religious dogma—are all too alive in Israel’s underclass. And after years of steady Palestinian violence and rejection, too many in Israel shrug off the rhetoric of its own racists as regrettable, but understandable. …

It’s that resignation in the face of racism that scares me, and partly that’s because it comes from a place I understand. There is something beautiful about the belief that because we are Jews, racist rhetoric will never lead to brutal murder. And there is beauty to the genuine shock—not just horror, but surprise—when it does.

Do you remember when American newscasters and presidents could still honestly declare themselves “shocked” and “unsettled” by mass shootings and school violence? In retrospect, that shock was a beautiful thing. But in the United States, those days are gone. We have grown accustomed to domestic mass shooting. And I fear that a similar thing is happening here in Israel—that this will be the last time that an Israeli defense minister can seem genuinely shaken by the reality of Jewish terror.

Dershowitz remains optimistic that Israel will bring Abu Khdeir’s killers to justice:

I believe the Israeli legal system will be fair, or perhaps even bend over backwards, when it comes to the brutal murderers of Khdeir. Criminal trials in Israel do not involve juries. Accused criminals are tried by professional judges, who are in general selected on a non-partisan basis. Verdicts and sentences are less likely to be influenced by popular opinion than in the United States, where judges are either elected or politically appointed, and where jurors are supposed to reflect the views of the people.

Even if some Israelis might have more sympathy for Jews who killed a Palestinian than for Palestinians who killed Jews, that sort of public bias will have little impact on the trial of those accused of killing Khdeir. The age of the defendants, however, might. There are reports that some may be minors, and Israeli law does take account of the age of accused criminals. But older vigilantes may well be involved as well, either in planning, inciting or protecting the actual killers. The investigation is ongoing and will not stop until everyone who has played a culpable role in the murder is apprehended and brought to justice.

But Saletan has his doubts about Netanyahu’s pledge to treat Abu Khdeir’s murder the same as other acts of terrorism:

It’s not just Netanyahu who has pledged that Khdeir’s killers “will face the full weight of the law.” Naftali Bennett, Israel’s economy minister, says he and his right-wing supporters “will demand the Terrorist Law we put forward be applied to the boy’s killers.” Defense Minister Moshe Ya’alon says the killers “should be treated as terrorists.” Khdeir’s parents point out that there’s a simple way to make good on these promises. “Destroy their houses just like [Israel] destroyed the houses of the suspects in Hebron,” says the boy’s father. “Demolish their houses and give them life sentences,” says his mother.

Some Israelis are already concocting excuses for not applying the policy to Jews. Almagor, a 28-year-old organization that claims to speak “for terror victims’ rights,” says in its mission statement that every victim “is entitled to justice: punishment of the criminal, the psychological closure that comes with punishment, laying down the law in its full force.” But on Monday, in a letter to the Israeli government and members of parliament, the group’s director pleaded that while “we need to deter Palestinian terrorists by destroying houses and exiling their families,” Jews don’t need to be treated this way, because they seldom kill.

The Challenge Of Reform Conservatism

This blog has long been generally supportive of the attempt by a handful of sane and intelligent conservative thinkers to brainstorm some kind of future for the American right. And who wouldn’t be? If the alternative is the brain dead 1979 redux position of someone like Kimberley Strassel, you gotta love Ross Douthat. But it strikes me there are deep challenges for this fledgling group of now Tanenhaus-blessed scholars, and they may be hard to overcome.

The first is the lack of any clear unifying theme or rallying cry that can meld policy to politics. “Reform” seems too vague and goo-goo a thatcherreagan.jpgtheme to catch on. On the core axis of more or less government, the reformicons rightly answer smaller, better government – but the “better” part always ends up a little duller than “smaller”. A child tax credit may or may not be a decent idea – but it’s very hard to fit it into the broader tradition of less government dependency. Ditto attempts to alleviate student debt, or to encourage the hiring of the long-term unemployed, or the block granting of anti-poverty funds to the states. All of them are hard to do when you demonize government itself as regularly as the Republican rank and file.

Perhaps the best scenario for a raft of such small, but potent policy proposals would be a Republican version of the Clinton administration – which bored the pants off ideologues but still connected with the tangible needs and concerns of most people. Alas, it’s hard to imagine a Clintonism of the right without a Clinton. It was Bill’s astonishing charm, loquaciousness, relentlessness and seduction that made these tedious laundry lists so popular. I do not see any such charismatic figure with such a direct and personal grasp of so many policy issues on the right. Maybe he or she will show up as a charismatic and brilliant governor. Or maybe not. If Ted Cruz is the new archetype of a Republican, never.

Within British conservatism, there are, in contrast, two competing traditions – Whig and Tory – that mitigate this problem. The Whiggish triumviratetimsloangetty.jpgfaction had its high watermark under Thatcher, a conservative who embraced market liberalism as the best foil to socialism. But the Tory faction never disappeared completely. Its rallying cry – and historical legacy – is “One Nation” Toryism, rooted in Disraeli’s conservative embrace of the working classes, and abhorrence at the vast social and economic inequalities of his time. It has no problem at all with government and its benefits. This would be a natural and identifiable tradition to embrace in Britain for a set of reformers like the Levin brigade. In America? No Disraeli ever existed – and no Bismarck either. Eisenhower may be the best analogue. And re-introducing Eisenhower to the next generation is a pretty heavy lift. The trouble with American conservatism is that it is, in essence, so new, and so wedded to a particular era, that it doesn’t have the depth and reach of a European conservatism that can provide a leader like Angela Merkel.

And then the reformicons are operating at a disadvantage in a culturally polarized America. It would be great if this were not the case – but since a huge amount of both parties’ base mobilization requires intensifying the cultural conflict, and since the divide is rooted in real responses to changing mores, it will likely endure. And that kind of climate makes pragmatic conservatism again less likely to get a hearing.

So, for example, I’m perfectly open to new ideas on, say, helping working class families with kids. But some pretty basic concerns about the current GOP on cultural issues – its open hostility to my own civil marriage, its absolutism on abortion, its panic at immigration, its tone-deafness on racial injustice – push me, and many others, into leaning Democrat for a while. And it’s important to note that even the reformicons are die-hard cultural and religious conservatives in most respects. On those questions, there is no airing of the idea of reform. mccameronbrunovincentgetty.jpgDavid Cameron’s post-Thatcher re-tooling of British conservatism took at least two major issues associated with the left-of-center – marriage equality and climate change – and embraced them fully. If the reformicons could do something like that, they would begin to gain traction outside of a few circles in DC and in the country at large. But they won’t; and, given the rigidity of the GOP base on those issues, can’t.

Then there’s the absence of any foreign policy vision. The fixation on domestic policy is welcome – but the greatest disaster in Republican government in the last decade was the Iraq War, and, more broadly, the massive over-reach of big government in trying to re-make the world into a democratic wonderland. To some extent, Rand Paul and Mike Lee have shown an ability to tackle this question – and favor a serious continuation of Obama’s de-leveraging of the US abroad, along with a further dismantling of the Cheney infrastructure for the war on terror. But the reformicons have never issued a clear rejection of Cheneyism, and indeed seem, f0r the most part, like unreconstructed neocons abroad. I can’t see any of them demanding some concessions from Israel for a two-state solution, for example, or any policy toward Iran but war. But they’re mainly silent on these burke.jpgquestions – which also marginalizes them. The most important Republican debate, it seems to me, is about the role of the US in the world in the 21st Century. Hegemon? Democratizer? Or simply great power? On this, the reformicons are silent. Their predecessors in the debates of the 1970s weren’t.

But maybe I’m being too glum. There are always unforeseen events to alter the future. Reagan’s 1980 victory was not seen until a few weeks before the November election. It’s certainly possible, although unlikely, that a Republican could win the presidency in 2016. But what I’d look for in the meantime in the reformicon future is what contribution they could make in the last two years of the Obama presidency. If the GOP controls both Houses, the country might look to them for some legislative action that the president could sign onto. If the country sees signs of actual policy progress, affecting their actual lives, thanks to reform conservative ideas and a pragmatic liberal president, then the atmosphere could change. Alas, I see the likelihood of that, in our current context, and in the run-up to 2016, to be close to impossible. It may take another epic national defeat for the GOP to take the reformers seriously. It took three consecutive lost national elections for the Tories to find Cameron. And part of me thinks that the best hope for the reformicons in the long run will be a Hillary Clinton victory in 2016.

I wonder how many of them, as they go to sleep at night, have quietly agreed with that.

If You Can Make It There, You’re Probably Rich Or Shady, Or Both

Jim Epstein contends that New York’s “affordable housing” mostly benefits the rich:

In May, New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio (D) unveiled a plan to build 80,000 new affordable housing units, “marshaling every corner of government and the private sector,” he boasted, “in an unprecedented response” to the city’s “crisis of affordability.” De Blasio, who ran on a promise to reduce inequality, is now enabling upper middle class New Yorkers to tap into these subsidies to serve their housing needs. In a city in which one in five households lives below the poverty line, spending limited government dollars so professionals earning six figures don’t have to leave their favored neighborhoods is obscene.

Take Manhattan’s 606 West 57th Street, a 1,025-unit building to be put up by developer TF Cornerstone. In exchange for setting aside 220 of those apartments for “lower income” tenants, the developer will get a local real estate tax exemption, tax-exempt financing, Low Income Housing Tax Credits (in which banks kick in equity in exchange for a tax rebate), and permission to build a larger building than the zoning Council code would otherwise allow. The kicker is that some of these “lower income” families are wealthy by most standards. The 220 affordable apartments will be split up among households of four earning no less than $50,300 and no more than $193,000 per year – or nearly four times New York City’s median household income, which was $50,895 in 2012.

Meanwhile, Michael Hudson, Ionuț Stănescu and Sam Adler-Bell report on questionable NYC real estate deals:

Since 2008, roughly 30 percent of condo sales in pricey Manhattan developments have been to buyers who listed an international address – most from China, Russia and Latin America—or bought in the name of a corporate entity, a maneuver often employed by foreign purchasers. Because many buyers go to great lengths to hide their interests in New York properties, it’s impossible to put a number on the proportion laundering ill-gotten gains. But according to money-laundering experts as well as court documents and secret offshore records reviewed by the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists, New York real estate has become a magnet for dirty money.

Andrew Rice elaborates:

[W]hile New York real estate has significant drawbacks as an asset – it’s illiquid and costly to manage – it has a major selling point in its relative opacity. With a little creative corporate structuring, the ownership of a New York property can be made as untraceable as a numbered bank account. And that makes the city an island haven for those who want to stash cash in an increasingly monitored global financial system. “With everything that is going on in Switzerland in terms of transparency, people are being forced to pay taxes on their capital that they used to hold there,” says Rodrigo Nino, the president of the Prodigy Network. “Real estate is a great alternative.”

Those on the New York end of the transaction often don’t know – or don’t care to find out – the exact derivation of foreign money involved in these transactions. “Sometimes they come in with wires,” says [broker] Luigi Rosabianca. “Sometimes they come in with suitcases.” Most of the time, the motivation behind this movement of cash, and buyers’ desire for privacy, is legitimate, but sometimes it’s not. … “It’s something that is never discussed, but it’s the elephant in the room,” says Rosabianca. “Real estate is a wonderful way to cleanse money.”

Americans And Danes Agree On Welfare

Aaroe-Fig-1

In fact, their views are almost identical, a recent study suggests, as long as you tell them whether the recipient in question is “unlucky” or “lazy”:

When modern individuals – Americans and Danes alike – form opinions on who deserves welfare in mass society, they do so using the same psychology that has guided help-giving decisions for millenniums: they watch out for cheaters and seek to help reciprocators.  The key question guiding our intuitions about recipient deservingness is: Is this a person who is motivated to give something back to me and society? These psychological systems designed for cheater-detection and decision-making about reciprocity crowd out cultural learning and a lifetime of exposure to different welfare state cultures. Therefore, when provided with direct information about the motivation and the circumstances of the social welfare recipients, just two sentences of information can make Danes and American become substantially and statistically indistinguishable in their social welfare opinions.

Squeaky-Clean Energy

Michael Grunwald fears that efforts to avoid another failure like Solyndra will make the government too cautious:

So far, the [clean energy] loan program has only burned through about $800 million of its $10 billion in reserves. Mitt Romney suggested during a debate with President Obama that half of its loans had failed; in fact, more than 95 percent are performing fine. That’s a record most private portfolio managers would envy, and it’s especially remarkable for a program that’s supposed to focus on innovative projects that private financiers won’t bankroll without government help. The goal was to help push promising green technologies across the so-called “Valley of Death,” and it seems to be working. Now that a bunch of huge solar projects have been built with government help, a bunch of copycat projects are under construction with purely private financing. They’ll benefit from the lessons learned in the initial round.

… it would be a shame if Solyndraphobia drove the Energy Department towards overly safe projects that don’t need government help. We don’t need an energy version of the Export-Import Bank, offering slightly cheaper financing to borrowers with no plausible risk of default. The loan program’s main goal should be facilitating disruptive projects in order to reduce our dependence on fossil fuels, not avoiding failure in order to make sure taxpayers recoup every dollar. The Ex-Im Bank’s repayment rate is 99.7 percent; that means it’s very unlikely to have a Solyndra problem, and equally unlikely to accomplish anything useful.

The Guilty Gamer

New research suggests that violent videogames make players more “morally sensitive” by causing them to regret their own behaviors:

“This may, as it does in real life, provoke players to engage in voluntary behavior that benefits others,” notes lead author Matthew Grizzard [of the University of Buffalo] in a summary of the study, which is published (behind a paywall) in the journal Cyberpsychology, Behavior and Social Networking. So, the suggestion is that not only is amoral in-game activity harmless, it might also be beneficial to society.

This conclusion rests on previous findings within sociology/social psychology that when humans feel guilt about some real-world behavior (or lab-simulated real-world behavior, rather) they will convert that feeling into actual prosocial behavior. A quick survey reveals a 2003 New Mexico State University study finding that feelings of guilt could be used to push real-world cooperation, suggesting that guilt may be used as “‘information’ about the future costs of uncooperative strategy.”

Related Dish on torture in videogames here.

Cracking The Human Code

Matt Quirk chats with Matt Yglesias about his recent novel, The Directive, which involves breaking into the Fed. The premise:

[T]he idea is that, rather than a heist relying on brute force like blowing up the safe, or stealth like doing gymnastics through a laser field, you get in by abusing people’s trust. When I planned out the book, I actually talked to the red teams that work for government facilities to try to break into them, and most of their techniques are based on social engineering and getting people to trust them and let them in.

It could be something as simple as having two cups of coffee — like when I went into the elevator at Vox’s office, somebody saw I was busy and they just swiped me in because I look like I belong here. Another famous one is the smokers’ door. If you get to the smokers’ door before the smokers come out and you seem like you belong there, they’ll let you back in the building because people are very reluctant to challenge people.

To beat social engineering, you would have to challenge everyone, which just isn’t in our makeup. It works at the Pentagon, they have guys with podiums everywhere whose job is to challenge people. But otherwise if you turned around and slammed the door in someone’s face and said, “swipe in,” you would seem so rude, and that’s just so against human nature. That’s the trait that these guys use to break into places.

Yemeni Apparel

Yemeni women line-up outside a polling s

Responding to a recent post on Boushra Almutawakel’s “Mother, Daughter, Doll” photo series, a reader reminisces about mid-century Yemeni fashions:

I spent one of the best parts of my childhood living in Yemen in the early- to mid- 1960s, where my father worked at the US Consulate in Taiz. We had the opportunity to mingle in the streets, to shop at the souq (albeit with a guide/male domestic worker who negotiated with the vendors) and to see how Yemenis dressed. Yemeni women did not wear the hijab much at that time – the Yemeni counterpart, called a sharshaf, was generally made of lively colorful printed fabric, and many women did not cover their faces. A number of women wore colorfully embroidered dresses with a head scarf. Yemeni fabrics and clothing were exuberantly colorful, and while I couldn’t know the level of pressure within Yemeni society to conform to modesty requirements, it didn’t appear that there was an expectation that women should be made invisible. (From my Western eyes it did seem very puritanical, but I’d spent the prior two years living in Beirut, where Lebanese women wore bikinis on the beach.)

I’ve since learned from tourists who’ve visited Yemen that there’s now a great deal of pressure to completely cover not only women, but pre-pubertal girls, who in the past were not expected to dress more than modestly. It’s also sad to learn that the famous Yemeni textile industry has gone extinct, as fabrics and retail clothes now come almost exclusively from China. Compared with the problems of poverty, gender inequality and child marriage that Yemeni women and girls must deal with, fashions and textiles are much less important, but there’s no question that their oppression is reflected in their clothing.

(Photo: Yemeni women line-up outside a polling station to cast their vote in the presidential election in Sanaa on February 21, 2012 that brings an end to President Ali Abdullah Saleh’s 33-year hardline rule in Yemen. By Mohammed Huwais/AFP/Getty Images)

The Shocking Truth, Ctd

Recent research into solitary thinking found that a significant percentage of subjects preferred to suffer an electric shock rather than be alone with their thoughts. In a follow-up, Tom Jacobs notes that men were disproportionately likely to give themselves a jolt when faced with boredom:

Amazingly, 67 percent of the men – that is, 12 of 18 – gave themselves at least one shock during this period of thought and reflection. Only 25 percent of the women self-administered the jolt – still a high number when you consider there is physical discomfort involved. “The gender difference is probably due to the tendency of men to be higher in sensation-seeking,” the researchers write.

Meanwhile, Lauren Hitchings gives critics of the study a fair hearing:

[T]he results may have been partly down to the artificial set up. For a start, the very nature of letting your mind wander is that it drifts off on its own. Sitting in an experimental setting with an electric-shock generator might not be a fair representation. The set-up, especially the fact that participants were told to sit still, may have made people feel distracted and uncomfortable, says Jonathan Schooler, who studies the wandering mind at the University of California in Santa Barbara. But he does think there is a need to better understand those people who didn’t struggle with the task. After all, much has been made of the benefits of allowing the mind to wander – for instance, it can help to generate creative insights.

John Timmer zooms out:

[T]he results may indicate that, although we complain that we’re persecuted by things like smartphones and the constant barrage of e-mail, we actually may relish the distractions they bring. And, in terms of even broader perspectives, the study brings to mind a quote from Blaise Pascal: “All human evil comes from a single cause, man’s inability to sit still in a room.”