When Do Scandals Actually Sink A Politician?

Seth Masket reviews many studies on the question:

Your allies may be quick to abandon you during a scandal if you’re expendable (think John Edwards), but if you’re, say, the president, they may be more likely to rally to your side. Scandals may also be more damaging for black candidates (PDF) than for white ones.

Additionally, scandals may be more likely to emerge when the opposition party has a lower opinion of the incumbent and when it’s a slow news week (PDF). Voters think worse of scandals involving financial problems than they do of sex scandals, especially when abuse of power is involved. They are also quicker to forgive (or forget) sex scandals than financial ones (PDF).

The studies all seem to confirm the idea that scandals are serious and do exact a price from politician’s careers. Yet a lot of this research remains plagued by selection bias. That is, scandals may be more likely to emerge among the better candidates or more powerful officeholders. This isn’t because better politicians are more likely to cheat on their spouses (although that would be interesting!), but because no one’s going to bother to research and dig up scandals against a politician whose career isn’t going anywhere.

3D Printing Is Building Itself Up

Reason checks in on the growing 3D printing industry:

The latest breakthrough:

For the first time ever, scientists have 3D printed a cancer tumor in order to study how to kill it.

Growing cancer cells in a laboratory is nothing new—it’s often how new drugs are tested before they hit clinical trials. But those cultures are grown on petri dishes, where they’re unable to become actual “tumors” and are instead simply sheets of 2D cells. That means that a drug might work on cancer cells in a lab, but once it’s tested on an actual tumor, the three dimensional structure of it can throw in some added kinks that makes it ineffective. Wei Sun of Drexel University saw that the 3D printing of living cells has improved enough to make printing of actual tumors a viable possibility.

In other 3D printing news, Staples is hoping to bring the technology to the general public:

The office supply retailer began offering 3D printing services in two stores on Thursday, one in New York and another in Los Angeles. Anyone can walk in and have Staples crank out a tchotchke—or 1,000 of them—while reveling in the glory of the 3D printing revolution without spending thousands on an actual printer. If the pilot takes off, Staples (SPLS) says it will expand 3D printing services to more stores.

Sex, Lies, and Text Messages

A new study reveals that people often lie while exchanging sexy texts with their significant others:

“Deception during sexting with committed relationship partners appears to be fairly common,” writes a research team led by Michelle Drouin of Indiana University-Purdue University Fort Wayne. Its study is published in the journal Computers in Human Behavior.

Of the 155 participants (average age just under 22), 109 reported they had sent a sexually explicit text message. Among that group, 48 percent admitted lying during sexting with a committed partner. Specifically, 20 percent said they had lied about either what they were wearing or what they were doing, while 28 percent had lied about both. Women were the more frequent liars, texting untruths far more often than men.

Katy Waldman compares these findings to our deceptions in real sex:

Of course, we all lie in person too—is a fake sext any different from a fake orgasm?

As a medium, sexting feels peculiarly suited to a more benign type of fabrication (also known as storytelling): It aims to construct a shared fantasy of togetherness with someone who is not physically present. “Wildly imaginative leaps are possible,” writes Maureen O’Connor in her excellent deep dive into the genre. The simulated “self of sexting can be markedly different from the self who actually has sex,” and isn’t that kind of the point.

O’Connor also notes that “55 percent of women and 48 percent of men have engaged in ‘consensual but unwanted sexting,’ i.e., sexting when they’re not that into it.” These could be the bored people who lie. However, at least for women, the statistics on ‘consensual but unwanted’ regular sex look the same: 55 percent of women have done it (compared to 26 percent of men). Since rote erotic acts seem pretty frequent, perhaps our lies do hint at disengagement from the person at the other end of the line, or on the other side of the bed. But in this case, as in so many others, the technology seems to be abetting a natural human impulse, not rewiring our brains.

The Dish has covered the sexting phenomenon extensively, most recently here and here.

When The Cover Is The Story

Jill Filipovic suggests that the Rolling Stone gaffe that has fact-checkers around the world snickering shows just how much magazine covers still matter:

Some of us still buy print magazines, but ever more of us are reading the articles on tablets or laptops instead. And the volume of accessible content online far exceeds that at your local newsstand or grocery store checkout. And yet, despite such an enormous quantity of high-quality, cover-worthy imagery, the photos on the covers we can actually hold in our hands are what become online content fodder.

That scarcity may actually be the point. There’s not a widely read website in Internet-town that keeps the same photo on the front page for more than a day, let alone a week or a month. Magazine real estate may be rendered more valuable by virtue of the fact that it’s more permanent – if you have a hard copy of a magazine you can store it away without the fear that you might go to read it one day and find an “Error: Page Unknown” message. And although fewer people may purchase a copy of Rolling Stone over the course of a month than click over to the homepage of a popular website, the eyes on a magazine cover may be more valuable than those on a quickly changing web page.

Even if you only look at magazine covers while waiting to check out at Walgreens or getting your nails done, your eyes are settling on a small handful of options, making each of them resonate more strongly than the hundreds of pictures in your 15 open browser tabs.

By the way, Julia Louis-Dreyfus set the record straight via Twitter:

What The Hell Just Happened In Nigeria?

The Nigerian terrorist group Boko Haram kidnapped some 100 teenage girls from a government school in the northeastern state of Borno on Monday. Zack Beauchamp expects the group to hold the girls for ransom:

“Their goal is almost certainly to ransom [the girls],” Daveed Gartenstein-Ross, a senior fellow at the Foundation of the Defense of Democracies who follows Boko Haram, told me. ”Otherwise, they have chosen a target that will make everybody hate them. Killing [100] schoolgirls would be a huge PR hit even for some of the rougher jihadist groups.”

Boko Haram has been known to kidnap for money. Since the group launched a full-on uprising against the Nigerian government in 2012, it has kidnapped a number of foreigners in order to raise funds to continue the struggle.

Nigerians in Borno province, which is both the location of the school and Boko Haram’s base of operations, aren’t as wealthy as the foreigners that the group might normally kidnap. But kidnappings aren’t always about money. “Ransom can be for any number of things, including ransoming for a prisoner exchange,” Gartenstein-Ross says. Nigeria has captured many Boko Haram fighters during the ongoing conflict. In response, the group has both attacked prisons and demanded prisoner releases as part of ransoms before.

Walter Russell Mead is more pessimistic:

Boko Haram, which is believed to have camps in the hilly forests surrounding Chibok near the border with Cameroon, have used kidnapped girls in the past as sex slaves and laborers. All of this happened the same day that a bomb blast, also blamed on the Islamist group, killed 75 people at a bus station outside the capital Abuja.

Despite a much touted government military offensive that was launched against the militants in October, the threat from Boko Haram is growing. Abuja, which in three weeks is set to host the World Economic Forum on Africa (called the “African Davos”), is hundreds of miles away from the state of Borno, where the kidnappings took place. That Boko Haram might be able to conduct two highly-coordinated attacks against Nigerian civilians on the same day, in two locations far apart, will not be any comfort to President Goodluck Jonathan and the people he is charged with protecting.

Meanwhile, John Campbell wishes American journalists would pay as much attention to the unrest in Nigeria as they do to the situation in Ukraine:

It takes horrific violence in the capital city, Abuja, to generate US coverage on Nigeria. In the US as in southern Nigeria, the carnage receives little to no attention – no matter how great it is – so long as it is far away in the northeast. The “Giant of Africa” and until recently Washington’s most important strategic partner in Africa and a major source of imported oil and gas, Nigeria is largely ignored by the U.S. media, beyond occasionally boosterish articles on the business pages that focus on the Lagos-Ibadan corridor and the country’s oil patch. While the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal are honorable exceptions and have previously broken stories of gross human rights violations by the government security forces U.S. media inattention to Nigeria seems short-sighted and unwise.

A Victory For Transgender Indians

Transgenders Welcome SC Verdict, Recognizing Transgenders As Third Gender

In a landmark ruling yesterday, India’s Supreme Court decided that transgender individuals need no longer identify themselves as “male” or “female” on official documents. The court also called for an expansion of rights:

Hijras are deprived of jobs, education and health care; turned away at hospitals, limited by the practice of male and female wards. India had taken steps to ensure their recognition when India’s Election Commission earlier allowed a third gender of “other” on voter registration forms for the national elections now taking place.

But the Supreme Court on Tuesday expressed concern over transgenders being harassed in society and said “it was the right of every human being to choose their gender.” It directed the government to bring them into the mainstream, ordering it to set aside quotas for jobs and education for transgender individuals, bringing them in line with the benefits already afforded other minority groups and lower castes. The court said hijras will be entitled to “all other rights,” including passports, voter cards and driving licenses.

Rama Lakshmi explains how to square this ruling with the decision the court handed down in December, reinstating a colonial-era law criminalizing homosexuality:

In many ways, expanding the rights to transgendered people is far easier than legalizing homosexuality in India. For centuries, eunuchs – called hijras in Hindi — were given a special place in Indian religious epics and parables.

“Granting rights to transgenders is more acceptable to our psyche because we find many transgender characters in our religious, cultural mythologies and literature. Some of our Hindu Gods were of third-gender, some Gods changed their gender seamlessly to perform specific roles and rituals,” said Rose Venkatesan, who transitioned from being a man to a woman four years ago and is a former television host and an independent filmmaker in the southern city of Chennai. “There are temples and annual religious festivals for the transgender community.”

But in modern times, the eunuch community has lived in closed and segregated communes, either feared or reviled by their neighbors. In cities, it is not uncommon for eunuchs to show up at wedding parties and celebrations of the birth of a child wearing vibrant clothing and singing and dancing, clapping their hands aggressively and demanding money in return for blessing.

(Photo: Transgender Indians express their happiness with victory signs after the Supreme Court verdict in which it granted recognition to transgender people as a third category of gender in New Delhi, India on April 15, 2014. By Raj K Raj/Hindustan Times via Getty Images)

Moore Award Nominee

“It seems the height of privilege blindness to schoolmarm gays about how to engage their aggressors when Friedersdorf, in point of fact, has no idea what omnipresent psychological torture feels like… I realize I’m coming down rather hard on an ally here, but as an ally, Friedersdorf and those like him need to recognize that their first responsibility is to listen, not to dictate,” – J Bryan Lowder, doubling down on his view that all opponents of marriage equality should shut up and be denied high-profile jobs and endorsing “a little retributive succor, when we can.”

I’d say there are two premises in there that are ludicrous over-reach. All gay people live in a world of “omnipresent psychological torture”? No straight person has any right to an incorrect opinion on this question, and deserve to be written out of the discourse. Unsurprisingly, Lowder then refers to our astonishing progress over the last couple of decades as a “recent miracle.” Miracle? It sure wasn’t that. It was the result of adhering to the norms of open debate, liberal argument in making our case – precisely the approach Lowder thinks is repellent.

Let’s just say that if we had followed Lowder’s illiberal advice, there would be no marriage equality in America and a hell of a lot more “omnipresent psychological torture.”

How Do Ukrainians Feel About All This?

Leonid Ragozin explains why many Ukrainians are disillusioned with both Kiev and Moscow:

Southeast Ukraine may be the world’s most difficult and unwelcoming environment for fomenting a genuine protest—stability tops the list of local values and priorities. Many local residents admire Putin for bringing that to Russia, but what he is now peddling in Ukraine is instability, and that’s a very tough sell. 

Russia’s efforts are getting increasingly counterproductive. In fact, Putin has become the single biggest force helping to patch up the split between Ukraine’s nationalist west and Russophone east. While the West and many Ukrainian politicians continue to alienate Ukrainian Russophones by treating them as if they are an unfortunate historical error, Putin did more than all of them combined to awake many in Ukraine’s east to the fact that their country, however imperfect, is a better place for a Russian speaker than Russia proper is. A recent poll show that a majority of people in Ukraine’s Russophone regions don’t support separation.

Akos Lada and Maria Snegovaya note that the divide between supporters and opponents of the Euromaidan revolution “is becoming more generational than regional”:

Younger (and better-educated) Ukrainians across all the regions of Ukraine are Western-oriented, support democracy and pro-Western development. As to their attitudes toward Euromaidan, the pattern is such that the older a person is, the more he or she supported the Viktor Yanukovich government and opposed the protesters[.] … Strikingly, the generational change would almost entirely eliminate any existing regional divide in Ukraine in about 10 years if Russia did not intervene – according to the estimates of Evgeny Golovaha, a Professor at the Institute of Sociology of NAS of Ukraine. This is similar to the pattern of convergence described by Alesina et al. in “Goodbye Lenin or not” for Western and Eastern Germany. Overall, Ukrainians are not only turning to the West but making a different civilizational choice, where democracy comes in a package with different political values.

Christian Caryl relays what people in Odessa, another strategically important Russophone city, are saying:

There are, undoubtedly, many Odessans who might welcome rule from Moscow. One hears little Ukrainian spoken on the streets; it’s estimated that about 90 percent of the 1 million people inhabitants of the city prefer to use Russian in their daily lives. Politically, though, Odessa is sharply divided between those who applaud annexation by Russia and those who remain loyal to the goals of the Euromaidan revolution that toppled the government of President Viktor Yanukovych. …

Yet despite the differences in opinion, it’s hard to find anyone in Odessa who welcomes the possibility that Russian forces might invade. “I’m afraid of war,” says Alina Savchenko, a 25-year-old teacher, who notes that her family has members in both Russia and Ukraine. “I live here. I don’t want to see any conflicts among my relatives.” She can think of little positive to say about the revolutionary government in Kiev, but says that she would prefer to see Ukrainians solve their own problems “without interference from the outside, whether it be from Europe or Russia.” Poll figures suggest that Savchenko speaks for the mainstream. Recent surveys in eastern Ukraine have found that even there only a tiny minority — from 4 to 4.7 percent — want to break away from the country.

The latest Dish on Ukraine here and here.