The husband on the iPhone after my appearance on Colbert last night:
You were great. But seriously: THE SOCKS. What the fuck? Have I taught you nothing? Your new suit looked so sharp and dapper … And the socks. Jesus.
(Love you!)
And I was so proud of the suit.
In the primaries, Beinart suspects liberals will flock to Rand:
While things could always change, the 2016 Democratic nomination is so far shaping up as the least competitive, non-incumbent presidential primary contest in memory. It looks increasingly likely that if Clinton faces any opposition at all, it will be from a Don Quixote like Bernie Sanders or Brian Schweitzer, not a challenger with any genuine political base or ability to raise substantial money.
For Rand Paul, that’s fabulous. It means lots of Democrats and independents will cross over to vote in Republican primaries, where the action is. And most of them will vote for him.
Allahpundit thinks “Beinart’s theory is likelier to play out as a true Operation Chaos, with Dems voting strategically, than them voting for Paul in earnest”:
[I]t’ll be conventional wisdom among both Democrats and many Republicans come 2016 that Paul, if nominated, simply cannot win. Beinart himself describes Paul as a right-wing McGovern in the making. If you’re a Democrat voting in an open GOP primary, you might vote for him for that reason, that he’s a patsy.
“I would argue that conservatism and the cause of limited government are undermined by loose talk and an excessive animus toward the federal government. These days, in fact, conservatives would be well served to focus a good deal more attention on the purposes of government, not simply its size. I say that because during the Obama era the right has been very clear about what government should not be doing, or should be doing much less of, and for understandable reasons. But it has not had nearly enough to say about just what government should do. That needs to be corrected — and in the process conservatives need to be careful to speak with care and precision about our Constitution and the role of the federal government in our history,” – Pete Wehner, Commentary.
This was in response to Jim DeMint’s surreal attempt to force American history into his rigid ideology. Somehow, in DeMint’s imagination, the civil war was won without “big government.” But the federal government is never “bigger” than in wartime, its powers never so expansive. When that federal government is sending troops to conquer half the country, how much “bigger” can it get? You can totally see why Chait pounces thus:
Everybody knows the slaves were freed by Ronald Reagan, and he did it by cutting taxes.
Kilgore goes deeper:
[DeMint’s ]rap is based on a series of palpable falsehoods that are extraordinarily common in the exotic world of “constitutional conservatism:” the deliberate conflation of the Declaration of Independence with the Constitution (this is how they sneak God and “natural rights”—meaning property and fetal rights—into the latter); the idea that the Civil War was about everything other than slavery; and the claim of Lincoln’s legacy, even though the Great Emancipator was in almost every respect a “big government liberal” as compared to the states rights Democrats—DeMint’s ideological and geographical forebears who touted the Constitution even more regularly (and certainly more consistently) than today’s states rights Republicans.
But this is more than a debate. DeMint now runs the Heritage Foundation, and has run it into the ground with know-nothingism and partisanship.
What was once a right-of-center oasis in rigorous social science, economics, social policy, science proper and other academic disciplines, is now a purely political operation, run by ideologues. And the consequences of replacing solid research with ever-more abstract ideological posturing are dire. A major political party is flying blind a lot of the time.
Look at the response to the ACA. Heritage once innovated several features of Obamacare; now the GOP scrambles to produce anything as a real alternative that can grapple with some of the same issues. Paul Ryan issues a report on poverty that rests on fatal misunderstandings of social science. Another potential candidate, Ben Carson, rightwing “intellectual”, Allen West, puts out a book with fake quotes pulled off the Internet. And the seriously smart ones – Ted Cruz, par exemple – specialize and revel in demagoguery they must know is irrelevant to governing.
This is the mark of a party more interested in selling books to a devoted audience, not a party capable of actually running a government. Which is why, in my view, the GOP is increasingly conceding the full responsibility of running a country in favor of a constant stream of oppositional pirouettes and rhetorical excesses. That may win a few midterms; but it will never win a general. Nor should it.
(Photo: Jim DeMint by Mandel Ngan/AFP/Getty)
During a recent “Ask Anything” taping with Dave Cullen, to discuss his book Columbine for the 15th anniversary this month, he opened up about his experience with Truvada, which he’s been taking for almost a year now:
Meanwhile, the in-tray is starting to fill up with responses to my post:
Thank you so much for your writing on Truvada and celebrating it for the godsend that it is. I’m in a serodiscordant couple, so to hear it described as a “party drug” makes me feel ill. If eliminating fear at the heart of a relationship is a party, then, yeah, that’s a party I’ll go to. If wanting to fuck the person I love safely makes me a whore, well then I suppose I’m a whore. The names can’t hurt our community as much as HIV has. So if takes being called names to finally end this virus, then let them call us whatever they want.
Another:
Your blog has been one of the few places I can go for reassurance about PrEP ever since going on it six months ago. I am 28 years old and have grown up in a generation of gay men that has been taught that
not using condoms is tantamount to instantaneous seroconversion. When I first started taking Truvada, I was excited to share my experiences with friends and loved ones. But since that time, I have decided to no longer disclose my use of prep, since I have experienced a significant amount of backlash from friends as well as prospective sex partners. It can sometimes be a passive remark, like a friend telling me that this is a “lifestyle choice.” Other times, it is a more brash statement, like “truvada whore”. They assume I am on the pill because of a sex life that is somehow more licentious than my counterparts that are not on prep, which isn’t true.
The advent of PrEP has created a unique relationship between those who are taking steps to prevent HIV seroconversion and those who already have HIV: a shared interest in treating and eradicating a devastating health threat. But in our own community, we continue to face backlash thanks in no small part to misinformation propagated by groups like AIDS Healthcare Foundation. On one side we see a group looking toward effective treatment options built on a foundation of openness. On the opposite side is a swath of gay men who stigmatize those who have HIV, and yet, are simultaneously wary of those men who take pills to prevent getting the HIV disease. A paradox, if ever there was one.
Another reader:
OMFG you spoke the truth here, thank you. What’s frustrating is that so few people are speaking it. Unfortunately, I am recently (December 2013) HIV positive. (Don’t date pathological liars.) However, the drug cocktail (Complera in my case) is amazing, and I’m already undetectable with no side effects, but it would of course be better if I weren’t on it in the first place.
I’d been active in HIV/AIDS related work heavily 15-20 years ago, when I was much younger, and fell out of it for various reasons, so it’s been an education diving back into the weeds of it. Because of highly effective treatment options, HIV is a fundamentally different disease than it was in 1999, when I was last in a job working with mostly HIV+ patients. It’s now a treatable, chronic condition and not a terminal illness, and one that’s harder for treated patients to transmit and one for which it’s possible for non-patients to get a pretty effective prevention drug for.
Yet it feels like the public health and prevention strategies are still stuck in 1992, when the disease was still a death sentence. No wonder HIV infection rates amongst gay men are rebounding. We need to fight the disease as it exists today. That disease profile includes the current prognosis, transmission risks and prevention tools, each of which has changed dramatically since current HIV public health measures came into place. It’s happening, but not fast enough, and that slow pace is causing more people (like me) to get infected unnecessarily.
Andrew, you can sometimes be a pain in the ass, riding your hobby horses, and sometimes I want to slap you. It’s your best AND your worst quality, and it can be infuriating, even when I agree with you. But it’s moved the needle before (gay marriage, anyone?), and I think you have an opportunity to move the needle here to save lives and reduce the infection rate. Agree or disagree with you, when you get passionate on a topic, you’re hard to ignore and you force the conversation into the open, and this is a conversation that’s not being had in the open enough.
So please make this the first of many posts on the subject, and infuriate and annoy the hell out of us. You’ll do a world of good.
Research shows that one in three American adults with chronic disease have trouble paying for food or medicine. Erin Marcus considers how to address this link between illness and food insecurity:
The SNAP program, for the most part, operates independently of the health system. Applicants aren’t required to meet with a health professional, and most internists and other adult medical specialists don’t routinely make direct referrals to the program.
But what if SNAP were more like WIC, and referrals to the program became second nature for clinics serving chronically ill, low-income people? … One idea might be for clinic check-in staff to screen patients for food insecurity when they arrive for their appointment, perhaps by having them answer some questions on a tablet or mobile phone that would automatically trigger a referral to SNAP. It doesn’t have to be complicated—one study found that a single question—“In the past month, was there any day when you or anyone in your family went hungry because you did not have enough money for food?”—was effective at determining food insecurity among parents at a clinic serving low-income children.
The other kind of daddy beard:
It came from the in-tray:
I’m a long-time Dish reader and wanted to send in a pic of my daughter Layla and myself for BOTW consideration. Thanks!
Although investing in education leads directly to higher incomes at the individual level, Charles Kenny notices that the connection doesn’t seem to hold at the national level. He wonders why:
Analysis by Lawrence Katz and Claudia Goldin suggests that increased educational attainment among Americans from 1915 to 1999 might account for 10 percent of the growth in U.S. GDP over that time. Some commentators contend that this an underestimate (PDF). But at the global level, no relationship has been found between a more educated population and more rapid economic development. There has been an explosion in schooling in developing countries, but many show nothing like explosive growth in GDP per person. By 2010, the average Kenyan had spent more years in school than the average French citizen had in 1985. But Kenya’s GDP per capita in 2010 was only 7 percent of France’s GDP per head 25 years earlier.
What explains the limited impact of increased education on economic growth?
A possible answer is that education acts as a filter rather than an investment. A recent study (PDF) in Italy found that test scores had a significant impact on the earnings of employees—but none on the earnings of self-employed people. One interpretation of that result is that schooling signals persons with intelligence and ambition, rather than actually imparting or indicating skills that make them better at their jobs over the long term. Signaling helps as a screening tool for employers, but makes no difference to people who work for themselves. Presumably, they already know how smart and ambitious they are.
In our final video from the whip-smart Olopade, author of The Bright Continent, she outlines why Africans are often greater conservationists than their Western counterparts:
Meanwhile, a reader sounds off:
I’ve been liking what Dayo Olopade has said so far, but this latest bit on fat and lean economies is extremely problematic in my view.
Everyone likes to make fun of everyone rushing out to buy a slightly better iPhone, but if you look at where people spend their money, it’s mostly on healthcare, housing, and education. This is true almost the world over, whether the economy is “fat” or “lean”. I’m sure she wouldn’t have problems with anything like this, but if you’re going to make an entire classification for economies then you need to complain about more than the iPhone.
There’s actually some good economic literature looking at this on the other side, with a seminal paper titled “Economic Lives of the Poor“, which talks about the types on consumption decisions made by the very poorest people, those living on less than 2$ or 1$ a day (they talk about both groups, and not just in Africa). The thing is, these poor groups also tend to spend their money in ways that we would call inefficient, like 10% of their income on alcohol and tobacco and 10%on weddings and funerals (varying by country of course). So these people who are quite possibly starving are spending 20% of their income on things that aren’t necessary. And they often buy sweet food instead of something that provides calories more cheaply (7% of their income on sugar!).
But see how uncomfortable this position is? Who the heck am I to say that this spending is making their life worse? If you or I were in their position, wouldn’t we like a little bit of chocolate every now and then, just to make the day tolerable? Wouldn’t you get drunk when you could, just to forget the awfulness of things?
Look, I’m not trying to equivocate the a new iPhone with starving, but saying you know what other people should buy better than they do is a very slippery slope, and one that I will never be comfortable with, no matter their good intentions.
For all of Dayo’s Ask Anything videos, go here.
(Archive)
Pay disclosure, or letting employees know what their co-workers earn, has been touted as a remedy to wage discrimination against women, but Emiliano Huet-Vaughn’s research suggests that its benefits may extend beyond that:
What I found was that people in the group shown their relative earnings position were more productive than those that weren’t given that information. In fact, the work output of those in the informed group increased by about 10 percent after they learned their relative positions.
Why did pay disclosure increase productivity? We’re not sure, but the answer may be that people care about their position relative to their coworkers. We may work harder even if we don’t see a raise if we know that we’re doing well compared to our peers. Workers may care about the level of their earnings not only because it lets them buy goods and services, but because it also lets them know where they stand in their peer groups, giving them an internalized sense of status.
Christopher Ingraham parses a study finding that more attractive people are perceived as more intelligent:
The researchers found a strong relationship between how attractive a person was rated, and reviewers’ assumptions about how intelligent they were. This relationship was especially strong among women. But when it came to actual intelligence, there was a significant gender gap: reviewers were able to accurately gauge the real intelligence of men, but not of women. They’re not exactly sure why this would be, but one possible explanation is that women are simply judged more pervasively on their looks than men are: “The strong halo effect of attractiveness may thus prevent an accurate assessment of the intelligence of women.”
The Dish 