Tag: Premium

by Jonah Shepp

Vauhini Vara flags a new campaign by Coca-Cola featuring guest workers in Dubai:

In March, Coke installed five special phone booths in Dubai labor camps that accepted Coca-Cola bottle caps instead of coins. In exchange for the cap from a bottle of Coke—which costs about fifty-four cents—migrant workers could make a three-minute international call. The ad shows laborers in hard hats and reflective vests lining up to use the machine—and grinning, for the first time in the video, as they wait. “I’ve saved one more cap, so I can talk to my wife again tomorrow,” one man tells the camera. More than forty thousand people made calls using the machines. Then, in April, after the booths had been up for about a month, the company dismantled them.

At first glance, the ad may seem innocuous, even sweet, until you consider how Coke is exploiting these workers’ misery to burnish its friendly image:

I sent links to the ads to Nicholas McGeehan, a Gulf researcher for Human Rights Watch who has studied labor conditions in Dubai. I was interested in his take on the questions of appropriateness and ethics that some viewers had raised. The videos, he said, were “odious.” For one thing, he said, Coke is not only using these low-income workers to advertise its product, it is also requiring them to buy soft drinks themselves—at nearly a tenth of their typical daily wages, he pointed out—to use the special phone booth. On top of that, he feels that the ads normalize and even glorify the hardship faced by migrant workers—at least some of whom may be working against their will. “If this was two hundred years ago, would it be appropriate for Coke to do adverts in the plantations of the Deep South, showing slaves holding cans of Coke?” he asked. “It is a normalization of a system of structural violence, of a state-sanctioned trafficking system.”

The Dish recently looked at the conditions of guest workers in Dubai and other Gulf states here.

by Jonah Shepp

The Office of Naval Research is spending $7.5 million to find out:

“Even though today’s unmanned systems are ‘dumb’ in comparison to a human counterpart, strides are being made quickly to incorporate more automation at a faster pace than we’ve seen before,” Paul Bello, director of the cognitive science program at the Office of Naval Research told Defense One. “For example, Google’s self-driving cars are legal and in-use in several states at this point. As researchers, we are playing catch-up trying to figure out the ethical and legal implications. We do not want to be caught similarly flat-footed in any kind of military domain where lives are at stake.”

The United States military prohibits lethal fully autonomous robots. And semi-autonomous robots can’t “select and engage individual targets or specific target groups that have not been previously selected by an authorized human operator,” even in the event that contact with the operator is cut off, according to a 2012 Department of Defense policy directive. “Even if such systems aren’t armed, they may still be forced to make moral decisions,” Bello said.

Since the robotic future of warfare has to some extent already arrived, and the danger of getting it wrong is so great, this seems worth the money to me, but Suderman doesn’t see how an ethical military robot is possible:

Obviously Asimov’s Three Laws wouldn’t work on a machine designed to kill. Would any moral or ethical system? It seems plausible that you could build in rules that work basically like the safety functions of many machines today, in which the specific conditions result in safety behaviors or shut down orders. But it’s hard to imagine, say, an attack drone with an ethical system that allows it to make decisions about right and wrong in a battlefield context.

What would that even look like? Programming problems aside, the moral calculus involved in [waging] war is too murky and too widely disputed to install in a machine. You can’t even get people to come to any sort of agreement on the morality of using drones for targeted killing today, when they are almost entirely human controlled. An artificial intelligence designed to do the same thing would just muddy the moral waters even further. Indeed, it’s hard to imagine even a non-lethal military robot with a meaningful moral mental system, especially if we’re pushing into the realm of artificial intelligence.

Meghan Neal entertains the argument that killer robots might actually be more ethical than human soldiers:

For one, killer bots won’t be hindered by trying not to die, and will have all kinds of superhero-esque capabilities we can program into machines. But the more salient point is that lethal robots could actually be more “humane” than humans in combat because of the distinctly human quality the mechanical warfighters lack: emotions.

Without judgment clouded by fear, rage, revenge, and the horrors of war that toy with the human psyche, an intelligent machine could avoid emotion-driven error, and limit the atrocities humans have committed in wartime over and over through history, [roboethicist Ronald] Arkin argues.  “I believe that simply being human is the weakest point in the kill chain, i.e., our biology works against us,” Arkin wrote in a paper titled “Lethal Autonomous Systems and the Plight of the Non-combatant.”

But, of course, as Zack Beauchamp points out, that same lack of emotion prevents a robot from disobeying orders to commit an atrocity:

Charli Carpenter, a political scientist at the University of Massachussetts-Amherst, makes a compelling argument that robots could commit war crimes — because war crimes, contrary to what we might prefer to believe, are often not committed by rogue soldiers as crimes of passion but as deliberate tools of terror engineered by top commanders. In the Bosnian War, for example, Bosnian Serb soldiers were ordered by their commanders to use rape as a tool of terror, and soldiers who refused were threatened with castration.

Robots, unlike people, always do what they’re told. Carpenter’s point is that human-rights abusing governments could program robot warriors to do whatever they’d want, and they’d do it, without compunction or thought. If the reality of war-time atrocities is that they tend to be intentional, not crimes of passion, then that’s a huge count in favor of banning military robots today.

Filip Spagnoli engages both sides of the moral dilemma:

It’s true that robots can be programmed to kill indiscriminately or to kill all brown people. But history is full of human commanders giving exactly the same kind of orders. If robots are programmed in immoral ways, then that’s an easier problem to solve than the prejudices or emotional failures of scores of individual soldiers and commanders. Of course we’ll have to monitor the people who will program the robots. But is this more difficult than monitoring the immoral orders by human leaders? Obviously it’s not. It’s true that monitoring will be easier in democracies, but if dictators want killer robots there’s not a lot we can do to stop them or to convince them to use robots in a ethical manner.

by Jessie Roberts

A half-century after its release, Eric Schlosser revisits Dr. Strangelove. He notes that “Kubrick’s original intention was to do a straight, serious movie,” but the director “gagged on the idea of a straight version” once he began working on the screenplay:

Pauline Kael wrote that “‘Dr. Strangelove’ was clearly intended as a cautionary movie: it meant to jolt us awake to the dangers of the bomb by showing us the insanity of the course we were pursuing. But artists’ warnings about war and the dangers of total annihilation never tell us how we are supposed to regain control, and ‘Dr. Strangelove,’ chortling over madness, did not indicate any possibilities for sanity.” In the same vein, Susan Sontag asserted that, in future decades, “the display of negative thinking” in the movie would seem “facile.” And Sontag wrote that “Dr. Strangelove is nihilism for the masses, a philistine nihilism.”

I find both of these sets of remarks strange. Why should a popular artist have any obligation to propose “sane” solutions to an intolerable situation?

Surely it’s enough to expose with overwhelming comic energy the contradictions and paradoxes of “mutual assured destruction.” Sane actions are the business of scientists, the military, and Presidents, a few of whom may have been roused to act by this movie. (When Ronald Reagan entered the White House, he wanted to see the war room. This gives one pause. But, later, working with Mikhail Gorbachev, he brought about a partial reduction of nuclear weapons by both sides.) And Sontag’s distaste for “Strangelove” feels off. It’s actually a “cheerful film,” she says. Well, yes, that’s the point of the joke. The movie teases the many Americans acquiescing in a mad logic. At the end, Strangelove leaping out of his chair, and General Turgidson warning of a “mine-shaft gap” with the Soviet Union, are continuing their assertion of high acumen. For them, the game of “strategy” just continues. Sontag wanted a serious film, but I don’t see how anyone could miss, under all the buffoonery and juvenile joking, a furious sense of outrage.

by Jonah Shepp

Sudan has sentenced a Christian woman to death for apostasy:

A pregnant 27-year-old Sudanese woman was sentenced to death by hanging Thursday for apostasy after marrying a Christian man and refusing to convert to Islam. Mariam Yahia Ibrahim Ishag also faces charges of adultery. Ibrahim, who was born to a Muslim father but raised Orthodox Christian by her mother, was first sentenced on Sunday, but she was given until Thursday to change her mind and convert. She refused to do so, Al Jazeera reports.

“I am a Christian and I never committed apostasy,” Ibrahim said.

Ibrahim was found guilty of apostasy — the abandonment of one’s religious faith – because she was born to a Muslim father and married a Christian man. The adultery charge came as Islamic law prohibits Muslim women from marrying outside of their religion, a rule which effectively voided the marriage.

Here’s hoping that international outrage over this ruling will see it overturned. Harris Zafar stresses that executing apostates has no genuine basis in Islam:

In Demystifying Islam: Tackling the Tough Questions, I dedicate an entire chapter to explaining Shariah and another chapter to tackling the question of religious freedom and the supposed punishment of death for apostasy. A close study of Islam and its scripture reveals that Islam neither prescribes religion to be legislated nor prescribes any punishment for apostasy.

But in many Muslim-majority countries, apostasy is considered a crime punishable by the state, endorsing the view that Islam calls for death of any Muslim who renounces his or her faith. A growing number of Muslims, however, reject this belief on the basis of Islam, arguing there is no Islamic punishment prescribed for one who renounces their faith. This is because the concept of killing a person for choosing a different faith is, in fact, a violation of the teachings of Islam. Simply put, Islam does not prohibit freedom of conscience and religion and does not prescribe punishments for matters such as apostasy.

But Dreher thinks Islam has to answer for this sort of barbarism, doctrinal basis or none:

Hey Brandeis, this is the kind of thing that Ayaan Hirsi Ali speaks out against. Yet you wanted nothing to do with her, because somebody might call you anti-Muslim. You privileged Americans wouldn’t even have her on your campus. Well, look, not all Muslims in the world support this despicable stuff, but if what Sudan is doing to this Christian woman, and what traditional sharia-loving Muslims do to women and girls in Sudan, in Nigeria, and elsewhere is “Muslim,” then being pro-human means you had better be “anti-Muslim” in the sense I mean here.

If, God forbid, she goes to her death, Mariam Yahia Ibrahim Ishag will be a powerful witness to Christianity. And the cruel men who will have murdered her will be powerful witnesses to Islam, whether anyone likes it or not.

Kimberly Smith argues that the real story here is about Sudan’s “complete disregard for the dignity of life, especially female life”:

I know Muslim women in South Sudan who the Islamic Janjaweed raped with sticks as they mocked, “This is so you cannot make black babies.” I know men who’ve been beaten, had their teeth knocked out and forced to swallow them and had limbs hacked off as they watched their wives and children dragged behind the tail of a horse into slavery because their skin was black instead of the beautiful bronze color of their Arab-descendant fellow countrymen. I know a beautiful young schoolteacher whose father forced her to leave her job to marry a man who already had four wives so that he could garner a few more cows. I’ve sat through bomb blitzes targeted at the indigenous people of the Nuba Mountains, which is largely Islamic, simply because they are black and yet dare to proclaim their right to life, liberty and the use of their homeland’s natural resources.

The depravity of the Sudanese government extends far beyond religion and deep into the heart of humanity. A people will not truly have freedom of religion unless it is built upon a foundation of the sanctity of life.

by Jonah Shepp

With less than a week to go before Ukraine attempts to elect a new president, Putin claims that he has ordered Russian troops to pull away from the borders—again:

The president made a similar pronouncement on May 7, which was met with the same skepticism by global leaders when NATO officials on the ground said that there appeared to be no reduction in troops. Now, also, an unnamed NATO officer told Reuters that “We haven’t seen any movement to validate (the report).” But this time, it seems that Putin may have an actual incentive to ease some pressure off of its neighbor. According to the New York Times, one candidate running for office in Kiev has caught the Kremlin’s attention, and could become something of an ally if he is voted the country’s next president. Petro Poroshenko, a wealthy pro-Western candidate who has business interests in Russia, is now a favorite to win the May 25 election.

The Dish took a look at Poroshenko last month here. Previewing the elections, Erik Herron wonders whether Kiev will be able to pull them off:

The May 11 “referendums” held in Donetsk and Luhansk further complicate the implementation of presidential elections. Polling places and election equipment (e.g., ballot boxes) were commandeered by groups conducting the vote, and some separatists have indicated that they will not permit the presidential election to take place.

Large-scale violent demonstrations in the cities of Odesa and Mariupol, as well as active combat between separatist and pro-government forces in the Donetsk and Luhansk regions, threatens the security of citizens who want to participate in the polls and threats are likely to further undermine turnout. Based on data from the last presidential election, impediments to voting in Crimea, Donetsk, and Luhansk alone could affect around 5 million voters, or 20 percent of the voting population. These regions border other large population areas, and if instability spreads, the impact on the voting-age population could be intensified.

Joshua Yaffa expects the pro-Russian separatists to attempt to sabotage the elections, but doubts they will be successful:

The separatists have enough fighters to disrupt voting and keep some polling stations from opening, especially in areas where they’re strong such as the military stronghold of Slaviansk. But they lack the numbers to take over every school, cultural center, and administrative building where voting will occur. They will probably focus on preemptive intimidation, targeting electoral officials and other local administrators for threats and attacks. In Luhansk, for example, separatist fighters kidnapped an election commissioner. Voting day may be a flashpoint for violence, because pro-Kiev paramilitary groups are expected to deploy to ensure voting while anti-Kiev fighters may fan out to do the opposite. Civilians could be the ones who suffer, as they did on May 11 during the separatist referendum, when a pro-Kiev battalion of unclear authority fired into an angry crowd in Krasnoarmeysk, killing two people.

In any event, the threat of war is being taken very seriously. In Kiev, David Patrikarakos reports that “the atmosphere has darkened”:

Maidan remains cosmetically militarised—ringed by barricades of tyres and sandbags – but it has become little more than a tourist trap, selling souvenirs of the revolution to the trickle of foreigners who still visit. Now the barricades are being reinforced and expanded. On 5 May, access into the square via a neighbouring street was controlled by a blonde militia girl of no more than 17, who manned a makeshift gate allowing vehicles access in and out. The armoured personnel carrier parked incongruously in the middle of the street—which some of the more enterprising militiamen had been charging people 50 hryvnias a turn to sit in and have their photo taken—was being cleaned and tested.

Both sides are adopting a war mentality, the most obvious—and ominous—aspect of which is the dehumanisation of the enemy. Pro-Russians describe the Odessa fire as “inhumanity … last seen by the Nazis in the Second World War,” while the more extreme pro-Ukrainian elements post memes that mock those who died. A collective psychosis, born of machismo and paranoia and fuelled by rumour, is taking hold. The latest story gaining traction in the capital is that thousands of Russians—solitary males of military age—have begun to appear in Kyiv, renting rooms and just waiting. “Let them come,” says Maksym, my wiry and intense landlord. “I’ve got body armour and I’m cleaning all my guns.”

And, in Odessa, Kirchick profiles Brighter Future for Ukraine, a recently formed civil defense group that opposes both Russian intervention and the new government:

Given the 40,000 or so Russian troops still amassed on Ukraine’s eastern border, and the active subversion efforts aimed at destabilizing the government, I ask the men why they have not joined the Ukrainian military or national guard. “There is no real chain of command in the army,” Baba tells me. They have helped the government as necessary, like when, last month, they captured, an alleged spy with a Russian passport and dozens of bank cards (purportedly for paying provocateurs). They turned him over to the Ukrainian intelligence service. But their aversion to signing up for their country’s defense forces goes beyond mere disappointment with organizational dysfunction, and strikes at the heart of why they established parallel structures to carry out what should be state functions in the first place. “So-called state leaders are not interested in the state,” Baba says.

Recent Dish on the crisis in Ukraine here, here, and here.

by Katie Zavadski

Picky-eating adults (or PEAs) count the likes of Anderson Cooper among their ranks. Hilary Pollack infiltrated one of their online communities:

As a non-PEA, it can be difficult not to pass judgments on those who are basically encouraging a mother to shrug and supply her son with a diet entirely of gluten and sugar. But why do we care what other people eat, especially those who have such strong convictions about it that they’d rather risk becoming a pariah than try a bite of zucchini? It’s difficult to imagine that anyone would choose such an affliction.

Group founder Bob K. assures another exasperated parent with some resigned but hopeful food for thought:

“In most cases … hypnotherapy will fail.  What we have is very hard to overcome.  The good news [is that] many people that have [this issue] are gifted in other ways, and there is no reason to not have a very happy life with it.”

This may be true, but one of the more difficult parts of being a PEA—and one that they lament together with knowing words of encouragement and empathy—is the ongoing struggle with romantic relationships. Some are in happy marriages, but many others report being rejected by potential partners again and again for their seeming stubbornness. The more experienced PEAs of the group adamantly insist on being upfront about it on the first date, lest it come out as a “secret” weeks or months into a relationship. And universally, if they’re forced to choose between a babe and their French fries, the fries will prevail. Conversion is not an option, but maybe finding a kindred spirit is. And nobody wants to be lonely.

by Patrick Appel

Plumer provides five maps that illustrate the severity of the drought:

This isn’t a one-year event: at least half of the United States has faced drought on and off since 2012 — at the peak in July 2013, some 81 percent of the country was experiencing at least some level of drought. …Put together, the 2012-14 drought has been one of North America’s biggest since the costly 1988-89 drought.

In response, Philip Bump argues that “the current level of national drought isn’t remarkable” given that “half the country has been in drought for half of the weeks since January 2000.” What is unusual:

The actual problem right now is noted by Plumer, a little further down. “[E]very single part of California is now facing ‘severe,’ ‘extreme,’ or ‘exceptional’ drought,” he writes, “the first time that’s happened in the [Drought Monitor]’s 15-year history.” The drought is substantially worse than past droughts. That’s the problem. And that is exactly what we’d expect to see in a warming world.

William Cowan urges Californians to remember that their state is just as prone to floods as it is to drought, writing that “may be no better moment than the dry present to remember the extraordinary washout of 1862, which brought what was likely the most expansive flooding in the recorded history of America’s West”:

Aridity is the norm here, but it is only part of the story. Despite its reputation for perpetual sunshine, Southern California may face as great a risk from cataclysmic flooding as any other major metropolitan region in the United States. Its geologic history tells us so. Massive floods might be the exception, and yet, these events have factored into California’s history for millennia. Whether it is cyclical, the product of a changing climate or some frightening combination of both, extremes of weather, flood, and drought appear to be occurring with more regularity. We fear how dry we are now, but we will be wet again. And we should be prepared for that, too.

On that note, John Upton warns that the next El Niño could hurt the global food supply:

A dinosaurian belch of warm water thousands of miles wide has appeared at the surface of the Pacific Ocean near the equator. The warming ocean conditions have spurred NOAA to project a two-thirds chance that an El Niño will form by summer’s end. It’s tipped to be of the monster variety—the extreme type that could become more common with global warming. Because the planet has warmed since the last extreme El Niño, some 17 years ago, there are fears that these warm waters could herald record-shattering extreme weather and temperatures.

For a sense of the type of havoc that extreme El Niños can wreak, think back to the late 1990s, or to the early 1980s, when widespread flooding and droughts plagued every inhabited continent, bleaching corals, ravaging wildlife, and killing tens of thousands of people. And as you mull over those disturbing memories of yore, chew on a sandwich—and savor it, for the weather that’s forecast to strike us could make that bread harder to get.

by Chris Bodenner

Such as this one:

As a man, one of the benefits of strict condom usage is that it allows me to fake an orgasm at will. Sometimes it’s because I’m insecure about achieving a real orgasm or avoid a partner’s insecurities (altruistic). From conversations with other men I know I’m not the only one, and yet in the wider culture the male-faked orgasm is invisible.

Another reader:

The Science of Faking It and Starting With Sex lead me to wonder, given some past blog posts, that you might open up a thread on men who fake orgasms. To encourage that, I thought I’d share the two times in my life that I’ve done so.

I’m a straight male in my late 20s, and each time I faked an orgasm it was with a girl I met and went to bed with without actually getting to know too well. Condoms are essential to that sort of thing. First time was when I brought home a girl who shouted so much (from the moment of penetration) that my roommate with whom I shared a wall walked out of the apartment and loudly slammed the door, which was such a terrific embarrassment that I essentially just quit the whole matter, faked a spasm or three in the rod, and told her I’d had it and was too tired to go on.

Second time was about four years later, when I left a terrible party and wound up at a bar nearby, met an extremely attractive woman who took me home with her. But she was completely un-participatory in bed. Up too late, and having had well enough to drink, I gave up on trying to please someone who obviously wasn’t interested in the first place. Faked a few spasms, then went to the bathroom to flush the evidence that I’d enjoyed it as much as she apparently had, and then went on to make a fool of myself by continuing to contact her and see her over the next few weeks, before she stopped talking to me. I’d say who could blame her, but I’d imagine that meeting a thoroughly disinterested partner is not a thing that is limited to gender.

Best I can say is that a man faking an orgasm is a method of saving face for both parties.

by Jonah Shepp

After anti-China protests in Hanoi escalated into rioting and arson last week, Per Liljas reports on the aftermath of Beijing’s latest provocation in the South China Sea:

Two Chinese passenger ships arrived early on Monday at the central-Vietnamese port of Vung Ang to evacuate Chinese nationals, who are fearing for their safety after anti-Chinese riots last week saw foreign businesses attacked, two Chinese killed and about 140 people injured. More than 3,000 Chinese have already been helped to leave the country following protests that flared up across Vietnam over a Chinese oil rig that is drilling in waters claimed by both sides. Beijing has announced a 4.8-km exclusion zone around the rig, and Hanoi claims that there are 119 Chinese vessels in the area, including warships.

Public protests are a rarity in communist Vietnam. The security forces have been deployed in Ho Chi Minh City to quell new waves of demonstrations, and mobile carriers have sent repeated texts to subscribers with a message from Prime Minister Nguyen Tan Dung asking people to stay away from further protests. However, small groups of peaceful protesters continued to gather on Sunday, and neither side has shown any real sign of backing down over the territorial conflict, which has revived a long-standing enmity between Beijing and Hanoi.

Zooming out, Sean Mirski analyzes the Chinese leadership’s strategic calculations:

Beijing seeks to control the South China Sea in order to manage national security threats and advance its economic objectives. The Sea represents a strategic vulnerability for China, both as a historical invasion route and as a modern threat to its energy security and export-oriented economy. Controlling the South China Sea would also offer many tangible benefits. The Sea teems with bountiful fishing stocks, a mainstay of many regional economies. Beneath the ocean floor, even more valuable assets wait. Although experts differ about the size of the potential bonanza, they all agree that there is enough petroleum and natural gas to make any bordering state covetous.

These strategic imperatives are reinforced by China’s domestic politics. … So even if China’s leaders were inclined to surrender Chinese claims in the South China Sea, they would be deterred from doing so by the inevitable domestic backlash. Instead of compromising, Beijing feels increasingly pressured by a nationalist public to act assertively in its relations with the other claimants.

Vikram Singh thinks China’s aggressiveness could backfire:

Beijing’s actions carry significant risk, and mask a tension between China’s short and long-term goals. Sailors or airmen in tense standoffs could miscalculate and spark an incident that demands military escalation. Countries like Vietnam could also decide to take a stand and choose to fight rather than give in to Chinese pressure. Yet that decision would be calamitous: the last time China and Vietnam went to war, in 1979, about 60,000 people were killed. China would not benefit from such conflict in Asia, especially if it took the blame for derailing Asia’s long run of peace and progress.

Even if it avoids war, China can overplay this hand to such a degree that Southeast Asian nations defy history and join together to resist domination by a resurgent Middle Kingdom. The 10 members of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) are far from forming an alliance and have no tradition of such banding together, but ASEAN has grown stronger and is welcoming a greater U.S. role in the region, in part because of China’s assertiveness.

Zack Beauchamp assesses the likelihood of a full-blown conflict as fairly low:

The case for the possibility of war is simple: it’s happened before. In the late 70s, Vietnam aligned itself with the Soviet part of the Communist bloc rather than the Chinese one (the two had, at the time, parted political ways). China wanted to punish Vietnam for the deviationism, and they fought a somewhat pointless, but fairly bloody, war in 1979.

That’s not likely to repeat itself today. For one thing, China is exponentially more powerful than Vietnam, and so Vietnam knows risking a conflict is risking a crushing defeat. For another, China contributes a lot of money to Vietnam’s economy, particularly through tourism. Vietnam wouldn’t want to risk losing that. Finally, as [Jonathan] London notes, Vietnam’s core leadership — its general party secretary, president, and leader of the National Assembly — have a well-known pro-China tack. “Their loyalty,” London writes, “is to the enduring illusion that Beijing is a partner.”