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Twenty years after the Walt Disney Company broke ground on a master-planned community of Celebration, Florida, Kelsey Campbell-Dollaghan describes the town as “a paradigm for how contemporary Americans view utopian projects – with a huge amount of suspicion”:

Celebration, below its twee veneer and even below its shoddy craftsmanship, is a pretty sustainable idea. It has lessons for us to learn about how to quell the worst of the sprawl eating away at our country. And it is, by most accounts, a pretty good place to live: Public spaces, walkable streets, downscaled housing, and good schools, all within a compact downtown. Even its critics have to admit that it’s better than swampy, sprawling hellscape that lies just outside of it, dripping with strip malls and sweaty drive-thrus.

So why don’t we think of it as a success? For one thing, the mere whiff of utopia sets our teeth on edge these days. After a century of high-profile failures – from Fordlandia to Helicon Home Colony – most of us can’t shake the idea that behind those neocolonial shutters lurks something sinister, whether as simple as tax evasion or as truly nightmarish as a violent cult. In other words, Celebration is not only a victim of its own marketing, but a victim of a public that perceives planned communities as deeply creepy – which is how Celebration is described again and again.

Maybe the problem with Celebration isn’t its flaws, but the weariness with which the American public perceives the simple idea of utopia these days. After centuries of struggling to engineer a perfect society, utopia’s greatest enemy might turn out to be as simple as a creeping suspicion.

(Photo of downtown Celebration by Bobak Ha’Eri)

A reader writes:

I think there’s a pretty fundamental flaw in Jacobs’ interpretation of the study on atheists and immorality. He says:

The findings suggest our instinctive belief that moral behavior is dependent upon God – as ethical arbiter and/or assigner of divine punishment – creates a belief system strong enough to override evidence to the contrary. It leads people many to look at non-believers and reflexively assume the worst.

I would argue that this study says nothing of the sort. Jacobs is drawing the line from atheism to immorality, where the study only shows a causal path from immorality to atheism. There is a big difference between assuming someone who is acting unethically is an atheist and saying that someone who is an atheist is less capable of acting ethically. As an illustration, imagine they repeated the same experiment with serial killers, varying gender instead. Most documented serial killers have been men. Thus, someone doing the above experiment would likely more readily assume that a serial killer was a man. This does not mean that these people think men in general are incapable of acting morally.

Another writes, “The idea that atheists are less moral than believers deeply offends me”:

I am an atheist, yet I strive to do the right thing in all aspects of my life. I do not always succeed, but I always try. And I do not try to do the right thing because I am seeking reward, or trying to avoid punishment in some afterlife, but because I believe that, in most situations, there is a right and a wrong, and that to be a moral person, one must strive to do right.

I learned in a university philosophy course about different theories of the stages of moral development, and that the highest form of morality is based on an internalization of universal principles of right and wrong. The most primitive form of morality is based on a fear of punishment. It is not necessary to believe in a higher power to achieve the highest form of morality.

When I am unsure of what is right in any situation, I don’t ask “What would Jesus do?” but rather, “What would my mother do?” My mother was one of the most moral people I have ever known, and although she believed in God, she did not always follow the Church in its pronouncements as to what was right and wrong. She followed her own conscience, even if it disagreed with the Church’s teachings. My mother was an amazingly good woman and my moral compass. I struggle without her.

Another is on the same page:

Your post about distrust of atheists brought to mind a criticism I shared with the late Christopher Hitchens. Hitchens used to rail against the notion that only believers can be moral because they believe in a god that can reward you or punish you. Hitchens would say it’s very telling when believers only do good to gain reward or avoid punishment, instead of just doing good for the sake of doing good. I share this feeling.

My wife and I are atheists, and we are raising our two children as such. We live in what’s considered Alaska’s Bible Belt (think: near Palin’s hometown), and religion is very pervasive in everyday life and governmental functions. This has a real chilling effect on how “open” about our atheism we can be. If more people knew, I am certain we would be ostracized and stereotyped as some sort of horrible people.

This is why I am of the opinion that there are lots more atheists than there appears to be. Society just hasn’t gotten to the point where people’s minds have accepted atheism as a harmless, acceptable thing, so many atheists say in the closet.

Will Potter warns that it’s an increasingly deadly world for them:

Between 2002 and 2013, at least 908 people were killed because of their environmental advocacy, according to “Deadly Environment,” a new report from the investigative nonprofit Global Witness. That’s an average of at least one environmentalist murdered every week, and in the last four years, the rate of the murders has doubled. In 2012, the deadliest year on record, 147 deaths were recorded, three times more than a decade earlier. “There were almost certainly more cases,” the report says, “but the nature of the problem makes information hard to find, and even harder to verify.”

In places like Myanmar, China, and parts of Central Asia, human rights monitoring is simply prohibited. In African countries like Nigeria, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, and Zimbabwe, where clashes over resources have escalated, researchers say it is impossible to track the violence without in-depth field investigations, because governments haven’t documented the killings. The most vulnerable activists are those in indigenous communities in remote, rural areas who are facing off against much more powerful business interests in industries like mining and logging. Much of the world never hears about their struggles, or their deaths. In other words, where environmental advocates are most at risk they are least visible.

Keating adds:

The most dangerous country in the world for environmentalists is Brazil, with 448 killings over the last 10 years. According to the report, “this can be attributed to Brazil’s land ownership patterns, which are among the most concentrated and unequal in the world.” The country’s rapid economic growth has frequently brought powerful business interests into conflict with small and medium-sized farms as well as indigenous groups, often with deadly consequences.

To be fair, the high totals from Brazil may also be a result of the fact that the country has a relatively robust civil society and media sector, so killings in the context of land and environmental disputes are more likely to be reported.

Michael Kelley explains why Russia is looking to assert more control over the Internet, which Putin said on Thursday was “a CIA project” and “is still developing as such”:

Today, Russia is leading the charge for breaking up the Internet as it currently functions by running Web traffic through servers in each respective country. “In two years we may get a completely different Internet,” Russian investigative journalist Andrei Soldatov told BI in January. “It might be a collection of Intranets instead of one Internet. Actually I think it’s very possible.”

Earlier this week, Russia’s parliament passed a law requiring foreign Internet services such as Gmail and Skype to keep their servers in Russia and save all information about their users for at least half a year. This would create a Russian ‘Intranet’ that would be separate from the globally-interconnected Web, much like social media website VKontakte now serves as Russia’s Kremlin-allied Facebook outside of Facebook.

Bershidsky focuses on the Kremlin’s attempt to censor blogs:

A bill passed by the Russian parliament on Tuesday says that any blogger read by at least 3,000 people a day has to register with the government telecom watchdog and follow the same rules as those imposed by Russian law on mass media. These include privacy safeguards, the obligation to check all facts, silent days before elections and loose but threatening injunctions against “abetting terrorism” and “extremism.” This signals to bloggers that they will be closely watched and that Russia’s tough slander and anti-terrorist laws will be applied when the authorities think it appropriate. Bloggers who fail to register as media face fines of up to $900.

There was no international outcry as in the case of the Turkish Twitter ban. Only Dunja Mijatovic, the media freedom representative of the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe, called on Russian President Vladimir Putin to veto the bill, which he is unlikely to do because it fits in well with his recent oppressive policies. Perhaps Russia has already been written off as a rogue state because of its heavy involvement in the Ukraine crisis, and more curbs on its media freedoms are no longer an issue for the international community. For Russian bloggers, however, the bill – which will come into effect from August assuming that Putin signs it – is a sign that the government is coming for them.

Pavel Durov, the founder of VKontakte, Russia’s answer to Facebook, fled the country earlier this week, saying his company had been taken over by Putin cronies:

Durov explained that after seven years of relative social media freedom in Russia, his refusal to share user data with Russian law enforcement has set him at odds with the Kremlin, which has recently been trying to tighten its grip on the internet, according to The Moscow Times. VK’s former CEO says that despite his multiple refusals of Kremlin requests to censor his site in a similar fashion to how it filters print and TV news, the site — which boasts 143 million registered users globally, 88 million of whom are based in Russia — is now effectively under state control.

Keating takes a closer look at the “Internet sovereignty” movement:

Russia is one of a number of countries pushing the idea of “Internet sovereignty”: the notion that governments—rather than multinational corporations based in the United States or U.S.-founded agencies like the ICANN, which is responsible for the Internet’s global domain name system—should have control over their own internal cyberspaces. …

Internet sovereignty might be a little easier to take seriously as a concept if many of the governments that are most enthusiastic about it weren’t so blatantly interested in policing their citizens’ Internet use. Iran, for instance, has been for years been pushing a “national Internet” project aimed at keeping unwelcome outside influences from reaching its citizens.

Noah Feldman calls the unity deal signed between Fatah and Hamas a positive development:

A Palestinian national unity government could make sacrifices that a partial government never could. Fatah activist Marwan Barghouti, in Israeli jail since 2002, could potentially become a bridge between the Palestinian parties. No one is describing such an outcome as likely. But certainly Fatah without Hamas can’t make a meaningful deal.

So the Hamas-Fatah reconciliation is a good thing for the possibility of meaningful peace. You can’t make peace with half a people: You need all of them represented at the table. If the Palestinians can present a united front and willingness to negotiate, Israelis may well move toward political reconciliation over the possibility of a deal. The prospects for that may look bleak at the moment, but in the past, the Israeli public has been able to elect governments with a mandate to negotiate whenever the Palestinians managed to look like serious partners. We probably have no more than a decade to go in which a two-state solution remains possible. Palestinian reconciliation is a precondition for peace. Here’s hoping it sticks.

Jonathan Schanzer disagrees:

After the death of Yasser Arafat in 2004, the new Palestinian president, Mahmoud Abbas, brought an end to the intifada. Since then, to Abbas’ full credit, Fatah has maintained a course of nonviolence, and security cooperation with Israel has reached at an all-time high. To his discredit, however, incitement has continued, including the glorification of terrorists in the media. Fatah, in other words, has been wrestling with its demons. In fact, a controversy erupted recently when the Palestinian Minister of Religious Affairs, Mahmoud al-Habbash, came under fire by Fatah activists for condemning a terrorist attack against Israelis.

Yesterday’s reconciliation deal appears to have interrupted, or even ended, this important tug-of-war. Hamas’ embrace of terrorism is full-throated, and so is its rejection of Israel. So, while Fatah’s embrace of Hamas may lead to national unity, it bodes poorly for peace. It also portends poorly for the Palestinian nationalist movement as it takes its first steps into what appears to be a post-Oslo world.

Paul Pillar objects to Israel “invoking a label or slogan as if it were an acceptable substitute for policy”:

The Israeli prime minister says Hamas is “dedicated to the destruction of Israel.” Actually, Hamas leaders have repeatedly made clear a much different posture, one that involves indefinite peaceful coexistence with Israel even if they officially term it only a hudna or truce. It would be more accurate to say that Israel is dedicated to the destruction of Hamas, an objective that Israel has demonstrated with not just its words but its deeds, including prolonged collective punishment of the population of the Gaza Strip in an effort to strangle the group. Such efforts have included large-scale violence that—although carried out overtly by military forces and thus not termed terrorism—has been every bit as lethal to innocent civilians. In such circumstances, why should Hamas be expected to be the first to go beyond the vocabulary of hudna and mouth some alternative words about the status of its adversary?

The Israeli and U.S. reactions do not seem to take account of the fact that the terms of the announced Hamas-PLO reconciliation are undetermined and still under negotiation. The agreement can involve Hamas moving much more toward the posture of Abbas and the PLO than the other way around.

Avi Issacharoff points out that the outcry over Hamas’s inclusion has obscured the details of the reconciliation deal:

[I]f Netanyahu weren’t so busy looking for excuses to not talk to the Palestinians, he would discover a few interesting things about the agreement.

First, Abbas has potentially brought Netanyahu and the international community what they were demanding: a government, with no Hamas representatives, made up only of technocrats, without politicians and with Abbas himself at its head. The government is supposed to deal not only with the West Bank, but also with the Gaza Strip.

And maybe that is what is making Netanyahu nervous. If the agreement does go into effect, if a government presiding over the Gaza Strip and West Bank is created, and if elections are held, Netanyahu could find himself facing a real partner in the person of Abbas. All the “no partner” claims, citing the fact that Abbas doesn’t rule the Gaza Strip, will cease to be relevant.

Goldblog gets why Netanyahu pulled out of peace talks, given Hamas’s nastiness, but calls the decision myopic nonetheless:

Israel doesn’t get to pick its enemies. It has to make peace with the ones it has. Hamas is one of those enemies. And Netanyahu’s argument doesn’t take into consideration that, theoretically at least, the Palestinian Authority could, over time, help moderate Hamas and bring it more into the two-state fold.

But who am I kidding? Maybe both of Netanyahu’s superficially contradictory beliefs are true. Maybe he can’t make peace with a divided Palestinian entity. And maybe he can’t make peace with a unified Palestinian entity. Maybe he can’t make peace with any Palestinian entity because members of his own political coalition are uninterested in taking the steps necessary for compromise.

Arguing that the “peace process” has become a charade, Ami Ayalon urges Israel to pursue a policy of “constructive unilateralism” in preparation for more substantive peace negotiations when the facts on the ground have improved:

Israel could also take steps that move it closer to its goal of securing its future as a Jewish democracy: declaring it has no sovereignty claims over areas east of the security fence, enacting a voluntary evacuation and compensation law for settlers who reside in these areas (while the Israel Defense Forces remain in those areas until an Israeli-Palestinian agreement is reached) and planning the absorption of these settlers back in Israel proper.

The next constructive step should be the Palestinian admission into the United Nations in September provided the Palestinians accept the international community’s conditions to renounce terror, recognize Israel and recognize previous agreements. The United States has a key role in facilitating this step.

Once progress is made in creating the reality of two states, negotiations can be restarted from a point much closer to a real Israeli-Palestinian agreement.

A reader adds to a previous pick:

1994 also feature two of the greatest documentaries of the 20th Century, Crumb and Hoop Dreams (both of which were controversially omitted from the Best Documentary and Picture categories of the Oscars). It was also the year that Wong Kar-Wai broke through with Chungking Express, and Peter Jackson made waves with Heavenly Creatures. And of course, Jackie Chan released his penultimate film, Drunken Master II. Kevin Smith also made his debut with Clerks, triggering the next wave of DIY filmmakers that would produce and market films (and themselves) outside the studio system, and setting the stage for the next generation of filmmakers, comics and showrunners that would grow up with the Internet. It really was a killer year.

Another begs to differ:

1996? Ugh. I’ll never forgive that year for foisting Vince Vaughn AND Owen Wilson upon us. The greatest year for film was 1984, hands down:

Beverly Hills Cop, Ghostbusters, Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom, Gremlins, Karate Kid, Footloose, Romancing The Stone, Splash, Purple Rain, Amadeus, The Natural, Bachelor Party, The Terminator, The Gods Must Be Crazy, Starman, The Last Starfighter, Muppets Take Manhattan, Sixteen Candles, This Is Spinal Tap, Top Secret!, The Neverending Story, Body Double, Star Trek III: The Search For Spock, Revenge of the Nerds, Once Upon A Time In America, Dune, Police Academy, Against All Odds, Repo Man, Night of the Comet, Toxic Avenger, Red Dawn …

Even Jason had his arguably best turn (Friday The 13th: The Final Chapter) and Freddy was born (A Nightmare On Elm Street). Suck on that, 1939.

Another fan of 1984:

Now, these aren’t “Oscar” caliber films by any stretch of the imagination – in fact it was an incredibly weak Academy Awards year – but the deep impact of these movies, for a generation who grew up in the ’80s at least, is almost beyond the reach of any statues or honors. Almost each one of these films was a genre defining, cinema shattering event (not to mention providing about three-fifths of all movies airing on cable between 1-6 PM on any given weekend).

Update from a reader:

Since some readers are treating the subject of the greatest year in film as My Favorite Hollywood Popcorn Flicks of My Youth, maybe it’s time for us film snobs to set the record straight.

While 1939 and 1974 have their partisans, I’d have to say film’s greatest year was 1959.

1959 saw the emergence of the French New Wave, with Francois Truffaut’s The 400 Blows and Alain Resnais’ Hiroshima, Mon Amour.  It also featured John Cassavetes’ landmark independent film Shadows, which inspired countless young filmmakers to see what they could do with a 16mm camera and a shoestring budget.  It saw Robert Bresson’s classic Pickpocket and Tony Richardson’s Look Back in Anger, which is one of the greatest, if not the greatest, of the British postwar social realist films.  Less often mentioned is Kon Ichikawa’s harrowing Fires on the Plain, which I consider one of the very few genuinely anti-war films ever made (most get too caught up in the machinery and the “shock and awe” of war – Exhibit A is the “Ride of the Valkyries” scene from Apocalypse Now.)

Hollywood was no slouch either, in 1959, releasing perennial favorites Some Like It Hot, Ben-Hur, and North by Northwest.  It also saw the release of Otto Preminger’s Anatomy of a Murder, with its frank and theretofore unheard-of discussions of semen, penetration, and that famous pair of torn panties.  Preminger had been fighting against the Production Code his whole career, and Anatomy of a Murder may have represented his final victory: the Code by that point was so weakened that it gave his film the green light anyway, sealing its own obsolescence.

Of course, my favorite youthful year for popcorn flicks was 1986, but that’s a totally different subject.  ;-)

One more:

I’m surprised more readers haven’t posted about the ’70s. I really think it was the last legitimately great decade for American film. Don’t get me wrong, there have been some great gems since then, but the ’70s had a combination of revolutionary dramas, blockbusters, horror films, and comedies that I don’t think any decade since can match.

Take 1974: The Godfather Part II, Chinatown, Blazing Saddles, Young Frankenstein, and Texas Chainsaw Massacre. My favorite year might be 1975 though: Jaws, One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, Barry Lyndon, Return of the Pink Panther, Monty Python and the Holy Grail, Dog Day Afternoon. All amazing movies that blow pretty much the decades of the ’80s, ’90s, and certainly the 2000s out of the water.

Harold Pollack explains how Medicaid forces millions of people with disabilities to live in poverty in order to remain eligible:

With important variations across the states, most recipients are forbidden from having more than two or three thousand dollars in the bank. You can generally keep your house or your car. That’s pretty much it. You can’t have that emergency fund on hand in case the muffler or the furnace breaks.

And what about the stuff Medicaid doesn’t cover? It’s nice to get your teeth cleaned or just to buy a Big Mac every once in awhile. Because of such means-testing, that new mother is forbidden from setting any money aside for her child’s education. That food services worker living with intellectual disabilities can’t save up for a nice vacation. …

These requirements seem especially strange in the wake of health reform. If you’re on Medicaid because you had a spinal cord injury, you face punishing limitations on your allowable financial assets. If you qualify for Medicaid on the basis of low-income, you don’t face the same limitations. There’s no real justification for this inconsistency. Its one virtue may be that it could prove politically generative, in promoting beneficial reforms. It’s hard to believe that the disability community or the American public will long tolerate this discrepancy.

The 2013 Achieving a Better Life Experience (ABLE) Act, which is on the legislative agenda again this year, is intended to mitigate this catch-22.

Sarah Kliff explains why the Beaver State is shutting down its health exchange:

Oregon’s exchange has, since the get-go, had a pretty terrible run. Because of technological problems, the state couldn’t process online applications for months. Instead, it had to hire 400 temporary workers to process the flood of paper applications used as an alternative. And even by the end of open enrollment — and after spending $200 million in federal funds — Cover Oregon was the only exchange in the country where people couldn’t self-enroll in a health plan in a single sitting.

Oregon’s exchange didn’t have one single-point of authority, a state-issued review concluded in March. The project involved multiple agencies, who sometimes had different and conflicting goals. And Oregon did not set any penalties for when its main contractor, Oracle, missed deadlines.

This raises a number of policy questions, as Jason Millman points out:

Despite its technical problems, Cover Oregon has enrolled about 64,000 in private health plans since October, and enrollment has been extended until the end of the month. When the next enrollment period opens Nov. 15, will those Oregon customers have to go through the enrollment process all over again? That’s not clear, Cover Oregon technology chief Alex Pettit said Thursday. He’s scheduled to meet with federal health officials Monday and Tuesday to iron out further details.

Suderman’s lays into the state government for its incompetence:

Cover Oregon didn’t come through it at all. There were delays, and then more delays. The exchange never successfully went online. No one ever signed up for private coverage through the system. Reports surfaced showing that independent consultants had warned for years that the ambitious project was likely doomed. The warnings were ignored.

In March, Gov. Kitzhaber accepted the resignation of Cover Oregon’s acting director Bruce Goldberg, who supervised the exchange-building process, and requested that the exchange’s board remove Chief Operating Office Triz DelaRosa and CIO Aaron Karjala. It was a $300 million disaster—a model for the nation that turned out to be a total failure.

Josh Archambault predicts that several other state exchanges will fail eventually:

[A] recent hearing in DC highlighted how many of the states still lack a plan to sustain operations in the coming years. All claimed to not require additional federal funding, but even the executive director of the California exchange had to push back on independent assessments that they would be unable to sustain in future years. Hawaii was of special note, given that they don’t have any concrete plans for how to finance themselves yet.

The Obama Administration has started to show malleability in how long states have to spend establishment funds, Rhode Island being the first example of this. But those funds will eventually run out, and a GOP-run Congress is unlikely to provide a blank check to keep them running.