Tag: Premium

A reader slams the claim that AA’s benefits remain unproven:

[Dr. Lance] Dodes’ assertions are false. Keith Humphreys has previously addressed this claim here. I also address it in this post. While the Cochrane study has flaws that are addressed in my post, it’s worth noting that the study compared AA and twelve-step facilitation (TSF) to other treatments. They found that AA and TSF were no more effective than other treatments. Cochrane’s abstract was poorly worded, but it only takes a few minutes to discern this.

Another writes that Dodes “depicts a superstitious, vindictive, and ominous version of 12-step recovery completely unlike the one I’ve experienced”:

Dr. Dodes claims, “The notion that people with addictions suffer from a failure of morality to be indexed and removed is fundamental to Alcoholics Anonymous.” In my own experience, AA literature and members are clear in their belief that alcoholism is not a moral failing, but better understood as a disease. On page 18 of Alcoholics Anonymous, the authors clearly state their view of alcoholism: “We have come to believe it is an illness.” The disease model of addiction is so widely accepted by members of 12-step programs that even South Park saw it as a ripe target for satire.

Later, Dodes refers to “AA’s emphasis on proselytizing,” which he rather snidely defines as “a basic tool through which recognized religions and certain fringe religious groups spread their message.” Whatever AA activities he regards as proselytizing are more casual than any I have ever seen used by any religious group in the world (whether “recognized” or “fringe”). AA does not place advertisements, solicit donations, preach on street corners or go door-to-door.

AA is composed entirely of volunteers and has no top-down leadership hierarchy. What organization there is comes from the “12 Traditions of Alcoholics Anonymous,” first published in Twelve Steps and Twelve Traditions. Tradition Nine states, “AA, as such, ought never be organized,” and Tradition Ten is clear that “our public-relations policy is based on attraction rather than promotion.” If Dr. Dode does not believe that AA groups live up to these professed commitments, he should say as much and provide evidence. If he is unaware of them, then he is embarrassingly uninformed.

I’m confused by one claim of Dr. Dode’s in particular: “For now, I will simply say that there are indeed better treatments for addiction.” Besides the anecdote he provides about his work with Dominic, I found no further mention of such treatments. Presumably, I’ll have to buy one of his books or schedule an appointment to learn more. In the meantime, millions of recovering addicts worldwide will be sharing their experience, strength and time – for free – to anyone with a desire to stop drinking or using.

Another pleads for the Dish to wise up on AA:

You link over and over and over again to these critiques of AA that are so wrongheaded as to be laughable – if they weren’t so full of pernicious disinformation. By conflating AA and rehab, the authors have a whole article that elides the massive difference between the two. Rehabs have taken the 12 steps from AA – which are not copyrighted, because, you know, as above, the sixth tradition avoids problems of money, property, and prestige – and the failings of the system are those of rehabs. There’s almost nothing accurate about AA in that Salon article. A few points:

AA and rehab have even been codified into our legal system: court-mandated attendance, which began in the late 1980s, is today a staple of drug-crime policy. Every year, our state and federal governments spend over $15 billion on substance-abuse treatment for addicts, the vast majority of which are based on 12-step programs. There is only one problem: these programs almost always fail.

AA never costs money. Ever. The sixth tradition of AA is that “an AA group ought never endorse, finance or lend the AA name to any related facility or outside enterprise, lest problems of money, property and prestige divert us from our primary purpose.” And the court-mandated system is actually at odds with that same tradition. I have worked with many men trying to get sober in rehab and they have all relapsed because they were being forced to get sober. That doesn’t work and never will, because true alcoholics will look for any reason to keep drinking.

Another lie in the article:

AA has managed to survive, in part, because members who become and remain sober speak and write about it regularly. This is no accident: AA’s twelfth step expressly tells members to proselytize for the organization: “Having had a spiritual awakening as the result of these Steps, we tried to carry this message to alcoholics, and to practice these principles in all our affairs.”

This misinterpretation is completely counter to the eleventh tradition of AA, which expressly tells members not to proselytize: “Our public relations policy is based on attraction rather than promotion; we need always maintain personal anonymity at the level of press, radio, and films.”

And even writing you about this is not in the spirit of the tenth tradition: “Alcoholics Anonymous has no opinion on outside issues; hence the AA name ought never be drawn into public controversy.” And yet people seem to be completely set on running it down, even though I’ve seen it work miraculously in my life and again and again in others. To educate yourself, you might want to check out the traditions of AA here.

Jonathan Crow spotlights Orson Welles’ trailer for Citizen Kane, calling it “as innovative as the film itself”:

The trailer for Citizen Kane, which you can see above, has no actual footage from the movie – something of a rarity. Instead, the trailer serves as a curious four-minute long documentary featuring behind-the-scenes footage and short vignettes of characters reacting to the movie’s mysterious central character. … Compare Kane’s trailer with one that was more typical of its time like Casablanca. Amid the overwrought copy and some comically flashy transitions, that trailer all but tells you what is going to happen in the film. There’s violence! Danger! Romance! Kane’s trailer, on the other hand, is less a sales pitch than a mystery. It shows plenty about the people behind the making of the movie but it shows nothing from the actual film. Based solely on the trailer, you don’t know what Kane is about, short of being about a shadowy, complicated character called Kane.

Welles wasn’t just being cagey for the sake of building audience interest. He was trying to head off a fight. Though Welles publicly claimed that Kane was not about media barron William Randolph Hearst, you can hardly blame the tycoon for feeling otherwise. Hearst was a newspaper magnet with a showgirl mistress who built himself a preposterously opulent castle. Citizen Kane is about a newspaper magnet with a showgirl wife who built himself a preposterously opulent castle.

For a broader look at the development of the movie trailer, check out the short documentary below:

Joe Berkowitz captions:

“The History of the Movie Trailer” is a 15-minute video that traces the evolution of its subject matter from the silent film era through to the blockbusters of today. In doing so, the video positions movie trailers as a unique medium that is halfway between advertisement and cinematic artform that is occasionally as impressive as the film it’s promoting. Created by FilmmakerIQ.com with help from BlackMagicDesign.com, “The History” highlights some interesting trivia that even the most hardcore movie junkies among us might not have realized we wanted to know. For instance, it’s strange to think that trailers were initially produced by theaters themselves until the 1960s, when studios took over.

More here.

World War Z author Max Brooks is out with a new, non-fiction graphic novel, The Harlem Hellfighters, about the 369th Regiment, the first African-American infantry unit to fight in World War I. Nick Romeo praises the way the book handles the moral complexity of the story:

Brooks doesn’t simply romanticize the men of the 369th; he’s aware of the ugly motives that may have prompted them to fight. The same soldier who delivers the subversive history lesson explains his enlistment like this: “White folks payin’ me to kill other white folks?!?! Glory, hallelujah!” To present the soldiers only as noble patriots persecuted by an evil system would have made them caricatures. Instead, Brooks makes them human, and as such they are subject to the same distorting rages as members of any other race. The soldier doesn’t seek revenge against particular white folks; he wants to kill them indiscriminately. No race, Brooks suggests, is immune to racism.

This moral complexity is just one of the novel’s many achievements. Dialogue and imagery are often richly juxtaposed; in one frame, the word “hero” hovers beside the image of a soldier vomiting over the side of the ship. Heroism isn’t all crisply snapping salutes and courageous charges at the enemy; it has a messy, unglamorous side as well.

Ben Mathis-Lilley interviews the author:

Why were these men, so badly treated in their own country, willing to fight for it?

They understood what it meant to be an American more than white Americans. We live in a country of really rare ideals and rights, and I think a lot of people take those for granted. I think these guys were aware of ideals because their country hadn’t lived up to them. This was the first war for ideals we’d ever fought. It wasn’t a revolution or a land grab. It was to “make the world safe for democracy.” You can’t appreciate democracy until you don’t have it. I could be wrong, but I think that resonated with them.

And yet it still took decades for the country to even begin to fully extend democracy to black Americans.

They came back to a tremendous backlash. You should google a newsreel of the KKK march in Washington, D.C. There’s an iconic image of thousands of Klan members marching with the Capitol in the background. That’s in the ’20s; that’s after the war. They endured a tremendous backlash. But even that backlash ultimately pushed the cause of freedom further. They didn’t benefit from it. But their children did.

Lara Zarum praises Saul Austerlitz’s Sitcom: A History in 24 Episodes from I Love Lucy to Community for illustrating “the beauty of TV: if you sit close enough, you can see a faint outline of your reflection in the screen”:

Unlike film or literature, Austerlitz observes, TV needs the active participation of an audience in order to keep showing up on our screens every week. There’s a reason it reflects our lives (Roseanne) or a fantasy of them (Leave it to Beaver). The sitcom’s cozy relationship with its audience verges on unhealthy codependence. Its basic structure may have varied little over the course of its history, but sitcoms have to be flexible in order to suit the desires and responses of the viewers: When All in the Family’s racist, bigoted Archie Bunker (Carroll O’Connor) received the surprising and overwhelming admiration of TV audiences, the show had to dance on the line between “approval and condemnation of its prime instigator.”

Emily Nussbaum zeroes in on how Bunker’s bigotry both influenced and reflected cultural divides:

In Season 8, there’s a trenchant sequence in which Archie, drunk and trapped in a storage room with Michael, talks about his childhood. Yes, his father said “nigger” while he was growing up, Archie says—everybody did—and when Michael tells him what his father said was wrong, Archie delivers a touching, confused defense of the man who raised him, who held his hand, but who also beat him and shoved him in a closet. It was all out of love, Archie insists.

“How could any man that loves you tell you anything that’s wrong?” he murmurs, just before he passes out. The scene should have been grotesquely manipulative and mawkish, but, strengthened by O’Connor’s affecting performance, it makes [series producer Norman] Lear’s point more strongly than any op-ed, even decades later: bigotry is resilient, because rejecting it often means rejecting your own family.

Civil-rights advocates, including the National Urban League and the Anti-Defamation League, tended to share [critic Laura Z.] Hobson’s distrust of the series. (In contrast, the A.C.L.U. awarded Lear the Freedom of the Press Award, in 1973.) Bill Cosby, who was a major TV star after “I Spy,” downright despised Archie Bunker. Even a decade later, on “The Phil Donahue Show,” Cosby was still expressing frustration that Bunker had never apologized for anything, making him “a hero to too many Americans for his shortsightedness, his tunnel vision.” He added, “And I’m really a believer that the show never taught or tried to teach anybody anything.”

To critics, the show wasn’t the real problem: its audience was. In 1974, the social psychologists Neil Vidmar and Milton Rokeach offered some evidence for this argument in a study published in the Journal of Communication, using two samples, one of teen-agers, the other of adults. Subjects, whether bigoted or not, found the show funny, but most bigoted viewers didn’t perceive the program as satirical. They identified with Archie’s perspective, saw him as winning arguments, and, “perhaps most disturbing, saw nothing wrong with Archie’s use of racial and ethnic slurs.” Lear’s series seemed to be even more appealing to those who shared Archie’s frustrations with the culture around him, a “silent majority” who got off on hearing taboo thoughts said aloud.

(Video: Archie and Mike in a scene from All in the Family, “Two’s a Crowd,” February 12, 1978)

Alexander Aciman’s plea for colleges to stop hitting up indebted grads for donations hit a nerve with readers:

I told Chicago (“The U of C” in my time before their ungrammatical and inelegant rebranding as “UChicago”) they would never see another cent from me as long as the president, Robert Zimmer, was making such crazy, truly crazy, money: $3.4 million at last count, in 2011. I said the same to Harvard – zillions in hand and poor-mouthing all the time.

I have benefited greatly from my education and the opportunity that derives from my degrees from both institutions, but I end up giving my own modest philanthropic dollars to the small liberal arts college where I teach. We don’t have very many big government grants, much less DOD or DOE contracts, propping up the STEM fields. We instead have a relatively poor alumni base of public servants, teacher, preachers, and country doctors, not investment bankers and hedge funders and tycoons. We make do on less than our peers and we teach the students really well.

Also, we don’t require any students to take out loans. Whoever can get in can afford it because we guarantee full demonstrated need with no loans. That’s a huge monetary commitment to do the right thing and it’s coming out of the hides of lots of other things on campus, mainly faculty and staff salaries, academic programming, and delays in new, direly needed teaching and learning spaces.

Another writes:

As an Ivy League graduate who spent more than 10 years helping to raise money from my classmates after we graduated in the 1970s, here’s my theory:

the people like me, who struggled mightily for respect as young alumni, are now in charge of fundraising operations but have failed to understand the much larger impact loans have on current students than they did on earlier generations.

I am very fond of the Ivy League university I attended, but it wasn’t an automatic ticket to riches. I give when I can. But I wish there was a better way for young alumni to contribute to the success of the university other than being badgered for money when they have huge loans. I think strong career networking and strong career services would be a help, but as far as I can tell, the faculty don’t actually care about graduating students who can find jobs with bachelor’s degrees, and so the career office is run by a person with a counseling degree who has no actual hiring experience in the business world.

Another points out a “straightforward” reason alumni offices chase even the tiniest donations:

One of the criteria on which schools are ranked (by organizations like US News & World Report) is the percentage of graduates donating to the school. It’s why I give $5 per year to my alma; it’s a cheap way to do my part to ensure the future worth of my degree.

Victoria Turk sums up Greenpeace’s latest report (pdf) on the global environmental impact of the IT industry:

It puts IT-related emissions at two percent of global emissions—about the same as the aviation industry.

While it’s harder to envisage emissions coming from the hum of your laptop compared to, say, the roar of a jet engine, keeping data centres in power requires a lot of, well, power. And as our data consumption increases and more people get connected, that’s only going up. As Greenpeace writes, “The replacement of dirty sources of electricity with clean renewable sources is still the crucial missing link in the sector’s sustainability efforts.”

The report commended some companies for committing to clean energy—it praised Apple, Box, Facebook, Google, Rackspace, and Salesforce for setting goals of 100 percent renewable energy for their data centres and making steps in that direction. It was considerably less effusive in its verdict on [Amazon Web Services] (whose data centres provide storage and computing to a whole load of internet heavy-hitters) and Twitter[.]

Lauren C. Williams adds that this naming and shaming really does push IT companies to clean up their act:

“What you have is a set of customer-facing companies that are delivering very valuable information services,” Jonathan Koomey, a Stanford University research fellow for energy policy and finance, told ThinkProgress. “Because they are customer-facing, these companies actually care about where they get their electricity. When it’s shown that they’re getting their energy from sources that aren’t as clean, that’s a problem for their customers.”

To combat a poor public image, companies in turn start revising their policies and focus on investing in cleaner energies. Greenpeace released a similar report in 2012 that named Apple as one of the dirtiest companies. Since then, Apple has jumped to the front of pack. “Apple is the archetypal example,” Koomey said. “They were really slammed in the first report. And what Apple decided to do was put this whole thing behind them and go to 100 percent renewable [energy].”

Fallows wonders whether it will succeed:

Through its 30-plus years of economic modernization, China has seemed to stick to efficient levels of corruption. Connected families got very rich, but most families did better than they had before.

An increasingly important question for Xi Jinping’s time in office, which bears on the even more urgent question of whether China can make progress against its environmental catastrophe, involves the levels and forms of Chinese corruption. Has it begun passing from tolerable to intolerable levels? If so, does Xi Jinping have the time, tools, or incentive to do anything about it? Will exposing high-level malfeasance—like the astonishing recent case of Zhou Yongkang, who appears to have taken more than $14 billion while he held powerful petroleum and internal-security roles—encourage the public? Or instead sour and shock them about how bad the problem really is? Is it even possible to run a government and command a party while simultaneously threatening the system that most current power-holders have relied on for power and wealth?

Adam Minter highlights one example of everyday corruption: the pocketing of the fines China collects from parents who violate the one-child policy:

The problem, according to Chinese media reports, is that quite a bit of that revenue doesn’t seem to land in government treasuries. In rural Yunnan Province, for example, audits suggest that in one county as little as 10.18% of social compensation fees flowed into government coffers. In Chongqing, 68 million yuan ($11 million) worth of social planning fees failed to find their way to the treasury.

Needless to say, the stench of corruption hangs heavy over such discrepancies. In Yunnan, officials were found to be using social maintenance fees to pay for personal expenses, including medical bills. In some regions, local authorities allow officials who collect the fees to keep a certain percentage of them. The situation — whereby officials are incentivized to hunt down children for their revenue-generating potential — is both untenable and perverse.

In a review of Melissa Gira Grant’s Playing the Whore, Katha Pollitt faults today’s left for its acceptance of sex work:

It’s one thing to say sex workers shouldn’t be stigmatized, let alone put in jail. But when feminists argue that sex work should be normalized, they accept male privilege they would attack in any other area. They accept that sex is something women have and men get (do I hear “rape culture,” anyone?), that men are entitled to sex without attracting a partner, even to the limited extent of a pickup in a bar, much less pleasing or satisfying her. As Grant says, they are buying a fantasy—the fantasy of the woman who wants whatever they want (how johns persuade themselves of this is beyond me). But maybe men would be better partners, in bed and out of it, if they couldn’t purchase that fantasy, if sex for them, as for women, meant finding someone who likes them enough to exchange pleasure for pleasure, intimacy for intimacy.

The current way of seeing sex work is all about liberty—but what about equality? I thought the left was about that, too.

Elizabeth Nolan Brown disagrees:

I’m not sure what Pollitt means by “normalized.”

I’ve never seen any feminists arguing that prostitution should be the predominant sexual paradigm or that scores more people should go into it. We simply think that prohibition of sex work creates more problems than it solves, that adults should be free to engage in sexual contracts with one another as they see fit, and that driving sex work underground leads to more exploitative conditions for those who are coerced or forced into it. If that’s “normalization,” sure, but it wouldn’t be the first term I’d choose. Semantics aside, the fact that a practice may contribute to troubling gender expectations simply isn’t justification to prohibit it.

Erik Loomis also takes issue with Pollitt’s moralizing tone:

Unfortunately, while Pollitt is writing in the language of second-wave feminism, she’s also writing in the language of prohibitionism. She tries to stigmatize a reality of the world as immoral, but in fact just reinforces a system by which women are in fact victimized. Even the poor women she accuses Grant of ignoring are not helped by keeping sex work illegal. If you legalize sex work, you are going to make it harder for underground sex operations that treat women terribly to continue because a major reason why they exist is that sex work is illegal and therefore stigmatized. That’s not to say sex work is great–it’s a bad job—but keeping it illegal does not promote the equality that Pollitt wants to see.

Ben Casselman sums up today’s jobs report:

The economy added 192,000 jobs in March, the 42nd consecutive month of growth, the Bureau of Labor Statistics reported Friday. All the gains were in the private sector, pushing nongovernment employment to 116 million, just above the prior record set in January 2008, when the recession was just beginning. The private sector lost 8.8 million jobs in the recession and has gained 8.9 million since.

But the wounds of the recession are far from fully healed. Total payrolls remain more than 400,000 below their prior peak due to deep cuts in the number of government workers, especially at the state and local level. And the adult population (16 years and older) has grown by 14 million since the recession began, meaning the U.S. job market is nowhere close to fully recovered on a per-capita basis.

Drum is relatively upbeat:

This is basically good news. The labor force participation rate increased because 500,000 people entered the labor force, and the raw number of unemployed stayed about the same. The fact that people are returning to the labor force is pretty positive, as is the fact that jobs numbers for January and February were revised upward a bit. Jared Bernstein points out that wage growth has been fairly strong over the past year, which also counts as good news as long as the Fed doesn’t use this as an excuse to start tightening monetary policy.

Ylan Mui sees the report as a sign that the economy could finally takeoff:

[M]any analysts believe the economy grew at a paltry rate of 2 percent or less during the first quarter. (The government’s official estimate won’t be released until the end of the month.) That threatened forecasts that the economy could expand at a rate of 3 percent this year for the first time in nearly a decade. The solid job growth in March — if it holds up in future months — puts that goal back within striking distance.

Danny Vinik throws cold water:

[W]hile the nearly 200,000 jobs is a welcome development, the recovery has still not hit second gear. Month-to-month jobs reports contain a lot of noise as the sampling error is high and revisions can change the numbers significantly. One way to filter out some of that noise is to use a three-month moving average. As you can see, job growth has fluctuated between 150,000 and 200,000 jobs for years now:

Cassidy notes that the many groups are still doing very poorly:

[R]ather than trying to further parse the payroll numbers, let’s look, for once, at the distributional data in the report, which shows that a great deal of variation and inequity are persisting, despite the over-all improvement. The recovery has been real for some groups, particularly those with college educations and whites who aren’t trapped in extended spells of unemployment. But, for other groups, including the long-term unemployed, African-Americans, and young adults who aren’t in college, finding work remains a formidable challenge, and finding a decent job is even harder.

But Bill McBride wants the recovery put in perspective:

Although this was a slow recovery compared to most previous recessions, this was actually a relatively fast recovery compared to recessions following a severe financial crisis.  It is easy to complain about policy makers, but we have to recognize that some policies actually helped ease the pain for millions of workers.