Tag: Premium

by Dish Staff

Readers join Dish staffers in sharing their stories:

Around age 5, my father took me to the mall for some shopping and the ritual Santa visit. Whatever it was he needed to buy, the journey was unsuccessful on that front, and we traveled directly to another mall to try again. Of course, there was at this second mall another Santa, one with somewhat different facial features and proportions. I quickly deduced these could not both be Santa, and, QED, Christmas was a fraud.

Pinned with the sudden outburst of my doubts, Dad didn’t miss a beat. “Well of course Santa can’t be at every mall,” he said nonchalantly.  “He’s a busy guy, making toys. He has a lot of helper Santas he sends out to find out what people want for Christmas. They’re called ‘subordinate Clauses.'”

Maybe he’d been waiting his whole adult life to make that pun. Maybe it came to him in a brilliant flash. Needless to say I didn’t get it for many more years. But I bought the substance when it counted, and the benevolent illusion was preserved.

Not for this reader:

I believed in Santa until I was five or six. Then I learned about gravity, and I wasn’t sure how the sleigh could fly, since reindeer don’t have wings or jets. The more I thought about the logistics of Santa, the more they bothered me. How did Santa get around the world in one night? The Polar Express, which I loved, implied that he didn’t even get started until after midnight, and that made the whole thing seem even more implausible.

This story has an unexpected twist:

I have an older brother, by 3 years. As with most older brothers, mine delighted in ruining anything I believed in or liked.

Knowing this, one year my dad took my brother aside and told him, “I know you don’t believe in Santa anymore, but don’t ruin it for your brother.” As my dad tells it, my brother’s bottom lip started quivering, and with tears in his eyes, he looked up at my dad and said, “There’s no Santa??” He was certain my brother no longer believed and felt so guilty for ruining his eldest son’s Christmas that year.

Another reader:

Santa was revealed to me as an empty suit the Christmas I was 5. We were at my grandparents house when the adults informed me that Santa had decided that I should open my presents before Christmas morning (I have no idea why other than they just wanted open presents early) so he was making an express delivery. This announcement was followed by a big ho ho ho on the porch that sounded just like my uncle and my gifts magically appeared. I got suspicious.

But I still wanted to give him the benefit of the doubt, so the next year I wrote my Santa letter and asked him for a Dancer Ballerina doll, which I got, only to have her twirl one time and break. My mother told me that they must have made a mistake in Santa‘s workshop, so Rudolph would probably fly back in a day or two to take it back so the elves could repair the ballerina’s twirl. But the next day I found the box she came in – in my mother’s bedroom hidden under some quilts, and the sticker on it didn’t say North Pole; it said Sears. And I was done.

Weird thing though: I didn’t tell my parents for another year or two. They seemed to get such a kick out of Santa that I didn’t want to ruin it for them.

Another:

I don’t have any recollection of losing my faith in Santa, but I do have a quick anecdote about my daughter, now eight. Mid-October, as we are eating dinner, she asks, “So, when are you and Mom going to give KJ (older brother) and me The Talk“? The capital letters were quite clear in her speech. Having already explained to her how she arrived on this world, I was a little confused.

“What talk?”

“The talk where you tell us there is no Santa Claus, you’ve been buying all the presents, and then lying to us so we wouldn’t ask you for more?”

“Oh. Next year.”

“Cool.”

Another got both Talks at once:

I believed in Santa for an almost embarrassingly long amount of time. I was 13 years old when my mother sat me down and informed me that if I was going to start learning about sex, I might as well learn the truth about Santa. The problem for me was a combination of too clever parents (I was regularly required to put toys and clothes  out on the porch in early December for Santa to “recycle” so that when my younger siblings or cousins received them it wouldn’t be weird), and a stubborn need to believe in magic that has unfortunately followed me into adulthood. Well, that, and as I repeated told my classmates, “My parents are way too poor to buy that stuff, so Santa has to be real.”

Another older believer:

I was relatively late to the game of realizing Santa wasn’t real (I think I defended his existence to numerous doubtful friends).  But my realization happened as a result of just thinking too hard one car ride with mom.  I started to think that if Santa were real, my capacity to receive presents would be limitless – I could have not only a Nintendo, but every game they ever produced.  I mean, if he’s got these elves making toys and magical powers, why couldn’t I receive everything I possibly wanted?

I realized that deep down I knew this was impossible, that there were economic restraints on Christmas.  So I just turned to my mom and said “there’s no Santa is there,” and she replied “no.”  And that was the end of it.

(Image via Cess Padilla)

by Dish Staff

Given how little trade most of the world does with North Korea, further economic sanctions aren’t really an option:

Peter Singer, mercifully, rules out war:

We didn’t go to war with North Korea when they murdered American soldiers  ​in the 1970s with axes. We didn’t go to war with ​North Korea when they fired missiles over our allies. We didn’t go to war with ​North Korea when one of their ships torpedoed an alliance partner and killed some of their sailors. You’re going to tell me we’re now going to go to war because a Sony exec described Angelina Jolie as a diva? It’s not happening.

As Will noted, Chait recommends that the government make Sony whole. Ambinder disagrees:

I wondered online if Sony could argue somehow that it is too big to fail — that if the attack is tied to a country, then perhaps the company can be indemnified from lawsuits arising from its own alleged neglect. The answer is no.

Going forward, Congress might consider some sort of risk pool for companies that meet strict standards and still find themselves the victim of state-sponsored hacking. Sony does not seem to have met those standards. It was low-hanging fruit. Sony will have to eat its losses, because saving Sony from embarrassment is not in our national interest. But securing open access to the internet for American companies is now considered to be a critical national security issue.

Bloomberg View’s editors think “Sony and other corporations can’t expect the U.S. government to respond to every attack on their behalf”:

However embarrassing and costly to the studio, the hacking represents a cybercrime, not an act of cyberterrorism directed at civilians or vital national infrastructure. (By the same token, threats against theaters showing a Hollywood comedy that mocks Kim Jong Un hardly compare with the vows of annihilation that constantly pour out of North Korean state media.) Companies need to improve their own defenses.

They ask, “What level of attack would prompt a U.S. counterstrike?”

There’s no need for any new red line to be drawn here. It would only help the Kim regime calculate the risk-reward ratio for its cybermischief. Ambiguity can help deter North Korea from attempting anything more serious, such as an attack on the U.S.’s critical infrastructure.

It’s worth keeping in mind that certain individuals, like Kim Zetter, still have doubts that North Korea is responsible for the attack:

Nation-state attacks aren’t generally as noisy, or announce themselves with an image of a blazing skeleton posted to infected computers, as occurred in the Sony hack. Nor do they use a catchy nom-de-hack like Guardians of Peace to identify themselves. Nation-state attackers also generally don’t chastise their victims for having poor security, as purported members of GOP have done in media interviews. Nor do such attacks involve posts of stolen data to Pastebin—the unofficial cloud repository of hackers—where sensitive company files belonging to Sony have been leaked. These are all hallmarks of hacktivists—groups like Anonymous and LulzSec, who thrive on targeting large corporations for ideological reasons or just the lulz, or by hackers sympathetic to a political cause.

Barbara Demick listens to another skeptic:

“There is such a level of vindictiveness toward Sony that it feels more like an ex-employee or a business dispute,” Martyn Williams, a long-time North Korea watcher, who has taken a contrarian view on the attack, said. Williams believes that the hackers could be using North Korean software, or possibly imitating North Korean tactics, to cover their own tracks. He notes that the Guardians of Peace hackers didn’t mention “The Interview” before this week. He also believes that a recent message on a text-sharing Web site that threatened moviegoers and invoked 9/11 was unlikely to have come from North Korea. “North Korea is definitely capable of annoying its neighbors, but to make these kind of threats, saying ‘Remember 9/11,’ I don’t think North Korea is so stupid,’’ Williams said.

On the other hand, today the FBI officially blamed North Korea for the hack.

by Michelle Dean

The news about humanity is never very good when it comes from Reddit, is it? Today’s contribution comes via an editorial at WIRED. Its authors, Elena Glassman, Neha Narula and Jean Yang, are scientists at MIT. They described the gendered horror show that was their Reddit AMA:

Within an hour, the thread had rocketed to the Reddit front page, with hundreds of thousands of pageviews and more than 4,700 comments. But to our surprise, the most common questions were about why our gender was relevant at all. Some people wondered why we did not simply present ourselves as “computer scientists.” Others questioned if calling attention to gender perpetuated sexism. Yet others felt that we were taking advantage of the fact that we were women to get more attention for our AMA.

The interactions in the AMA itself showed that gender does still matter. Many of the comments and questions illustrated how women are often treated in male-dominated STEM fields. Commenters interacted with us in a way they would not have interacted with men, asking us about our bra sizes, how often we “copy male classmates’ answers,” and even demanding we show our contributions “or GTFO [Get The **** Out]”. One redditor helpfully called out the double standard, saying, “Don’t worry guys – when the male dog groomer did his AMA (where he specifically identified as male), there were also dozens of comments asking why his sex mattered. Oh no, wait, there weren’t.”

“Oh, it’s just Reddit,” you might be saying to yourself. As a seasoned 4chan conspiracy theorist myself –at this point I think “4chan prank” whenever some weird story begins to break, at first even wondering if the whole Sony leak could be a 4chan hoax, if they could have made up the whole document stash – I understand the impulse to brush this sort of thing off as trolling. It is that, and undoubtedly some of these comments come from the sort of pure unmitigated jerkery commonly found in the underbelly of the internet.

But it’s also something else. Because their comments aren’t all that far from ones I have heard myself, said with utter sincerity. Men don’t respond very well, still, to the notion that gender might be relevant. They might be a little meaner about it in anonymous spaces online, but you can see the problem everywhere.

One of the slim, ephemeral benefits of being publicly identifiable as a feminist is that I don’t tend to be in male-dominated or even male-only spaces very often. There is one giant exception to that. Years ago, I spent some time in a journalism school. An admissions fluke had me in a class that was overwhelmingly male. There was one other woman, but she dropped out early.

I knew I was in for it when in a very early class, one of the other students starting waxing philosophic about fact-checking and John D’Agata. And towards the end of this digression, he referred to the magazine The Believer. And then he referred to its editor as “Ben Marcus’s wife.” Full stop.

I’m polite. I’m Canadian. I waited for the discussion to come around to me. I said something like, “You know, her name is Heidi Julavits. I wouldn’t call her Ben Marcus’s wife, if I were you.” I meant it rather benevolently at the time. I was amused.

Now, to be clear, at the time the student registered chagrin. As I recall, he said something like, “Oof, that probably sounded sexist, didn’t it.” It did. There he had it. We moved on.

But the incident hardened into a parable within our small class. Mea culpa: I participated in this hardening by sometimes teasing the other student about his use of the phrase.

The parable didn’t come to be about him, though. It came to be about me, about what I was like, meaning that I was the kind of person who’d insensitively attack a man for making an inadvertently sexist comment. And gradually, the story became a way for the other male students to express their frustrations with my views of the world. I remember very clearly one of them bringing it up – it seemed to come up way too often – months later and saying, “There was nothing wrong with what he said. Ben Marcus is more famous than Heidi Julavits.”

Now, you could be forgiven for not wanting to do the fine filigree work of parsing reputations here. Suffice to say that I don’t think either Marcus or Julavits would be upset if I said that neither of them was particularly famous. I do, actually contend, that even within the kind of meager fame literary circles bestow on writers and editors like them, that Julavits is likely better known. This may only be true because Marcus writes experimental fiction and she is involved with more widely accessible work. (The latter is not an insult in my world.)

But that isn’t the point. The point is it’s odd to classify a woman as someone’s wife, particularly in a professional context, and no, your gut feeling that someone is more famous does not get us away from the problem with the phrase. Even if you didn’t “mean” to be sexist, the identifier “somebody’s wife” is a remnant of sexism. Women take it personally. They should. It was long used as a way to inform women that, as in Rebecca Solnit’s phrase, “This is not their world.”

The tossed off remark was only the spark of the larger problem, though. When I said something that day, and even later when I teased the student, I wasn’t trying to be a warrior for gender justice. I was trying to gently remind a bunch of young men that they, too, should pay attention to the names of women. It was almost friendly professional advice, because it was quite possible that they’d end up pitching stories to her.

Nonetheless, it labelled me as the person in the class who “made things” about gender. It made me the butt of these young men’s jokes. Which eventually had the result of making me angry with most of them, because there are only so many times you can hear from people that your apprehension of reality is incorrect before you start to get angry with them. I realize they might have felt the same way about me. But they outnumbered me at the time. Which they still do, by the way, just about everywhere in journalism that I’d actually like to go.

That’s another way of saying that besides injured feelings, I had history and statistics to be angry about. As do those MIT science professors.

by Dish Staff

Nebraska and Oklahoma are suing Colorado for legalizing marijuana:

Two of Colorado’s neighboring states, arguing that the legalization of marijuana for Coloradans is causing crime problems across state borders, asked the Supreme Court on Thursday to allow them to file a lawsuit directly before the Justices.  If the suit goes forward, Nebraska and Oklahoma’s filing said, the Court should rule that the commercial part of the Colorado scheme is unconstitutional and could no longer be enforced.

Josh Harkinson explains the states’ grievances:

Evidence has been mounting that Colorado can’t contain all of its weed. In June, USA Today highlighted the flow of its marijuana into small towns across Nebraska. Since 2011, the paper reported, felony drug arrests in Chappell, Nebraska, a town just seven miles north of the Colorado border, have jumped 400 percent.

Colorado has vowed to defend its laws:

Colorado Attorney General John Suthers isn’t backing down. In a statement, he said he intends to defend the state’s marijuana laws. “Because neighboring states have expressed concern about Colorado-grown marijuana coming into their states, we are not entirely surprised by this action,” Suthers said. “However, it appears the plaintiffs’ primary grievance stems from non-enforcement of federal laws regarding marijuana, as opposed to choices made by the voters of Colorado. We believe this suit is without merit and we will vigorously defend against it in the U.S. Supreme Court.”

Sullum doubts the prohibitionists will prevail:

As Deputy Attorney General James Cole explained to the Senate Judiciary Committee last year, the Justice Department decided against trying to block marijuana legalization in Colorado and Washington after concluding that there was no viable legal strategy to stuff the buds back into the jar. It is well established that Congress cannot compel states to punish activities they decide should not be treated as crimes. Although the federal government might have more success in challenging a state’s licensing, regulation, and taxation of marijuana businesses, Cole said, the upshot of such a victory would be a legal but completely unregulated market. Given the way the Supreme Court has interpreted the Commerce Clause with reference to the ban on marijuana, the feds might force Colorado and Washington to scrap their rules for growing and distributing marijuana. But they cannot constitutionally force Colorado and Washington to arrest, prosecute, and imprison marijuana growers and distributors.

(Photo: A tourist purchases marijuana at La Conte’s Clone Bar & Dispensary during a marijuana tour hosted by My 420 Tours in Denver on December 6, 2014. By Craig F. Walker / The Denver Post)

by Will Wilkinson

The hacking of Sony and the studio’s subsequent decision to halt the release of The Interview is incredibly weird and it’s left me pretty well stumped. First of all, I’m not 100% positive North Korea is the culprit. I’m not aware of dispositive evidence (maybe the government has it) and it’s more than a little surprising that the North Koreans could do anything so competently. I guess they could pay somebody to do it. In any event, the idea that the North Korean dictator gets to decide what Americans are allowed to watch is outrageous. What leaves me baffled and vexed is what to do about it.

Jonathan Chait wants to the feds to step in and backstop the studios:

The federal government should take financial responsibility. Either Washington should guarantee Sony’s financial liability in the event of an attack, or it should directly reimburse the studio’s projected losses so it can release the movie online for free. The latter solution has the attractive benefit of ensuring a far wider audience for the film than it would otherwise have attracted.

I don’t think this is a bad idea at all, but it’s not clear to me that it gets us far toward solving the problem of the hacker’s veto. What if the Guardians of Peace threaten to blow up Amazon or Netflix server farms, or Comcast HQ, and once again the studio, or the distributors, with perfectly understandable myopic capitalist prudence, capitulate? I mean, when several theaters resolved to show Team America: World Police in the place of The Interview, Paramount said “Nope, shut it down” – a move, in the words of Peter Suderman, that “can really only be described as next-level cowardly bullshit.”

It would seem to me that, in the end, the only real answer is spine. It’s hard not to agree with George Clooney:

We should be in the position right now of going on offense with this. I just talked to Amy an hour ago. She wants to put that movie out. What do I do? My partner Grant Heslov and I had the conversation with her this morning. Bryan and I had the conversation with her last night. Stick it online. Do whatever you can to get this movie out. Not because everybody has to see the movie, but because I’m not going to be told we can’t see the movie. That’s the most important part. We cannot be told we can’t see something by Kim Jong-un, of all f*cking people.

Quite so. But, again, how do you ensure that all the players down the distribution chain don’t get the jitters? As Jonah Golberg notes:

The only problem: At least one cable company preemptively surrendered to North Korean intimidation, too, reportedly saying it would not air the film. Now, even if Sony had a backbone transplant, it couldn’t release the movie.

Sony could still dump it on the Internet and let it spread virally. It would lose ticket sales, but the company would strike a defiant blow nonetheless.

Don’t hold your breath. Sony would rather go the way of appeasement. And so would everyone else, it seems.

Clooney worries, and I think he’s right to worry, that our lack of spine is going to lead to insipid, bland, inoffensive, a political film-making. Freddie de Boer observes that we’ve got that problem already:

What I wonder is why people aren’t a little more put off by a form of censorship that is more insidious, and will likely affect far more movies in the long run: the soft censorship of appealing to the Chinese government in order to reap the Chinese box office. There have been widespread claims that recent blockbuster movies like the latest Transformers have been written so as to appease Chinese censors. There’s nothing wrong with writing movies to reach out to a particularly huge foreign box office– why wouldn’t you want your movie to play to Chinese moviegoers?– but appealing to the Chinese government is a whole other ball of wax. That’s where you  can see genuine self-censorship coming in. And while I imagine that this whole thing will blow over before long, without a great deal of long-term damage, I think the urge to play in China -and for the Chinese government —  will only grow over time.

The problem of willingly selling out to the Chinese reminded me of Ayn Rand, whose bracing moral lessons I’m sure Freddie had in the back of his mind. Rand’s finest novel, The Fountainhead, is an anti-capitalist screed about the spiritual and cultural evil of catering to market demand. Forget the problem of giving the commie censors what they want. It’s wrong to give the free market what it wants, when what it wants is aesthetically debased, which it always is. The architect hero of The Fountainhead, Howard Roark, is the ultimate in spine, the patron saint of never selling out. When one of his perfect, austere modernist buildings is bowdlerized the better to suit the public taste, he blows it up. That’s right, Howard Roark is a terrorist, a jihadi for artistic integrity. Maybe Howard Roark is the answer. Maybe can show us the way. Maybe Sony needs to feel that it is unsafe not to release The Interview. Maybe Seth Rogen needs to blow something up! Or maybe Brian Beutler is on to something, and the best we can do is call on Anonymous to steal the movie and make sure that, in this case at least, market-based American spinelessness can’t put a gag on our precious stoner auteurs.