Tag: Premium

Adam Pasick examines the Chinese public’s largely sympathetic response to Beijing airport bomber Ji Zhongxing:

If Ji Zhongxing had set off a hand-made explosive in an airport in most other countries, he would be labeled a terrorist. But Ji, who was protesting a beating by local government officers in 2005 that left him paralyzed and in a wheelchair, is being hailed as a hero by many Chinese social media users. What’s more, officials in Guangdong, where Ji previously ran an unlicensed motorcycle taxi service, have been ordered to reopen his case.

The unusual reaction highlights the fact that many Chinese are becoming increasingly outraged at cases of official misconduct, especially thuggish behavior by municipal urban management officers known as chengguan, who are known for heavy-handed crackdowns against street vendors and other independent businesses. There have been been several high-profile violent incidents involving chengguan in recent weeks, including a watermelon vendor in Hunan province who was beaten to death.

Notably, Ji warned away bystanders before detonating the bomb and injured only himself. Pasick notes that “not all of China’s frustrated citizens have been so considerate”:

In May, a Xiamen man named Chen Shuizong, angry that officials refused to correct an error in his identity documents and give him social security benefits, killed 47 people including himself by setting a public bus on fire. By comparison, Ji was described as a “good person” by social media users, and discussion of his action was not censored by Chinese internet authorities.

That jibes with the response found on Weibo, the Chinese microblogging site:

Most of the comments on Chinese social media expressed sympathy for Ji, seeing him as a victim of social and political injustice. Ji has started writing his experience in a blog since 2006; Feng Chingyang (@风青杨V) reviewed his blog and concluded:

I finished reading Mr. Ji’s blog and found out that he was beaten and became crippled because of running an illegal motorcycle taxi. His family was in debt and they could not get any reasonable compensation after years of petitioning. His parents had passed away and his heart also died with them. I don’t agree with the way Mr. Ji handled his misfortune. However, if we don’t want to see another Mr. Ji in this country, we have to pay attention to the root of matter. He was a normal person in the very beginning, what made him abnormal?

Weibo user “South of the Sea” warned that China can expect more of the same:

All citizens who have faced injustice are a time bomb! To deactivate the bombs, grievances have to be channeled and addressed. Maintaining social stability through political control and repression is a dead end.

In our first video from Ken, he explains how to talk Republicans about marriage equality, as well as how to counter the most prominent arguments against it:

Ken Mehlman is a businessman, attorney, and political figure who held several national posts in the GOP and Bush administration. He managed Bush’s 2004 re-election campaign, which used anti-gay marriage arguments to win the critical state of Ohio, and subsequently chaired the RNC from 2005 to 2007. After that, Mehlman worked for the law firm Akin Gump Strauss Hauer & Feld, then became the Global Head of Public Affairs at Kohlberg Kravis Roberts, a private equity firm. In 2010, Mehlman came out as gay, making him one of the most prominent openly gay Republicans and a major advocate for the recognition of same-sex marriage. He also serves on the board of the American Foundation for Equal Rights. Our full Ask Anything archive is here.

No, Margaret Sullivan didn’t chase him away – but she couldn’t have helped. Marc Tracy sees the real logic of Silver’s move from the NYT to ESPN:

[T]he resources and opportunities the Times can offer Silver are probably dwarfed by those that ESPN/ABC/Disney can. … This isn’t just about money—although since ESPN pays mediocrities Skip Bayless and Stephen A. Smith well more than $1 million each year combined, it is not difficult to imagine Silver netting seven figures for himself. But consider the possibilities in terms of resources, branding, and things to cover. ESPN has built a magazine around personality Bill Simmons and is building a late-night show around personality Keith Olbermann. Its stars toggle relatively seamlessly from Web-writing to print writing to television to podcasts to radio. Maybe he would prefer to talk more about baseball and other sports? His book, The Signal and the Noise, spent extremely little time on politics. Silver is a noted poker buff; guess which network airs the World Series of Poker? And so on.

It’s a big blow to the NYT, and another sign of how a few highly visible and talented individuals in media can increasingly set their own terms for which ship to attach themselves to, or, at some point, strike out entirely on their own. It makes a lot of sense for Nate to do sports alongside politics. It’s what he cut his teeth on and what he loves. Josh Marshall notes that, during election years, “Nate will do his politics and polling stuff for ABC News,” which is owned by ESPN parent company Disney. In a later post, Josh sees it pretty much as I do:

Two points that stand out to me. First: Silver’s apparent interest in bringing his statistical/probabilistic approach to news to a whole slew of new venues like weather, economics, education and more. Personally, as a news consumer, I find this fascinating. And I’m eager to see it. Numbers aren’t the be all and end all of news or understanding the world we live in. But the way that Nate has used them in sports and politics is a super important check on commentators’ innumeracy, groupthink, nonsense and subjectivity. It is, to use that overused word, highly disruptive in a very positive way.

It also deepens my suspicion that Nate had started to get a little bored with politics, at least as his exclusive realm.

Walter Hickey calculates that Silver has done relatively few sports stories while at the NYT:

Between February 24, 2008 and August 29, 2010 — the 30 months of its run — Silver wrote 43 posts tagged “sports” at his previous independent site, FiveThirtyEight.com. From August 25 to now — the 35 months he’s spent at the Times — Silver has only been able to write 27 posts tagged “sports,” and many of these were videos discussing his own articles. What this means is that when he was flying solo, Silver penned an average of 1.43 sports posts per month. At the Times, he only wrote 0.77 sports posts per month.

Yglesias thinks Silver’s renewed focus on sports is wise because sports “creates a much steadier stream of audience interest” than politics:

There’s a summer lull, but even that comes at a period that’s actually very well-suited to analytics since it means there’s enough baseball season data to start making meaningful assertions about it. So Silver can plug away at sports coverage, and then every four years pivot back to politics for a few months to capture the huge surge in interest in electoral politics that comes right before a presidential election. That’ll be a huge advantage for ABC News’ political team, but since Silver has basically gotten his poll averaging method down already it’s not necessarily a huge drain on his time to do it.

James Cutting’s “exposure effect” claims that, through repeated exposure, viewers of inferior art come to rank those works more highly than canonical “great” art. A team of scholars reached a different conclusion:

We reported findings suggesting that increased exposure to art works does not necessarily make people like them more. Instead, the quality of an art work remains at the heart of its evaluation. We repeatedly exposed study groups to two sets of paintings (by the English Pre-Raphaelite painter John Everett Millais, and the American ‘Painter of Light’ Thomas Kinkade) before asking them to express a degree of liking for them. Although Millais is a well-respected artist, Kinkade’s work has been described as “a kitsch crime against aesthetics” and “so awful it must be seen to be believed.” We found that people liked Kinkade’s paintings less after they had been exposed to them. This was not the case with the Millais paintings. In our view, this suggests that exposure does not work independently of artistic value.

So are these works of art on Tumblr bad?

In one sense, this is a really tricky question. There might be a whole bunch of different reasons someone tags a particular piece as bad art. For example, a work might fail to conform to ordinary expectations about art. Or it might be morally challenging, disturbing, or even ethically questionable. Labelling a picture bad may not be a simple matter; many different kinds of things might be meant by displaying a work as ‘bad’ art. But in another sense, the question is pretty straightforward. Is the picture any good?

A reader sends the above image:

I give you: The Museum of Bad Art. Not only are the pieces classic unto themselves, but the commentary is invaluable:

In this complex narrative, the artist addresses how we perceive and the fear of how we are perceived. The faceless female form hesitates. Terror grips the little dog. His left paw pushes, as if to say “you go first.” The largest figure lurks behind, holding his pet, but not his mate. The choice of spectacles is confirmation that the artist is conflicted at the prospect of emerging. Yet when the hinged door is opened, we find he has nothing to hide.

The MOBA collection of “bad” art isn’t just stick figures and other poorly rendered art; it’s art that aspires to greatness and perhaps achieves it, but not in the way intended. Really, take a minute and stroll through the collection online. It’s definitely worth it.

A reader sounds off on a recent post:

Will Wilkinson’s idea that the government is doing just fine with the sequestration made my blood boil. I understand his point about the government being forced to cut and refocus, but the problem is that not all agencies were as bloated as others. Some were better managed than others, and others were already pretty lean after Congress had cut and cut year after year.

Congress and the President completely failed us, though I blame Congress more because at least Obama tried to fix things as the deadline loomed. Congress abdicated its responsibility to make tough budgetary decisions based on reasonable goals and compromises. Wilkinson’s approval of sequestration is approval of a Congress that decided to bury its head in the sand rather than do its job.

I work in law enforcement for a Federal agency, and I have been furloughed. Prior to sequestration’s going into effect, my agency’s budget was already pretty lean, since Congress had already cut billions out of the budget in the preceding years. Those cuts resulted in reduced training and hiring, meaning there were few of us to complete more work with less know-how. The sequestration cut into that budget further still. But nothing else is left to cut except my hours. That doesn’t make us leaner and more streamlined; it just makes us less efficient.

In a law enforcement agency, when there are fewer resources on hand, we take on fewer cases and drop more cases instead of developing them. More people are absolutely getting away with breaking the law because of sequestration.

Also, we are putting off making important investments for future work in the hope that we might have a bigger budget next year. This is not effective management, and it is being forced on us by people who clearly do not care whether government is effective.

Congress is obviously free to find that law enforcement has enough funding to do its job and can redirect money to where it is needed. But that’s not what happened here. My agency was treated exactly the same as the VA, the Department of Education, the DoD, and everyone else. Maybe the DoD needed cuts. That would be a reasonable thing to find, but it is Congress’s job to decide to make those cuts. It is also their job to look at other agencies and increase their funding where appropriate. They didn’t do that. They don’t do anything.

I am frustrated. I love my job, and I am pretty good at it. I want to be a part of the government and do my part to run this great country. The only thing I absolutely hate about this job is that it is subject to the whims of the world’s worst board if directors: the U.S. Congress. I want to work more and serve my country, but the private sector just looks better and better. (Heck, private government contractors’ salaries will go up to $950,000 next year. That’s a much better salary than my CEO – Obama – makes.)

Maybe a meat cleaver works in some places, but it doesn’t in others. And Congress clearly isn’t competent to make that determination. I wish people would not suggest that sequestration worked. It just gives Congress license to do even less.

A reader writes:

I am a pediatric intensive care unit physician with 13 years experience in the field.  The idea that an organism that withdraws from something that would be considered painful in a person with an intact nervous system is therefore experiencing pain and suffering is incorrect.  The idea that an associate professor of neurobiology would make that assertion seems to smack either of incompetence or speciousness.

Withdrawing from a pinch or burn is not a decision or a response to pain, but a spinal cord reflex.  When you touch a hot surface, you don’t think “Jesus, that hurts!” and then withdraw your hand.  You yank your hand back and think “aw crap, that’s going to hurt in a second … yep, there it is!”  The nerve circuits that produce the reflex withdrawal go from the sensory apparatus to the spinal cord, and then right back to the muscle.  No brain involved.  They are also considerably faster than those fibers that go to the spine, the brain stem, the thalamus, and then the cortex to be perceived as pain.  Although the “fetal neural structures” might be in place, simple withdrawal doesn’t prove that those structures go any higher than the spinal cord.

I run into this problem about once a month when we are forced to declare “brain death” in children who are the victims of violence – car wrecks, ATV accidents, gunshots, etc.

These unfortunate people have no detectable brain activity of any kind and are legally dead.  But if you pinch their toe hard enough, you can produce what’s called the triple flexion reflex. This is not obscure knowledge – we teach it to residents all the time.  And it’s certainly something that an associate professor of neurobiology should be very familiar with.

This ultimately gets to the question of what pain is, and what suffering is.  People whacked out on dilaudid can report something as being painful, but it’s as if it is happening to somebody else and they just don’t care.  Are they still “in pain” and need more medicine, or is the fact that they’re not suffering sufficient?  I believe that the “fetal neural structures” might be in place to have the electrical activity associated with parts of the pain sensation in people with more-developed neurological systems.  I do not believe that an organism without a cortex is capable of suffering. And that’s really what we’re talking about, isn’t it?

Update from a reader:

You might find this relevant to your discussion. In my research lab we’re culturing cortical neurons in special petri dishes called “multi-electrode arrays” that allow us to record electrical activity directly from the cultures. We use this setup to study how neurons create and modify electrical connections. Typically we use cortical neurons from fetal rats. This tissue is harvested on day 18 of gestation, just three days before birth. The neurons typically culture easily and start firing right away.

Recently, however, we’ve been able to get access to some human fetal cortical tissue. These cells come from aborted human fetuses. I’m not certain of the gestation period but its almost certainly early 2nd trimester. We’ve recently started culturing these cells and we’ve discovered something amazing. Whereas the rat neurons start firing almost immediately, the human neurons must culture for close to two months before they’ll start spontaneously firing in a way that is consistent with typical normal brain behavior. This is a stunning finding and breaking news to boot; my grad student only told me about all this on Friday! It seems that neurons that are too early into the gestation cycle are not sufficiently mature to produce firing patterns that one would associate with normal brain function.

What this has to do with pain or consciousness is anyone’s guess, but it’s almost certainly an important piece of information that no one has discovered before now. We’ll be busy getting this ready for publication in the coming weeks but I thought your readers might enjoy hearing about it first.

Urban heat islands are man-made areas marked by significantly higher temperatures relative to rural surroundings.  A new study finds that “blacks, Asians, and Latinos are all significantly more likely to live in high-risk heat-island conditions than white people”:

[Researchers] compared Census population data with the 2001 National Land Cover Dataset, mediating for factors such as income, home ownership, and density. Richer folks of color who own their homes are less likely to live in a heat island than the poor, but still significantly more likely than whites. The study doesn’t point to causality, but does mention past and present lending practices which have concentrated people of color in dense, urban neighborhoods that may or may not receive the same level of civic investment as other areas.

Translation: This study highlights the persistent racial segregation of urban areas more than it does a lack of trees. All told, this is just yet another amenity that people of color are losing out on. … It’s not just a potential discomfort, but a serious health risk, when extreme heat is a factor in about one in five deaths resulting from natural hazards.

Ngoc Nguyen at New American Media interviewed study co-author Dr. Rachel Morello-Frosch:

NAM: What accounts for greater [heat] island risk in hyper-segregated cities?

RMF: What we are seeing in the physical environment — the planting of trees and infrastructure that tries to decrease heat island risk in cities — these kind of investments, you tend to see less of in places with high levels of racial inequality. The physical environment in cities is a reflection of the social environment, and it tends to disadvantage people of color particularly.

It’s possible in cities with higher levels of segregation, there is less investment to protect people from [heat] island risk, such as tree-planting campaigns, greening of space and neighborhood, reduction in impervious surfaces that really absorb heat, whiter roofs, those kinds of things, certain levels of public investment.

NAM: What was surprising in the study findings?

RMF: In metropolitan areas with greater levels of racial segregation, everyone — whites included – were more likely to live in heat-prone areas … what this shows is that, in some ways segregation adversely affects everyone. This form of social inequality affects everyone. Segregated places have much higher [heat] island risk compared to less segregated places.

A reader writes:

I think what Ms. Gallagher and Card himself don’t understand (or willfully ignore) is the fact that no one – NO ONE – has said that Mr. Card shouldn’t be allowed to publish his books or have a movie made of his important, seminal novel.  No one wants a McCarthy-like blacklist.  What many of us are angry about is that a book we love might be used to support the frankly repugnant rhetoric of an organization like NOM, of which Card is a member of the board.  Freedom of speech does not mean that you’re free of societal scorn.  I owe Card a lot for teaching me how to be a better writer, and Ender’s Game is a beautiful, heartbreaking book.  But I might not see it because then my ticket would be subsidizing a hate-group.  That’s the issue, point blank.

Another draws another distinction:

Boycotting Wal-Mart and Exxon is one thing. It’s their business practices that make them despicable, and doing business with them encourages those practices.  Boycotting Ender’s Game solves nothing except discourage smart fiction writing.

Another:

I am quite familiar with Ender’s Game, having read it several times, including recently, and I would say with confidence that there is no homophobic element to it.

That’s one reason I was so shocked to find out Card felt so strongly. The book, in fact, is notable for its characters almost asexual lives. They’re children, for the most part. They are interested in very adult things – war and world politics among them – but their sexuality is basically an unexplored province.

Further, I would add – NOT as a defense of Card’s view – that writers in general, and science fiction writers in particular, are idiosyncratic, opinionated, and sometimes insane people. It’s an activity that requires one to basically live in one’s head, and pay much more attention to the world created there than the world outside. Orson Scott Card is a bigot, but he’s an old bigot who should just shut up and write his stories, and whose non-fictional utterances should be heard by no one but his family and any who intentionally befriend him.

Another is more skeptical:

Does Card’s homophobia influence his art? Well, the aliens in Ender’s Game are called “buggers”.

Another looks at Card’s subsequent works:

Ender’s Game is the beginning of a sequence of books (it is followed by Speaker for the Dead, Xenocide, and Children of the Mind) as well as a subsequent set of books that follow the same overall story from the point of view of different characters (Ender’s Shadow, Shadow of the Hegemon, Shadow of the Giant).  In these books, particularly the “Shadow” books, the issue of gay marriage does get inserted and unsurprisingly rejected by the relevant character in the story.  With the caveat that it’s been quite a while since I read it, even this sequence in the books, which is not even central to the plot – which I grant makes it a rather gratuitous political self-indulgence on Card’s part, but hey, it’s his book! – I didn’t have a sense of homophobia from the character or, by extension, the author.  Rather, the issue is presented as one of how society should be structured, but the gay character is at that point essentially one of the good guys, and is not in any way ostracized or harassed, and is treated with respect.

If anything, the attitude in Card’s novels is about as open and accepting as one could ask for from a fairly orthodox, devout Mormon. I have read most of Card’s books and occasionally dip into his blog-like postings at his website hatrack.com. I disagree with a lot of his conclusions, but always respect his analysis.  Kinda like the Dish sometimes.

Update from a reader:

I’m sure I’ll be one of many, but I had to respond to the reader who noted that the aliens are called Buggers. I’ve seen it made other places, and it’s painful to hear, just about as bad as when Rush claimed ‘Bain’ in the Batman movie was to smear Romney. If people want to boycott the film, I totally get it. But please, don’t be so ignorant of the book to claim this as a reason.

Yes, while the aliens are given the official name of Formics, they are more colloquially called Buggers. Given that we were at war with them it’s not exactly shocking they were given a derisive name. But the point is *SPOILER ALERT* that at the end of the day, the whole war was just a giant miscommunication between two very difference species. For the rest of his life, Ender will try to undo the damage he caused the Buggers and live with immense guilt about how he treated them. The future conversation about the war will be about how horrible humanity treated the buggers and how much blame should Ender receive. If the goal was to put down homosexuality, Card did an incredibly horrible job of it.

I think most readers of Card’s work have the same shocked reaction to finding out his views, because they simply don’t come through in the books. The series I keep rethinking about since finding out about his views is the Earthfall series, not the Ender’s Game series. One of male characters is gay, and another female one has written offensive theories about how people become gay. The female one is the one who ends up finding out she is wrong and is extremely embarrassed and ashamed. However, the two end up marrying and having kids together anyhow, in a “need to repopulate the world” situation. The understanding they come to is that they always use a particular position (I’m sure you can guess which) and he be allowed to be thinking about his former lovers during. I have no idea how to read/think about this section anymore.

Spurred by voters in Portland, Oregon who defeated a bill that would have provided for the fluoridation of their drinking water, Mark Oppenheimer decries the trend of “left-wing Puritanism”. He relays this telling anecdote:

Last month, at a birthday party for a three-year-old, I was hit with the realization that most of the parents around me were in the grip of moral panic, the kind of fear of contamination dramatized so well in The Crucible. One mother was trying to keep her daughter from eating a cupcake, because of all the sugar in cupcakes. Another was trying to limit her son to one juice box, because of all the sugar in juice. A father was panicking because there was no place, in this outdoor barn-like space at some nature center or farm or wildlife preserve, where his daughter could wash her hands before eating. And while I did not hear any parent fretting about the organic status of the veggie dip, I became certain there were such whispers all around me.

His broader argument about the meaning of liberalism:

I am only suggesting that we resist thinking of Puritanism as the only, or optimal, parenting style for liberals, for two reasons.

First, thinking that Puritanism—whether a preference for organic foods or natural fibers or home-birthing—is somehow constitutive of a liberal politics is rather insulting to liberalism. Most of the middle-class “liberal” parents I know have allowed lifestyle decisions about what they wear, eat, and drive to entirely replace a more ambitious program for bettering society; they have no particular beliefs about how to end poverty or strengthen the labor movement, and they don’t understand Obamacare, or really want to. It’s enough that they make their midwife-birthed children substitute guava nectar for sugar.

But more important, realizing that Puritanism does not equal liberalism liberates us to think of another way to be liberal: by rejecting the kind of stress that comes from Puritanism. They say hygienic reform; I say the 30-hour work week and not stressing if my children eat Kix. Liberalism, as the political philosopher Corey Robin has recently argued, should be above all about freedom. The best reasons to want a labor union, or universal health care, or Social Security are to be free of worry, want, and privation, and to be out from under the hand of the boss. It makes no sense to re-enslave ourselves with fear, worry, and stress. That is not liberal but reactionary.

Arit John adds a point of contrast:

[C]onservative parents have generally become relatively more open-minded. Lenore Skenazy was famously called the worst mom in America after admitting that she let her 9-year-old ride New York’s subway home alone. But really, she’s just instilling her kids with self reliance and pull-yourself-up- by-your-bootstraps-grit. Skenazy’s Free Range Kids movement supports events like “Take Our Children to the Park and Leave Them There Day,” which is both self-explanatory and (potentially) horrifying. And yet none of her children has gone missing or been taken away by the authorities.

All those liberal worries about about obesity, high blood pressure, germs, autism and industrial chemicals, is leading to a lot of stress, which may in the end be more harmful than anything. Your bickering about the virtues of antibacterial hand lotion might give your kid a complex.

Reviewing historian Richard Gamble’s In Search of the City on a Hill, Ben Wetzel traces the history of the now-famous phrase:

[Gamble] argues that the phrase “city on a hill” (found in Matthew 5:14) originally described the mission of the church, but that over time the secular state has come to exert a near monopoly over the image.

Gamble begins the book with surprising observations about [Puritan leader John] Winthrop’s famous discourse, A Modell of Christian Charity.  Much is unknown about the circumstances surrounding the sermon’s composition.  Indeed, since no one onboard the Arbella (the ship that transported the Puritans from England to Massachusetts) ever left any record of the message, and since Winthrop himself never mentioned giving the speech in his journal, Gamble concludes that it is possible that the governor never delivered the discourse at all.  In any case, Gamble points out, Winthrop could hardly have been envisioning the United States, whose tenets of toleration, individualism, and democracy the governor would have found appalling.

Proceeding in time, Gamble traces the fate of the “city on a hill” throughout American history.  Jonathan Edwards, for example, used the image in the 1730s to describe his Northampton congregation, but did so usually to chastise his church for failing to uphold true godliness.  When Edwards used the image, however, he was not alluding to Winthrop’s vision, because A Modell of Christian Charity was not published until 1838.  Few observers in the 1830s noted its appearing, and none thought they saw the origins of the American mission in its contents.  Indeed, over the next century, writers who quoted from the document almost never drew attention to the “city on a hill” passage at all.

That changed dramatically by the late 20th century:

[I]t was not an academic but a politician who first used the phrase in a more public setting.  And his name was not Ronald Reagan.  Instead, John F. Kennedy (reading a speech prepared by his aide Ted Sorenson) declared to the Massachusetts state legislature in 1961 that he “had been guided by the standard John Winthrop set before his shipmates on the flagship Arbella three hundred and thirty-one years ago, as they, too, faced the task of building a new government on a perilous frontier.”  And then: “‘We must always consider’ [Winthrop] said, ‘that we shall be as a city upon a hill–the eyes of all people are upon us.'”  Clearly, as Gamble points out, the Irish-Catholic Kennedy’s conception of the “city on a hill” was a far cry from what Winthrop would have envisioned in the seventeenth century, let alone what Jesus was describing in the gospel of Matthew.

It is unclear if Reagan learned of the phrase directly from Kennedy or picked it up elsewhere, but in any case the Great Communicator made the image his own in the last third of the twentieth century.  As with Kennedy, Reagan’s use of the “city on a hill” was largely devoid of any specifically Christian content.  Instead, as the high priest of America’s civil religion, Reagan deployed the image as a stand-in for a vague Americanism.  Although some critics of the president, such as New York governor Mario Cuomo, argued that there was a good bit wrong with the “shining city,” for the most part the phrase had been adopted by both parties and emptied of any prophetic content by the end of the twentieth century.