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You’re not letting this one go, are you? A reader writes:

In 2008 Barack Obama ran as a candidate opposed to gay marriage. I don’t think there’s any doubt that he chose to do this in the teeth of his personal beliefs and the knowledge that it would be hurtful to the gay community. He chose to do so because he believed to do otherwise would lose him votes and possibly the election. The president has changed his official stance on the issue, and his policies and rhetoric today certainly reflect that change. But I don’t think he’s issued any sort of public apology for his 2008 stance.

Now, Clinton’s past sins in this area dwarf Obama’s, but Clinton was also operating in a political climate much more hostile to gay rights. Are you convinced that, under similar circumstances, Obama would not have behaved the same? I’m not.

Well, that’s an impossible hypothetical, but if forced to give an answer, I’d say I am. Yes, they’re both pragmatists; but there is a limit and a method to Obama’s pragmatism, and a patience in achieving his ends. There is, in contrast, no limit I have been able to find to the Clintons’ pragmatism or careerism. They were also amateurs, who didn’t think through how to achieve their ends, announced aims without beginning to prep for how to get there, and ended up being completely outflanked by the rabid right. Another reader:

From AFP: “Ending the US travel ban had been an uphill struggle for rights groups, who saw former president Bill Clinton’s attempts to repeal the restrictions shot down by conservatives.” So you saying that Clinton “signed the HIV travel ban” by supporting (along with Barney Frank) a generous NIH funding bill with historically high HIV/AIDS funding, which (despite Clinton’s/Frank’s lobbying) re-authorized the ban, would be like saying “Obama signed the green-card ban on gay immigrants” by signing a non-inclusive immigration reform bill (which he’s indicated he’d do if there were no other way to pass immigration reform).

There’s a huge difference between not including gay couples in immigration reform because a Supreme Court ruling would soon likely make it it moot; and signing into law a brutal piece of stigmatization and persecution for countless people with HIV. Jesse Helms said he regretted it. Clinton has never owned up to his role in signing it. Above, in an interview two years ago, he is still blaming others. You will not find a single instance of him blaming himself for bungling these issues in 1993 and then running from them ever since. Again: a simple sorry would suffice. It remains beyond him. Another reader:

Sorry Andrew, but your criticism of Bill Clinton’s record on gay rights jumped the shark when you listed “don’t ask, don’t tell” as one of the ways in which he “did so much damage to gay lives.”

While DADT was seriously flawed insofar as it required that gays in military remain closeted, it prohibited – for the first time – discrimination and harassment against closeted homosexual and bisexual service members and applicants.  This distinction seems ludicrous now, but it was a huge step forward at the time.  Clinton, moreover, actually wanted to sign an executive order that would have allowed gays to serve openly, but he was forced to fall back on DADT as a compromise position after being met with staunch opposition from prominent congressional Republicans and Democrats who threatened to write the exclusion of gays into law.

In fact, other than DOMA, Clinton’s record on gay rights is extremely impressive for the 1990s.  He was the first president to appoint openly gay men and women, he issued executive orders lifting the ban on security clearances for LGBT federal employees and outlawing discrimination based on sexual orientation in the federal civilian workforce, and he also pushed for both hate crimes laws and for the private sector Employment Non-Discrimination Act.  All this at a time when supporting gay rights was pretty unpopular.

None of this, of course, excuses Clinton from later selling out gays for his own political gain, but you overplayed your hand.

He sold us out at the very beginning. He had no plan to implement the end of the gay ban; it was just another promise to fundraisers he never thought through. Then he dropped it almost immediately and left all those who had come out in the lurch. Then under Clinton as commander-in-chief, the rate of discharges on grounds of homosexuality doubled compared with this predecessor. He did nothing to stop this, even as George Stephanopoulos reassured me and others that gay servicemembers were going to be safer under the new law. They were, in fact, sitting ducks – and Clinton learned one lesson: take the money from the gays but fire more of them than any private employer. Note above that he even blames Colin Powell before taking responsibility himself. But Clinton never took responsibility for anything but his successes. Another reader:

The issue about Clinton and DOMA taps into a bigger question I have about how to view the millions of conversions on this issue over the last two decades, and the millions more who have not yet changed their minds. Are they all recovering bigots?

I did not support same-sex marriage when DOMA passed. Few Americans did; in 1988, only 11 percent supported gay marriage or had much idea what it would actually mean. I opposed DOMA, but mainly because it singled out gays and lesbians – not because I had a substantial disagreement with the policy of allowing only heterosexual marriage. Though I believe now that it was an awful law, DOMA seemed a logical step for those who sincerely opposed same-sex marriage.

There was an interesting moment on this week’s “Meet the Press” (a rarity, I know), when Ralph Reed and Jim DeMint accused Rachel Maddow of labeling Bill Clinton and all those who once supported DOMA as bigots. Maddow pointed out that Reed and DeMint were the only ones using the word “bigot”, but they had a point. As our society’s views continue their tectonic shift on this issue, how do you accommodate people whose deeply held beliefs are changing?

Was I a bigot in 1996? Or did I not yet recognize the discriminatory effects of my beliefs? I don’t really have an answer to that yet – and I would suggest that the answer is just as fuzzy for Clinton and other politicians who supported gay rights in principle but also supported DOMA.

I try to avoid the word “bigot” as much as possible for those reasons. I don’t think Clinton was a bigot just because he made a big show of returning to Arkansas in election year to personally preside over the execution of a mentally retarded African-American man, Ricky Ray Rector. I just think he was a disgusting opportunist, and if it ever was a choice between his career and minorities, his career always came first. It still does, and I wouldn’t be bothering with his Baldwin-like inability to own his own anti-gay record, if he weren’t obviously trying to win the White House back again, by-passing the 22nd Amendment via his wife.

Tate Watkins looks at why Haiti, which grew half of the world’s coffee during colonial times, has struggled in recent years:

Washed beans that sell for high prices abroad account for less than 2 percent of coffee grown in Haiti. Unwashed beans make up 90 percent of Haitian production, most of which is consumed by the domestic market or slips across the border to the neighboring Dominican Republic on donkeys, duty-free.

Poor farmers have sporadic cash flows, and most prefer to sell as quickly as possible, with little regard to price or who happens to be buying. The farmers’ cooperatives that sell washed beans for export lack financing and pay only a portion of the price up front; members have to wait until the end of the season to receive the remainder, or ristourne. Local and Dominican traders can often pay immediately upon purchase and are happy to buy low-grade coffee or even raw cherries. The majority of Haitian farmers wind up selling low-value coffee at correspondingly low prices.

How Haiti compares to Rwanda, whose coffee exports have boomed over the past few decades:

Haiti and Rwanda produce about the same volume of beans each year. But Rwanda has exported nearly 20 percent of its coffee in recent years as washed beans for gourmet markets, up from just 1 percent in 2002. Haiti sells 90 percent of it’s production as cheap, dry-processed beans that never leave the island of Hispaniola. The upshot is that in 2010, Rwanda made $55 million from coffee exports. Haiti made $1.5 million.

Update from a reader:

I’m glad to see the topic of Haitian coffee come up. it does seem like a real possibility to start pulling Haiti back up. I would like to give a quick plug for the Singing Rooster non-profit that has been providing loans and training to co-ops in Haiti. The coffee’s fantastic and the put the money back into Haiti.

When hypothetically on the cusp of death, physicians overwhelmingly decide against life-prolonging intervention, with the exception of pain medication. Lisa Wade talked to USC professor and doctor Ken Murray to figure out why:

First, few non-physicians actually understand how terrible undergoing these interventions can be. [Murray] discusses ventilation. When a patient is put on a breathing machine, he explains, their own breathing rhythm will clash with the forced rhythm of the machine, creating the feeling that they can’t breath. So they will uncontrollably fight the machine. The only way to keep someone on a ventilator is to paralyze them. Literally. They are fully conscious, but cannot move or communicate. This is the kind of torture, Murray suggests, that we wouldn’t impose on a terrorist. But that’s what it means to be put on a ventilator.

A second reason why physicians and non-physicians may offer such different answers has to do with the perceived effectiveness of these interventions.

Murray cites a study of medical dramas from the 1990s (E.R., Chicago Hope, etc.) that showed that 75% of the time, when CPR was initiated, it worked. It’d be reasonable for the TV watching public to think that CPR brought people back from death to healthy lives a majority of the time.

In fact, CPR doesn’t work 75% of the time. It works 8% of the time. That’s the percentage of people who are subjected to CPR and are revived and live at least one month. And those 8% don’t necessarily go back to healthy lives: 3% have good outcomes, 3% return but are in a near-vegetative state, and the other 2% are somewhere in between. With those kinds of odds, you can see why physicians, who don’t have to rely on medical dramas for their information, might say “no.”

Previous Dish on the subject and Ken Murray’s work on it here, here, here, and here. Update from a reader:

This chart has been popping up all over the internet without a key piece of context.  As can be seen in Figure 2 here, or at this Radiolab article, the original caption for it reads as follows:

Preferences of physician-participants for treatment given a scenario of irreversible brain injury without terminal illness (see text for details). Percentage of physicians shown on the vertical axis. For cardiopulmonary resuscitation (CPR), surgery, and invasive diagnostic testing, no choice for a trial of treatment was given. Data from the Johns Hopkins Precursors Study, 1998.

Emphasis mine.  Irreversible brain injury changes the calculus somewhat.  It’s probably not true, as the chart without context suggests, that over 60% of doctors would refuse to take antibiotics to save their lives if they had a chance of regaining normal functioning.

Drawing on evolutionary psychology, Micah Mattix reviews Denis Dutton’s arguments in The Art Instinct:

The first feature of our inclination toward art is that we seem to have a universal love of landscape paintings — and not just any landscape, but landscapes similar to those our ancestors would have encountered on the African savanna. A central pillar of evidence for his argument is a 1993 study commissioned by Russian painters Vitaly Komar and Alexander Melamid that surveyed people from ten diverse countries and found a surprising number of consistent aesthetic preferences. Dutton writes:

People in almost all nations disliked abstract designs, especially jagged shapes created with a thick impasto in the commonly despised colors of gold, orange, yellow, and teal. This cross-cultural similarity of negative opinion was matched on the positive side by another remarkable uniformity of sentiment: almost without exception, the most-wanted painting was a landscape with water, people, and animals.

Dutton suggests that this seemingly universal preference for paintings depicting open spaces, trees, water, and animals is related to our ancestors’ search for food and safety. Such landscapes would have presented opportunities for cultivation; and the presence of water and climbable clusters of trees — which could have served as lodgings for game and provided safety from predators — would have been preferred by hunter-gatherers to either a dark forest or desolate plains. The emotional response to landscapes, the sense of peace, Dutton suggests, developed from the habitat choice of “people (and proto-people) in the Pleistocene.”

(Image: Petworth Park: Tillington Church in the Distance, J. M. W. Turner, c. 1830, via Wikimedia Commons)

Voyager I has discovered several:

In three studies published Thursday in the journal Science, Voyager researchers provided the most detailed view yet of a mysterious region more than 11 billion miles from Earth, where the sun’s ferocious solar winds slow to a whisper and pieces of atoms blasted across the galaxy by ancient supernovae drift into the solar system. The area, which has been dubbed the “magnetic highway,” is a newly discovered area of the heliosphere, the vast bubble of magnetism that surrounds the planets and is inflated by gusting solar winds. Like Earth’s magnetosphere, which shields us from radioactive solar winds, the heliosphere shields the solar system from many of the cosmic rays that fill interstellar space. …

Toward the end of July 2012, Voyager 1‘s instruments reported that solar winds had suddenly dropped by half, while the strength of the magnetic field almost doubled, according to the studies. Those values then switched back and forth five times before they became fixed on Aug. 25. Since then, solar winds have all but disappeared, but the direction of the magnetic field has barely budged. “The jumps indicate multiple crossings of a boundary unlike anything observed previously,” a team of Voyager scientists wrote in one of the studies.

Adam Mann adds, “No one is entirely sure what’s going on”:

“It’s a huge surprise,” said astronomer Merav Opher of Boston University, who was not involved in the work. While the new observations are fascinating, they are likely something that theorists will debate about for some time, she added. “In some sense we have touched the intergalactic medium,” Opher said, “but we’re still inside the sun’s house.”

Extending this analogy, it’s almost as if Voyager thought it was going outside but instead found itself standing in the foyer of the sun’s home with an open door that allows wind to blow in from the galaxy. Not only were scientists not expecting this foyer to exist, they have no idea how long the probe will stay inside of it. Stone speculated that the probe could travel some months or years before it reaches interstellar space.

“But it could happen any day,” he added. “We don’t have a model to tell us that.” Even then, Stone said, Voyager would not have really left the solar system but merely the region where the solar wind dominates.

Alex Knapp notes that the Voyager crafts still have years of life in them:

It’s not clear yet when Voyager 1 will leave the solar system – scientists won’t know for sure until it actually gets there. That could be anywhere from a few months to a few years away. It’s sister craft,Voyager 2, is also expected to enter interstellar space, but that will be some time later. Both probes have enough power to last to 2020, so we should learn quite a bit about interstellar space before they fall silent.

Mataconis’s take:

In terms of pure science, we’ve arguably gotten more from these two small unmanned craft than we have from the manned space program itself. That’s not too shabby.

Last week, the Obamas peered out of the Door of No Return, a part of Goree Island’s House of Slaves where, the story goes, “Africans were held before going through the door and being shipped off the continent as slaves.” Max Fisher discovers that the site’s history isn’t so straightforward:

If you ask the stewards of this museum on Goree Island what happened there, they’ll likely refer you to the plaques on the wall, which say that millions of slaves passed through the building that Obama visited Thursday, now called the House of Slaves. … But if you ask Africa scholars, they’ll tell you a very different story. “There are literally no historians who believe the Slave House is what they’re claiming it to be, or that believe Goree was statistically significant in terms of the slave trade,” Ralph Austen, who as a professor emeritus at the University of Chicago has written several academic articles on the subject, told the Associated Press.

But door remains an important landmark regardless:

Katharina Schramm, in a book on the role of history in African ideologies today, called the Door of No Return a symbol of “the cultural amnesia and sense of disconnection that slavery and the Middle Passage stand for.” The door, she wrote, has become increasingly associated not just with its largely fictional past but with its very real present as a place of historical “healing and closure,” sometimes now described as a “Door of Return” out of slavery’s shadow.

Historical anthropologist François Richard adds his thoughts:

Some people use the history/memory couplet to parse the problem of Gorée’s house of slaves (i.e., history concerned with facts and memory with symbolic value and historical gravity, a mode of affective resonance absolutely central to identities in the African diaspora). It’s not the most satisfying or cutting way of analyzing the phenomenon, but it has the merit of offering a point of entry. What ‘s important to remember, though, is that while the details about the house may not be entirely exact, they do speak to a deeper historical truth – namely, the experience and infamy of turning humanity into a commodity.

A reader writes:

A question: I’m wondering how Alec Baldwin’s gross, shitty remarks on Twitter have made you feel about your stance on hate crimes laws. If I am remembering correctly, you are against them on the grounds that they criminalise thoughts and motivations instead of just behavior. At any rate, you’ve now said that Baldwin should be prosecuted for the threats that he made. Fair enough. Threaten people with violence in public, prosecution is just what you may get.

I’m assuming, though, that your revulsion and desire for justice has been influenced by Baldwin’s use of homophobic slurs in those threats. Without them, would the threats be as serious, as deserving of punishment?

Because isn’t that kind of the real argument behind hate crimes legislation? That violence perpetrated against members of marginalized groups specifically because they are marginalized is actually more harmful and more threatening and terrorizing, on purpose, by it’s very nature? For example, arson is one thing (and already illegal), but burning down a black family’s house to terrorize their neighbors and larger community is another – causing ripples of fear and injury and damage just like the damage done (as you point out) to children who are bullied and threatened with language like Baldwin’s daily.

My only reason for seeking legal recourse is that Baldwin publicly threatened a named individual with violence and urged others to commit it – and has not withdrawn that call to beat a man senseless. That’s one reason Stark has closed his own Twitter account to just a few. He’s under physical threat of violence – and Baldwin has not recanted that threat. I’d have the same position regardless of the identity of the target – and would want no further charges than threatening violence against a specific human being. Another reader:

Would you care to compare and contrast your reaction to Alec Baldwin’s outburst to Niall Ferguson’s idiocy about Keynes?  Are you willing to forgive one just because he’s your buddy?  Not that Baldwin is any sort of good guy; just look at what he said about his daughter six years ago.  But what makes Baldwin so deserving of your wrath?

Niall didn’t threaten to physically hurt anyone – and was widely pilloried by liberals. That’s the difference. Another is tired of the coverage:

Do we really need multiple posts on Alec Baldwin’s tirade?  We all understand the hypocrisy – he’s a liberal actor who got mad and said some anti-gay slurs against someone who he thinks wronged him.  But he’s certainly not the first celeb who’s words deviate from his politics.  Calling him out on it out is fair enough. But please do not become some pseudo-Page 6 and cover it incessantly.  If you do, you’re pulling a page out of the Fox News/NY Post playbook.

Agreed. If anyone in Hollywood or the gay establishment had really taken him on, I wouldn’t feel so compelled to point out the double standard.

Some dudes sound off:

Now this is an interesting thread.  I am a straight male and I personally would despise having to shave my armpits and legs every few days. So I don’t actually know why I expect women to do it.  I mean, when I have to shave my face I go old-school and make it a luxury.  I have my safety razor, my badger hair and my creams and I get a nice shave.  I do this once a month.  The rest of the time is a Monday morning once-over with a beard trimmer (I am somewhat blonde and can get away with it).  If I had to do that to a higher percentage of my epidermis, I’d be even lazier.

All that said, being in NYC I’ve seen plenty of women who have stopped shaving their legs or armpits.  I cannot explain it, but I have an absolutely visceral reaction to it.  I am immediately and ferociously grossed out by it. This is likely immature and/or neanderthal of me, but I can’t help it.

Another:

I was going to stay out of this one, but here goes: I don’t think women should have to shave, but it is the case that basically any woman who wants to date me has to shave on a very regular basis. I simply find smooth legs on a woman very sexy, and hairy legs completely off-putting. I don’t know if that’s a mere cultural construct, but it doesn’t really matter; I’m not changing my mind.

Besides that simple preference, I think the idea of shaving is really sexy. It means that a girl paid attention to her body and changed how it would look and feel, just because it might make me want her even more. That idea is hot!

I should add, I also groom myself very carefully.

I trim my pubic region and shave everything balls and below. I shave my face regularly. I moisturize twice a day. I clean the hairs out of my nose and pluck the few strays that grow off my earlobes. I don’t see this as an imposition, and I really don’t get why women or anyone find it to be such a pain in the ass. We’re talking about 5-10 minutes of effort in the shower, right? Is that really such a terrible thing? If that’s the level of problem we’re down to, I’d say we’ve come a long way in terms of women’s equality.

I also don’t think that wanting women to be hairless as a sexual preference constitutes “misogyny” per se. Misogyny properly defined is “The hatred of women by men.” Having a certain aesthetic preference, I think, doesn’t rise to that level. It’s tempting to use that word to more generally refer to anything men want women to do that some women don’t want to do, but we shouldn’t make that mistake. There are men out there who really do hate women. Those are the misogynists. The rest of us just think smooth legs are sexy to touch.

Another:

Straight man here with a preference toward women who shave their legs and pits. I applaud those in the thread who choose not to shave, but I don’t view myself as “oppressive” or “misogynistic” because I have a preference toward a cultural norm. Most people find baldness or men with toupees less attractive than men with a full head of hair (granted not to the same extent). It’s the same with men with patchy beards, or neck-beards. Nearly all of them have to regularly shave to feel attractive in the public’s watchful gaze. Do I think these are “oppressive” viewpoints? No. Do I think it sucks for bald men that want hair, neck-beards that don’t like shaving, and women that don’t want to shave? You bet.