Conservatives and Republicans in Washington — activists, strategists, politicians — are increasingly embracing a theory about Obamacare: It’s going to collapse of its own weight, and its failure could yield a sharp right turn in the 2014 and 2016 elections. That theory is probably wrong, and dangerously so. To be rid of Obamacare, Republicans will have to do more than just wait for it to go away — and more than they have done so far.
And they’ll have to say that those pilot cost-controls in the ACA may be starting to work in lowering costs. Ramesh wants Republicans to come up with a real alternative to the ACA:
Republicans’ confidence that Obamacare will collapse has contributed to their lassitude in coming up with an alternative. It is a perverse complacency. If the program were going to collapse in the next three years, it would be all the more important for Republicans to build the case for a replacement for it. We can be sure that the Left would respond to any such collapse by making the case for a “single payer” program in which the federal government directly provides everyone insurance.
Congressional Republicans have not reached agreement on what should replace Obamacare, let alone a strategy for enacting that replacement. The best option for replacing Obamacare would be a plan that made it possible for almost everyone in the country to purchase catastrophic insurance (and possible for most people to buy insurance that goes beyond catastrophic coverage) by removing the obstacles that government policy puts in the way of that goal.
Chait doubts that coming up with an Obamacare alternative would benefit the GOP politically:
Republicans have wisely decided to attack Obamacare without committing themselves to an alternative because the alternative would be easy to attack. Ponnuru, for instance, suggests changing the tax code and stripping regulations to create “a market in which almost everyone would be able to purchase relatively cheap, renewable insurance policies that protected them from the risk of catastrophic health expenses.” Telling tens of millions of Americans they’ll lose their insurance that covers basic medical expenses and get bare-bones policies with thousands of dollars in deductibles is not a winning play.
I don’t dispute Chait’s analysis – but wouldn’t it be great if the GOP and politics in general were not that cynical all the fucking time?
Waldman is tired of hearing about Snowden’s personal life:
We all know that the news runs on personalities; a “story” without protagonists and antagonists isn’t a story at all, it’s just an “issue,” and that’s dullsville. But I’m sure the White House couldn’t be happier that the NSA story is quickly becoming dominated by a discussion of Edward Snowden himself, which naturally crowds out discussion of the substance of his leak and whether we want to make adjustments to the policies and programs he revealed. So now we’ll be treated to endless “investigations” of who Snowden was friends with in grade school, what kind of food he likes to eat, and any other details that can be known about him.
James Poniewozik likewise thinks the fixation on Snowden is wrongheaded:
A Snowden or Assange could be a not-so-great person advocating a worthy position, or vice versa. It’s also possible to argue, say, to condemn the government Hoovering up phone records yet question whether people with access to state secrets should be able to declassify them unilaterally. Or it should be, anyway. Dividing the debate between Team Snowden and Team NSA, though, crowds out the room for the arguments in between both poles.
Calling Edward Snowden “the ultimate unmediated man,” or speculating about whether or not he’s a terrible boyfriend to the live-in girlfriend he appears to have left behind in Hawaii isn’t really about the morality, efficacy, or lackthereof in his decision to leak material to Glenn Greenwald and the Washington Post. It’s a combination of prurience and a decision about whether we should invest in him in a larger sense. And whether that’s right or not, it’s not without consequence.
Max Fisher worries that “it’s increasingly plausible that Iran will emerge as the big winner”:
How did it happen? The answer may be both simple and complex. For all the twists and turns in regional politics, sectarian divisions and even great-power politics, it might come down to something really simple: Iran just has a bigger stake in Syria than the U.S. does. …
A rebel-held Syria, whether those rebels were the Islamists favored by Saudi Arabia and Qatar or the moderates hoped for in Washington, would shut out Iran from its only major Arab ally and and make it much tougher for Iran to reach its proxies in Lebanon and the Palestinian territories. It would leave Iran less able to reach the outside world or to threaten Israel, which Tehran sees, rightly or wrongly, as an imminent threat to Iranian security that must be deterred.
This makes it appear like we are openly aligned with the rebels, but that is not the case.
We are formally opposed to the continued rule of the Assad regime, and we are working with some rebel groups, but we are just as opposed to some of the rebels (probably the majority of them) as we are to the Iran-backed regime. As [Liz Sly’s WaPo article] notes, the war in Syria has morphed into a sectarian conflict that pits Sunnis against Shiities and Alawites. It is neither advisable nor possible for us to take the side of the Sunnis in a sectarian religious war. That would pit us not only against Iran, but against Iraq. Plus, it’s the wrong thing to do. …
It is a gigantic failure of analysis to look at Syria as a proxy war between Iran and the United States of America. We would like to diminish Iran’s power and influence, it’s true. But not at the expense of taking sides in a sectarian fight where the most effective fighters on our side are indistinguishable from al-Qaeda.
After being placed on an adult wait organ list, 10-year-old Sarah Murnaghan received her new lungs yesterday. Michael Fitzgerald ponders the case:
The data is murky, but according to one transplant expert I spoke to who has applied for pediatric patients like Sarah to receive adult lungs, outcomes for children who receive a lung transplant from an adult might be worse than in adult-to-adult transplants cases. Adult-to-child transplants can be complicated by size differences between an adult organ and a child’s organ cavity, among other factors. According to the same expert, it could be three to five years until the medical community has enough data to accurately rank kids next to adults based on the complex algorithms used to place people in an order that is considered most fair. Experts are divided as to whether a patient like Sarah would have a longer, healthier life than the adult recipients Judge Baylson has pushed behind her.
Barro uses the story to argue that we should be able to buy and sell organs:
People are morally squeamish about the idea of paying for organs. They fear that a legal market in organs would exploit the poor and only benefit people wealthy enough to pay market prices. A well-designed market should overcome these concerns.
One such option is a proposal from Matas. Under his plan for kidneys, organs would not be traded person-to-person; insurance companies or the government would set prices and buy them like any other medical supply. Combined with a system of universal coverage, this would ensure that transplanted organs would not be a luxury for the rich.
It is highly likely that live organ sellers would tend to be poor. But the prognosis for donors giving in the legal market is good: A mortality rate of just 0.03% for kidney donations. That is still a risk, but people make all sorts of life choices that entail added risk for added money, including entering dangerous occupations; legal organ sales would simply make one more such option available.
He also praises Singapore, which has “a system of ‘presumed consent’ where all people are organ donors unless they affirmatively choose to opt out.”
I get it. I do. All I have to do is see our friends’ kids—plural—playing together, caring for each other, sharing a secret language. All I have to do is watch Dahlia’s joy and tenderness when she gets to hold their baby brothers and sisters. Justin sees it too, and he knows what she’s missing. But he reminds me often how the sacrifices we’d need to make to raise another child would impact Dahlia’s happiness—not to mention our own.
In an interview with NPR, Sandler addresses common concerns about having only one child:
“I think that there’s the concern that only children are lonely children. And I think that when parents consider having a second child as a gift to their first, that is probably the thing that they are most often concerned about, which I understand. I think that we have a very visceral response to seeing a child alone in a sandbox.
“But it was interesting, speaking to psychologists about the experience of loneliness for only children, a lot of them believe that we have the strongest primary relationship with ourselves, which is incredible armor against loneliness; that for a lot of only children, being alone is the experience of solitude, which is a very rich thing, instead of loneliness, which is a very painful thing.
In an interview with Salon, Sandler admits that she’s “still shocked at how this topic rankles people”
I mean, I wrote a book about Evangelicals from a feminist atheist perspective and did a ton of Christian radio — and the blowback I got was nothing compared to when my Time cover story came out saying, quite simply, that only children are OK. It’s like I’m suggesting that people should have aborted their own children — or that their parents should have aborted their siblings. It’s fascinating to me how emotional, how fraught the topic is. At a conference I spoke at recently, a professor hugged me and told me how “brave” I was to take this on — when the conference had been focused on family planning and poverty … and this is what’s brave? That’s nuts. Listen, I‘m not telling anyone how many kids they should have — lord knows, we have enough people telling women what to do with their bodies — just saying that if this is a choice you want to make, or that your body is making for you, then you should know that only children aren’t fundamentally rotten, or no more rotten than anyone else.
I’d like to respond to the reader who wrote in with this criticism of the Bechdel Test. It’s not designed to be a screenwriting guide, or to suggest that all movies that don’t pass the test are unfairly sexist. It’s designed to show how disquieting the proportion of films that don’t pass it is. If the number of films in that video that pass the test were closer to 50%, it wouldn’t be making much of a point. It’s not meant to encourage screenwriters to add arbitrary scenes into movies to pass the test; it’s to encourage screenwriters to write more films about women in the first place, precisely what your reader claims to want.
Another:
I agree with the commenter that the Bechdel Test is problematic. Consider this scenario:
Two neurosurgeons who are also female are collaborating on a complicated case. The patient is male. The conversation they have about the treatment particulars technically fails the Bechdel Test.
Despite this issue, I still think the test can identify problems in writing female characters. The real problem it shines a light on, however, is that we don’t have enough protagonists who are female and the few we do have operate in a very narrow field of character types. An even more valuable tool to me as a writer is to flip the gender or ethnicity of my characters and see what’s left of their conflict in the story. If not much is left, then that can be a problem depending on the point of the story. Inevitably, flipping a character’s gender or ethnicity can show us how the default is to have characters who are white, male and straight.
Casting Helen Mirren as The Doctor would shake the franchise up in a good way, just as casting Judy Dench as M in the 007 movies did. I’m disappointed in how the casting was handled for Dench’s replacement. Sure, go back to M being male, but then make the new Q female. (However, note that they did cast Moneypenny as a black female.)
For a great example on how shaking up traditional expectations on gender, ethnicity and sexual orientation can create a great cast of characters, see Syfy’s Warehouse 13. It’s ensemble cast includes quite a range of characters from a young female computer hacker (and Runaways fan) to a Russian Jew to a gay Buddhist ATF officer to an older Black female in charge of everyone. Oh, and in this show H.G. Wells was female writing under a male pseudonym.
Another:
It can also be enlightening to look at the “reverse Bechdel test,” in which you look at the number of times men talk with each other about something other than a woman. A friend of mine has been tracking this in some movies and TV episodes – here.
Of course, that doesn’t quite address what your screenwriter correspondent was saying; he (I’m guessing he’s male) was claiming that secondary characters in movies always talk about the protagonist, and that the protagonist is too-often male. The reverse Bechdel test doesn’t take that theory into account. But it’s nonetheless true that secondary male characters in movies and TV shows do very frequently talk about things other than the protagonist – and it’s also true that there’s almost always more than one male character in any given movie or show.
Here are ten famous films that surprisingly fail the Bechdel Test (note that Run Lola Run features a female protagonist but she never talks with other women)
Here are some examples of things real women talk about, other than men.
Here are some suggestions on writing good female characters, especially in comics.
Here are some problems I saw with female characters in stories submitted to my magazine.
Here are more of my thoughts on female characters.
Researchers at the Institute of Economic Affairs in the U.K. have … recently identified “negative and substantial effects on health from retirement.” Their study found retirement to be associated with a significant increase in clinical depression and a decline in self-assessed health, and that these effects grew larger as the number of years people spent in retirement increased.
Similarly, a study published in 2008 by the National Bureau of Economic Research found that full retirement increased difficulties with mobility and daily activities by 5 percent to 16 percent and, by reducing physical exertion and social interactions, also harmed mental health.
The broader literature on the question of whether retirement harms health has been more mixed. The big question is whether the observed physical deterioration after retirement occurs because it is underlying poor health that leads people to end their working life. Some studies that try to control for this reverse causality, such as a 2007 paper by John Bound of the University of Michigan and Timothy Waidmann of the Urban Institute, find that retirement doesn’t harm health — and may actually improve it. Another study, by Esteban Calvo of the Universidad Diego Portales in Chile, Natalia Sarkisian of Boston College and Christopher Tamborini of the Social Security Administration, finds harm from early retirement but no benefit from delaying retirement beyond the traditional age.
Well, that’s how Sam Harris has often described me – so I might as well repay the back-handed compliment. But what makes Sam’s work about religion so compelling is that, unlike my old friend, Hitch, he actually grasps what faith can be at its best. He doesn’t dismiss it – or its spiritual aspirations – as somehow inherently absurd. In fact he has spent years of his life exploring the possibility of sublime spirituality without God. And his argument, it seems to me, is mainly with intolerant, fundamentalist forms of religion, of which Islam is easily the most troublesome at this point in history. Glenn Greenwald recently said that Sam could feel no empathy for Muslims, that his worry about Jihadism was a function of not getting their point of view, a sweeping generalization based in tribalism. Sam cannily responds in a post worth reading and listening to at length:
Let us see where the path of empathy actually leads…
First, by way of putting my own empathy on my sleeve, let me say a few things that will most likely surprise many of my readers. Despite my antipathy for the doctrine of Islam, I think the Muslim call to prayer is one of the most beautiful sounds on earth. Take a moment to listen:
I find this ritual deeply moving—and I am prepared to say that if you don’t, you are missing something. At a minimum, you are failing to understand how devout Muslims feel when they hear this. I think everything about the call to prayer is glorious — apart from the fact that, judging by the contents of the Koran, the God we are being asked to supplicate is evil and almost surely fictional. Nevertheless, if this same mode of worship were directed at the beauty of the cosmos and the mystery of consciousness, few things would please me more than a minaret at dawn.
Sam gets it because he’s been there, having engaged in thousands of rituals and countless hours in meditation for much of his adult life. This is why he of all the new atheists was the one I most wanted to have a dialogue with. (You can read it here.)
The whole new post is full of that sum of religious and spiritual experience. But this is what he also gets:
Islam marries religious ecstasy and sectarian hatred in a way that other religions do not. Secular liberals who worry more about “Islamophobia” than about the actual doctrine of Islam are guilty of a failure of empathy. They fail not just with respect to the experience of innocent Muslims who are treated like slaves and criminals by this religion, but with respect to the inner lives of its true believers. Most secular people cannot begin to imagine what a (truly) devout Muslim feels. They are blind to the range of experiences that would cause an otherwise intelligent and psychologically healthy person to say, “I will happily die for this.” Unless you have tasted religious ecstasy, you cannot understand the danger of its being pointed in the wrong direction.
I too understand that ecstasy, having experienced it myself in my life. There was a time as I was cast adrift in my teens when I clung to doctrine even more ferociously as a bulwark against shifts and changes I could not yet master. I see this now. I didn’t then. I believed God was telling me I had to enforce countless tiny things – avoiding cracks in the pavement, painting the Crucifixion repeatedly in art class, annotating my school books with little tiny crosses, praying constantly. I never reached the total subservience demanded by Islam, but I saw enough of why that appeals to be alarmed by it.
Belief, when severed from healthy doubt, when grasped as a psychological crutch to keep reality at bay, reaches inevitably for totalism. In fact, the bewildered and conflicted may need that totalism to keep their lives under any sort of order. Think of those 9/11 mass murderers, attending strip bars, then shaving their entire bodies, then flying planes into building.
Think of the staggering sectarian carnage now metastasizing in the Muslim Middle East. Think of how total your devotion must be to do the things some Jihadists do – like hacking a person down in the street and bragging about it.
To argue that we should not associate those actions with religious extremism, but be more aware of our own alleged Islamophobia, seems simply perverse to me. But – and this is a crucial qualifier – that does not mean that ratcheting up rhetoric against this fundamentalism necessarily helps. Nor does treating their crimes as different. Nor does invading Muslim countries, or torture. We can both recognize the unique threat Jihadism represents as the Muslim world attempts to navigate a modernity beyond their control – and we can be very cool, calm and collected in deciding how best to stymie it, defuse it, prevent it.
But we will not stop it. I suspect this phenomenon – and its concurrent violence – may last as long as the savagery of the European wars of religion in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. The difference is that this time, our technological capacity for mass slaughter is exponentially greater than it was four centuries ago. And the likelihood of a mass-casualty catastrophe occurring at some point is extremely high. We must simply hope it happens, if it must, somewhere other than here.
(Thumbnail photo: Minaret at sunset by Flickr user Dingopup)
Pareene dissects the reasoning behind Redskins owner Dan Snyder’s reported hiring of Frank Luntz to conduct focus groups on the Redkins’ controversial name:
You hire Luntz not to merely poll, but to figure out how best to sell people on something. It seems reasonable to assume that team owner Daniel Snyder, who has vowed to never change the name, is working now on how best to convince people that his team’s name is not a repellent racial epithet. Luntz’s specialty is renaming things to sound more appealing, but in this case he’ll be crafting the best possible language to use when explaining why something shouldn’t be renamed. …
That Snyder is hiring Frank Luntz suggests a certain amount of concern that nationwide blasé acceptance of his team’s name may be coming to an end.
He certainly didn’t seem to take criticisms particularly seriously before — his team’s P.R. desk has usually just pointed to a couple of polls and dismissed critics as unimportant — but now he is writing letters to Congress and working out a P.R. strategy. That’s good. It means he’s losing. But it doesn’t mean he’ll lose. The team has successfully fought public pressure for decades, and the NFL has other high-priority P.R. nightmares distracting it from taking the controversy seriously. And soon we’ll begin hearing some much more convincing arguments in favor of the name, courtesy of Luntz and whatever other high-priced professional spinners Snyder hires.
We can expect his research to reveal that most Americans don’t think the name “Redskins” is especially offensive. (A recent ESPN poll has already concluded as much.) Then Luntz can write a strategy memo advising Snyder on the most effective way to deflect the controversy. Among other things, Snyder will surely want to avoid reminding the public of the history of the term “Redskins.” Football fans love tradition. But it’s hard to root for a team named after the bloody scalps of American Indians butchered by bounty hunters.
Sarah Kliff passes along new research suggesting that being a designated driver is “[e]asy in concept but apparently a bit difficult in execution”:
About one-third of designated drivers have at least one drink while carrying the title, according to a new paper in the Journal of Studies on Alcohol and Drugs. Twenty percent, breath tests showed, had a blood alcohol level higher than 0.05, enough to impair their driving skills. … As the researchers note, this study has limitations: It was done at a set of college bars with a relatively homogeneous population. It doesn’t speak to designated driving in other situations. Still, it does suggest that there’s at least a decent-sized segment of the population that doesn’t have a strict idea of what it means to be the designated driver.
J.K. Trotter notes the novelty of the “designated driver” concept as a possible explanation:
The concept of “designated driving” is actually a fairly recent invention — it originated in northern Europe before spreading to North America in the late 1980s, via Harvard’s famous Alcohol Project — so it’s conceivable that kinks still need to be worked out. But millions of Americans have been educated about the effects of alcohol, thanks in no small part to the lobbying power of Mothers Against Drunk Driving. Indeed, the Florida study’s authors suggest that their findings “identify the need for consensus across researcher, layperson, and communication campaigns that a [designated driver] must be someone who has abstained from drinking entirely.”
Nancy Shute explains why “not legally drunk” is a bad metric for DDs to use:
In Europe, a designated driver is widely considered to be the less inebriated driver, not an abstainer. And surveys of drivers in the U.S. have found that they think it’s fine for the designated driver to drink, as long as her or his blood alcohol level is below the legal limit.
But when people’s driving skills while drinking are tested in laboratories, they start getting messed up much earlier than many people think. Some studies have found driving skills impaired with a blood alcohol level of 0.02 percent — much lower than the 0.08 percent that’s the current legal limit across the U.S. At 0.05 percent, pretty much everyone’s unable to drive very well.
The Dish 