Tag: Andrew Sullivan

Elijah Solomon Hurwitz talks with drone pilots about the monotony of their work:

Though strikes on suspected terrorists and the resultingcivilian casualties get the headlines, the lion’s share of remote piloting consists of quieter, more shadowy work: hour after hour of ISR—intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance. Sitting in ergonomic chairs in ground control stations—essentially souped-up shipping containers—RPA operators coordinate with ground intel to identify human targets, then track them with high-powered zoom lenses and sophisticated sensors. (A nine-camera sensor nicknamed Gorgon Stare is capable of streaming full video with enough resolution to discern facial expressions.)

“It might be little things like a group of kids throwing rocks at goats, or at each other, or an old man startled by a barking dog,” says Mike. “You get a sense of daily life. I’ve been on the same shift for a month and you learn the patterns. Like, I’ll know at 5 a.m. this guy is gonna go outside and take a shit. I’ve seen a lot of dudes take shits.”

Sascha-Dominik Bachmann considers the moral aspects of drone warfare:

Keith Shurtleff, the US Army Chaplain and military ethics teacher, aptly summarized this concern “that as war becomes safer and easier, as soldiers are removed from the horrors of war and see the enemy not as humans but as blips on a screen, there is very real danger of losing the deterrent that such horrors provide.”

via The Dish http://dish.andrewsullivan.com/2013/06/20/the-tedium-of-remote-control-war/?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+andrewsullivan%2FrApM+%28The+Dish%29

On-the-ground readers report:

Why nary a mention of the anti-government protests going on in Brazil? Tens of thousands of people are demonstrating in cities throughout the world’s sixth largest economy – certainly big news and something of this scale not seen in South America since the ’80s. Granted it’s not the Middle East. However, it’s a significant event worthy of some coverage/analysis on the Dish, IMO.

The IMO is admittedly biased. I just returned from marching with protestors along Av. Faria Lima in São Paulo. Things were quite peaceful, one could even say festive, as clowns trounced about, a man on stilts danced around (dusted them off before Carnaval it seems), and groups of drummers played classic samba rhythms. Much of this is simply indicative of Brazilian culture – the whole enjoying life and trying to have a good time part of it.

Nonetheless, the general message of the protests was not festive: “We deserve better from our government.”

I saw all sorts of signs and placards admonishing a corrupt government that heavily taxes its people with little to show in terms of public services (education and healthcare in particular). I believe your last post about Brazil was this in January – “Boom Times For Brazil”. There are two sides to every coin, so Dish readers should know that boom times don’t necessarily mean good times for the citizenry of a country that suffers from tragic and wholly resolvable social inequality. It will be interesting to see if the momentum of these protests continues.

On the cab ride home, the driver told me that he doesn’t think anything will be done by the PT party in response to this. Brazil’s President, Dilma Rousseff, was quoted simply saying, “It is natural for young people to demonstrate.” Whether this response throws more fuel on the fire is yet to be seen. Also, there were more than just young people in the crowd tonight.

Another gets more specific:

Things here in São Paulo are getting contentious and it looks as if it could be Taksim all over again. About two weeks ago, some small protests started on Paulista Ave in downtown São Paulo over a $0.10 increase in the bus fares. Of course, the protest was about more than a hike in fare though; it was about the horrible state of Brazil’s infrastructure, government corruption, high inflation and low growth – basically everything that’s dysfunctional about this place.

Predictably the police didn’t handle things well, so more people came out, fueling more protests. Last Friday police began firing on protestors and beating journalists – it looks like the government has finally woken the slumbering beast here. 230,000+ people are said to have headed out to the streets of São Paulo, with large protests in Rio and other major cities as well. Brazilians are apparently even going to protest in front of their embassies as far as away as Dublin and Berlin.

For videos and documentation of some of the violence from Friday, you’ll have to Google Translate this (check out number 9). Here is a good explanation of what the real issues are (like Taksim wasn’t about just a park, this isn’t just about bus fares). A Facebook event page for protests is here. And here is a list of 33 foreign cities Brazilians will also be protesting in.

Also worth noting is that the FIFA Confederate Cup is starting this week, which is basically like a trial run for next year’s World Cup. Brazil’s infrastructure is failing spectacularly there, with some people waiting up to six hours just to leave the airport. So this is basically the worst timing possible for the government, as the world’s attention is about to be on the country anyway.

I’ll be going down to the protest today. I can continue passing along info as I find it.

That reader follows up:

This video shows some of the protests over the weekend in Rio. The reporters in the video are trying to blame the violence on the protesters and are writing them off as just angry youth with nothing better to do – while the video shows police beating people and shooting tear gas at them. The reporters also are lamenting that this is happening during the Confederate’s Cup, as it’s going to embarrass the country on the international level. It was a HUGE deal for Brazil to land the World Cup and Olympics because it meant tons of money was going to be pumped into the country to build infrastructure. Well, the money came and the infrastructure didn’t. So now you have tens, if not hundreds, of thousands of pissed off people on the streets.

Another passes along this video as a good summary of the protestors’ grievances.

(Photo: Demonstrators clash with riot police during a protest in front of Rio de Janeiro’s Legislative Assembly (ALERJ) building in Rio de Janeiro, on June 17, 2013. Tens of thousands of people took to the streets of major Brazilian cities protesting the billions of dollars spent on the Confederations Cup – and preparations for the upcoming World Cup –  and against the hike in mass transit fares. By Tasso Marcelo/AFP/Getty Images)

via The Dish http://dish.andrewsullivan.com/2013/06/18/what-the-hell-is-happening-in-brazil/?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+andrewsullivan%2FrApM+%28The+Dish%29

[Re-posted from yesterday with many questions added by readers]

A brief bio of Barro:

He is the lead writer for the Ticker, an economics and politics blog hosted by Bloomberg L.P.. He appears regularly on Bloomberg Television and has appeared on Real Time with Bill Maher on HBO. Time named Barro’s Twitter feed one of “The 140 Best Twitter Feeds of 2013″, one of ten in the Politics category. In 2012, Forbes selected him as one of the “30 Under 30″ media “brightest stars under the age of 30.” Barro describes himself as a Republican, but has expressed opposition to the policies of the Republican party.

Last week the Dish highlighted Chait’s profile of Barro. Andrew Leonard wrote of him recently:

He is, in my opinion, a rare breed indeed: an intellectually honest analyst of political and economic affairs who makes up his own mind, does not hew to any preset ideology and relies on facts to makes his arguments. People who disagree with him have labeled him conservative, liberal and libertarian. That’s not easy to achieve! Barro can wage total war against the notion that austerity is the correct prescription for our economic problems while at the same time arguing that public sector unions are bankrupting state governments. I follow him because I always learn something from him, even when I disagree with him. … Josh Barro is also the gay son of the famously arch-conservative economist Robert Barro, which makes him inherently interesting for reasons that have nothing to do with the quality of his analysis, and everything to do with the social and cultural splits that define our current society.

To submit a question for Josh, simply enter it into the Urtak survey after answering all of the existing questions (ignore the “YES or NO question” aspect and simply enter any open-ended question). To vote, click “Yes” if you have a strong interest in seeing Josh answer the question or “No” if you don’t particularly care. Thanks for your help.

via The Dish http://dish.andrewsullivan.com/2013/05/29/ask-josh-barro/?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+andrewsullivan%2FrApM+%28The+Dish%29

Contribute your two cents to the growing thread:

A reader writes:

Is it that Polikoff and Gladstone are under the impression that teaching children to write in cursive somehow takes up too much time? Or that children are vessels into which we can only fit so much, and therefore we should not try to teach them anything “unnecessary”? Pure hogwash on both counts. Learning to write legibly and speedily by hand is, in my own humble experience, invaluable. Any endeavor that requires note-taking in any real degree, especially in real time, becomes immensely more easy and pleasurable if one writes well in cursive, and it’s much faster than “print” letters.

And think about the utilitarian logic of not teaching “unnecessary” things to children. Should we not teach them music, drawing, singing, dancing, sports or any other of the manifold pursuits that give life depth and richness but do not technically serve any real economic purpose? Preposterous.

Furthermore, writing well and attractively by hand deepens our engagement with our language, instills respect for the written word, and frankly just looks better, in my opinion. It also isn’t really very hard. Like most worthwhile things, it just takes practice. And I reject this silly sophistry that says making things beautiful, and teaching kids to do simple, humble things like writing nicely is something we don’t have the resources or time to give them. Instilling in them a deep sense of craft, and of craftsmanship, is in fact of the highest importance.

Another reader who defends cursive:

The greatest lesson I ever learned came from an idealistic young woman who spent a year in the late sixties teaching sixth grade at the American Community School in Hampstead between gigs with the Peace Corps.  When asked by a fellow student why we were studying a seemingly insignificant thing, she replied, “You’re not here to learn stuff.  You’re here to practice how to learn stuff, because no matter how old you get, you will always need to learn.”

Another:

Cursive, as it’s taught in schools now, was actually not intended to be for handwriting.  ”Looped cursive,” with its letters that look nothing like print, originally comes from letterforms inscribed by copperplate engravers.  Credit for this knowledge goes to Barbara Getty and Inga Dubay, calligraphers who for years have had a side gig running handwriting improvement workshops for doctors!  They also take issue with the “ball and stick” method of teaching print handwriting, as each letter often requires two or more strokes, and advocate instead for italic-style handwriting, which is much more natural (I’ve attached the best comparison I can find).  As an added bonus, italic handwriting easily transitions into cursive.

Who knows if any of this will be relevant in the digital age, but apparently the difficulty of writing in cursive also assists memory.

via The Dish http://dish.andrewsullivan.com/2013/05/06/should-we-kill-cursive-ctd-2/?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+andrewsullivan%2FrApM+%28The+Dish%29

During a longer mediation on the economics of journalism, Rohin Dhar passes along some fascinating research on the subject:

In 2010 Berkeley researchers performed an experiment selling souvenir photos to people after they rode a roller coaster. They tried 4 different pricing schemes. The first was a flat fee of $12.95 for the photo. The second was a flat fee of $12.95 for the photo, but half the money went to charity. The third was to pay what you want for the photo. The final scheme was to pay what you want for the photo, with half the money going to charity.

Allowing people to name their own price was a complete disaster. Everyone lowballed the researchers. But when customers paid what they wanted and half the money went to charity, the researchers raked in money. It generated 3X more revenue per rider than any other option. Adding a charity component to the flat fee had basically no effect on whether someone would buy it.

When people can pay what they want, this experiments indicates it helps if there is a worthy cause attached to it. In that case, it works well. Otherwise, customers will choose to pay almost nothing.

via The Dish http://dish.andrewsullivan.com/2013/05/03/when-pay-what-you-want-works/?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+andrewsullivan%2FrApM+%28The+Dish%29

The Boston Globe’s Big Picture has the most stirring images from yesterday. A reader responds to what was probably the most gruesome photo to surface:

Please, please, I hope to find that the man in the wheelchair with the bilateral leg trauma (and amputations) has survived. He will be in every prayer I have the ability to pray. If you hear of him, please let us know.

He appears to be alive and stable. A little background on the young man here. By the way, the guy in the cowboy hat seen helping in the photo is also featured in this stirring Youtube, in which he recalls the carnage while shaking uncontrollably. He also appears to be the same guy holding up the American flag in the middle of the bomb site. His name is Carlos Arredondo and his remarkable backstory is here.

via The Dish http://dish.andrewsullivan.com/2013/04/16/chronicling-the-carnage/?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+andrewsullivan%2FrApM+%28The+Dish%29

La Repubblica has published the following story, summarized by the Guardian:

A potentially explosive report has linked the resignation of Pope Benedict XVI to the discovery of a network of gay prelates in the Vatican, some of whom – the report said – were being blackmailed by outsiders. The pope’s spokesman declined to confirm or deny the report, which was carried by the Italian daily newspaper La Repubblica.

The paper said the pope had taken the decision on 17 December that he was going to resign – the day he received a dossier compiled by three cardinals delegated to look into the so-called “Vatileaks” affair … The newspaper said the cardinals described a number of factions, including one whose members were “united by sexual orientation”.

In an apparent quotation from the report, La Repubblica said some Vatican officials had been subject to “external influence” from laymen with whom they had links of a “worldly nature”. The paper said this was a clear reference to blackmail.

Hmm. Is the Vatican’s grotesque hypocrisy on the issue of homosexuality part of this story? We don’t yet know.

(If a reader who knows Italian could translate the original piece, I’d be grateful. Photo: Getty Images.)

via The Dish http://dish.andrewsullivan.com/2013/02/21/the-red-prada-shoe-drops/?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+andrewsullivan%2FrApM+%28The+Dish%29

We’re slowly getting a sense of how many TGBQLX people there are in America. I.e. how many homosexuals, lesbians and transgenders there are in the population. When I was a newbie gay, the mantra was 10 percent. We were “one in ten”. Seriously.

This immediately struck me at the time as a) obviously propaganda and b) ridiculously insecure. There was no way to know for sure, given the ubiquity of the closet back in the 1980s, but ten percent is a hell of a lot of people: 30 million. Why did I keep bumping into faces I recognized wherever I was in the US? If it were really ten percent, where were they all?

And why on earth does it matter if we make up 10 percent or 1 percent? A minority’s civil rights are not dependent on how many of them there are or how large a segment of society they form. Do we say: sorry, guys, you only form 2 percent, you don’t meet the minimal bar for becoming a minority? It’s not like running for the Knesset. It struck me then and now as part of a wearying tendency among some gays to think that every straight dude is just a few beers away from being gay (that’s not how it works); or a desperation to feel somehow more significant because of larger numbers.

Which simply make it all the more of a relief to see that Gallup has finally come up with a believable number of around 3.5 percent. (Check how gay your state is here.) DC is the super-gayest “state” – but that is a little distorted since DC is really the inner city of a larger metropolitan area and the gays tend to congregate there. But there’s also the attraction of politics for gay men. If you’ve ever spent much time among the staffers on the Hill, you’ll know what I mean: the US capitol makes the Vatican look straight.

My pet theory for why this is the following.

For many young gays in the past – and who knows if this will continue in the same way now the stigma has waned so much – the prospect of dating girls was so scary and the prospect of dating boys so impossible that they buried themselves in some kind of nerdiness. I threw myself into scholarship, my repressed homosexuality enabling me at the age of 17 to translate English into different Latin styles, following Cicero or Tacitus. Man, repression can make you smart. Others went into baseball scores; or entertainment trivia; or obsession with PSB B-sides; or knowing how many Republican votes could be found in some Cuyahoga County. Some kind of virtual life – lived with passionate intensity.

Hence the political gay. Hence Mehlman and Ambinder and Nagourney and McGreevey and Wofford and Zeleny and Bruni and Brock and Berke and on and on. Because repression is declining, we may never again get someone obsessed enough to produce the Almanac of American politics. But if that future person exists, chances are they’ll be living in DC. So much gayer than New York.

via The Dish http://dish.andrewsullivan.com/2013/02/17/3-5-percent/?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+andrewsullivan%2FrApM+%28The+Dish%29

How a blog transitions from one URL to another:

The real story of four of us at my apartment tonight was slightly different. It looked like an out-take from The Walking Dead, as we trouble-shot, called developers, checked with servers, noticed new glitches, made last minute fixes to bugs and on and on (including breaking up a rare beagle fight). But at midnight all of the old URLs for the Dish automatically redirected you to this, our new home: dish.andrewsullivan.com. If you do not see the new site immediately, try refreshing the page after a few minutes. It may take a minute or two for your browser’s cache to refresh.

Starting Monday morning, some posts will have a blue “Read On” button. If you click that button, the post will expand for continued reading, just as in the past. If you’re a subscriber, you will always be able to access all read-on material. If you are a non-subscriber, you will be limited to seven read-on clicks during a 30-day period. If you open a read-on post in a new window, that will also count against the read-on meter. If non-subscribers max out the read-on meter, all content above a read-on will still be free and accessible – but the deeper dish won’t.

Incoming links from other blogs and websites will never, ever count toward the meter; other bloggers need not fear that their readers won’t be able to see content they link to. I want to personally soothe Dan Savage’s concern on this point.

If you are already a subscriber, first thanks! Second, there are two ways you can log in:

The first is to just click the red button in the upper-right corner of the Dish that says “Already subscribed? Sign In”, then click the blue “Sign In” button on the page that pops up, and then enter the email address and password you selected when you subscribed. If you have already subscribed but can’t remember your password, click here. If you can’t remember what email you used to subscribe, send us a message at support@andrewsullivan.com with “Forgot Email Address” in the subject line.

The other way is to wait until after you click your eighth read-on. At that point a page will pop up containing a “Sign In” button; click that to enter your email address and password.

You can use the same e-mail address and password on multiple devices. Once you have logged-in from a device or browser, you will not be required to login again on that device or browser again for several months.

As with any site launch, compatibility across all different browsers – Safari, Firefox, Explorer, Chrome, etc – and their various versions in different devices can cause design and layout glitches. If anything looks dramatically off kilter, please email at support@andrewsullivan.com with the following info: browser name (i.e. Safari), browser version (i.e. Version 6.0.1), operating system (OS X Version 10.8.2), and the device you are using (i.e. MacbookPro Retina). Also, cookies will need to be enabled in your browser or else you may be unable to log in.

If you have any issues not discussed above, please send a description of your problem to support@andrewsullivan.com and we will get back to you as soon as possible. But phew. We made it. We couldn’t have done it without your early financial support. And I couldn’t have done it without the Dish team’s staggering work-ethic, professionalism and personal hygiene.

We’ll be sharing some of the new features of the site in the morning. But feel free to poke around and let us know what you think. This is a work in progress. It always has been. And it always will.

via The Dish http://dish.andrewsullivan.com/2013/02/04/migration-explained/?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+andrewsullivan%2FrApM+%28The+Dish%29