Are Voters Just Lemmings?

In 2008, the political scientists Marty Cohen, David Karol, Hans Noel, and John Zaller released a book called The Party Decides: Presidential Nominations Before and After Reform. The basic argument is that, despite the ostensible democratic machinery of state primaries, party elites were the ones who really made the decisions. The authors showed that even after the presidential primary reforms in the late ’60s and early ’70s made the nomination process more reliant on voters, the candidate who collected the most endorsements from party grandees still ultimately locked up the nomination.

A semi-bastardized version of this argument quickly became conventional wisdom among the pundit class. Although The Party Decides itself contained extensive caveats and qualifications (especially concerning its minuscule sample size), the book came to be treated as all but ironclad proof that the voters had no say whatsoever in the selection of their party’s nominee. When it comes to presidential primaries at least, The Voters Are Stupid. They might think they have some say in choosing their party’s nominee—said the wonks, nodding sagely to one another—but in reality, they were merely validating the pre-existing choices of the elite class.

But by 2015, this consensus was melting like snow before a stream of hot urine, as Donald Trump contemptuously bulldozed the Republican establishment and locked up that party’s nomination. Indeed, not only did he casually brush aside unified opposition of nearly the entire Republican elite, but he did it despite having no formal political experience of any kind. It seemed the voters had some kind of a voice after all.

But this changed political context did not spell the end of the Stupid Voter narrative: It merely changed form. Whereas voters were previously deemed stupid because they had no influence on political outcomes, they were now deemed stupid because they had too much influence, influence that thwarted the wise and sensible aims of political elites who otherwise would have governed in the public interest. In 2016, political scientists Christopher Achen and Larry Bartels published a much more ambitious book called Democracy for Realists: Why Elections Do Not Produce Responsive Government. It is, basically, The General Theory of Stupid Voters. It has become the latest conventional wisdom about democracy, garnering near-universal praise in the elite press, from the London School of Economics to Foreign Affairs to the New York Review of Books. The Economist deems it “the most influential recent book on voting.” (...)

First, let’s take a look at the central argument of Democracy for Realists. Achen and Bartels assemble a huge body of evidence to demonstrate that the voting public is vastly ignorant about policy, tends to rationalize pre-existing biases, and blames the incumbent party for things they could not possibly control, like shark attacks. Even when voters can be shown to be making a sort of judgment about political success on the merits—namely, voting the bums out during times of economic crisis—their decision tends to be severely myopic. Voters generally judge economic performance only on the last few months before election day, not based on how the whole last electoral term has gone.

The authors take aim at something they call the “folk theory” of democracy, which they define as the idea that democracy is about simply representing the will of the voters. The “folk theory” of democracy is the animating force behind initiatives to increase popular participation in decision-making by adding ballot initiative and referendum procedures to various constitutions, so that “the people” can have a direct voice on policy matters. The authors demonstrate many severe problems with this sort of direct democracy — most notably, that it is at least as vulnerable to elite influence as any other sort of democracy, if not more so. Ordinary citizens really are not equipped to make decisions on complicated policy questions, and have often shot themselves in the foot by voting down water fluoridation measures and so forth (often egged on by well-funded right-wing extremists).

The trouble starts with their formal model of the folk theory, which they represent with an elaborate mathematical system descended from neoclassical economics called the “median voter theorem.” By this view, voters select candidates closest to their own ideology, and assuming voter preferences are represented by a single left-right spectrum with two equal-sized peaks, parties will rationally appeal to the median voter directly in the political middle. This predicts that each party will have the exact same centrist platform. The “rationally ignorant” median voter doesn’t have to do anything to see his preferences validated by the political system.

This model was directly based on similar economic models, which take a lot of assumed background conditions, run them through some intimidating math, and produce a result demonstrating that free market institutions automatically produce the best of all possible worlds. Voting, it’s just like buying peanut butter! It’s sort of an appealing notion, so long as it doesn’t make any close contact with reality.

Achen and Bartels blow this theory out of the water, thus defeating their conception of the folk theory of democracy. Most obviously, the parties do not have the same platform and never have, not even during the mid-20th-century period of relative political consensus when this kind of model was somewhat plausible. But since 1980 especially, the idea that the parties don’t have strong and increasingly stark disagreements is prima facie ridiculous.

The authors have a lot of smart things to say about the negative influence economics-style reasoning has had on political science. But they don’t consider the idea that using the median voter theorem to represent the folk theory may itself be misleading.

This can best be seen in their implicit theory of reasoning, which is based on the same neoclassical bullshit. They define it in exclusively individual terms—a fundamental premise of this style of economics. By their lights, political reasoning happens when someone has pre-existing, fully worked-out ideology, and perfect knowledge of how the political system has affected their personal well-being , who then calculates the most rational political decision in terms of their own pocketbook and principles.

It is true that virtually nobody behaves in this way. Many people don’t have a clue what each party stands for, while others are egregiously mistaken about who believes what. But more importantly, Achen and Bartels argue that even very well-informed people tend to rationalize their group identities by adopting whatever the consensus view is—and then argue that, by definition, adopting a consensus view cannot be a “reasoned” decision: “[T]he political preferences and judgments that look and feel like the bases of partisanship and voting behavior are, in reality, often the consequences of party and group loyalties … the more information a voter has, often the better able she is to bolster her identities with rational-sounding reasons.”

There are a lot of problems with the premise of this argument.

by Ryan Cooper, Current Affairs |  Read more:

Image: Matt Lubchansky

Bill Nye On The Green New Deal

[ed. I don't usually watch John Oliver, but Bill Nye at 18:20 - 19:10 goes all Pulp Fiction on climate change. MFs. (Also check out: 10:10 - 11:45. I want to do this with my grandkids.] 

Ramadan

Introduction

Ramadan is considered the holiest month of the year for Muslims. In Ramadan, Muslims fast from food and drink during the sunlit hours as a means of learning self-control, gratitude, and compassion for those less fortunate. Ramadan is a month of intense spiritual rejuvenation with a heightened focus on devotion, during which Muslims spend extra time reading the Qur’an and performing special prayers. Those unable to fast, such as pregnant or nursing women, the sick, or elderly people and children, are exempt from fasting.

When does Ramadan take place?

Ramadan is the 9th month of the Islamic calendar, which is based on a 12 month lunar year of approximately 354 days. Because the lunar year is 11 days shorter than the solar year, each lunar month moves 11 days earlier each year. It takes 33 solar years for the lunar months to complete a full cycle and return to the same season. This year, the month long fast of Ramadan is set to begin on May 6th, 2019. The month traditionally begins and ends based on the sighting of the first crescent of the new moon. Starting on May 4th, Muslims throughout the United States and the rest of the world will begin to search the sky for the new crescent, or in some cases, they will follow a pre-determined date based on astronomical calculation. During this month, Muslims fast from pre-dawn until sunset, as a means to grow in God-consciousness and moral excellence.

The Length and Purpose of Fasting

Muslims fast from pre-dawn to sunset, a fast of between 11-16 hours depending on the time of year for a period of 29-30 days. The fast of Ramadan entails forgoing food and drink, and if married, abstaining from sex during the fasting hours. For Muslims, Ramadan is a time to train themselves both physically and spiritually by avoiding any negative acts such as gossiping, backbiting, lying or arguing. Muslims welcome Ramadan as an opportunity for self-reflection, and spiritual improvement. Ramadan is also a highly social time as Muslims invite each other to break fast together and meet for prayers at the mosque.

The ultimate goal of fasting is gaining greater God-consciousness, in Arabic, taqwa, signifying a state of constant awareness of God. From this awareness a person should gain discipline, self-restraint and a greater incentive to do good and avoid wrong. In commemoration of the revelation of the Qur’an, Muslim’s holy book, which began during the month of Ramadan, Muslims attempt to read the entire book during Ramadan and gather nightly at mosques to hold special prayers during which the entire Qur’an is recited by the end of the month. (...)

Family Routines

A Muslim family usually rises about 5:00 a.m. before the first of dawn and eats a modest, breakfast-like meal called suhur. After the meal, the family performs the morning prayer, and depending on the circumstances, the family goes back to bed or begins the day. Particularly during the long summer months, people often take a nap in the late afternoon after work or school. At sunset, family members break the fast with a few dates and water, and depending on the culture, other light foods such as soup, appetizers or fruit. This is referred to as iftar which means “breaking the fast.” After performing the sunset prayers, the family eats dinner. Inviting guests to break the fast or going to someone else’s house for iftar is very common in Ramadan. Many families then go to the mosque for the night prayer and a special Ramadan prayer called taraweeh. After completing their prayers, the families return home around 11:45 p.m. (All of these times vary depending on the time of year, with shorter days in the winter and longer days in the summer.)

by ING |  Read more:

Image: uncredited

[ed. See also: IHOP And Ramadan: A Uniquely American-Muslim Tradition (WAMU 88.5).]

Amazon Offers Employees $10K and 3 Months’ Pay to Start Their Own Delivery Businesses

Following news of Amazon’s plans to reduce Prime shipping down to one day, the company this morning announced an expansion of its Delivery Service Partner program, which now includes a new incentive that encourages existing Amazon employees to start their own package delivery company. The partner program, first announced last year, includes access to Amazon’s delivery technology, hands-on training and a suite of other discounts for assets and services like vehicle leasing and insurance. For employees, it now includes a $10,000 incentive, too.

The retailer says it will fund startup costs up to $10,000, as well as the equivalent of three months of the former employee’s last gross salary, to give the employees the ability to get their new business off the ground without worrying about a break in pay.

Amazon said last year that people were able to start their own delivery business with only $10,000. At the time, military veterans were able to get that $10K reimbursed, as Amazon was investing a million into a program that funded their startup costs.

The new incentive to do the same for any employee — and offer them three months’ pay on top of that — is a much broader commitment. And it’s one that makes sense, given Amazon’s lofty ambitions to double the speed of its shipments.

Employees — or any other entrepreneur — who wants to become a delivery partner, are able to lease customized blue delivery vans with the Amazon smile logo on the side, and take advantage of other discounts, including fuel, insurance, branded uniforms and more.

Before the launch of the partner program, Amazon had relied on its Amazon Flex crowdsourced workforce to help it deliver packages to help it reduce costs. But these gig workers often faced too much uncertainty with regard to their pay because of things like fluctuating gas prices that cut into profits, lack of insurance and the general logistical challenges that come from trying to deliver packages from a smaller, unbranded personal vehicle.

Delivery partners, meanwhile, could earn as much as $300,000 in annual profit by growing their fleet to 40 vehicles, Amazon claims. The company said last year it expected that hundreds of small business owners will come to hire tens of thousands of drivers across the U.S.

That is already happening. Since the launch of the program in June 2018, more than 200 small businesses have hired “thousands” of local drivers, Amazon says this morning. It expects to add hundreds more small businesses this year, as well.

by Sarah Perez, TechCrunch |  Read more:

Image: Amazon

[ed. Hello, FedEx and UPS. See also: Amazon rolls out machines that pack orders and replace jobs (Reuters) and, since we're talking about corporations that exploit the gig economy: Democrats have an ambitious plan to save American labor unions (Vox).]

Inside a Golden Basketball Sunset

Is This the Warriors' Last Stand? Inside a Golden Basketball Sunset (SI)

Image: John W. McDonough/Sports Illustrated

If God Is Dead, Your Time Is Everything

At a recent conference on belief and unbelief hosted by the journal Salmagundi, the novelist and essayist Marilynne Robinson confessed to knowing some good people who are atheists, but lamented that she has yet to hear “the good Atheist position articulated.” She explained, “I cannot engage with an atheism that does not express itself.”

She who hath ears to hear, let her hear. One of the most beautifully succinct expressions of secular faith in our bounded life on earth was provided not long after Christ supposedly conquered death, by Pliny the Elder, who called down “a plague on this mad idea that life is renewed by death!” Pliny argued that belief in an afterlife removes “Nature’s particular boon,” the great blessing of death, and merely makes dying more anguished by adding anxiety about the future to the familiar grief of departure. How much easier, he continues, “for each person to trust in himself,” and for us to assume that death will offer exactly the same “freedom from care” that we experienced before we were born: oblivion. (...)

Or James Baldwin, that great recovering Christian, who once wrote, “I have always felt that a human being could only be saved by another human being.” Or Primo Levi, who, when faced with death in Auschwitz, was briefly tempted to pray for rescue, and then did not pray, lest he blaspheme his own secularity. Or Camus, especially in “The Myth of Sisyphus” (a philosophical articulation of the atheistic world view), and in his rapturous unfinished novel, “The First Man” (a novelistic embodiment of the secular world view), in which his alter ego is possessed, from childhood, of “a love of bodies” that exalted him when he was able “just to enter into their radiance, to lean his shoulder against his friend’s with a great sensation of confidence and letting go, and almost to faint when a woman’s hand lingered a moment on his in the crowd of the trolley—the longing, yes, to live, to live still more, to immerse himself in the greatest warmth this earth could give him.”

A systematic articulation of the atheistic world view, the one Marilynne Robinson may have been waiting for, is provided by an important new book, Martin Hägglund’s “This Life: Secular Faith and Spiritual Freedom” (Pantheon). Hägglund doesn’t mention any of the writers I quoted, because he is working philosophically, from general principles. But his book can be seen as a long footnote to Pliny, and shares the Roman historian’s humane emphasis: we need death, as a blessing; eternity is at best incoherent or meaningless, and at worst terrifying; and we should trust in ourselves rather than put our faith in some kind of transcendent rescue from the joy and pain of life. Hägglund’s book involves deep and demanding readings of St. Augustine, Kierkegaard, Marx, and Martin Luther King, Jr. (with some Theodor Adorno, Charles Taylor, Thomas Piketty, and Naomi Klein thrown in), but it is always lucid, and is at its heart remarkably simple. You could extract its essence and offer it to thirsty young atheists.

His argument is that religious traditions subordinate the finite (the knowledge that life will end) to the eternal (the “sure and certain hope,” to borrow a phrase from the Anglican Book of Common Prayer, that we will be released from pain and suffering and mortality into the peace of everlasting life). A characteristic formulation, from St. Paul’s Epistle to the Colossians, goes as follows: “Set your minds on things that are above, not on things that are on earth, for you have died, and your life is hidden with Christ in God.” You die into Christ and thus into eternity, and life is just the antechamber to an everlasting realm that is far more wondrous than anything on earth. Hägglund, by contrast, wants us to fix our ideals and attention on this life, and more of it—Camus’s “longing, yes, to live, to live still more.” Hägglund calls this “living on,” as opposed to living forever. (...)

The problem with eternity is not that it doesn’t exist (Hägglund is uninterested in the pin dancing of proof and disproof) but that it is undesirable and incoherent; it kills meaning and collapses value. This is a difficult truth to learn, because we are naturally fearful of loss, and therefore attached to the idea of eternal restoration. Hägglund, who was born and reared in Sweden and now teaches comparative literature at Yale, begins his book by telling us that he returns every summer to the northern-Swedish landscape he knows from his childhood. His love of the place is premised on the knowledge that he will not always be able to return; that he, or it, will not be there forever:

When I return to the same landscape every summer, part of what makes it so poignant is that I may never see it again. Moreover, I care for the preservation of the landscape because I am aware that even the duration of the natural environment is not guaranteed. Likewise, my devotion to the ones I love is inseparable from the sense that they cannot be taken for granted. . . . Our time together is illuminated by the sense that it will not last forever and we need to take care of one another because our lives are fragile.

Once we seriously consider the consequences of existence without end, the prospect is not only horrifying but meaningless (as the philosopher Bernard Williams argued years ago). An eternity based on what Louise Glück calls “absence of change” would be not a rescue from anything but an end of everything meaningful. Hägglund puts forth his eloquent case: “Rather than making our dreams come true, it would obliterate who we are. To be invulnerable to grief is not to be consummated; it is to be deprived of the capacity to care. And to rest in peace is not to be fulfilled: It is to be dead.”

A liberal rabbi or pastor might object that Hägglund is unhelpfully hung up on eternity. Eternity is not at the heart of what such people care about; they hardly ever spend time envisaging it. But Hägglund’s central claim is that a good deal of what passes for religious aspiration is secular aspiration that doesn’t know itself as such. He wants to out religionists as closet secularists. When we ardently hope that the lives of people we love will go on and on, we don’t really want them to be eternal. We simply want those lives to last “for a longer time.” So his reply would probably be: Just admit that your real concerns and values are secular ones, grounded in the frailty, the finitude, and the rescue of this life. He makes a similar point in relation to Buddhism. He is happy to welcome, as essentially secular, those popular forms of meditation and mindfulness which insist on our being “present in the moment”; but he chides as religious and deluded those doctrinal aspects of Buddhism which insist on detachment, release from anxiety, and an overcoming of worldly desire. (...)

It is the same when Augustine, in the “Confessions,” mourns the loss of a close friend—of a friendship that was “sweet to me beyond all the sweetness of life that I had experienced”—only to remind his readers that, as a good Christian, he should not have loved someone who could be so easily lost, rather than loving God, who can never be lost. It is the same when Martin Luther, grieving the death of his daughter in 1542, reminds his congregation after the funeral that “we Christians ought not to mourn.” And the same when Kierkegaard, in “Fear and Trembling,” praises Abraham for being ready to sacrifice his son Isaac at God’s command, sure in the knowledge that God will redeem his loss. In all these cases, Hägglund identifies the true dynamic, the true anguish, as secular desire—a natural anxiety about loss, a natural mourning of the lost one—horribly distorted by its corrective religious gloss. The supposed attraction of eternity, Hägglund writes, is that you cannot lose anything there. “But if you can lose nothing in eternity,” he goes on, “it is because there is literally nothing left to lose.”

by James Wood, New Yorker |  Read more:

Image: Deanna Halsall
[ed. And if there is an afterlife? See: Don Juan in Hell (Act III), Man and Superman (George Bernard Shaw)].

Table For One: How Eating Alone is Radically Changing Our Diets

Eating alone has become a defining feature of modern life: the breakfasting commuter; the household members with conflicting schedules; the widower who receives few visitors. Almost a third of British adults are eating alone “most or all of the time”, according to the latest Wellbeing Index, compiled with data from more than 8,000 people for Sainsbury’s by Oxford Economics and the National Centre for Social Research. Similarly, a Mintel survey of 2,000 UK consumers aged 16 and over has found that one in three are “regularly eating every meal alone”. In London, the figure rises to almost half.

Much of this solitary munching takes place behind closed doors. Single-occupancy homes are the second-most-common household size in Britain and a record 35% of over-16s are single, according to the Office for National Statistics. This is why, in 2018, Tesco announced plans to stock more than 400 single-portion products including burgers, steaks and vegetables.

As a nation, we have also become less self-conscious about solo dining. The bookings website OpenTable recently reported that reservations for one have increased across the UK by 160% since 2014. Bar seating and communal tables are increasingly popping up in restaurants.

While destigmatising solo dining in all its manifestations is liberating, our new dietary habits steer us into uncharted territory. Until now, eating in groups has been a universal human ritual. Not only is it practical (many hands make light work – and also reduce our vulnerability to predators) but meals have, traditionally, been used to meet our fundamental need for connection with others. It wouldn’t be making a giant leap to link eating alone with the current loneliness epidemic. One might also wonder if it is only a coincidence that this new phase is happening at the same time as rising obesity rates.

On a micro level, deciding what to have for dinner after a long day can be a challenge. “Eating alone has not only hugely changed how and what we eat but also how we talk to ourselves about eating,” says Bee Wilson, the author of The Way We Eat Now. “There’s a constant mismatch between a sense of how we should be eating and how we’re actually eating.” The multi-generational family meals of the Dolmio television ads are presented as the ideal, she says, but how many of us eat like that in real life, except for at Christmas? The default number that cookbook recipes serve is still four or six, but at least recipe writers have had to meet demand for meals you can throw together in minutes. Many of us are time-poor now, but when you are cooking for one you have to do the washing up as well. (...)

Increasingly, ready meals are aimed at single households but, “as with any form of eating, there’s probably huge diversity in the ways people eat when they’re alone,” says Wilson. One way that younger generations are “squaring the circle of eating alone, enjoying food but not being enslaved to the kitchen is through the rise of meal prepping”, she says. Meal prep does not simply mean “preparing meals”. Rather it is a hashtag for an Instagram craze (10m posts and counting) for a borderline neurotically health-conscious version of batch cooking. “That has been a huge phenomenon,” says Wilson. “So many young millennials I speak to are going on about that book The Green Roasting Tin – you throw lots of delicious vegetables and herbs into a roasting tray, cook up a huge batch of it, then portion it up into tupperware boxes.” (...)

There is another factor that plays into the rise of solo dining. “In this world of convenience,” says Edward Bergen, global food and drink analyst at Mintel, “what we find is that mealtimes are becoming quicker. In Britain especially, consumers are spending less and less time, year on year, on meals.” In fact, he says, we are a nation of snackers, with 37% of us eating snacks instead of having a proper meal at least once a week. Millennials are the biggest snackers, taking shorter lunch breaks and relying instead on grab-and-go offerings (a booming market), from stodgy pastry products to porridge pots and healthy vegan wraps.

The glory of solitary eating is that you are free to savour your guilty pleasure without judgment. The New Yorker writer Rachel Syme recently triggered a mammoth confessional Twitter thread by admitting that when working from home alone she enjoys “a pickled beet in between a mini Babybel cheese sliced in half, eaten like a tiny sandwich”. Respondents shared their love of everything from tuna salad mixed with a packet of crisps to sucking bacon grease out of kitchen roll.

As the food and hospitality industries compete to service lone diners, the trend is increasingly presented as an aspirational consumer choice. Bergen says: “Of the people who often eat meals on their own, two thirds say mealtimes are a great way to have quality time to yourself.” In these busy times with blurred boundaries between work and leisure, me-time is certainly at a premium. However, as the 2017/18 Waitrose Food and Drink Report found, rather than luxuriate in our own company and take a moment to watch the world go by, many of us (23% of the 2,000 people surveyed) commune with our smartphones when eating out.

The rise of “food television” disturbingly encapsulates this disconnect. Otherwise known by its original South Korean name of mukbang, the phenomenon has become a source of fascination for Wilson. “People are watching videos of other people eating while they’re eating something completely unrelated,” she says. “It has also taken off in the US and people do it in the UK, too.” Usually, the presenters are beautiful young women who webcast themselves eating improbable quantities of food while inanely chatting about how delicious it is. “It’s about being kept company in some way we crave,” says Wilson, “and it’s a vicarious thing where you’re looking at someone eating this 6,000-calorie meal and that makes you feel better about the takeaway pizza that you’re eating by yourself at home.”

by Amy Fleming, The Guardian |  Read more:

Image: Steve West/Getty Images

U.S. Farmers to Get $15 Billion in Aid Amid China Trade War

President Donald Trump said on Monday that his administration was planning to provide about $15 billion in aid to help U.S. farmers whose products may be targeted with tariffs by China amid a deepening trade war.

“We’re going to take the highest year, the biggest purchase that China has ever made with our farmers, which is about $15 billion, and do something reciprocal to our farmers so our farmers can do well,” Trump told reporters at the White House.

He did not provide any more details on what kind of an aid package it would be.

American farmers, a key constituency of Trump, have been among the hardest hit in the trade war. Soybeans are the most valuable U.S. farm export, and shipments to China dropped to a 16-year low in 2018, while soybean futures prices last week fell this week to 11-year lows.

U.S. Agriculture Secretary Sonny Perdue said on Friday that Trump had asked him to create a plan to help American farmers cope with the heavy impact of the U.S.-China trade war on agriculture.

A new aid program would be the second round of assistance for farmers, after the Department of Agriculture’s $12 billion plan last year to compensate for lower prices for farm goods and lost sales stemming from trade disputes with China and other nations.

by Jeff Mason, Tim Ahmann and Humeyra Pamuk, Reuters |  Read more:

[ed. So, $27 billion in subsidies over two years to prop up Big Ag (ie. "farmers") and buy votes. What happens to products that can't be sold? Are they thrown away? Does agribusiness just close up shop for a year or two and collect free money? Is this just another version of what the government and Federal Reserve did propping up Financials and Wall Street (who also have large stakes in agribusiness)? Free market capitalism has become a joke. Think about that when Republicans start fear-mongering over "democratic socialism". It's already here, just for corporations and one-percenters. Stay tuned for updates. For example: Trump pushes for new bailouts for farmers hurt by his trade war (Vox).]

Victor Brauner, L'acteur [The Actor], June 1956
via:

The State of Affairs

The Modern Model

Marriage is a lot like physics – it runs into trouble when a third body is introduced.

Both fields also experienced a revolution in the last century or two, with old ideas being replaced by new conceptions of how things work. For marriage, what was once a mostly economic and societal arrangement is now a romantic one, and is subject (at least in the West) to the “Modern Model of Marriage”.

The modern model goes something like this: a couple meets, feels strong chemistry, discovers shared interests, and starts having sex. The next step is emotional intimacy, as the partners are expected to become each other’s best friends and confidants. Next comes economic partnership: living together, making and spending money together, getting ready for parenthood. A spiritual dimension is added as each partner finds meaning and transcendence in their shared love. Finally, the wedding vows lock in the final requirement: that all of the above will now be provided exclusively within the couple, forever.

This exclusivity is meant to provide security, which has to take precedence in the trade-off against the other benefits of marriage. A union that scores a B grade on chemistry, engagement, sex, meaning, intimacy, and economics with an A+ on security is considered a great marriage, about as good as one can hope for. We accept that couples may face financial troubles, a drifting apart of interests and hobbies, decreased intimacy, and lackluster sex. But it’s an oxymoron to say: “my marriage is great, there’s just a bit of infidelity”.

And yet, as Esther Perel quips:

Infidelity has a tenacity that marriage can only envy.

(...) The State of Affairs is a close inspection of the reality of marriage and adultery. For the most part it relies not on p<0.05 studies but on Perel’s three-decade career as a therapist in a dozen countries. The diversity of perspectives in the book is its great strength; it does not offer a single Theory of Relationships and is skeptical of all such attempts. Instead, Perel explores how affairs happen, what it means for all three people involved, and what we can learn from them about the foundation of human desire, fear, sexuality, and love.

The book is subtitled “Rethinking Infidelity”, but I read it as a primer for rethinking relationships more broadly. The multitude of affairs recounted in the book happen in good marriages and bad, new marriages and old, gay and straight, Morrocan and Swiss. Combined, the point to myriad structural weaknesses of the modern model, to the point where launching into a relationship guided by it seems as reckless as sailing into the ocean on a leaky ship. (...)

Perel explains that infidelity today is not a threat to our economic or physical security, but to our emotional security. It’s a threat to our very identity.

At so many weddings, starry-eyed dreamers recite a list of vows, swearing to be everything to each other, from soul mate to lover to teacher to therapist.

It is a grand ambition, and infidelity tells the betrayed partner that they failed at it. A prerequisite for romantic marriage is succumbing to the illusion that one can make their partner happy like no one else can, that the union is unique and special. The marriage ceremony fuses this illusion into one’s identity, reinforced by the social proof of friends and family offering their tearful congratulations. Infidelity shatters this illusion in a moment.

Affairs can also unmoor the betrayed partner from their own past. Realizing that they lived a lie forces them to reassess their entire personal history for the length of the relationship. The loss of personal history is also experienced as a loss of identity.

The trauma caused by affairs is real, as both the cheater and the betrayed know. Infidelity certainly deserves moral condemnation. And yet, Perel suggests that a focus on moralizing isn’t the most productive reaction to the discovery of an affair.

First, she considers cheating in the context of all other marital misdemeanors. The book recounts the stories of people who cheated on spouses who for years ignored them, bullied and belittled them, emotionally abused them, sacrificed their relationships for work or gambling or crystal meth. It is strange that in all those cases we support the right of the abused partner to find love and comfort with someone else, but only on the condition that they first go through the drawn-out and potentially ruinous process of official divorce. If someone seeks an escape from loneliness and misery before the final papers are signed we turn them from victim to villain.

More importantly, the more moral opprobrium a society has for cheating, the harder life becomes for the betrayed partner.

by Jacobian, Less Wrong |  Read more:
Image: uncredited

via:

Swarms of Drones, Piloted By Artificial Intelligence, May Soon Patrol Europe's Borders

Imagine you're hiking through the woods near a border. Suddenly, you hear a mechanical buzzing, like a gigantic bee. Two quadcopters have spotted you and swoop in for a closer look. Antennae on both drones and on a nearby autonomous ground vehicle pick up the radio frequencies coming from the cell phone in your pocket. They send the signals to a central server, which triangulates your exact location and feeds it back to the drones. The robots close in.

Cameras and other sensors on the machines recognize you as human and try to ascertain your intentions. Are you a threat? Are you illegally crossing a border? Do you have a gun? Are you engaging in acts of terrorism or organized crime? The machines send video feeds to their human operator, a border guard in an office miles away, who checks the videos and decides that you are not a risk. The border guard pushes a button, and the robots disengage and continue on their patrol.

This is not science fiction. The European Union is financing a project to develop drones piloted by artificial intelligence and designed to autonomously patrol Europe’s borders. The drones will operate in swarms, coordinating and corroborating information among fleets of quadcopters, small fixed-wing airplanes, ground vehicles, submarines, and boats. Developers of the project, known as Roborder, say the robots will be able to identify humans and independently decide whether they represent a threat. If they determine that you may have committed a crime, they will notify border police. [ed. Until we 'advance' to the point where you're just shot on the spot.] (...)

“The development of these systems is a dark step into morally dangerous territory,” said Noel Sharkey, emeritus professor of robotics and artificial intelligence at Sheffield University in the U.K. and one of the founders of the International Committee for Robot Arms Control, a nonprofit that advocates against the military use of robotics. Sharkey lists examples of weaponized drones currently on the market: flying robots equipped with Tasers, pepper spray, rubber bullets, and other weapons. He warns of the implications of combining that technology with AI-based decision-making and using it in politically-charged border zones. “It’s only a matter of time before a drone will be able to take action to stop people,” Sharkey told The Intercept. (...)

Roborder won its funding grant in 2017 and has set out to develop a marketable prototype — “a swarm of robotics to support border monitoring” — by mid-2020. Its developers hope to build and equip a collection of air, sea, and land drones that can be combined and sent out on border patrol missions, scanning for “threats” autonomously based on information provided by human operators, said Stefanos Vrochidis, Roborder’s project manager.

The drones will employ optical, infrared, and thermal cameras; radar; and radio frequency sensors to determine threats along the border. Cell phone frequencies will be used to triangulate the location of people suspected of criminal activity, and cameras will identify humans, guns, vehicles, and other objects. “The main objective is to have as many sensors in the field as possible to assist patrol personnel,” said Kostas Ioannidis, Roborder’s technical manager. (...)

The documents obtained by The Intercept show Roborder responding to some ethical concerns about the project but not about the technology itself. In their grant application, Roborder’s developers conceded that their research “may be exploited by criminal organizations and individual criminals when planning to perpetrate acts of serious crime or terrorism” but wrote that the consortium of public and private companies developing the technology would work to keep their data safe. That group includes drone manufacturing companies, several national police departments, two national guards, a defense ministry, a port authority, a cyberdefense company, a company that specializes in developing equipment for electronic warfare, and another that provides “predictive analytics” for European police forces.

As for the technology’s possible modification for future clients, the answers were less clear. The developers would not comment on the potential for military sales after the project cycle ends. Developers added that their work is delayed because one of Roborder’s key consortium partners, Portuguese drone manufacturer Tekever, has left the project. Spokespeople for Roborder, Tekever, and Horizon 2020 would not explain the rationale for Tekever’s departure.

by Zach Campbell, The Intercept |  Read more:

Image: Soohee Cho/The Intercept

[ed. Coming soon to a backyard near you (wait until the cops get this).]

What Is Writing and Does This Count as It?

As culture evolves, it becomes ever more difficult to answer the question “What is art?” If you spill spaghetti sauce, is that a painting? Does a squeaky floor count as a song? If you say, “You, too,” when a T.S.A. agent says, “Safe travels,” is that a comedy-inflected performance piece?

Writing is among the art forms most difficult to define, most complicated to pin down, most synonym to yet another synonym. Fortunately, I have developed a helpful guide for the next time you find yourself asking, “Is the thing I have just done technically writing?” (Spoiler: the answer, almost always, is yes.)

• Writing is when you rearrange your pencils on a table until the café closes.

• Writing is when you sit—fingertips hovering over your keyboard, cursor blinking on a fresh blank document—and open Twitter for the twenty-eighth time.

• You can tell that someone is a writer because she’ll have a pencil behind her ear, a Moleskine notebook in her hand, a pen behind her other ear, coffee on her breath and shirt, eyes that beg for your approval, and a Sharpie she’s somehow hidden in her hair. (...)

• You officially become a writer when you own more than one laptop sticker. (If the first sticker is from a local NPR station, just the one will do.)

• A key sign of writing is letters happening in a specific order. If you can read the letters, that’s prose. If the letters are a little jumbled, that’s poetry. If the letters are grouped in threes with other symbols, that’s actually a pay phone which, if you think about it, is kind of spoken-word writing.

by Mia Mercado, New Yorker |  Read more:

Image: Iya Forbes / Getty

Squirrel King

The city didn’t put stop signs at our suburban corner until I was thirteen. The intersection wasn’t particularly busy. It was, however, just tree-lined enough, and the neighborhood drivers just careless enough, that more than a few quiet afternoons were shattered by wrecks outside. Each time we heard squealing tires and crashing metal, Mom dutifully called 911 and then rushed to help. Despite the reckless driving, no one was ever killed. Pet dogs and stray cats weren’t so lucky. Neither were the squirrels.

Roadkill on our neighborhood’s streets was ever-present. Dad joked about free dinner. Mom insisted we keep the family dog away. She was always looking out for our safety and well-being. Sometimes this meant protective hugs, like after the time a bigger kid sat on me while eating a Klondike Bar. Sometimes this meant harsh words, like when I threw myself out of a moving car. And sometimes this meant saying nothing at all. But it definitely meant keeping us from playing with the street’s dead animals, especially the Squirrel King.

When I was nine, His Bushy-Tailed Majesty, the ruler of the Acorn Throne, was struck down immediately in front of our home. He must’ve been leading a crusade, because his fallen body, smooshed flat against the pavement, was surrounded by a host of chittering companions, a retinue of brave knights. Compared to them, he was huge. And more than that, he was getting treatment I’d never before seen. Staring wide-eyed out our front window, I spied a secret and sacred squirrel-rite: Royal Mourning.

The Squirrel King’s funeral wasn’t the first I attended, though it was the most frenetic. After my childhood friend Caleb was killed by a drunk driver, we stood quietly in church, our bodies nearly as still as his. When it was time to go, I begged to stay near his casket awhile longer, believing he was somehow more alive the longer I remained. The Squirrel King’s mourners had no such illusions: they’d rush into the street, pressing their bodies prone just like their King’s, and after a few moments’ pause, they’d scurry away, into the nearby trees. Soon others would take their place, lying flat to pay their respects before running away, too.

Mom eventually joined me at the window. Together we watched the squirrels grieve their lost leader, me providing enthusiastic commentary and squirrely speculation, her standing behind me quietly. After a few minutes, she gave me a tight squeeze, pulled us away, and said it was time for grocery shopping. I spent most of our trip wondering aloud at the splendors we’d seen. Squirrels must’ve been coming from across the city just to visit our street. Who’d known we’d had such an important resident in the leaves above.

by Steven A. Miller, Guernica |  Read more:
Image: Anne Le Guern
[ed. Happy Mother's Day.]

Hooligan Return to Cook Inlet Waters

Hooligan return to Cook Inlet waters (ADN)

[ed. One of my favorite rites of spring. A couple sandwiches, a few beers, sun, beautiful scenery, eagles, seals, beluga whales. I gave all my fish to friends because I didn't much care for the taste - a strong oily flavor, even after frying, smoking, baking, stewing and just about every other kind of prep you can think of. Not even spaghetti sauce or halibut bait, but a lot of people really like them. Just nice to be out after a long cooped-up winter.] 

Summer Bummer: A Young Camper’s $142,938 Snakebite

It was dusk as Oakley Yoder and the other summer camp kids hiked back to their tents at Illinois’ Jackson Falls last July. As the group approached a mound of boulders blocking the path, Oakley, then 9, didn’t see the lurking snake — until it bit a toe on her right foot.

“I was really scared,” Oakley said. “I thought that I could either get paralyzed or could actually die.”

Her camp counselors suspected it was a copperhead and knew they needed to get her medical attention as soon as they could. They had to keep her as calm and motionless as possible — the venom could circulate more quickly if her heart raced from activity or fear.

One counselor gave her a piggyback ride to a van. Others distracted her with Taylor Swift songs and candy as the van sped from their location in a beautiful but remote part of the Shawnee National Forest toward help.

First responders met them and recommended Oakley be taken by air ambulance to a hospital.

The helicopter flight transported Oakley 80 miles from a school parking lot just outside the forest to St. Vincent Evansville hospital in Indiana, where she received four vials of antivenin and was then transferred to Riley Hospital for Children in Indianapolis for observation.

Her parents, Josh Perry and Shelli Yoder, were already in bed that night when they got the call about what had happened to Oakley. They jumped in the car and arrived at Riley about two hours before their daughter. Once she made it, doctors closely observed her condition, her toe still oozing and bruised. By lunchtime, Perry said, physicians reassured the parents that Oakley would be OK.

“It was a major comfort for me to realize, OK, we’re getting the best care possible,” said Perry, who is a health care ethics professor at the business school at Indiana University Bloomington. Less than 24 hours after the bite, Oakley left the hospital with her grateful parents.

Then the bills came.

Patient: Oakley Yoder, now 10, of Bloomington, Ind. Insured through Indiana University Bloomington, where her father and mother work as faculty.

Total Bill: $142,938, including $67,957 for four vials of antivenin. ($55,577.64 was charged for air ambulance transport.) The balance included a ground ambulance charge and additional hospital and physician charges, according to the family’s insurer, IU Health Plans.

Service Providers: St. Vincent Evansville hospital, part of Ascension, a nonprofit Catholic health system. Riley Hospital for Children, part of Indiana University Health, a nonprofit health system. Air Evac Lifeteam, an air ambulance provider.

Medical Service: The essential part of Oakley’s treatment involved giving her four vials of snake antivenin called CroFab.

What Gives: When bitten by a venomous snake, there is no time to waste. If left untreated, a venomous bite can cause tissue damage, hemorrhaging and respiratory arrest. Children tend to experience more severe effects because of their relatively small size.

CroFab has dominated the U.S. market for snake antivenin since its approval in 2000. When Oakley was bitten, it was the only drug available to treat venomous bites from pit vipers. (Oakley probably was bitten by a copperhead snake, a type of pit viper, the camp directors told her parents.)

In short, the drugmaker, London-based BTG Plc, essentially had a monopoly.

The average list price for CroFab is $3,198 per vial, according to the health care information tech company Connecture. Manufacturing costs, product improvements and research all factor into the drug’s price, said Chris Sampson, spokesman for BTG.

by Carmen Heredia Rodriguez, Kaiser Health News | Read more:
Image: Chris Bergen
[ed. See also (from the comments): I am the director of The Rattlesnake Conservancy. We are thrilled that you are covering snakebites and educating people without fear-mongering (“Bill Of The Month: Summer Bummer: A Young Camper’s $142,938 Snakebite,” April 30). However, I am concerned that in the radio report on NPR your team mentioned the young lady used a tourniquet and did not mention how dangerous that can be. Many snakebite experts agree that using a tourniquet is dangerous, leading to potentially life-threatening consequences when the tourniquet is removed. Absent loss of life, it also leads to venom accumulation in the limb and significant tissue damage. The best course of action is immobilizing the affected limb and emergency care as soon as possible. No snakebite kits, tourniquets or other devices will help. The only effective treatment for snakebite is antivenom.

The Facebook group “National Snakebite Support” is a crucial tool for anyone who may have been envenomated. The group is staffed by the United States’ top venom specialists and snakebite medical doctors. Their team quickly responds to patients and will communicate with hospital staff on behalf of a patient as needed.

That being said, remember that venom has saved more lives than it has taken. Many medications, including several for blood pressure, arterial clotting and experimental medications, are developed from venomous snakes. For more information, check out our website.

— Anthony Daly-Crews, Buckeye, Ariz.

Flora Borsi, Selfie
via:

The Gut Doctor

A mysterious gut doctor is begging Americans to throw out “this vegetable” now. But, like, which? A journey through internet garbage.

There is a gut doctor, and he begs Americans: “Throw out this vegetable now.” This news is accompanied by a different image nearly every time. This morning, the plea appeared at the bottom of an article on Vox next to a photo of a hand chopping up what appears to be a pile of green apples. At other times, it has been paired with a picture of a petri dish with a worm in it. Other times, gut bacteria giving off electricity. The inside of a lotus root. An illustrated rendering of roundworms.

The gut doctor’s desperation pops up over and over, on websites like CNN and the Atlantic (and as I said, this one), in what are known colloquially as “chumboxes.” These are the boxes at the bottom of the page that have several pieces of clickbaity “sponsored content” or “suggested reading.” They’re generated by a variety of companies, but the largest two are Taboola ($160 million in funding) and Outbrain ($194 million in funding), both founded in Israel in the mid-aughts.

What is the point of a chumbox, and why would it be called that?

Chumbox is a sort of gross fishing reference, chum being the tiny fish that fishers use as bait to catch larger fish. Before the word came into the lexicon, Casey Newton explained the purpose of these boxes for The Verge in 2014:

Outbrain, Taboola, and their peers have a simple pitch for the sites they work with: add our modules to your site for free, with just a few lines of code, and start making money immediately from the traffic you deliver to paying partners. “Our whole pitch to publishers is a no-brainer,” LaCour says. Adam Singolda, co-founder and CEO of Taboola, says top journalistic outlets are making more than $10 million a year adding its modules to their sites — significant revenues in an industry still struggling to find its footing online.

The shift happened after publications realized that they weren’t making enough money from banner ads (which have dismal click-through rates of around one-tenth of a percent) and before they started cutting deals directly with large tech platforms like Facebook and Google to serve their content to broader audiences and try to wring out some revenue.

In 2015, John Mahoney coined the term and wrote a widely cited “taxonomy” of chumbox content for the Awl. The content types he identified:

• Sexy Thing (e.g., hot singles in your area, “your area” determined using your IP address)
• Localized Rule (e.g., some change in your city’s parking meter system, ditto)
• Deeply Psychological Body Thing
• Celeb Thing
• Old Person’s Face
• Skin Thing
• Miracle Cure Thing
• Weird Tattoo
• Implied Vaginal or Other Bodily Opening
• Disgusting Invertebrates or Globular Masses
• Extreme Weight Loss Thing
• Money Thing
• Wine
• Oozing Food

The gut doctor fits into several of these categories, depending on the image he’s paired with. He is always a Miracle Cure Thing and he is often also a Disgusting Invertebrates thing. He is sometimes a Deeply Psychological Body Thing, or Oozing Food.

By 2016, 41 of the top 50 news sites used these modules as a revenue source. Reply All co-host Alex Goldman visited Taboola’s New York offices in June 2018, where he met CEO and founder Adam Singolda. Singolda informed him that he had never heard the term “chumbox,” and that he did not like the word “ads,” but that Taboola serves about 20 billion “recommendations” per day.

by Kaitlyn Tiffany, Vox | Read more:
Image: uncredited

Charlotte Knox
via:
[ed. I like third guy, he seems the happiest. Weird stripes and all.]

via: