What's so great about Andrew Sullivan

Yes to Matthew Yglesias's response to Kate Antonova's smear, which misspells Yglesias. [UPDATE: The tweet has been deleted, but Antonova essentially said that Andrew Sullivan, Matthew Yglesias, David Brooks, and Steven Pinker shouldn't be published because their writing adds nothing of value.]

I got hung up on the part of this that was about me, but imagine looking at a world where same sex couples can marry all across the western world and deciding that Andrew Sullivan has never had anything of value to add to the conversation.

Such a dumb, myopic view of the world. pic.twitter.com/qhqTnQayz7

— Matthew Yglesias (@mattyglesias) August 29, 2020

My old post about Andrew Sullivan.

Sullivan, Yglesias, Brooks, and Pinker are all great. I've disagreed with all of them at times, but their writing does add value to the world. For instance, I blogged this and this by Brooks, this and this by Yglesias, and this and this by Pinker.

Also, lol at the hair-splitting of: I don't want these writers to be canceled — I just want them to be stopped from getting published anywhere ever again! Reminds me of that old joke: "We're not lost — we just don't know where we are!"

President Trump shares fake news about his approval rating

President Donald Trump said “Great news!” when tweeting this image from Fox News, which says “TRUMP’S SOARING APPROVAL” at the top, and then “55% OVERALL.”

Great news! #MAGA pic.twitter.com/haZ1HbVpNu

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) April 11, 2019

Sounds impressive! Except for one slight detail: according to the same poll that was the basis of the Fox News report, 55% is actually his disapproval rating. His approval rating is only 43%. And he calls other people fake news . . .

Mo Elleithee, director of the Georgetown Institute of Politics and Public Service (which conducted the poll), tweeted back:

I’m the Director of @GUPolitics & this graphic is incorrect.

The Battleground Poll shows 58% approval on the economy.

But it shows only 43% overall approval, & 52% disapproval.

The 55% number is the President’s unfavorable rating. (Only 40% favorable.)https://t.co/a00b6ljiJl https://t.co/nntXuHaUKj

— Mo Elleithee (@MoElleithee) April 11, 2019

Some other Twitter users have a theory:

My guess is that Fox posted the bogus graphic knowing Trump would tweet it. Now they can claim it was a mistake but most of their viewers will believe it's true.

— Ed Krassenstein (@EdKrassen) April 11, 2019

What was wrong with Ilhan Omar's tweets about Israel and AIPAC?

Some are saying, "Well, Rep. Ilhan Omar was right: AIPAC really is an influential pro-Israel lobbying organization, and it does use money to exert its influence! So what's the problem with her two tweets [now deleted] that were denounced by House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and other congressional Democrats?"

This Reason piece explains what that's missing. Yes, you can look at Omar's two tweets that have gotten the most attention and say each one on its own has some truth to it. But that's overlooking the larger context of her statements. She was responding to a Haaretz article about House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy's criticism of Omar's statement from years ago that "Israel has hypnotized the world," and the world must "awaken" to "see the evil doings of Israel."

To her credit, Omar has apologized for those statements (though her recent response to Pelosi was called a "nonapology" by my mom, Ann Althouse). But it's still troubling when a member of Congress uses old anti-Semitic tropes about Jews as an elite group secretly controlling the world with all their money. You don't get to keep pulling out invidious stereotypes about a historically marginalized group and then plead innocent because hey, there is some truth to your statements. That's setting the bar too low for our national leaders. To insist on reading each individual tweet by Omar in isolation from everything else she's expressed about the topic would be applying a skewed standard that we shouldn't apply to any powerful government official.

As David Bernstein says in the Reason post:

Let's be generous, and assume she meant AIPAC to begin with. Two freshman Democrats who have attracted a great deal of attention are widely perceived to have engaged in anti-Semitic rhetoric while criticizing Israel. The leader of the House GOP, just off demoting a member of his caucus for racist comments, threatens similar action against the two Democrats. . . . Suggesting in the absence of 'Israel lobby' money, the House Republican leader wouldn't call out anti-Semitism by House Democrats suggests that you believe that the lobby, i.e., Jews, are pulling the strings in a classic Jewish-conspiracy kind of way, such that even the most mundane and obvious of political maneuvers are really just tribute to a Jewish cabal.

Words to live by

"Dance like no one's watching; tweet like one day you will be held up as the moral authority of the land." — Kumail Nanjiani

Twitter

The illusion that you're hanging out with celebrities.

Live-blogging the Republican presidential debate on foreign policy

Keep reloading this post (or the homepage) for updates. You can also find live-blogging on TalkingPointsMemo.

CBS News starts out with a long clip show of some of the most intense lines from previous debates, including the spats between Mitt Romney and the Ricks (Perry/Santorum) about whether Romney would be allowed to finish speaking. So they're shamelessly admitting what everyone knows: that the networks thrive on getting the candidates to attack each other.

8:05 - The first question goes to Herman Cain: what would you do to keep Iran from obtaining nuclear weapons? This debate is going to be all foreign policy, in contrast with all the previous debates, which have been mostly about domestic policy. Cain is probably under the most pressure in this debate, since there are so many questions about whether he has any foreign policy competence. Cain is sounding very polished and confident. [UPDATE: As you'll see in some of the commentary I've quoted near the end of this post, my remarks here were not prescient. Overall, Cain's performance in debating foreign policy tonight seems to have been rated very poorly.]

8:06 - Romney says that Iran is President Obama's "greatest failing" in foreign policy.

8:07 - A moderator calls time on Romney in the middle of his sentence, and Romney forcefully says that he still has time left because he sees the yellow light. The moderator says: "I stand corrected." [ADDED: Josh Marshall at TalkingPointsMemo says:]

Mitt stands down [moderator] Scott Pelley as a meta-signal that he can stand down Iran.

8:09 - Newt Gingrich: "There are many ways to be smart on Iran, and relatively few ways to be dumb, and this administration skipped all the ways to be smart." Gingrich makes a point to praise Cain's and Romney's answers on Iran.

8:15 - Santorum, in his answer on Iran policy, pointedly contrasts his own record with President Bush, saying that Bush wasn't willing to spend the money to implement Santorum's policy. Most of the debates have rarely mentioned Bush, but clearly Santorum believes that criticizing Bush is a way to win over Republican voters.

8:18 - Jon Huntsman: "I don't want to be nation-building in Afghanistan, when this nation so desperately needs to be built." He deemphasizes foreign policy as a whole, saying the main issues are the economy and education.

8:24 - Perry says he'll start out by giving "zero" foreign aid to all countries. "Then we can have a conversation" about whether to give any foreign aid to anyone. He strongly opposes foreign aid to Pakistan.

8:25 - I'm pretty sure Romney, Perry, Cain, and Gingrich all got multiple questions before Michele Bachmann got one.

8:26 - Bachmann: "President Obama has been willing to stand with Occupy Wall Street, but he will not stand with Israel. Israel looks at President Obama and they do not see a friend."

8:27 - Gingrich passionately agrees with Perry's answer on foreign aid. He accuses Pakistan of hiding Osama bin Laden.

8:28 - Santorum disagrees with much of what the others have said about Pakistan: "Pakistan must be a friend. . . . We need to continue the aid relationship. The aid is all spent in the United States; it's not sent over there."

8:34 - A moderator asks Gingrich: "Would you care to address Gov. Romney's ability to think outside the box and challenge national-security perspectives?" Gingrich: "No." The moderator points out that he did just that in a recent radio interview. Gingrich: "That's because I was on a radio show. We're having a debate to see who should run against President Obama."

As always, I'm writing down these quotes on the fly and probably won't catch all of them verbatim.

8:39 - Moderator to Perry: "As you said in the last debate, you advocate the elimination of the Department of Energy—" Perry: "Glad you remembered it!" Moderator: "I've had some to think about it." Perry: "Me too!" This, of course, gets a huge laugh. The moderator asks him how we're going to deal with nuclear weapons if we abolish the Department of Energy. Perry doesn't answer the question.

8:41 - Cain: "I do not agree with torture. Period." But he'll defer to the military's definition of torture. The moderator follows up to ask what he thinks about waterboarding. Cain: "I think it is an enhanced interrogation technique." He would bring back waterboarding.

8:42 - Bachmann also supports waterboarding. She says Obama seems to want (?) to lose the war on terror. Bachmann has clearly decided she needs to be as vociferously anti-Obama as possible.

8:42 - Ron Paul: "Torture is illegal . . . by our laws and international laws. Waterboarding is torture. It's illegal under our law and international law. It's also immoral. And it's also very impractical. There's no evidence that you get reliable evidence." [ADDED: Here's the video:]



8:45 - Romney agrees with Obama's policy of killing American citizens who are fighting with anti-American terrorists. The audience boos. Moderator to audience: "We will not have booing."

8:47 - Gingrich makes a powerful statement that the correct action in war is "to kill people who are trying to kill you," not about giving those people due process rights. He emphasizes that this is consistent with "the rule of law," because war is separate from the criminal justice system. His answer draws some vague heckling from the audience. [ADDED: Here's the video:]



8:50 - TPM posts a somewhat comical freeze-frame of Romney at the debate, supposedly watching Perry.

8:52 - After Romney gives his answer to a question on China, Huntsman makes an extremely wonky correction to Romney: "I don't think you can take China to the WTO on currency-related issues." Subtext: Romney is a former governor with no foreign-policy expertise; Huntsman was also a governor, but he's seasoned in foreign policy.

8:56 - Perry is asked whether his policy of bringing all foreign aid down to zero applies to Israel. Perry says yes. "In fact, we oughta do that with some of those agencies that I was trying to think the name of." (Yes, he did say "think the name of.")

9:03 - Josh Marshall writes:

I think we have to face the reality that with Rick Perry remaining lucid and not forgetting where he is, the entertainment value of these debates really goes off a cliff.

9:05 - Paul is asked whether we should invade Syria and try to overthrow the Assad dictatorship. Unsurprisingly, he says no. Moderator: "But what about the 3,500 people dead [in Syria]?" Paul points out that the Soviet Union and China killed "hundreds of millions of people," and we didn't see fit to invade them.

9:08 - Senator Lindsey Graham, who's in the audience, asks a softball question about whether the candidates would maintain Obama's policies about "enhanced interrogation techniques" and trying some of the inmates at Guantanamo Bay in civilian court. Can the candidates say anything other than that they'd reverse Obama's policies? That's exactly what Cain says.

9:13 - Bachmann makes a highly incendiary charge against Ron Paul: that he was against authorizing the military to kill bin Laden. Paul says he supported "going after bin Laden," and was only "upset that it took 10 years."

9:14 - Josh Marshall points out something about CBS News that I had also noticed: the online streaming debate after the one-hour mark has been "almost unwatchable." [ADDED: Here's someone on Twitter who also calls it "unwatchable." Nate Silver of the New York Times gave up on watching after the first hour.] It keeps stopping and starting — and you don't get to hear the part that was going on while it stopped, so you miss out on big chunks of the debate and only get to hear partial sentences. Marshall says that National Journal's feed is better, but I'm not able to play that feed at all. I'm using a MacBook Pro with almost no other applications running, and I'm sure Marshall, one of the most successful bloggers in the world, has a decent internet setup.

9:15 - Romney says we should return Medicaid to the states, which would save $100 billion a year. (I thought this was the foreign-policy debate.)

9:20 - Bachmann says we need to eliminate every program President Lyndon B. Johnson gave us as "the Great Society." "If you look at China, they don't have food stamps. They save for their own retirement." Of course, Social Security is us saving for our retirement. It's just a way to pool everyone's money for some of those savings.

9:26 - Huntsman: "I've negotiated with Pakistanis, both in government and in business." This might be Huntsman's strongest debate. I'm not hearing him give his usual delicate circumlocutions.

The debate is over. As the camera pans away, I notice that Gingrich was positioned closer to the center than Perry, indicating that Gingrich is rising and Perry is slipping. (I'm pretty sure the lesser candidates like Huntsman and Santorum have always been at or near the end, and Romney is always in the middle.)

Josh Marshall, a committed Democrat, praises Santorum's performance. Half an hour into the debate, he wrote:

I don't agree with much that Rick Santorum believes in foreign policy, though his answer on Pakistan was pretty reasonable. Yet it's clear that he's one of the few guys up there who thought about any of these issues before he realized that he'd have to answer questions about them in a foreign policy debate.

At the end, Marshall added:

Santorum is far and away the most lucid and knowledgable person on foreign policy.

The prominent conservative blogger Erick Erickson pans Cain on Twitter:

It is safe to say Herman Cain is the biggest loser tonight. What a damn shame. Just wow.

Similarly, Conor Friedersdorf of The Atlantic says:

Herman Cain seems much less confident, charismatic tonight. Equally uninformed as before.

Cain did often seem like a deer in the headlights (though it was hard to tell because of CBS News's spluttering feed). Someone on Twitter named Sean Agnew seems to agree:

I don't want Cain answering the 3am call. #sorry

Stephen Hayes, who works for The Weekly Standard and Fox News, responds to an answer by Cain that I either wasn't paying attention to or couldn't hear in full because CBS News doesn't know how to do a live online feed:

Really? President Cain would have supported both Hosni Mubarak in Egypt? And Ali Abdullah Saleh in Yemen? Sheesh.

Ben Smith at Politico says on Twitter:

Perry guy who sent a despairing 'sad' email after last debate now writes: "happy days here again! breaking out the bourbon!"

On Twitter, "Jason (the Commenter)" (who also regularly comments here) puts 4 of the candidates on a spectrum:

Hates torture to loves torture: Paul, Huntsman, Cain, Bachmann.

In the comments, Jason makes a very important point, which I had missed:

The biggest fail of the evening was Cain, who said that nine countries have nuclear weapons. You can only get that number if you include Israel, and they are adamant about neither confirming or denying that rumor. He threw them under the bus.

Another thing I didn't notice: many people on Twitter are saying Perry coined a new word tonight: "forewithal." Ryan Lizza of The New Yorker says:

Perry comeback? On the one hand, he made a great joke. On the other he called into question alliance with Israel and said forewithal.

Mickey Kaus calls out Nicholas Kristof's "faux mot" about Republicans supporting contraception for horses but not for humans.

Kristof posted this to Twitter:

You can’t make this up: Republicans back contraception for wild horses, cut it for humans.

He explained the point at the end of his most recent New York Times column.

Kaus points out that Kristof's refusal to appreciate the views of people who disagree with him is actually unhelpful in advancing Kristof's own position:

The conservative Republican response is presumably that life begins at conception and human life is sacred, while horse life is not. Duh! Also that we worry considerably less about the moral and social effects of promiscuity and eugenics on equine society. . . .

The chances that it will actually win over anyone are nil–but it will get him applause from a large audience (at least 1,079,881 [the number of people who follow Kristof on Twitter]) of the already convinced. It’s as much entertainment as argument. Not that there’s anything wrong with it! Unless you want Kristof’s side to win.

This is not just an issue about contraception for humans and horses. There's a much broader problem with people failing to understand their political/ideological opponents' actual views (particularly the left failing to understand the right). When people do this, it's a giveaway that what they care about most is not whether their position actually prevails; they're more interested in demonizing their opponents and, by contrast, putting halos over themselves.

Being a pundit on Election Day

"Election Days are tough. Everyone wants to read at the precise moment when you have nothing to write." — Mickey Kaus (on Twitter)

Obama's prime-time address on his oil spill strategy

We'll be able to watch it here live, starting at 8 p.m. Eastern. (Thanks to the White House for the "blogger-friendly" embed code.)



Here's the text.

President Obama said:

The families I met with last week who lost their loved ones in the explosion -- these families deserve to know why. And so I've established a National Commission to understand the causes of this disaster and offer recommendations on what additional safety and environmental standards we need to put in place. Already, I've issued a six-month moratorium on deepwater drilling. I know this creates difficulty for the people who work on these rigs, but for the sake of their safety, and for the sake of the entire region, we need to know the facts before we allow deepwater drilling to continue. And while I urge the Commission to complete its work as quickly as possible, I expect them to do that work thoroughly and impartially.

Jason (the commenter) says on Twitter:

Obama sure does like starting commissions. His campaign slogan should have been "hope, change, and commissions (mainly commissions)".

Amba says:

I got to clean up sh*t while listening to the president's speech; that seems appropriate on so many levels.

Jason responds:

You should set up a commission to figure out how it happened, another to advise you how to do it, and a third to make sure it never happens again.

RELATED: "Give Obama a Break: Presidents Don't Have Magic Powers That Clean up Oil Spills."

UPDATE: The New York Times has a run-down of commentators on Obama's address, which concludes with a long quote from my mom, Ann Althouse. She says, channeling the president:

We need to "jump start" the "clean energy" future. There's "the potential" to create "millions of jobs" but "only" if we "act together." We need to do something big at the national level to make this happen. Some people say we can't afford this, but he's saying we can't afford not to do it. He's vague about what this will be. The only thing he won't accept is doing nothing. He won't accept the "paltry limits of conventional wisdom." So even though we don't "precisely know" what we need to do, we will do it. Like we did in WWII and in going to the moon. We'll do something. And it will have to be big, but we don't know what it is. Then he drops from that scarily high level of abstraction and the unknown to... shrimpers. Something about shrimp people. We must think BIG and... shrimpy.

New York Times not using "tweet"

Back when I was weighing the pros and cons of Twitter, I said:

One of the things that's most kept me from using Twitter is the word "tweets." Anytime the topic of Twitter comes up, the word "tweets" isn't far behind. It sounds like a word you might come up with if you wanted to make a website appealing to 10-year-olds. But I just feel embarrassed when I hear adults talking about their "tweets." So while I might keep using Twitter, I'm not going to talk about "tweets."

The New York Times apparently agrees with me, having just made this an unofficial editorial policy. The Times' "standards editor" sent this memo to staff (via Metafilter):

Some social-media fans may disagree, but outside of ornithological contexts, “tweet” has not yet achieved the status of standard English. And standard English is what we should use in news articles.

Except for special effect, we try to avoid colloquialisms, neologisms and jargon. And “tweet” — as a noun or a verb, referring to messages on Twitter — is all three. Yet it has appeared 18 times in articles in the past month, in a range of sections.

Of course, new technology terms sprout and spread faster than ever. And we don’t want to seem paleolithic. But we favor established usage and ordinary words over the latest jargon or buzzwords. . . .

Someday, “tweet” may be as common as “e-mail.” Or another service may elbow Twitter aside next year, and “tweet” may fade into oblivion. (Of course, it doesn’t help that the word itself seems so inherently silly.)

“Tweet” may be acceptable occasionally for special effect. But let’s look for deft, English alternatives: use Twitter, post to or on Twitter, write on Twitter, a Twitter message, a Twitter update. Or, once you’ve established that Twitter is the medium, simply use “say” or “write.”

I agree with all that.

So, is it OK for the NYT to include "K thx bye" in a headline? (Again, credit goes to Metafilter for that catch.)

"There was no Twitter Revolution inside Iran."

So says Golnaz Esfandiari in Foreign Policy (via). More:

[T]he 'Twitter Revolution' was an irresistible meme during the post-election protests, a story that wrote itself. . . . Western journalists who couldn't reach -- or didn't bother reaching? -- people on the ground in Iran simply scrolled through the English-language tweets posted with tag #iranelection. Through it all, no one seemed to wonder why people trying to coordinate protests in Iran would be writing in any language other than Farsi. . . .

[A]n honest accounting of Twitter's role in Iran would also note its pernicious complicity in allowing rumors to spread. . . .

It's not that Twitter publicists of the Iranian protests haven't played a role in the events of the past year. They have. It's just not been the outsized role it's often been made out to be. And ultimately, that's been a terrible injustice to the Iranians who have made real, not remote or virtual, sacrifices in pursuit of justice.

The whole article is worth reading, especially for its vivid account of how Twitter "can serve the purposes of Iran's regime as easily as it can aid the country's activists."

The Library of Congress is going to "archive the collected works of Twitter."

We're going to record "the second-by-second history of ordinary people."

That NYT article makes this important point (which it attributes to unnamed academics):

For hundreds of years, . . . the historical record has tended to be somewhat elitist because of its selectivity. In books, magazines and newspapers, . . . it is the prominent and the infamous who are written about most frequently.

I've been critical of Twitter. But I only wish we had this kind of access to random people's fleeting thoughts from 50, 100, 200 years ago.

On the other hand, most tweets surely aren't very interesting. It's hard to imagine that more than 10% are worth going back and reading even a year later. But the Library of Congress is apparently archiving all tweets. This seems bizarrely undiscriminating for such an august institution.

Now, sifting through the 55 million tweets per day (!) would be an enormous task, so I'm not surprised they don't bother to do that. But couldn't they come up with an algorithm that would automate the process of distilling the whole archive into something with more overall value? For instance, they could have a rule that they only archive tweets that have garnered a certain number of "favorites."

Lastly, this is disturbing:

[T]he vast majority of Twitter messages that would be archived are publicly published on the Web.

"The vast majority"? You mean some of the posts that will be stored in the Library of Congress will be from posts that were never publicly published — that is, from "locked" accounts? How is that not a flagrant violation of privacy?

Resigning by Twitter haiku, or senryu

A CEO resigns with quirky dignity by posting this on Twitter:

Today's my last day at Sun. I'll miss it. Seems only fitting to end on a #haiku.

Financial crisis
Stalled too many customers
CEO no more

That was all one tweet, but I've added the line breaks so it's in proper haiku form. The CEO is Jonathan Schwartz, and he resigned from Sun Microsystems.

I sent this to my dad, and he responded with (1) a correction:

These poems are senryu, not haiku. Same structure, but haiku are about nature and include a seasonal reference, while senryu are about human experience.

. . . and (2) a senryu of his own:

CEO only
of myself, if I resigned
who would take over?

Penelope Trunk's Twitter post about miscarriage and abortion

Penelope Trunk said this on Twitter:

I'm in a board meeting. Having a miscarriage. Thank goodness, because there's a fucked-up 3-week hoop-jump to have an abortion in Wisconsin.

The mainstream media has swarmed around that three-sentence comment about what's going on in one woman's life. Penelope Trunk is one of the more successful bloggers, but she's hardly a household name — so why has this caused a national furor?

Ann Althouse (my mom) says the tweet sets back the cause of abortion rights by undermining the perception that pregnant women are on a "serious search for meaning."

Maybe the real-world net result of this tweet will be bad for abortion rights, but I wish it weren't. People should be allowed to post something to Twitter that doesn't include, within the maximum 140 characters, an obligatory qualification about how they realize that abortion is a very serious and somber thing.

And women should be allowed to write honestly about abortions and miscarriages.

Is the problem that she's glad she ended up having a miscarriage rather than doing what she had been planning to do and get an abortion? Well, if that's surprising to people, then that itself is a serious problem that her Twitter post might go some way toward rectifying. Many, many people would prefer a miscarriage to an abortion.

Maybe you think she should have somehow drenched her statement in emotion. And maybe that would have been more effective. But it can often be more subtly effective to take an issue that's usually considered too taboo or tragic to speak about honestingly and -- speak about it honestly. (And let's also remember that this is a Twitter post we're talking about; it shouldn't be held to the same standards as a magazine article.)

Being told just the plain facts can be a more powerful reading experience. It puts more responsibility on you as the reader to do some of the thinking and evaluating instead of having everything prejudged by the author. Even if this doesn't happen to be your favorite kind of writing, it's not immoral for someone to use that style when writing about miscarriages or abortions.

Trunk has also written a blunt blog post about getting two abortions, and another one about being sexually abused. Like the Twitter post, these blog posts don't broadcast their own emotional or moral significance.

But I'm glad I've had the chance to read stark descriptions of distinctly female experiences that I, as a man, haven't had to endure. We'd be a little worse off if people like Trunk felt the need to censor themselves.

The most desperate attempt to fit two trendy topics into one headline

A piece in Psychology Today: "Could Michael Jackson Have Created Twitter?"

Whose lives are valued more, men's or women's?

Nicholas Kristof's latest op-ed is about women in Africa who die in childbirth. He says:

According to the World Health Organization, Sierra Leone has the highest maternal mortality in the world, and in several African countries, 1 woman in 10 ends up dying in childbirth.

It’s pretty clear that if men were dying at these rates, the United Nations Security Council would be holding urgent consultations, and a country such as this would appoint a minister of paternal mortality. Yet half-a-million women die annually from complications related to pregnancy or childbirth without attracting much interest because the victims are typically among the most voiceless people in the world: impoverished, rural, uneducated and female.

When he links to this op-ed on Twitter, he uses the feminist point as the draw:

If men were dying in childbirth, this would be a crisis.

"Reader_iam" (who sometimes comments on this blog) responds:

It would? Are you sure? Which men? All men? Everywhere?

I've become exhausted with feminist counterfactuals like Kristof's. You hear them frequently: "People would take this problem more seriously if it were happening to men." "No one would care if a man did this." It's easy to make these claims without any evidence, because they're usually unfalsifiable.

But I actually do think Kristof's claim is falsifiable -- and indeed, false. You don't need to go through the Rube Goldberg-esque procedure of (1) starting with a problem that only leads to women's deaths, then (2) imagining a world where it happened to men, then (3) comparing the real-world reactions with the alternate-universe reactions. All you have to do is look at how people react in the real world when a disaster such as an earthquake kills a large number of people. The fact that "women and children" died will be specifically noted, as if the expected reaction is: "Not just people died, but women -- oh no!" It's similar to how the American media will report that a bomb in a foreign country killed a large number of people ... "including 3 Americans" -- horrors!

In fact, even the headline of Kristof's piece (which I know he might not have written) suggests that people are more moved by the deaths of women than of men -- or, at least, the media expects them to be. The headline is: "This Mom Didn't Have to Die." Do you think the Times would be as likely to run a tear-jerker headline: "This Dad Didn't Have to Die"?


IN THE COMMENTS: "Jason (the commenter)" has some questions for Kristof:

Who has longer life expectancies? Who gets off of boats first? Is more money spent on breast or prostate cancer research? ... Does the media worry about men dying unnoticed? Who makes up a greater proportion of the prison population? Who makes up a greater portion of the people begging on the streets?

If the average woman's lifespan were several years less than the average man's, it would be a crisis!

Also, "reader_iam" follows up with a couple important points:

I do want to be clear that the high rate of deaths in childbirth in Sierra Leone, and elsewhere, is not something I wish to make light of (nor you, I know). Indeed, it was the framing that bothered me, especially in light of the broader situation in Sierra Leone, based on other WHO statistics which (coincidentally) I'd happened to review recently, and therefore they jumped to mind when I saw Kristoff's piece.

As you'll notice, the stats here are appalling all the way around, but in all categories divided by sex, you can see that males are slightly worse off.

If you follow that link, you'll see that this includes general lifespan and infant mortality -- both are worse for males than females in Sierra Leone.

Words of wisdom on blogging -- newness and negativity

1. "Interesting is a much better filter than new."

That's from Jason Kottke on Twitter. He writes the blog called Kottke, which might be the oldest blog of any note (started in March 1998) that's still thriving today.

There seems to be an unwritten rule of blogging that you need to post about something as soon as it emerges as the issue of the day. It's looked down on if you blog about it a week later, or you'll at least need to excuse it with an apology ("I'm sorry I'm late to this, but I just noticed it, and..."). Blogging about a story that's a month old is unthinkable.

For instance, this post on Reason magazine's blog Hit & Run links to a segment from 60 Minutes, but the blogger seems to feel apologetic for doing so:

[This video] aired a couple of weeks ago, but it's a pretty good look at the drinking age debate, with lots of camera time for Amethyst Initiative founder John McCardell. [emphasis added]

"But" it's a pretty good look at the drinking age debate? Why not "and"? Did the debate over the legal drinking age really change at all in the few weeks since the 60 minutes segment aired?

I know it's petty to pick on this one person's word choice, but it's symptomatic of a general problem in blogging. Sure there'll be an issue here and there that's so timely it only really makes sense to blog it right away. But don't most things worth talking about stay interesting for a while?

If something that's a couple weeks "old" is too out of date for you, you certainly wouldn't have much interest in, say, reading a book.

So I plan to keep breaking this unwritten rule of the blogosphere; that is, I'll blog something that doesn't cross the "new" threshold as long as it crosses the "interesting" threshold. Even a subject that's centuries old isn't off limits; a fortiori, it's OK to blog something from last year.


2. "People get a hit of energy when they are negative about something."

That's from Gwyneth Paltrow in an interview, in response to a question about her blog.

That explains a lot about blogging in general, and especially comments sections on blogs.


UPDATE: I just noticed that this was my 250th post. A quarter of the way to 1,000!

Losing our religion

Everyone's talking about this Trinity College poll showing that fewer Americans say they're Christian.

The Washington Post reports it like this:

15 Percent of Americans Have No ReligionFewer Call Themselves Christians; Nondenominational Identification Increases

The percentage of Americans who call themselves Christians has dropped dramatically over the past two decades, and those who do are increasingly identifying themselves without traditional denomination labels....

But I don't think those are the most important results from this poll.

It's hard to get at people's true thoughts and feelings by asking them to put a label on themselves, because you dredge up all the connotations surrounding the labels in addition to the literal meaning. There are plenty of atheists, for instance, who don't want to go around proclaiming, "I'm an atheist," because that's just not polite. And this can cut both ways: I have a couple friends who deeply believe in Christianity and call themselves "Christians," but will refer to themselves as "not religious" or even opposed to "religion." For them, "religion" means human-made institutions that distort and distract from the founding principles of Christianity.

The answers to these questions are more revealing, because they're about real life rather than labels:

Were you married in a religious ceremony? (ever married respondents only)

When you die, do you expect to have a religious funeral or service?

The answers were 69% "yes" vs. 30% "no" for weddings, and 66% "yes" vs. 27% "no" for funerals (with a few percent not answering). So that's roughly a 70-30 split for both questions. (Here's a PDF of the complete results.)

I'm surprised at how secular we've turned out to be. I would have expected those numbers maybe in Europe; I would have thought the percentage of secular weddings or funerals here in America would be more like 10%. Even to me, the idea of having a wedding or funeral without the trappings of religion feels ruthlessly antisocial.

There seems to be a strong notion (though maybe not as strong as I thought) that even if you aren't particularly religious, you should still publicly go through the motions to be nice. If you're, say, getting married, well, "families" are going to "expect" it.

People sometimes talk about "family" as if it's this dictatorial entity controlling your life. But if you're over 18, unless you're bound by some specific debt or contractual condition to a family member, you're allowed to do what you want.

The other day I blogged about Twitter and said I was enjoying the "all-caps micro-wisdom" of Jenny Holzer. One of her posts that stood out:

IT'S JUST AN ACCIDENT THAT YOUR PARENTS ARE YOUR PARENTS

Moderately cool stuff on Twitter (and the word that's kept me from using Twitter)

Yesterday I blogged about "what I do and don't understand about Twitter." As I said, I'm still not totally sure what the point is, but there's enough worthwhile content on it that I'll stay on it. If it's your preferred mode of communication, feel free to follow me. Hm, maybe that's how it would be useful to me: I could use it to stay in touch with you, the blog reader ... if you're out there! One of the things that's most kept me from using Twitter is the word "tweets." Anytime the topic of Twitter comes up, the word "tweets" isn't far behind. It sounds like a word you might come up with if you wanted to make a website appealing to 10-year-olds. But I just feel embarrassed when I hear adults talking about their "tweets." So while I might keep using Twitter, I'm not going to talk about "tweets." Here are a few posts I've seen on Twitter that went some way toward convincing me it's only a partial waste of time and not a complete waste of time:

michaelianblack Admitting that it's not the best thing in the world, can't we all agree that eating people isn't THAT bad? Lileks With an electric razor, you can shave at your desk. You don't have to look at yourself in mirror. Great for guilty consciences! rainnwilson @UtahRichie I read all replies except from guys from Utah. Sorry.

So it seems to work particularly well for guys with a wry wit. I like seeing New York Times obituaries, Buddhist sayings, sales on Amazon mp3s, what's going on in NYC, cryptically short recipes, and all-caps micro-wisdom. I follow a few Twittering bloggers: Penelope Trunk, Will Wilkinson, Matthew Yglesias. I also don't mind getting random promotional info, and even the occasional genuine thought, from such luminaries as Peter Singer, Al Gore, Nicholas Kristof, Regina Spektor, Imogen Heap, and Richard Florida. So that's all kinda cool, I guess. But it's still not as useful as Facebook. One other thing. Sooner or later everyone's going to get tired of the 140-character limit. I already am. I understand the benefit of forcing everyone to be concise. And it's kind of fun watching the number of remaining characters count down, which makes it "breezy and game-like." But they could keep all of that and make the limit, say, 300 characters. Cap it at a length that will let people write a couple decent sentences. Right now, it's hard to write even one sentence.

What I do and don't understand about Twitter

For a while, I didn't see the point of Twitter at all:

It seems like basically a blog service but with a word limit that's so restrictive that it's awkward to do links.

Or like IM without the spontaneity.

Or like Facebook's status updates without Facebook.

So, it's like a severely limited version of a bunch of other social media, with nothing extra to compensate? What's the point?

Since I wrote that, I've slowly started to see the point. It's sort of like IM but better: everyone's content gets merged together, so you can experience it as an ongoing stream rather than a discrete, private conversation. OK, that's nice.

But that's leaving something out: who is engaging in those conversations? Ideally, you'd be connected with huge numbers of friends on Twitter. Well, I know very few people who regularly use Twitter. Meanwhile, I'm on Facebook and have about 250 friends, which is not an unusually high number for Facebook. I'd be surprised if even 50 of them are on Twitter.

Why does that matter? Because Facebook already has a feature that's much like Twitter: you can write a "status" message at the top of your profile that will also temporarily show up on your friends' Facebook homepage. I think the Facebook status even has a more generous space limit than Twitter.

So here's the problem: let's assume I want to let people know what I'm doing -- say, making carrot-ginger soup (real example). Why would I post this to Twitter instead of Facebook? Even on the liberal assumption that 50 of my friends are on Twitter, that's just a tiny fraction of 250. So I can do the same thing on either site, but a lot more people will see it if I use Facebook.

A Slate article from yesterday gave an elaborate explanation of why Twitter isn't going to "kill Facebook." According to the article, Twitter has an edge because it gives users real-time content, right when it's posted, while Facebook manipulates the timing of its content. (The article then dismisses its own point by noting that Facebook is apparently going to overhaul the interface to be more like Twitter.) That may be good fodder for a Slate writer who needs to make a clever point in an article, but is that what's really going to determine whether Twitter "kills" Facebook (or Facebook "kills" Twitter)? I have to think most people choosing between the sites are going to care about the same thing I care about: how many people I'd want to be in contact with are using these sites?

Aside from all that, I have been warming up to Twitter. I see it as an alternative to Facebook for older people. Twitter might not make sense as an alternative to Facebook if you're in your 20s, but if you're over 40 or so, it allows you to partake in the joys of social media without having to figure out: "What's this Facebook thing all about?"

So I'll keep my account around, simply to stay in touch with interesting people who happen to be middle-aged. But it still seems pathetic next to Facebook.

Maybe that's why the mainstream media are so obsessed with Twitter. They're informed enough to know that social-networking websites are a big enough craze to be worth reporting on. And it's clear what the most important such site is right now: Facebook. But either they don't get Facebook or it's too complicated to try to explain how it works in the limited space of media soundbites.* Twitter, by contrast, is entirely based on simplicity and brevity, so it's easy to convey it to a mass audience and seem like you're tuned into what the kids are up to these days.

* Of course, if that's the reason, then you have to wonder: if the mainstream media aren't adept at explaining something as trivial as Facebook, can we trust them to report on complicated issues that are actually serious?

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