Select Page
It’s Not Always the End of the World

It’s Not Always the End of the World

by | May 23, 2019 | Politics | 0 comments

Political prudence isn’t in vogue, but it should be.

Via NYTimes, By Greg Weiner

A quarter-century later, as Lincoln prepared a bold stroke that helped define his own legacy — the Emancipation Proclamation — his annual message to Congress spoke of historical circumstances more grandly: “We shall nobly save, or meanly lose, the last best hope of earth.”

Those poles of Lincoln’s politics — modesty in ordinary times and boldness when required — illustrate the essence of prudence. The gateway to prudence is accurately gauging the character of one’s moment in history. That should be a topic of debate in 2020. Both sides can agree that Mr. Trump is a political anomaly; the question that can distinguish Democrats and Republicans is whether the nation’s situation requires anomalous measures. To justify his leadership style, Mr. Trump’s partisans must establish that his actions are prudent because a pivotal period in history demands them. The sharpest contrast to that view would be a call for normalcy fitted to normal times.

Yet for all the polarization in our politics, Mr. Trump and many of his Democratic challengers agree on the core claim that we live in the throes of a historical crisis. They concur that economic dislocation has ravaged the middle class: many of them might have uttered Mr. Trump’s inaugural proclamation of “American carnage.” All speak of constitutional crises — Mr. Trump of the excesses of the administrative state, Democrats of his violations of longstanding norms.

But the erosion of the middle class is not an acute ailment: It is a gradual, nearly half-century phenomenon that is susceptible only to gradual solutions as well. As for the supposed collapse of American government promulgated by the bureaucracy, the truth is much less dramatic: The administrative state is the product of an eight-decade consensus dating to the New Deal, not an emergent calamity. It can be unwound, but 80 years of practice will not yield to sudden solutions.

The quadrennial inflation of political problems to catastrophic status is a form of historical narcissism, according to which the era in which we live is always grave, earth-shattering, consequential. This raises Lincoln’s question: Who benefits from the claim that these are end times for the republic? The answer is messianic politicians, especially presidents, to whom we give additional power to rescue us. It is therefore no surprise that those who seek the office tend to speak in grandiose terms.

Barack Obama, accepting the Democratic nomination in 2008, proclaimed “one of those defining moments” requiring “a new politics for a new time.” Four years later, Mitt Romney said the 2012 election would “shape great things, historic things, and those things will determine the most intimate and important aspects of every American life and every American family.”

In 2016, Mr. Trump’s supporters said his outsized style was necessary to “drain the swamp” and reorder American politics. On the substance, there has been less reordering or disaster than either his defenders or critics are willing to concede. Wage growth at the bottom half of the economy is climbing, as it has been since roughly Mr. Obama’s second term. The number of troops deployed overseas, an index of conflict, has been declining since 2010.

Voters might reasonably credit Mr. Trump with accelerating those trends, just as they might reasonably dislike his approaches to doing so. But the inflated, world-historical narrative that surrounds both his adversaries and him obscures what might be clarifying differences in the 2020 campaign. If the contest is about who can most shrilly characterize the nation’s condition as opposed to whose politics are best suited to the actual needs of the moment, the candidates will be difficult to distinguish. The sole question will be which extravagant leader we need.

Because it can draw sharp distinctions between candidates, prudence can be a political asset. Yet American politics has comprehensively rejected prudence. Historical rankings of presidents routinely lionize leaders who presided over emergencies, a dynamic that, as Lincoln predicted in 1838, generates a constant demand for and corresponding supply of emergencies. These rankings inevitably consign to oblivion presidents who simply governed according to the circumstances of their times.

Similarly, cable news stations attract more viewers with the breathless chyron “breaking news” than they would with one reading “keep this in perspective.” For their part, voters have an endless appetite for transformative change that leaders, obsessed with their legacies, are eager to sate. The White House hopeful who promises simply to govern is doomed. Instead, the formula for presidential success is change divided by time: The president who alters the nation’s politics the most in the shortest period ranks the highest.

Prudence would question whether a given moment requires transformation or mere governance — whether we are actually hurtling toward the abyss or whether these are more commonplace times. As that inquiry, and Lincoln’s career, demonstrate, prudence does not demand Pollyannas. In genuine emergencies, boldness is prudent. But most political problems, including serious ones, fall short of tragic dimensions. In these situations, prudence counsels moderation.

Before claiming instead that every election revolves around a crisis, political leaders should embrace what Edmund Burke called “a moral rather than a complexional timidity.” Voters ought to share Lincoln’s skepticism of the rhetoric of catastrophe. That would be a prudent response to our grandiose politics and the grandiose politicians who peddle it.

Taming the Apex Predators of Tech

Taming the Apex Predators of Tech

by | May 23, 2019 | Business & Finance, Technology/Internet | 0 comments

To rein in monopolies, maybe we need to rethink what a monopoly is.

Via NYTimes, By Kara Swisher

 

In a tech galaxy that now seems far, far away, everyone was terrified of Bill Gates. He was the Apex Predator of Tech.

You wanted to make software? Microsoft would crush you. You wanted to start an online service? Microsoft would decimate you. You wanted to make a browser to navigate the World Wide Web? Chomp!

It was that last one that finally stopped Mr. Gates and Microsoft. The government accused the company of being a monopoly and of engaging in anticompetitive practices against Netscape and its Navigator browser. In 2001 the government won a landmark case against the company that required it to submit to more oversight and make it easier for other companies to offer competing software.

The Sherman Antitrust Act had prevailed over the leading power in tech, and what happened after was a resurgence of innovation that ushered in a spate of new companies and ideas. You can draw a pretty straight line from that decision to the growth of Google and Amazon and Apple, the explosion of Facebook and the introduction of start-ups like Uber, Airbnb, Pinterest and Slack.

In recent years tech has backtracked, except this time we have several Apex Predators instead of just one. Google and Facebook are the most obvious. More and more people in the media and in politics, as well as consumers, have become fearful of these companies for the damage they can do and the unregulated power they wield.

Something has to be done, but what? Even as distrust of big tech companies increases and governments move to control them, their businesses have never been more successful.

One option is privacy legislation. Europe passed such a law in 2016. While there is no national privacy law in the United States, California will soon have a state-level law, and other states are considering similar reforms. The idea of restricting tech companies’ use of personal data becomes more popular with every hack and every instance of abuse. Still, the likelihood of the United States passing a national privacy law with teeth is small.

Then there are the fines, such as a multibillion-dollar one that the Federal Trade CommissionClose X is considering to punish Facebook for privacy violations. While the fine would be the largest the agency has ever levied, it would also be far too small to make a difference. When Facebook announced it might have to hand over $5 billion as its get-out-of-jail-free card, Wall Street cheered and Facebook stock rose.

Meanwhile, there’s a lot of talk about the ways that countries can work together to improve the online ecosystem. Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern of New Zealand met with President Emmanuel Macron of France last week, for example, about creating an intergovernmental effort to end online extremism. While laudable in theory, very little of this hand-wringing is likely to result in any rules with heft. In addition, the prospect of governments making rules around the restriction of speech is rife with ethical dilemmas.

Finally there’s the biggest gun: Using antitrust law to break up big tech companies. Calls for antitrust action have become increasingly loud, most notably in a recent essay in this paper by the Facebook co-founder Chris Hughes. His statement that the company should be broken up attracted a lot of attention, especially after he called the power held by Mark Zuckerberg, his former college roommate, “un-American.” That had to hurt, even if the blow is likely to be glancing, since antitrust cases are slow-moving and hard to pull off.

And yet the idea of using antitrust to rein in these companies got a significant boost recently with the Supreme Court’s decision to allow a lawsuit from consumers aimed at how Apple runs its App Store to proceed in a lower court.

Breaking with the more conservative wing of the court in a 5-4 decision, Justice Brett Kavanaugh wrote in the majority opinion that Apple’s arguments that it wasn’t subject to a lawsuit over its app prices “disregard statutory text and precedent, create an unprincipled and economically senseless distinction among monopolistic retailers and furnish monopolistic retailers with a how-to guide for evasion of the antitrust laws.”

Apple has and will continue to argue that it is not a monopoly in either hardware and software — which is true. But the case, though narrow, is still a flashing neon sign of change. It centers on rethinking the idea of what a monopoly is with an eye to the power of the network effect. Even if a company doesn’t completely dominate its sector, if its platform can exercise what amounts to an iron-fisted control over consumers, perhaps it should be considered a monopoly after all.

Google and Facebook are good examples, because they hold sway in all kinds of ways that make it hard for other companies to compete and for consumers to escape. Google’s share of the search market allows it to dominate mapping, recommendations, email, video, documents and more, while Facebook rules the social media world through its main app along with Instagram and WhatsApp.

None of this is good for consumers, except perhaps by the measure of convenience, because the choices they have are limited and never likely to challenge the status quo. In other words, these companies are Apex Predators, too. You don’t have to be as powerful as Bill Gates once was to be just as harmful.

The question now is: How do we get consumers on top of the food chain for once?

Kara Swisher, editor at large for the technology news website Recode and producer of the “Recode Decode” podcast and Code Conference, is a contributing Opinion writer.

Highly Potent Weed Has Swept The Market, Raising Concerns About Health Risks

by | May 16, 2019 | Health & Medicine | 0 comments

Heard on All Things Considered

Via NPR, By Rhitu Chatterjee

Studies have shown that the levels of THC, the main psychoactive compound in pot, have risen dramatically in the U.S. from 1995 to 2017.

As more states legalize marijuana, more people in the U.S. are buying and using weed — and the kind of weed they can buy has become much stronger.

That concerns scientists who study marijuana and its effects on the body, as well as emergency room doctors who say they’re starting to see more patients who come into the ER with weed-associated issues.

Some 26 million Americans ages 12 and older reported being current marijuana users in 2017, according to the National Survey on Drug Use and Health. It’s not clear how many users have had serious health issues from strong weed, and there’s a lot that’s still unknown about the potential risks. But scientists are starting to learn more about some of them.

The potency of weed depends on the amount of delta-9-tetrahydrocannabinol, or THC, the main compound responsible for the drug’s psychoactive effects. One study of pot products seized by the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration found the potency increased from about 4% THC in 1995 to about 12% in 2014. By 2017, another study showed, the potency of illicit drug samples had gone up to 17.1% THC.

“That’s an increase of more than 300% from 1995 to about 2017,” says Staci Gruber, director of the Marijuana Investigations for Neuroscientific Discovery (MIND) program at the Harvard-affiliated McLean Hospital in Belmont, Mass. “I would say that’s a considerable increase.”

And some products with concentrated forms of cannabis, like hash and hash oil, can have as much as 80% to 90% THC, she adds.

“I think most people are aware of the phenomenon that ‘this is not your grand daddy’s weed,’ Gruber says. “I hear this all the time.”

Daily Marijuana Use And Highly Potent Weed Linked To Psychosis

Daily Marijuana Use And Highly Potent Weed Linked To Psychosis

But people might not be aware of the potential health risks of highly potent weed. “The negative effects of cannabis have primarily been isolated and localized to THC,” says Gruber. “So it stands to reason that higher levels of THC may in fact confer a greater risk for negative outcome.”

“In general, people think, ‘Oh, I don’t have to worry about marijuana. It’s a safe drug,’ ” says Nora Volkow, director of the National Institute on Drug Abuse. “The notion that it is completely safe drug is incorrect when you start to address the consequences of this very high content of 9THC.”

Pot’s paradoxical effects

THC can have opposite effects on our bodies at high and low doses, Volkow says. Take anxiety levels, for example.

“When someone takes marijuana at a low [THC] content to relax and to stone out, actually, it decreases your anxiety,” she says. But high concentrations can cause panic attacks, and if someone consumes high-enough levels of THC, “you become full-blown psychotic and paranoid.”

Weed can have a similar paradoxical effect on the vascular system. Volkow says: “If you take low-content THC it will increase your blood flow, but high content [THC] can produce massive vasoconstriction, it decreases the flow through the vessels.”

And at low concentrations, THC can be used to treat nausea in cancer patients undergoing chemotherapy. But Volkow says that “patients that consume high content THC chronically came to the emergency department with a syndrome where they couldn’t stop vomiting and with intense abdominal pain.”

It’s a condition called cannabinoid hyperemesis syndrome.

“The typical patient uses [inhales] about 10 times per day … and they come in with really difficult to treat nausea and vomiting,” says Andrew Monte, an associate professor of emergency medicine and medical toxicology at the University of Colorado’s school of medicine. “Some people have died from this … syndrome, so that is concerning.”

Scientists don’t know exactly how high levels of THC can trigger the syndrome, but the only known treatment is stopping cannabis use.

While the number of people who’ve had the syndrome is small, Monte says he and his colleagues have documented a rise in the number of cases at emergency rooms in Colorado since marijuana was legalized there five years ago. A study by Monte and his team found that cyclical vomiting cases made up about 18% of inhaled cannabis-related cases at his ER.

They also found that statewide, the overall number of ER cases associated with cannabis use has gone up. And Monte says his ER has “seen an approximately a three-fold increase in emergency department visits just by frequency. It doesn’t mean we’re getting overwhelmed by these visits due to cannabis, it’s just that means that there are more patients overall.”

Most people show up at his emergency department because of “intoxication” from too much pot, either straight or mixed with other drugs, Monte says. The bulk of these cases are due to inhaled cannabis, though edibles are associated with more psychiatric visits.

“We’re seeing an increase in psychosis and hallucinations, as well as anxiety and even depression and suicidality,” Monte says.

He thinks the increased potency of marijuana plays a role in all these cases. “Whenever you have a higher dose of one of these types of drugs, the patient is at a higher risk of having an adverse drug event. If the concentration is so much higher … it’s much easier to overshoot the low-level high that they’re looking for.”

Not everyone is at equal risk, Monte adds. “Many many people use cannabis safely,” he says. “The vast majority don’t end up in our emergency department.”

Different risks for users

Some people are more vulnerable than others to the potential negative effects of high THC cannabis.

Adolescent and young adults who use recreationally are especially susceptible because their brains are still developing and are sensitive to drugs in general, says Gruber of the MIND program. In a recent review of existing studies, she found that marijuana use among adolescents affects cognition — especially memory and executive functions, which determine mental flexibility and ability to change our behavior.

Medical marijuana users can face unexpected and unwelcome effects from potent weed. “It’s very important for people to understand that they may not get the response they anticipated,” Gruber notes.

Studies done on the medical benefits of pot usually involve very low doses of THC, says Monte, who adds that those doses “are far lower than what people are getting in a dispensary right now.”

David Dooks, a 51-year-old based in the Boston area turned to marijuana after an ankle surgery last year. “I thought that medical marijuana might be a good alternative to opioids for pain management,” he says.

Based on the advice at a dispensary, David began using a variety of weed with 56.5% THC and says it only “exacerbated the nerve pain.” After experimenting with a few other strains, he says, what worked for him was one with low (0.9%) THC, which eased his nerve pain.

‘Start low, go slow’

Whether people are using recreationally or medically, patients should educate themselves as much as possible and be cautious while using, Monte says.

Avoiding higher THC products and using infrequently can also help reduce risk, Volkow adds. “Anyone who has had a bad experience, whether it’s psychological or biological, they should stay away from this drug,” she notes.

Ask for as much information as possible before buying. “You have to know what’s in your weed,” Gruber says. “Whether or not it’s conventional flower that you’re smoking or vaping, an edible or tincture, it’s very important to know what’s in it.”

And the old saying “start low, go slow,” is a good rule of thumb, she adds. “You can always add, but you can never take it away. Once it’s in, it’s in.”

The End Of Empathy

The End Of Empathy

by | May 16, 2019 | Politics, Psychology | 0 comments

Via NPR, By Hannah Rosin

Militia leader Ammon Bundy, famous for leading an armed standoff in Oregon, had a tender moment in November of last year. He recorded a Facebook post saying that perhaps President Trump’s characterization of the migrant caravan on the U.S.-Mexico border was somewhat broad. Maybe they weren’t all criminals, he said. “What about those who have come here for reasons of need?”

Bundy did not say he was breaking with Trump. He just asked his followers to put themselves in the shoes of “the fathers, the mothers, the children” who came to escape violence. It was a call for a truce grounded in empathy, the kind you might hear in a war zone, say, or an Easter Sunday sermon. Still, it was met with a swift and rageful response from his followers, so overwhelming that within days, Bundy decided to quit Facebook.

In an earlier era, Bundy’s appeal might have resonated. But he failed to tune in to a critical shift in American culture — one that a handful of researchers have been tracking, with some alarm, for the past decade or so. Americans these days seem to be losing their appetite for empathy, especially the walk-a-mile-in-someone’s-shoes Easter Sunday morning kind.

When I was growing up in the ’70s, empathy was all the rage. The term was coined in 1908; then, social scientists and psychologists started more aggressively pushing the concept into the culture after World War II, basically out of fear. The idea was that we were all going to kill each other with nuclear weapons — or learn to see the world through each other’s eyes. In my elementary school in the 1970s, which was not progressive or mushy in any way, we wrote letters to pretend Russian pen pals to teach us to open our hearts to our enemies.

And not just enemies. Civil rights activists had also picked up on the idea. Kenneth Clark, a social scientist and civil rights activist, half-jokingly proposed that people in power all be required to take an “empathy pill” so they could make better decisions. His hope was that people with power and privilege would one day inhabit the realities of people without power, not from the safe, noblesse oblige distance of pity, but from the inside. An evolved person was an empathetic person, choosing understanding over fear.

Then, more than a decade ago, a certain suspicion of empathy started to creep in, particularly among young people. One of the first people to notice was Sara Konrath, an associate professor and researcher at Indiana University. Since the late 1960s, researchers have surveyed young people on their levels of empathy, testing their agreement with statements such as: “It’s not really my problem if others are in trouble and need help” or “Before criticizing somebody I try to imagine how I would feel if I were in their place.”

Konrath collected decades of studies and noticed a very obvious pattern. Starting around 2000, the line starts to slide. More students say it’s not their problem to help people in trouble, not their job to see the world from someone else’s perspective. By 2009, on all the standard measures, Konrath found, young people on average measure 40 percent less empathetic than my own generation — 40 percent!

It’s strange to think of empathy – a natural human impulse — as fluctuating in this way, moving up and down like consumer confidence. But that’s what happened. Young people just started questioning what my elementary school teachers had taught me.

Their feeling was: Why should they put themselves in the shoes of someone who was not them, much less someone they thought was harmful? In fact, cutting someone off from empathy was the positive value, a way to make a stand.

So, for example, when the wife of white nationalist Richard Spencer recently told BuzzFeed he had abused her, the question debated on the lefty Internet was: Why should we care that some woman who chose to ally herself with a nasty racist got herself hurt? Why waste empathy on that? (Spencer, in a court filing, denies all her allegations.)

The new rule for empathy seems to be: reserve it, not for your “enemies,” but for the people you believe are hurt, or you have decided need it the most. Empathy, but just for your own team. And empathizing with the other team? That’s practically a taboo.

And it turns out that this brand of selective empathy is a powerful force.

In the past 20 years, psychologists and neurologists have started to look at how empathy actually works, in our brains and our hearts, when we’re not thinking about it. And one thing they’ve found is that “one of the strongest triggers for human empathy is observing some kind of conflict between two other parties,” says Fritz Breithaupt, a professor at Indiana University who studies empathy. “Once they take the side, they’re drawn into that perspective. And that can lead to very strong empathy and too strong polarization with something you only see this one side and not the other side any longer.”

A classic example is the Super Bowl, or any Auburn, Alabama game.

But these days in the news, examples come up every day: the Kavanaugh hearings, emergency funding for a wall, Spike Lee walking out of the Oscars, the Barr report, Kirstjen Nielsen, every third thing on Twitter.

Researchers who study empathy have noticed that it’s actually really hard to do what we were striving for in my generation: empathize with people who are different than you are, much less people you don’t like. But if researchers set up a conflict, people get into automatic empathy overdrive, with their own team. This new research has scrambled notions of how empathy works as a force in the world. For example, we often think of terrorists as shockingly blind to the suffering of innocents. But Breithaupt and other researchers think of them as classic examples of people afflicted with an “excess of empathy. They feel the suffering of their people.”

Breithaupt called his new book The Dark Sides of Empathy, because there’s a point at which empathy doesn’t even look like the kind of universal empathy I was taught in school. There is a natural way that empathy gets triggered in the brain — your pain centers light up when you see another person suffering. But out in the world it starts to look more like tribalism, a way to keep reinforcing your own point of view and blocking out any others.

Breithaupt is alarmed at the apparent new virus of selective empathy and how it’s deepening divisions. If we embrace it, he says, then “basically you give up on civil society at that point. You give up on democracy. Because if you feed into this division more and you let it happen, it will become so strong that it becomes dangerous.”

We can’t return to my generation’s era of empathy innocence, because we now know too much about how the force actually works. But we can’t give up on empathy either, because empathy is “90 percent what our life is all about,” Breithaupt says. “Without it, we would be just alone.”

In his book Breithaupt proposes an ingenious solution: give up on the idea that when we are “empathizing” we are being altruistic, or helping the less fortunate, or in any way doing good. What we can do when we do empathy, proposes Fritz, is help ourselves. We can learn to see the world through the eyes of a migrant child and a militia leader and a Russian pen pal purely so we can expand our own imaginations, and make our own minds richer. It’s selfish empathy. Not saintly, but better than being alone.

 

Article Link>