Andrew Sullivan's Blog, page 146

An Actual War On Women, Ctd

The victims of ISIS are often raped, as we’ve detailed. But Kerry Crawford, Amelia Hoover Green, and Sarah Parkinson take issue with much of the reporting on these rapes:

Press reports and punditry about sexual violence in Iraq and Syria continually employ the phrases “weapon of war” and “tool of terror.” Without a doubt, some wartime rape is a weapon of war: Some commanders use rape or the threat of rape strategically to punish enemy communities, induce compliance, or demoralize opponents. But the “weapon of war” narrative is disastrously incomplete.

Research suggests that rape has multiple causes, and is more closely associated with fighting forces’ internal practices (like forced recruitment, training practices, or the strength of the military hierarchy) than with strategic imperatives, ethnic hatred, or other “conventional wisdom” causes. In short, to assume that wartime rape is always “rape as a weapon of war” is to ignore the majority of cases.

Moreover, to the extent that wartime rape is a weapon of war, policymakers who invoke the “weapon of war” narrative may actually strengthen belligerents’ strategic positions. Commentary about the Islamic State’s sexual “brutality” ­– exemplified in a recent policy recommendation aimed at “shaming” the organization – risks reinforcing the Islamic State’s intimidating reputation (which is already well-known on the ground and in the refugee camps). Reputations and rumors matter in conflict; recent research in Lebanon has suggested that fear of rape has become an important reason for refugees to leave Syria. Playing into combatants’ rhetorical strategies could result in increased refugee flows, contribute to efforts to diminish women’s involvement in public life, or even increase the incidence of wartime rape.

Mental Health Break

Game Of Thrones meets the Wild West:

After watching it, David Haglund can’t help but imagine a “Tarantino-directed spinoff movie based on characters created by George R.R. Martin.”

Why What Almost Happened Matters

Reviewing Richard Evans’ Altered Pasts: Counterfactuals in History, Cass Sunstein argues that what-if scenarios aren’t, as E. P. Thompson put it, “unhistorical shit,” but rather an integral part of the historical enterprise:

Here is another way to make the point. Social scientists test hypotheses. They might hypothesize, for example, that if people have to pay a small tax for plastic bags at convenience stores, they will use fewer plastic bags. To test hypotheses, social scientists usually like to conduct randomized controlled trials, allowing them to isolate the effects of the tax. Such trials create parallel worlds and hence alternative histories—one with the tax and one without it.

Historians cannot conduct randomized controlled trials, because history is run only once. Yet they nonetheless develop hypotheses, and they attempt to evaluate them by reference to the evidence. Evans is himself engaged in this enterprise. There is no difference between hypothesis-testing and counterfactual inferences. Any claim of causation, resulting from such tests, requires a statement that without the cause, the effect would 
not have occurred.

Evans appreciates the entertainment 
value of the most imaginative counterfactual narratives, but he doesn’t want them to be taken seriously, or to be seen as what historians do. With Thompson and Oakeshott (and countless others), he thinks that historians should explain what did happen, not what didn’t happen. The problem is that, to offer an explanation of what happened, historians have to identify causes, and whenever they identify causes they immediately conjure up a counterfactual history, a parallel world. Sure, there is a lot of distance between science fiction novelists and the world’s great historians, but along an important dimension they are playing 
the same game.

A 19th Century Frenchman Explains the 21st Century Middle East, Ctd

A reader writes:

Regarding the uses of Tocqueville to explain why the Middle East isn’t ready for democracy:

If we really want to know what Tocqueville thought about Islam and the Middle East, just skip the flattering portrait he gives us in “Democracy in America” and read his enormous body of work on France’s 1830 colonization of Algeria — a colonization that didn’t come to an end until 1962. Surprise: Tocqueville the liberal was an early and vocal supporter of the invasion, conquest, and subjugation of Algeria. In fact, he was such a fan that he made two trips there himself to determine whether he and his brother ought to buy land and become settlers. He also read the Qur’an, considered taking Arabic lessons, and positioned himself in the Chamber of Deputies as an expert on the “Algeria Question”. The man was committed.

So what can Tocqueville tell us about how modern Middle Eastern politics got so messed up? Stop me when this starts sounding familiar.

He sets out with the best of intentions, to civilize the barbarous Arabs and introduce solid French virtues like liberty and fraternity. But that doesn’t last long. When the native population turns out to not appreciate France’s virtuous conquest, a full-scale counter-insurgency is launched. And when other politicians begin to question the French army’s tactics, Tocqueville pulls a full Cheney: “I have often heard men in France whom I respect, but with whom I do not agree, find it wrong that we burn harvests, that we empty silos, and finally that we seize unarmed men, women, and children. These, in my view, are unfortunate necessities, but ones to which any people that wants to wage war on the Arabs is obligated to submit.” (1846)

Likewise, some of his colleagues began to complain that French liberals were being hypocritical, demanding equality at home but promoting despotism abroad. In words that might as well have been spoken by Netanyahu, Tocqueville reminds us:

“There is neither utility in allowing, nor a duty to allow, our Muslim subjects exaggerated ideas of their own importance, nor to persuade them that we are obligated to treat them under all circumstances precisely as though they were our fellow citizens and our equals. They know that we have a dominant position in Africa; they expect us to keep it. To abandon it today would be to astonish and confuse them, and to fill them with erroneous or dangerous notions.” (1847)

And contra Mitchell’s argument about the roots of “Islamic fundamentalism”, Tocqueville never once believed that the problem in the Middle East was too much tribal or religious linkages. Rather, his claim was the exact opposite, that the roots of Algerian violence can be found in the destruction of native institutions, habits, and social connections — and, moreover, that this is entirely Europe’s fault. French rule, he writes, has made “Muslim society much more miserable, more disordered, more ignorant, and more barbarous than it had been before knowing us.” (1847) Such was his faith in the importance of empire for France, however, that even admitting this failure could not undermine his ultimate support for the Algerian conquest.

I could go on. Others have at length. My point is just that if we really want to get into the business of shaping our Middle Eastern policy according to the theories of a man dead more than a hundred and fifty years, we should be serious about looking at what he actually said and wrote on the topic. And when we do, we may find that we bear far more direct responsibility than Mitchell or you, Andrew, seem to allow.

How You Can Die From Ebola Without Getting It

Julia Belluz explains that Sierra Leone is “imposing mandatory lockdowns on its citizens.” She provides the above chart showing the extent of the devastation:

The districts where Ebola is believed to be moving fast — Port Loko, Bombali, Moyamba — are now isolated. People won’t be able to leave their homes or go to school or work. During these periods, government and public-health officials will go door to door, educating people about Ebola and trying to identify patients who should be brought to containment facilities. Officials in Sierra Leone are worried that many Ebola victims are either going underground or simply unable to access care. And the death toll continues to surge — with nearly 600 estimated Ebola deaths in Sierra Leone this year.

Adam Taylor sees “numerous signs that pregnant women in Liberia, Sierra Leone and Guinea could be dying due to Ebola without ever getting the disease”:

Maternity hospitals are fearful of taking women in due to the risk of catching Ebola from a sick patient. That fear is understandable. Hundreds of health-care workers have been infected with Ebola recently, and many were infected by the patients they treat.

Bruce Aylward, assistant director-general for polio and emergencies at the World Health Organization, said that at first, most health workers who died were people working in “poorly run Ebola treatment centers.” However, as the disease spread, it began to affect the broader health community. “Now, if you look at [health-care workers infected with Ebola], they’re somebody who is delivering a baby in a clinic that had nothing to do with Ebola,” Aylward explained. The shift has affected both local and foreign doctors: Rick Sacra, one of the American doctors who contracted Ebola, was treating pregnant women in Liberia when he became infected (he has since made a full recovery).

Worse still, the fear of Ebola infection at medical facilities cuts both ways. Many pregnant women who need treatment are too scared to head to a health center, fearing a visit to a medical facility will actually increase their chance of catching Ebola. In countries where maternal mortality rates are so high than almost one out of every hundred women die, such a lack of treatment can have a deadly impact.

We featured one of those women here.

Putin vs The Internet

Well, this is unnerving:

Russian President Vladimir Putin and members of the Russian security council are reportedly considering a plan that would give the Kremlin the ability to cut off the Russian Internet from the rest of the world’s connection in the event of a national emergency. The plan, which officials say is necessary to protect Russian cybersecurity, has raised fears about tighter Kremlin censorship, though questions remain as to whether a national “kill switch” is even possible.

Reports first surfaced Friday in the Russian business newspaper Vedomosti, with sources saying, “Russian Internet service providers will be required to install equipment that would make it possible to shut off Russia’s access to the global Internet, in the event of an emergency.” The broadly defined “emergency” reportedly includes “military actions” or “serious protest actions,” possibly of the kind that came in the wake of Putin’s return to the presidency in 2012. The security council will also discuss a plan that gives Russia control of the country code top level domains (ccTLDs), the websites ending in “.Ru,” “.рф,” and to a lesser extent “.Su.”

Ilya Khrennikov and Henry Meyer contextualize the move:

Russia last month banned anonymous access to the Internet in public spaces and expanded the regulation of media to the blogosphere, requiring those with at least 3,000 daily readers to register their real names and contact information. In February the authorities had passed a law allowing them to close webpages without a court decision if material is deemed “extremist.”

Russian opposition leader Alexey Navalny, who used to criticize Putin and reveal corruption among his inner circle, was the first victim of that law when his blog on LiveJournal.com was shut in March. Recent legislation requires Internet companies to store Russian users’ information on servers in the country, similar to Chinese regulations.

Emily Parker adds:

According to Freedom House, from January 2012 to February 2013, the number of websites flagged for containing extremist material and blocked by the Ministry of Justice increased by around 60 percent. In 2012, Russia enacted a law allowing for the blocking of certain websites without judicial oversight. The law supposedly protects children and controls other harmful content but has been widely viewed as an attempt to clamp down on free speech. According to one study, in the year that followed, more than 83,000 websites were put on an Internet blacklist, and the vast majority was blocked “without a valid reason.”

In other Putin punditry, Benjamin Bidder worries that Putin’s successor will be even worse:

The fear is that someone could seize control of the Kremlin who thinks and acts more radically than Putin. The president created the preconditions of such a possibility with his own failed policies. If the Kremlin insiders want to find a successor, they will have to recruit him from the immediate circle of the current president. But Putin has reinforced hard-liners and pushed out the liberals.

The revolution scenario is no less disheartening. Power could be seized by forces from the extreme right and left. The boundaries between both are vague in Russia, as the name of such groups as the “National Bolsheviks” suggests.

Motyl disagrees:

In the final analysis, Bidder’s assessment amounts to an unwitting justification of dictatorial rule, repeating the self-serving claim that all dictators make: après moi, le déluge. In fact, world experience and both Russian and Soviet history suggest that Russia is likely to experience a better future if and when Putin finally goes. Getting rid of him, as quickly as possible, is a bet worth making—both by Russia and the West.

How Did Caffeine Come To Be?

New research shows that “caffeine evolved twice in nature—once in coffee, and a second time, completely independently, in tea and cacao”:

The study was co-directed by Victor Albert, a genome scientist at the University of Buffalo, and it compared the genetic code of the robusta coffee plant with the genetic code of tea and cacao plants. The researchers found that robusta plants use one kind of enzyme—known as a “methyltransferase”—to produce caffeine, while tea and cacao plants use another. Two organisms using different genetic instructions to achieve the same end is an example of convergent evolution, and the odds of it happening are long.

Why would caffeine evolve at all, never mind evolve twice? Evolutionary biologists theorize it could be protective; when caffeine-laced leaves drop to the ground, they contaminate the soil and prevent other plants from sprouting in the vicinity. Another explanation is one that might feel quite familiar to many of us, Albert explained to Nature: “caffeine habituates pollinators and makes them want to come back for more.”

The Best Of The Dish Today

My friend Damon Linker didn’t take so well to Zeke Emanuel’s piece on why he hopes to die at the age of 75. Money quote from Damon:

Reading Emanuel’s essay, I began to despair — not just about the moral outlook it expresses, but about whether its readers will even recognize how monstrous it is. Emanuel has taken the ethic of meritocratic striving that currently dominates elite culture in the United States and transformed it into a comprehensive vision of the human good. Viewed in its light, the only life worth living is one in which you endlessly, relentlessly strive to look as smart and clever as possible in the eyes of other smart and clever people. The ultimate goal of such a life is to be considered the smartest and cleverest person of all. Once old age or any other misfortune gets in the way of continually striving for that goal, one might as well cease to exist.

I think that’s an over-reaction. One does not need to embrace the cult of “achievement” or “success” to find old age, especially really old age, to be increasingly burdensome, and therefore not worth extending indefinitely at the cost of everything else. I suppose you could come away from Emanuel’s piece thinking that it values human productivity as the sole human good and thereby tacitly endorses a “eugenic” point of view. But that’s not what I took from it.

Here’s what I took from it. Life is not a sprint; it’s a marathon for most of us. And it has a very different pace at the end than at the beginning. Accepting this slower pace does not mean we should end the race before it’s over; it merely means that toward the end, the kind of things we might have done to our bodies to keep them fully poised for the future should not be our top priority. I’ve long joked that if things get really bad for me in my 70s, I’ll just stop taking my AIDS meds. But it isn’t entirely a joke. A graceful acceptance of one’s ultimate term limit can be a source of joy and peace and freedom, as opposed to the desperate life-extending mentality that leaves so many of us to die in intensive care. It is a more natural and less hubristic way to live. And to die. I have a feeling Montaigne would approve.

Today, we witnessed the launch of yet another bombing campaign against yet another country in yet another war authorized neither by Congress nor the UN. We observed the power and endurance of golf in China; the self-pity of most minorities and especially white evangelicals; Tocqueville’s insights into the current Middle East religious wars; and Nicolas Sarkozy’s chutzpah when it comes to saving marriage from the gays. Plus: results from one of the toughest window view contests ever. One contestant writes:

It’s obvious I can never win the VFYW contest. I mean, this week I identified Iqaluit, of all places. I found the right apartment building. I found the right apartment. I even found the right window. But I didn’t find the right part of the window! Good grief, as Charlie Brown would say. It feels like Lucy has whisked the football away again.

In other news, I finally broke down, got over my cheap ways, and bought a subscription.

Join him and about 20 others today here, for as little as $1.99 a month. The top two posts today were Does The GOP Really Give A Shit About The Debt? and Can The Church Survive in America? Many of the other posts were updated with your emails – read them all here. You can always leave your unfiltered comments at our Facebook page and @sullydish. Gift subscriptions available here. Dish t-shirts and polos are still for sale here.

See you in the morning.

(Photo: A red deer is seen through the morning mist in Richmond Park on September 23, 2014 in London, England. Tuesday marks the autumn equinox where day and night are of equal lengths. By Rob Stothard/Getty Images.)

Remembrances Of Things Freud

On the one hand, my @upguild Freudian Slippers lost a nose. On the other hand, I gained a Tribble… pic.twitter.com/HKCUIx9TuC

— Ethicist For Hire (@ethicistforhire) December 9, 2013

Michael S. Roth defends the Austrian’s relevance 75 years after his death:

Freud recognized that we are animals that respond to our biology through memory and story-telling. Psychoanalysis became a vehicle for telling those histories in ways that acknowledged our conflicting desires. Psychoanalysis isn’t a methodology to discover one’s true history; it is a collaboration that allows one to refashion a past with which one can live. The need to do so, and the impossibility of ever doing so definitively, has ensured the continued presence of Freud in our culture.

Seventy-five years after Freud’s death, we might well ask how we live with the intensity of these stories; how do we manage their meanings? Well, we now have culturally approved pharmaceuticals. The intensity and ambivalence of our desires have given rise to massive attempts to control them, and those controls have sometimes fueled these very desires. We may find that our medications create the desire for the feeling of intensity that they were supposed to protect us from.

Jon Kelly points out that “the gap between the pub Freud and what Freud actually wrote is often quite large”:

Although much of his body of thought – not least around “infantile sexuality” – was seen as dangerously radical during his lifetime, the more challenging aspects of his work were rarely dwelt on by the mass media. “From a historical perspective, he’s part of a general movement where people start to look more into themselves,” says Marianski. “There was a broad cultural shift in our culture – how you conceptualise the self?”

But there is much in Freud’s writing that makes the continued prominence of his terms appear incongruous. In particular, his theories of repression belong very much to a pre-sexual revolution world. “Now that young people seem to be at liberty to do whatever they want and talk about whatever they want, it’s very interesting that Freud would still be very interesting to them,” says James.

Better Reasons To Drop Bombs In Syria

Douthat identifies a few:

To the extent that these strikes have a limited military objective that either connects directly to the Iraqi front (by denying the Islamic State a secure rear) or targets groups plotting more actively against the United States, they trouble me much less than a more open-ended strategy in which we seek to conjure up a reliable ally (“you know, whatever the Free Syrian Army ever was,” to quote a U.S. official in Filkins’ piece) to be our well-armed boots on the Syrian ground.

Or put another way:

The idea that we can somehow hope to defeat ISIS outright in Syria, where we currently have no real allies capable of winning a war or securing a peace, without first seeing the Islamic State pushed back or defeated in Iraq — itself probably a long-term project — seems like the height of folly, and a royal road to another quagmire or bloody counterinsurgency campaign. But the possibility that strikes in Syria might modestly help our existing allies in Iraq seems at least somewhat more plausible, with a more limited worst-case scenario than a full-scale Syrian intervention if they don’t ultimately do much good.

But Larison fears that our limited involvement won’t stay limited:

Every step along the way, the administration has set down restrictions on what it would be willing to do, and it then cast those restrictions aside within days or weeks of imposing them. The administration is currently saying that there won’t be American forces on the ground engaged in combat, but as we should know by now every statement like this is entirely provisional and can be revoked at any time. Furthermore, because the administration persists in the lie that the 2001 AUMF covers this military action, it is very doubtful that the president will seek Congressional authorization for this war even if the war involves U.S. ground forces. I very much hope that Obama doesn’t yield yet again to the pressures in favor of escalation, but there is no reason to think that he will be able to resist them indefinitely.