Andrew Sullivan's Blog, page 151

Face Of The Day

A Kashmiri flood victim sits at a bonfire outside a tent in Srinagar on September 17, 2014. Army and other emergency officials have battled to rescue tens of thousands of people stranded by the floods, triggered by heavy monsoon rains, that hit the northern Himalayan region and neighbouring Pakistan. By Tauseef Mustafa/AFP/Getty Images.

Did Snowden Tip Off Al-Qaeda’s Cryptographers? Ctd

Contradicting a report issued last month by the intelligence firm Recorded Future (and subsequently dismissed as state-sponsored agitprop by Greenwald), Murtaza Hussain highlights a new report from Flashpoint Global Partners that concludes that Snowden’s leaks about NSA surveillance were not to blame for improvements in jihadist groups’ cyber security:

The report itself goes on to make the point that, “Well prior to Edward Snowden, online jihadists were already aware that law enforcement and intelligence agencies were attempting to monitor them.” This point would seem obvious in light of the fact that terrorist groups have been employing tactics to evade digital surveillance for years. Indeed, such concerns about their use of sophisticated encryption technology predate even 9/11. Contrary to claims that such groups have fundamentally altered their practices due to information gleaned from these revelations, the report concludes. “The underlying public encryption methods employed by online jihadists do not appear to have significantly changed since the emergence of Edward Snowden.”

These findings are notable both for empirical rigor through which they ascertained, as well as their contradiction of apparently baseless statements made by high-ranking U.S. officials regarding the impact of the leaks on U.S. national security. This is particularly important as it pertains to the ongoing public debate over the alleged threat of ISIS.

In Joseph Cox’s reading, the report actually questions whether al Qaeda’s counter-surveillance methods have improved dramatically in the first place:

The history of Islamic terrorists using encryption far predates Snowden, and even Wikileaks. An early milestone was an article in Al-Qaida in the Arabian Peninsula’s (AQAP) English language magazine Inspire in October 2010, which exhorted readers to use encryption. The programme suggested then was Asrar al-Mujahideen, originally launched back in 2007. It runs in a similar vein to popular open source encryption Pretty Good Privacy (PGP), utilising public and private keys to securely send files and messages. A 2.0 version was available in 2008, and after this other programmes came out for popular chat programmes, then Android and Symbian mobile devices.

From Asrar al-Mijahideen in 2007 to developments today, Flashpoint’s findings suggest jihadists haven’t made any major changes to their use of encryption: they’re just taking established models and applying them to different areas, such as instant messaging services or mobile phones.

Passions Running High In Scotland

Window in Aberdeen…. 'We don't talk much anymore' #bbcindyref #indyref pic.twitter.com/qglszjIfud

— Bradendavy (@BradenDavy) September 17, 2014

So what else is new? But Brenda Kutchinsky, a Scottish No voter, argues that the independence referendum has unleashed a “collective madness”:

I am as passionately Scottish as anyone who is planning to vote Yes, but I am being made to feel as if I don’t deserve to belong in my own country. … One of the region’s wealthiest businessmen, Charles Ritchie, has dared to speak out against both independence and the alleged bullying behavior of the Yes campaign. In the past two months, his company has reportedly received two hoax bombs in the post and one live bullet in a box of matches. I have heard that the police are now investigating this terrible matter. Two weeks ago, I summoned up my courage and put a No Thanks poster in my window, against the advice of friends who said it would open me up to abuse and possibly even a brick through my window. How ridiculous that I should be worried about the consequences of expressing my opinion to people among whom I have lived happily for 15 years, but this is the climate of fear in which I am currently residing.

But Leonid Bershidsky emphasizes that in a global context, “both the secession and anti-secession campaigns have been courteous, nonviolent and affable”:

“Within the set of civil wars, secessionist wars are not only the most common, but are additionally among the longest and bloodiest types of warfare,” Bridget Coggins, now at the University of California at Santa Barbara, wrote in her 2006 doctoral thesis, based on a database of the secession attempts from 1931 to 2002. Of these 275 attempts, 195 were characterized by violence on at least one of the sides.

Although that suggests rather a lot of peaceful disengagements, many derive from Britain’s relatively nonviolent dismantling of its empire after World War II — a policy orchestrated, at least partly, by Prime Minister Harold Macmillan, who was of Scottish descent. Ask Chechens, East Timoreans, Sudanese, Kosovars, Eritreans – or the leaders of the countries from which they fought to split – about playing by the rules; the word “massacre” figures prominently in the histories of these independence bids. … Comparing Scotland with Chechnya or Crimea may seem far-fetched, but Northern Ireland during the so-called Troubles was a hot spot on a similar scale, and its own secession referendum in 1973 was boycotted by the Catholic population. Passions in Scotland, by contrast, run no higher than they would during a local soccer match.

Bershidsky sees the relatively calm campaigns as evidence of the status quo’s soundness, asking “What would a division solve that negotiations within the current scheme of things can’t?” Tom Rogan argues that it’s in the Scots’ economic interest to vote No:

Consider a few statistics. Scottish exports account for only 6.3 percent of the U.K. total, whereas England accounts for 74.1 percent. While Scotland has a slightly higher total employment figure than England does, it has a bloated public sector (22.1 percent of total employment vs. 17.4 percent in England). The Scottish work force is also less productive than its English counterpart. Most disconcerting: Measured per 10,000 adults in the U.K., Scotland has fewer businesses than Northern Ireland and Wales, and a staggering 21 percent fewer than England. The business community has been clear about its view of the referendum. Even the Royal Bank of Scotland has threatened to leave Scotland if independence occurs. In short, the Scottish independence movement has subjugated itself to voodoo economics.

But the prospect of independence sends Suzanne Moore into paroxysms of enthusiasm:

Surely if this “political reformation”, as John Harris described it, happened anywhere else, we would be calling it a velvet revolution and marveling at democracy in action. It may well be fierce, shouty and messy, but these are undeniably voices from below and we should listen. The SNP, once conservative and narrow-mindedly nationalist, has turned itself into something that can harness progressive forces. … All this fretting about neighbors becoming foreigners is a denial about who we already are. Rather than post-national identities, post-sovereignty is the aim. Open borders, mobility and federalism could have been offered through devo max – but they weren’t, so now we have the entire establishment yelling “no, no, no.” So I say yes. Take a leap towards self-rule. One can be on the side of change or against it. The thing is, change is here now, whatever happens. Finally, thankfully, yes.

More Dish on tomorrow’s vote here.

The Senate Is A Coin Flip, Ctd

Aaron Blake ran simulations with the WaPo’s election model. The result:

The battle for control of the Senate is a pure toss-up. Not just like a this-is-very-close toss-up, but like a 50-50-odds toss-up. Our team ran 10,000 simulations using our most recent ratings of the 36 seats up for grabs on Nov. 4. It showed Republicans with a 50.03 percent chance of winning the Senate and Democrats with a 49.97 percent chance of holding the Senate. Again: pure toss-up.

Ben Highton asks, “What explains this over-performance by Democrats, or under-performance by Republicans?”

One possibility is that the “midterm penalty” — the loss in vote share suffered by the president’s party in the midterm — is shaping up to be smaller than in the past. That penalty is estimated by comparing midterm and presidential election years from 1980-2012. For 2014, we have applied the average penalty, taking into account uncertainty due to variation in past midterm penalties along with the uncertainty that arises simply because 2014 is a new election year. But it is plausible that the size of the midterm penalty in 2014 may end up being smaller than in the past. This could be the consequence of voter discontent with the Republican Party, as Nate Cohn has noted.

Another possibility is that there are idiosyncratic features of individual races that the background fundamentals cannot easily capture, and which favor Democrats in certain races. For example, maybe some candidates in the key races are just better or worse in ways that we cannot easily measure — but that the polls are capturing.

Harry Enten presumes that the Democrats’ advertising advantage has played a role:

Democratic Senate candidates and the outside groups supporting them have enjoyed advertising edges in almost all the competitive Senate contests over the past few weeks. Three of their larger advertising leads have been in Colorado, Michigan and North Carolina — the three states where we’ve seen the biggest movements toward Democratic candidates in the FiveThirtyEight forecasts. New Hampshire, one of the few competitive states to move toward the GOP over the last week, is also one of the few states where Republicans have had an advertising advantage. …

The question is whether Republicans and their affiliated groups can catch up. If they can, then we may see a reversion to the mean, and the Republicans’ more robust position might be restored. If Democrats maintain their lead on the air — and if that edge is what’s driving the Democratic run over the past few days — then they might able to overcome a bad national environment.

Andrew Prokop provides more details on the Democrats’ advertising edge:

Some of this advantage is because more Democratic incumbents are at risk, and incumbents usually have an easier time raising money than challengers. But Democrats are getting substantial support from Super PACs and dark money groups as well — the Washington Post’s Matea Gold describes how close allies of Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid are coordinating a major outside spending effort. The top disclosed donors to these pro-Democratic groups include wealthy financiers Tom Steyer and James Simons, as well as media mogul Fred Eychaner and former New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg, and several unions, according to BOpenSecrets.

Recent Dish on the Senate races here.

Busted With An Eggcorn, Ctd

A flood of emails came in following my bleg for examples of eggcorns. The most commonly cited one:

An eggcorn I am guilty of is “for all intents and purposes”. I guess I thought it was an extreme statement, therefore I was guilty of stating the phrase as for all INTENSIVE purposes.

Another:

A former employer always said “let’s nip this in the butt” instead of bud, and I always had to stifle a laugh picturing what it would accomplish.

Another:

My favorite example dates back to the early ’90s, when an abstract for a presentation at a computer conference talked about the need to “integrate desperate mail systems”. Why yes, I’ve seen quite a few of those.

That’s actually a malapropism, which many readers are confusing for an eggcorn. Wikipedia helps with the distinction:

The unintentionally incorrect use of similar-sounding words or phrases in speaking is a malapropism. If there is a connection in meaning, it can be called an eggcorn.

But we can’t pass up this malapropism:

My all-time favorite, culled from the annals of Freshman Literature classes everywhere, is Honoré de Ballsac.

Back to the eggcorns:

As a person who sends and receives thousands of so-called professional emails, I can’t tell you how many times I’ve seen a point described as “mute” instead of “moot”.

Another:

For some reason my marketing colleagues are all about “flushing out” concepts these days, rather than fleshing them out. Granted, most of them would be better off flushed …

Another:

People routinely say “breech the subject” when (I’m 98% sure) they mean broach.

And another:

Not too embarrassing, but I long thought that in the Pledge of Allegiance, we were describing the attributes of the Almighty when we said, “one nation, under God, invisible, with liberty and justice for all.”

On that note:

One of my younger brothers when we were little thought the opening verse of the patriotic hymn America the Beautiful went like this: “O, Beautiful for spaceship guys … ”

Another reader:

When I was a kid, my father had an employee in his business who was somewhat developmentally challenged. He used tons of eggcorns, but my favorite was that he called varicose veins “very close veins” – a pretty good description.

One more for now:

Stevie Nicks’ song “Edge of Seventeen” is an eggcorn. Someone told Stevie they had been doing whatever it was they were doing since the age of seventeen. Stevie heard “edge of seventeen” and decided to use that as the title of one of her hit songs.

Many more to come …

Spare The Rod.

Responding to the Adrian Peterson scandal, Harry Enten provides the above chart:

There is a large gap when it comes to religion. The subsample on religion has been included in the GSS only occasionally, yet there is a clear divergence. Born-again Christians are, on average, 15 percentage points more likely than the rest of the population to agree that spanking is an acceptable form of punishment.

Amanda Marcotte expands on the religious angle:

Christian conservatives defend the practice of spanking children, even with weapons, by saying that parents are not supposed to do so in anger.

“You want to be calm, in control, and focused,” writes Chip Ingram of Focus on the Family and that a parent who embraces corporal punishment “is not an angry, insensitive person with a big club and a vicious agenda.” This echoes a common refrain from parents to justify spanking, that they don’t do it in anger and they reserve it for serious infractions that require a lot of time and processing so the child doesn’t do it again.

Unfortunately, parents are overestimating their own abilities to keep it in check. Researchers at Southern Methodist University strapped audio recorders onto the arms of 33 mothers to see if and when they used spanking, and found that instead of retreating to a quiet space to calmly administer a spanking, mothers who spank are just hitting in anger and frustration. Kids got spanked for finger-sucking, messing with pages of a book, or getting out of a chair when they weren’t supposed to. Parents who spank say they do so around 18 times a year, but the SMU researchers found it was closer to 18 times a week.

The Best Of The Dish Today

Check out this review of the Boies-Olson book. It’s by David France, who made the best documentary about the AIDS years, the Oscar-winning How To Survive A Plague. And, yes, I’m persistent.

Speaking of documentaries, “Do I Sound Gay?” was the runner-up in the People’s Choice award at the Toronto Film Festival. Since Dishheads contributed to the Kickstarter, and the whole debate opened up a great thread, I thought I’d let you know.

Oh, and I finally found out what Grover was wearing at the Burn:

I had a French Legionnaire’s hat with the back cover that comes up under. That’s what I wore the whole time, with a couple of different T-shirts. But I brought with me a Soviet officer’s uniform, something I got in Afghanistan years ago, which, when it gets cold at night, if you’ve got to wear something for the cold, that’s a great thing to wear …. And I had Moroccan flowing robes that I got in Morocco, and I thought, ‘Well, if everybody’s looking like Gandalf or something, I’m prepared.’ But they don’t.

Well, some do. Serious beardage all over the place.

Today was the day for taking me to task. Readers told me to take a chill pill on Obama’s decision to go to war. Then they came at me for one more bash. If that weren’t enough, the Guardian busted me for an embarrassing eggcorn (explanation here). I also parsed Pope Francis’ recent mass wedding of several unconventional couples; and defended Sam Harris from the charge of sexism. Dish team analysis of the looming Scottish referendum here and here.

The most popular post of the day was The Offense Industry On The Offense; followed by Freddie’s joyous rant against intolerant social liberals.

Many of today’s posts were updated with your emails – read them all here. You can always leave your unfiltered comments at our Facebook page and @sullydish. 20 more readers became subscribers today. You can join them here – and get access to all the readons and Deep Dish – for a little as $1.99 month. Gift subscriptions are available here. Dish t-shirts and polos for sale here.

See you in the morning.

Americans Support Strategy They Know Won’t Work, Ctd

Aaron Blake highlights a Pew poll that shows Americans are united in their support for military action against ISIS:

But that unity is only a few inches deep. That’s because it’s becoming clear that Republicans are angling for a more active role in combating the Islamic State, while Democrats are very much concerned about so-called “mission creep” — i.e. getting too involved and not being able to go back. Pew asked people whether they were more concerned about going too far in Iraq and Syria or not going far enough. Republicans and conservatives both say overwhelmingly that they worry about not going far enough; Democrats and liberals worry more about doing too much. It’s basically Iraq 2004 — 10 years later.

And who was right then? Waldman entertains the possibility that the public isn’t being hysterical after all:

Only 18 percent of Americans overall — 23 percent of Republicans and 15 percent of Democrats — think the new military campaign will decrease the chances of a terrorist attack here at home. You can slice these data a couple of ways, of course, but around two-thirds to three-quarters of every group believes that the campaign will either increase the odds of a terrorist attack or not make much difference. Yet a majority supports it anyway.

I don’t think there’s necessarily anything confused about that; in fact, it might be a mature, sober judgment. People may believe that ISIS is primarily focused on what it’s doing in the Middle East, and going after them could, in the short run, lead them to try to retaliate against us with a terrorist attack here. But the public might also believe that despite that risk it’s the right thing to do. If that’s so, it would indicate a public reluctantly going along with a limited military action, not one driven by fear and chanting for blood.

So the public wants to launch a war on terrorism that it doesn’t think will decrease terrorism. That leaves those who believe it is “the right thing to do.” Does that mean right as in ISIS is “identical” to the Nazis, as O’Reilly has it? Or as in: it’s so despicable we should attack it even though it won’t work? That does not encourage me about the future of American foreign policy. Drum picks up on the same theme:

Only 18 percent of Americans think that fighting ISIS will reduce the odds of a terrorist attack on US soil. And there’s not a big difference between the parties. Even among Republicans, only 23 percent think a military campaign against ISIS will make us safer at home. That’s a refreshingly realistic appraisal.

But why? Is it because the Republican fear campaign is so transparently unhinged? Or is it because of President Obama’s unusually low-key approach to the ISIS campaign? I’d like to think it’s at least partly the latter. I’m not very excited about any kind of campaign against ISIS at the moment, but as a second-best alternative, it’s at least nice to see it being sold to the public as a case of having to eat our vegetables rather than as yet another exciting bomb-dropping adventure in defense of our national honor. It’s a step in the right direction, anyway.

James Lindsay flags another new poll from the Chicago Council on Global Affairs that illustrates Americans’ contradictory foreign policy tendencies in general:

At first blush the Chicago Council’s poll numbers reaffirm the current conventional wisdom that Americans are more skeptical toward foreign engagements. While a majority of Americans (58 percent) say the United States should take an “active part” in world affairs, the percentage who favor “staying out” (41 percent) is the highest since pollsters first began asking the question back in 1947. (The Chicago Council has been conducting its periodic foreign policy surveys since 1974.) As a result the gap between Americans favoring “active part” over “staying out” has shrunk to its smallest ever, just 17 percentage points.

But the public’s response to other questions in the poll suggest that an increased wariness about foreign policy is not the same as a sharp turn inward. More than eight in ten Americans say that strong U.S. leadership in world affairs is desirable, in line with previous responses to the question. Just as important, even those who want the United States to “stay out” of world affairs think that strong US leadership is either “very desirable” (19 percent) or “somewhat desirable” (50 percent).

But that’s such a vague question it’s had to know what to make of the answer. I mean: who would want the US not to exercise strong leadership? The question is: to what ends? And is it prudent? And can it be controlled?

The Beneficiaries Of Our Climate Response

David Roberts contrasts preventing climate change with adapting to it. He focuses on the altruism of global warming prevention:

Remember the famous carbon time lag: Carbon emitted today affects temperatures 30 (or so) years from now. So mitigation today doesn’t actually benefit humanity today; it benefits humanity 30 years in the future, when the carbon that would have been emitted would have wrought its effects. It benefits people who are both spatially and temporally distant. That’s almost pure altruism.

Roberts sees climate adaption as “nearly the opposite” of that:

It is action taken to protect oneself, one’s own city, tribe, or nation, from the effects of unchecked climate change. An adaptation dollar does not benefit all of humanity like a mitigation dollar does. It benefits only those proximate to the spender. A New Yorker who spends a dollar on mitigation is disproportionately preventing suffering among future Bangladeshis. A New Yorker who spends a dollar on a sea wallis preventing suffering only among present and future New Yorkers. The benefits of adaptation, as an iterative process that will continue as long as the climate keeps changing, are both spatially and temporally local.

One obvious implication of this difference is that, to the extent spending favors adaptation over mitigation, it will replicate and reinforce existing inequalities of wealth and power. The benefits will accrue to those with the money to pay for them.

The New Anti-Semitism In Germany

Leonid Bershidsky reflects on Angela Merkel’s latest response to it:

At Sunday’s rally, people held up signs that said “Jew-hate — Never Again,” but today’s anti-Semitism in Germany has little to do with its previous incarnation: Demonstrators from the euro-skeptic, anti-immigration party Alternative fuer Deutschland carried their own placards at the rally, saying: “Anti-Semitism Is Imported.” For once they were right.

The two men being held by police in connection with the Wuppertal attack are German Muslims, allegedly members of the increasingly active local Salafi community. Although Germany’s Jewish population has rebounded to about 200,000, from the post-World-War-II nadir of about 30,000, Muslims are much more numerous. Berlin, for example, has a Jewish population of about 30,000, and about 200,000 Muslims. …

Merkel’s difficulty in combating this new wave of anti-Semitism is that she cannot speak freely of its nature, because that might be interpreted as xenophobic.

What does any responsible European government do when one minority has an obvious problem with another? No European state has yet found a politically correct answer to that question, not Germany and certainly not France, which saw Europe’s biggest anti-Israel rallies over the summer and is constantly having to deal with challenges such as the incendiary tours by anti-Semitic comedian Dieudonne.

Jonathan S. Tobin responds to the same rally:

Merkel deserves credit for putting herself and her government on the line on this issue at a time when this issue is becoming more of a concern. The atmosphere of hate that she references is the result of a combination of factors in which the influence of immigrants from the Arab and Islamic worlds has combined with traditional Jew hatred as well as the willingness of many European academic and political elites to countenance verbal assaults on Jews and Israel in a way that would have been inconceivable in the first decades after the Holocaust.

But the key phrase in her speech was not so much the much-needed statement that attacks on Jews are attacks on all Germans and German democracy. It was that the people who are being targeted aren’t just those whose clothing indicates Jewish faith but the targeting of anyone who would stand up for Israel.