Andrew Sullivan's Blog, page 160

Quote For The Day

“Do not try to do too much with your own hands. Better the Arabs do it tolerably than that you do it perfectly. It is their war, and you are to help them, not to win it for them. Actually, also, under the very odd conditions of Arabia, your practical work will not be as good as, perhaps, you think it is,” – T.E. Lawrence.

Does Rebel Brutality Work?

Up to a point:

Beyond a certain point, however, brutality undermines the bargaining process. Attacks on civilians can effectively shift bargaining power away from the government and toward insurgents. Initially, positive shifts in rebel bargaining power increase the likelihood that the group achieves policy concessions from the state. However, beyond a certain point, these shifts may embolden the rebels, encouraging them to reject government concessions as their belief in their own future victory increases. Our results thus imply a curvilinear relationship between civilian targeting and the probability of a negotiated settlement wherein violence initially increases and then diminishes the odds of successful settlement.

The inflection point appears to be at the rate of approximately 400 deaths per month. Below that point, civilian victimization increases the likelihood that the conflict ends in formal government concessions to the rebel group. Beyond that point, however, the likelihood of significant concessions declines.

(Photo: A woman reacts after shelling in the town of Yasynuvata near the rebel stronghold of Donetsk on August 12, 2014. By Dimitar Dilkoff/AFP/Getty Images)

The Case For Microwave Dinners, Ctd

Joel Salatin balks at Marcotte’s feminist defense of microwaved meals:

[S]ince when are women the only ones who are supposed to shoulder the burden for integrity food? … Here’s the question I would like to ask these families: “Are you spending time or money on anything unnecessary?” Cigarettes, alcohol, coffee, soft drinks, lottery tickets, People Magazine, TV, cell phone, soccer games, potato chips . . . ? Show me the household devoid of any of these luxuries, then let’s talk. Otherwise, you’re just unwilling to do what’s more important, which is provide for the health of your family and your environment. That’s a personal choice, and one that’s entirely within your control.

I’m amazed at the difficult situations I hear about in which people do indeed rise to the occasion. Whether it’s sprouting mung beans or alfalfa seeds in a quart jar on the windowsill or buying grain by the bushel, resourceful, can-do people committed to changing their situation figure out a way to do it. For Marcotte to accept irresponsibility this easily underscores a profound courage deficiency. Turn off the TV, get out of the car, get off the phone and get in the kitchen — men, women and children.

Mollie Hemingway also pushes back on Marcotte:

The big elephant in the room of the Slate piece is, of course, how family breakdown and the pressure to leave homemaking have put women in a serious bind. Women are having to work horrible hours to get by and raise their kids, frequently alone, and then come home and manage meal preparation with homework and all the other responsibilities of family life. It’s almost like the breakdown of the family has hurt poor women disproportionately.

And as for those blessed to have greater material wealth, many women were told that careers should never suffer because of the demands of family and so they have to work long hours and then rush home to get kids from the daycare and then figure out meals. It’s utterly exhausting. A feminism that didn’t advocate policies and practices that weaken families would seriously help out here. As would a feminism that didn’t make women feel so terrible for being home with their children.

We Are Already Sort Of Allied With Iran

Photo of Commander Qasem Soleimani in Amerli, which was under siege from ISIS militants for over six weeks. http://t.co/VflFTG3V27—
Digital Resistance (@dgtlresistance) September 03, 2014

Flagging the above tweet, Jacob Siegel points to Iran’s deepening involvement in the ISIS conflict:

The photo reportedly shows the Iranian general Qasem Soleimani, commander of the Qods force, Tehran’s chief military strategist, and the man many American officials consider to be America’s most dangerous foe on the planet. His visit to the site underscores the convergence of U.S. and Iranian interests in Iraq, and Iran’s desire to be seen as orchestrating the efforts. Amerli was clearly a defeat for ISIS and a relief for the townspeople who had held off the group for six weeks. But it’s less clear what the alliance between U.S. airpower and Iranian-backed militias says about the vision guiding the mission in Iraq. Even leaving aside questions of a grand regional strategy for the Middle East—and how our track record suggests that U.S. led wars in Iraq can benefit Iran—its not clear how the precedent set in Amerli will serve the President’s more immediate goals for resolving the war in Iraq.

Juan Cole suspects Washington and Tehran are already coordinating their efforts to some extent:

US air strikes on ISIL in Iraq have alternated with Iranian air strikes on ISIL positions. It seems likely to me that the two air forces are coordinating in at least a minimal way, otherwise there would be a danger of them hitting each other rather than ISIL. … Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, Iran’s supreme leader, is alleged to have just authorized Iranian forces to coordinate with American ones. The denials from other Iranian politicians are likely merely camouflage for a policy that would dismay Iran hardliners.

But Keating doubts anyone will acknowledge that partnership:

There are obviously key points of conflict between Iran and the United States, not least of which is the country’s controversial nuclear program. A new round of talks about that issue are set to begin in New York this month. Any open acknowledgment of cooperation between the countries with regards to ISIS would likely make the U.S. Congress, hardliners in Tehran, and the Israeli government go absolutely berserk. But if the two nations continue to escalate the fight against a common enemy, it’s going to require some level of coordination. I don’t see Iran being formally invited into Obama’s “coalition of the willing.”

Nor is Russia likely to be a formal partner. But it too may become a de facto ally in the fight against ISIS. Ishaan Tharoor highlights how ISIS, which is believed to include some 200 Chechen fighters, is now lobbing threats at Putin as well:

Here’s a slightly new geopolitical wrinkle. Earlier this week, the Islamic State issued a video challenging a powerful global leader. But this time, it was not President Obama or one of his counterparts in Europe. It was Russian President Vladimir Putin. In the video, fighters pose atop Russian military equipment, including a fighter jet, captured from the forces of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad. This is Agence France-Presse‘s transcription of what follows:

“This is a message to you, oh Vladimir Putin, these are the jets that you have sent to Bashar, we will send them to you, God willing, remember that,” said one fighter in Arabic, according to Russian-language captions provided in the video. “And we will liberate Chechnya and the entire Caucasus, God willing,” said the militant. “The Islamic State is and will be and it is expanding God willing.”

Itchy Taser Trigger Fingers

Dara Lind takes a broad look at how cops are trained to use force. A smart point about Tasers:

Thomas Nolan, a criminologist at Merrimack College of Massachusetts, was a police union official in the late 1990s and early 2000s, when Tasers and similar weapons were first being marketed to police officers. He remembers that they were initially sold as an alternative to lethal force — something that could be used in the same situations as lethal force would be, but with a better result. “What vendors were saying, and what policymakers accepted as truth, was ‘You’re going to avoid wrongful-death lawsuits because you don’t have to use deadly force anymore to incapacitate someone, you can use Tasers.'”

That’s not how Tasers are actually used by departments. They’re now, says Nolan, “the default option. Cops are not considering that this is an escalation of force. The Tasers are coming out pretty quickly. Instead of ratcheting down the instances of deadly force, they’re ratcheting up instances of nonlethal force.”

Mental Health Break

This hound dances circles around the competition:

Quote For The Day

by Dish Staff

“Up the coast a few miles north, in a lava reef under the cliffs, there are a lot of rock pools. You can visit them when the tide is out. Each pool is separate and different, and you can, if you are fanciful, give them names, such as George, Charlotte, Kenny, Mrs. Strunk. Just as George and the others are thought of, for convenience, as individual identities, so you may think of a rock pool as an entity; though, of course, it is not. The waters of its consciousness – so to speak – are swarming with hunted anxieties, grim-jawed greeds, dartingly vivid intuitions, old crusty-shelled rock-gripping obstinacies, deep-down sparkling undiscovered secrets, ominous protean organisms motioning mysteriously, perhaps warningly, toward the surface light. How can such a variety of creatures coexist at all? Because they have to. The rocks of the pool hold their world together. And, throughout the day of the ebb tide, they know no other.

But that long day ends at last; yields to the nighttime of the flood. And, just as the waters of the ocean come flooding, darkening over the pools, so over George and the others in sleep come the waters of that other ocean – that consciousness which is no one in particular but which contains everyone and everything, past, present and future, and extends unbroken beyond the uttermost stars. We may surely suppose that, in the darkness of the full flood, some of these creatures are lifted from their pools to drift far out over the deep waters. But do they ever bring back, when the daytime of the ebb returns, any kind of catch with them? Can they tell us, in any manner, about their journey? Is there, indeed, anything for them to tell – except that the waters of the ocean are not really other than the waters of the pool?” – Christopher Isherwood, A Single Man.

(Photo by Flickr user tico_24)

Cancer Is Not A “Battle”

by Dish Staff

Not for Jenny Diski, who recoils from cancer clichés after receiving a diagnosis that gives her two to three years to live:

One thing I state as soon as we’re out of the door: ‘Under no circumstances is anyone to say that I lost a battle with cancer. Or that I bore it bravely. I am not fighting, losing, winning or bearing.’ I will not personify the cancer cells inside me in any form. I reject all metaphors of attack or enmity in the midst, and will have nothing whatever to do with any notion of desert, punishment, fairness or unfairness, or any kind of moral causality. But I sense that I can’t avoid the cancer clichés simply by rejecting them. Rejection is conditioned by and reinforces the existence of the thing I want to avoid. I choose how to respond and behave, but a choice between doing this or that, being this or that, really isn’t freedom of action, it’s just picking one’s way through an already drawn flow chart. They still sit there, to be taken or left, the flashing neon markers on the road that I would like to think isn’t there for me to be travelling down.

I am appalled at the thought, suddenly, that someone at some point is going to tell me I am on a journey. I try but I can’t think of a single aspect of having cancer, start to finish, that isn’t an act in a pantomime in which my participation is guaranteed however I believe I choose to play each scene. I have been given this role. (There, see? Instant victim.) I have no choice but to perform and to be embarrassed to death.

A Poem For Sunday

by Alice Quinn

“Julia Tutwiler State Prison for Women” by Andrew Hudgins:

On the prison’s tramped-hard Alabama clay

two green-clad women walk, hold hands,

and swing their arms as though they’ll laugh,

meander at their common whim, and not

be forced to make a quarter turn each time

they reach a corner of the fence. Though they

can’t really be as gentle as they seem

perhaps they’re better lovers for their crimes,

the times they didn’t think before acting—

or thought, and said to hell with the consequences.

Most are here for crimes of passion.

They’ve killed for jealousy, anger, love,

and now they sleep a lot. Who else

is dangerous for love—for love

or hate or anything? Who else would risk

a ten-year walk inside the fenced in edge

of a field stripped clean of soybeans or wheat?

Skimming in from the west and pounding hard

across the scoured land, a summer rain

raises puffs of dust with its first huge drops.

It envelopes the lingering women. They hesitate,

then race, hand in hand, for shelter, laughing.

(From Saints and Strangers by Andrew Hudgins. Copyright © 1985 by Andrew Hudgins. Used by permission of Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. All rights reserved. The poem also can be found in Poems of the American South, Everyman Pocket Poets. Photo by Eugen Anghel)

Ebola: A Survivor’s Tale

by Dish Staff

Kent Brantly, the doctor who caught the virus in Liberia and recovered after receiving an experimental treatment in the US, shares his experience as a caregiver and then patient:

During my own care, I often thought about the patients I had treated. Ebola is a humiliating disease that strips you of your dignity. You are removed from family and put into isolation where you cannot even see the faces of those caring for you due to the protective suits–you can only see their eyes. You have uncontrollable diarrhea and it is embarrassing. You have to rely on others to clean you up. That is why we tried our best to treat patients like our own family. Through our protective gear we spoke to each patient, calling them by name and touching them. We wanted them to know they were valuable, that they were loved, and that we were there to serve them.

Brantly, a missionary, went on to receive treatment at Emory University Hospital in Atlanta:

I finally cried for the first time when I saw my family members through a window and spoke to them over the intercom. I had not been sure I would ever see them again. When I finally recovered, the nurses excitedly helped me leave the isolation room, and I held my wife in my arms for the first time in a month.

Even when I was facing death, I remained full of faith. I did not want to be faithful to God all the way up to serving in Liberia for ten months, only to give up at the end because I was sick. Though we cannot return to Liberia right now, it is clear we have been given a new platform for helping the people of Liberia.

Recent Dish on the ebola crisis here.