Andrew Sullivan's Blog, page 204

The World’s Third-Largest Democracy Votes, Ctd

The new president of Indonesia is a metalhead! Congrats to @jokowi_do2! READ MORE HERE: shar.es/L1OJd http://t.co/taTCjKEHTG—
Revolver Magazine (@Revolvermag) July 23, 2014

The final results of Indonesia’s presidential election came in yesterday, and Jakarta Governor Joko “Jokowi” Widodo won with 53 percent of the vote. All is not yet settled, however, as his opponent Prabowo Subianto intends to challenge the election in court:

A case would test the institutions of Indonesia’s young democracy, especially the Constitutional Court. Set up after the fall of Suharto, its reputation suffered a severe blow earlier this year when Akil Mochtar, its former chief justice, was imprisoned for life after being convicted of graft—for rigging rulings in disputed local elections. His successor, Hamdan Zoelva, used to belong to one of the six parties that backed Mr Prabowo. Their association makes many Jokowi supporters uneasy.

Still, it is hard to see how a challenge could succeed. The court would have to find evidence that more than 4m votes had been tampered with to overturn Jokowi’s victory. Some irregularities in the counting process have come to light, but Mr Prabowo has produced no evidence of fraud on the scale he alleges. And while the court may have the final say on the election, the political mood already seems to be turning Jokowi’s way.

Assuming Prabowo’s challenge fails, Jokowi will become the first Indonesian president not plucked from the country’s political or military elite. Yenni Kwok calls his election the start of a new chapter in Indonesian history:

Unlike many established figures who dominate the political arena, the 53-year-old Jokowi came from a humble provincial background: he grew up in a riverside slum in Solo, Central Java, and does not have ties to an influential family. After a career as a furniture entrepreneur, he started in politics as mayor of his hometown less than a decade ago — and this rapid rise, along with the level of electoral enthusiasm and volunteerism his candidacy generated, has invited comparisons to U.S. President Barack Obama (the two were even born in the same year). Many see Jokowi’s win as an augury for a more mature era in Indonesian politics.

“His candidacy would have been improbable just a few years ago,” says Aaron Connelly, East Asia research fellow at the Lowy Institute in Sydney, who focuses on Indonesian politics. “This has not historically been a country in which parents told their children that they could grow up to become President.”

Ariel Heryanto attributes Jokowi’s success to the unpaid, unorganized grassroots movement that supported him:

Jokowi’s success is hugely a result of the spontaneous popular support from largely non-organised groups of ordinary Indonesians. They converged in various forms, with a high degree of fluidity. Famous artists and public intellectuals form parts of it, but the majority are everyday commoners. … As a candidate, Jokowi had limited resources and interest to mobilise the masses to support him. From early on his supporters impatiently pressed him to run for president. In contrast to the flow of the familiar “money politics”, individual citizens proudly published bank slips on social media, showing off their tiny share of donations to Jokowi’s election campaign. Jakarta’s pro-Jokowi July 5 concert attracted over 100,000 people. Unpaid volunteers with no political party affiliation designed and ran the event.

But the new president won’t have much time to bask in the glory of his victory, however historic it may be. James Lindsay rolls out the long list of problems he has to contend with:

Economic growth is slowing, inflation and interest rates are rising, the currency is weakening, and investment is falling. Economists expect things to get worse before they get better, largely because Indonesia’s commodity exports are fetching lower prices in world markets. The Indonesian government is running a substantial budget deficit, in good part because of overly generous fuel subsidies that amount to nearly $12 per day per driver in the country. The resulting surge in domestic demand for gasoline is one of the reasons why the former member of OPEC has become a net importer of oil. The cost of fuel subsidies is also keeping Indonesia from making desperately needed investments in infrastructure. Jokowi probably won’t be able to make much progress on any of these problems if he doesn’t do something about the country’s long history of government corruption. And you thought you had a lot of things on your to-do list?

Best Cover Song Ever?

A reader throws down the gauntlet in our new contest (guidelines here): “For me, Johnny Cash’s version of Nine Inch Nails’ “Hurt” takes the cake.” He has a point:

Songwriter Trent Reznor’s quote is worth reading:

I pop the video in, and wow… Tears welling, silence, goose-bumps… Wow. [I felt like] I just lost my girlfriend, because that song isn’t mine anymore… It really made me think about how powerful music is as a medium and art form. I wrote some words and music in my bedroom as a way of staying sane, about a bleak and desperate place I was in, totally isolated and alone. [Somehow] that winds up reinterpreted by a music legend from a radically different era/genre and still retains sincerity and meaning — different, but every bit as pure

It really builds and builds …

America Puts Away Too Many People

And Emily Badger finds little reason to believe it makes us safer:

[T]he Sentencing Project points out that declining violent crime rates in New York and New Jersey have actually outpaced the national trend, even as these states have reduced their prison populations through changing law enforcement and sentencing policies.

We certainly can’t take these three charts and conclude that reducing prison populations reduces crime. But these trends do make it harder to argue the opposite — particularly in the most heavily incarcerated country in the world. As the Sentencing Project puts it, “in the era of mass incarceration, there is a growing consensus that current levels of incarceration place the nation well past the point of diminishing returns in crime control.”

Reihan agrees the US uses incarceration too much. But he also wonders if other countries rely too little on it:

For example, while the prison per population rate (per 100,000) of the U.S. as of the end of 2012 was 707, it was 72 in Norway, 60 in Sweden, 58 in Finland, 73 in Denmark, and 78 in Germany: all roughly in the neighborhood of one-tenth the U.S. prison per population rate. Unfortunately, while violent crime is generally less prevalent in these countries (particularly intentional homicide — the U.S. has a homicide rate five times that of Sweden), it’s by no means nonexistent. Police recorded rapes in Sweden, for example, are twice as high as they are in the United States, though we might attribute this to better reporting. But Sweden’s robbery rate (103 cases of robbery per 100,000 people) is fairly close to that of the U.S. (133). And its police recorded assault rate (927 cases per 100,000 people) far exceeds that of the U.S. (262). Broadly similar patterns obtain in a number of other affluent European countries.

None of this is to definitively establish that, say, Sweden’s criminal justice system is too lenient, but it certainly points in that direction. So while it seems fair to say that the pendulum has swung too far towards reliance on incarceration as a crime control strategy in the U.S., the pendulum appears to have swung too far in the other direction in much of northern Europe.

Growing Up On The Big Screen, Ctd

After enjoying almost uniformly positive reviews, Linklater’s new movie Boyhood is starting to attract some negative attention. Christopher Orr is restrained in his criticism:

[I]f there’s a critique to be made of Linklater’s film, it is that it has a great deal more to say—or at least more interesting things to say—about grownups than about growing up. Remarkable as Mason Jr.’s physical transformation may be, socially and psychologically he’s not all that different at 18 from at six: a taller, more articulate version of the dreamy, aimless boy whose teacher complained that he spent his time “staring out the window all day,” but one whose life has developed in a relatively straight line—insofar, of course, as it’s had the opportunity to develop at all. Moreover, it is obviously a tricky thing to cast an actor so young and commit to his development over the next dozen years, and [actor Ellar] Coltrane never quite develops the gravitational pull to tether the movie. Yes, his character is meant to be an unfocused youth, but occasionally his comes across as merely an unfocused performance.

A much harsher Mark Judge finds that the “endless, enervating, boring” movie lacks spiritual depth, scoffing that it could be titled I Became a Teenaged Hipster. He psychoanalyzes the rave reviewers:

I think what we have here is an example of the Sideways syndrome.

Sideways is a mediocre 2004 independent movie that became a hit when critics began gushing about it. A.O. Scott in the New York Times had the courage to write that critics loved Sideways because the main character is a schlubby wine snob and critic. In others words, critics saw, and praised, not Sideways, but seeing themselves in Sideways.

Something similar may be going on with Boyhood. Movie critics identify with Mason’s social awkwardness, the liberalism of his biological parents, even the gender-bending when Mason lets a girl paint his nails. Ann Hornaday: “By the time Mason, now a deep-voiced teenager, affects an earring, blue nail polish and an artistic interest in photography, viewers get the feeling that he’s dodged at least most of the misogynist conditioning of a boy’s life.” Yes, and he’s also missed the passion, and conflict, and girl-crazy adrenaline-rushed joy of being a boy.

Eve Tushnet identifies three major flaws in the film:

First and most basically, Mason the teen is just kind of boring. The movie slams to a halt when he hits about tenth grade and never recovers. We get acres of teen philosophy (“I just want to be able to do anything I want, just because it makes me feel alive, not because it gives me the appearance of normality”) and the stakes suddenly feel very low.

That’s because of the second problem, which is that Mason never does anything really wrong. He’s a prototypical good-but-aimless kid. We see his foibles–he’s a bit surly and a tad whiny, he smokes some pot if you consider that a foible, he comes home late at least once which possibly makes his mom cry, he sometimes fails to do his homework–but no real sins. … Where’s the casual cruelty of childhood, the hurtful rather than just boring narcissism of adolescence, the misdeeds which will only be acknowledged and regretted years later? I mean, I get that “Boyhood” isn’t “Carrie,” but must it be “Annie”? …

And the final problem is that as Mason nears college age, the Meaning of Life begins to rear its horrid head. And the meaning of life, it turns out, is that we feel stuff.

How The Peace Process Collapsed … Again

In a lengthy narrative piece, Ben Birnbaum and Amir Tibon chronicle John Kerry’s efforts to broker an Israeli-Palestinian peace deal, and how the talks finally broke down. (Believe it or not, TNR decided to publish an account of the entire thing that blames everything on the Palestinians.) In their account, everything fell apart when Abbas made good on his threat to seek membership in 15 UN conventions, and went ahead with a reconciliation agreement with Hamas, after Netanyahu was unable or unwilling to meet Palestinian conditions for resuming negotiations. Toward the end of the piece, the authors wonder what comes next:

The Palestinians may resume their quest for full-fledged U.N. membership this fall. In Israel, there are almost as many plans as people: Lieberman, the foreign minister, wants his country to make peace directly with the Arab League; Bennett, whose party is now polling just behind Likud, is advocating partial Israeli annexation of the West Bank. Livni has spoken about unilateral steps that would forfeit Israeli claims to West Bank territory outside the settlement blocs and freeze building in those areas. In the United States, top Middle East voices are urging Kerry to bypass Abbas and Netanyahu and put forward his own detailed peace plan. …

There’s no shortage of ideas, in other words. And some of them—particularly that last—may bring Israelis and Palestinians closer to a deal than Kerry got this time. But few of the people we spoke to expected progress any time soon. With Netanyahu entrenched, Abbas on his way out, settlements and rocket ranges expanding, and the populations increasingly hardline, we seem to have reached the end of an era in the peace process. And no one harbors much hope for what comes next. “I see it from a mathematical point of view,” said Avi Dichter, the former chief of Israel’s Shin Bet intelligence agency. “The American effort will always be multiplied by the amount of trust between the two leaders. So if Kerry’s pressure represents the number five, and then Obama’s help brings the American effort to ten, it really doesn’t matter. You’re still multiplying it by zero. The final result will always be zero.”

Martin Longman quibbles with how the piece blames the failure of the talks solely on the Palestinians:

The way this reporting is constructed, it makes it look like there is all this flurry of activity on the American and Israeli sides which is just cut off at the knees by an impatient Abbas. I don’t doubt the basic reporting here, but I think it doesn’t take into enough account the degree to which Netanyahu was either delaying with a purpose or simply incapable of delivering.

Do the reporters actually believe that Netanyahu was on the verge of rounding up the votes he needed to release the fourth tranche of prisoners? If they do believe this, they didn’t bother to say that they believed it. Yet, the way they reported it implies that they actually believe it. It appears that Livni and the Americans thought it was possible. So, maybe it was. A successful vote wouldn’t have been any magic elixir anyway, but it would have kept the process alive. And that would have been a much better place to be than where we are now, wouldn’t it?

Frum, of course, finds the narrative of Palestinian intransigence more plausible, but his other takeaway is a great deal of respect for the work Kerry put in. “It’s amazing how much more gets done,” he writes, “when the secretary of state isn’t running for president”:

John Kerry’s initiative failed. But the risk of failure attends every political initiative. It’s fine to calculate how much political risk to accept. But when a secretary of state in pursuit of his or her own political future decides that no risk is acceptable, then nothing much is ever tried. Which is why Hillary Clinton’s record as secretary of state is so blank. By 2012, Obama had apparently given up on hopes of negotiating an Abbas-Netanyahu deal. Kerry’s hopes had dwindled, but not yet died. “I think we have some period of time—in one to one-and-a-half to two years—or it’s over,” Kerry said in 2013. So he tried. He failed. But in other places where is he trying, he seems to be succeeding: smoothing the post-Karzai political transition in Afghanistan, reaching U.S.-Europe consensus on how to respond to Russia in Ukraine. It seems you get a lot more done by doing your job than by positioning and planning for your next one.

(Photo: US Secretary of State John Kerry gestures as leaves the Jordanian city of Amman on March 27, 2014, en route to Rome. Kerry and Palestinian president Mahmud Abbas held “constructive” talks on the Middle East peace process, a US official said Thursday, as crunch decisions loom in the coming days. By Jacquelyn Martin/AFP/Getty Images.)

Keeping Secrets From Ourselves

Joshua Rothman contemplates the “artist’s sense of privacy” in Virginia Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway, which he describes as an “inner privacy, by means of which you shield yourself not just from others’ prying eyes, but from your own”:

By learning to leave your inner life alone, you learn to cultivate and appreciate it. And you gain another, strangely spiritual power: the power to regard yourself abstractly. Instead of getting lost in the details of your life, you hold onto the feelings, the patterns, the tones. You learn to treasure those aspects of life without communicating them, and without ruining them, for yourself, by analyzing them too much.

Woolf suggests that those treasured feelings might be the source of charisma: when Peter, seeing Clarissa at her party, asks himself, “What is this terror? what is this ecstasy? … What is it that fills me with extraordinary excitement?,” the answer might be that it’s Clarissa’s radiance, never seen directly, but burning through. Clarissa, meanwhile, lets her spiritual intuitions lift her a little above the moment. Wandering through her lamp-lit garden, she sees her party guests: “She didn’t know their names, but friends she knew they were, friends without names, songs without words, always the best.” That’s the power of artist’s privacy. It preserves the melodies otherwise drowned out by words, stories, information.

Libya’s Sorta-Kinda Civil War

Tripoli residents are fleeing their homes by the thousands after militia clashes destroyed the country’s main airport and left 47 people dead. A look at the airport:

The Economist brings us up to speed:

Militias from Misrata, frustrated at their failure to capture the airport after a week of fighting with the Zintan militia that holds it, arrived with tanks to pound the perimeter. The Zintanis responded with shells and anti-aircraft fire. As the violence expanded, huge fires burned in the city’s western districts. “A shell hit my neighbour’s house and a lot of people left,” says Seraj, a resident of the western suburb of Janzour. “We stayed inside, it was not safe on the streets.” When the smoke cleared, Zintanis remained in control of the airport, but it is now a shambles of wrecked buildings and burned-out aircraft. …

Without command of any troops willing and able to intervene, Libya’s foreign minister, Muhammad Abdul Aziz, on July 17th asked the UN Security Council to send military advisers to bolster state forces guarding ports, airports and other strategic locations. He warned that Libya risks going “out of control” without such help. But he found no takers. The Security Council, which passed resolution 1973 authorising NATO bombing of Gaddafi’s forces in March 2011, worries about committing troops to a war featuring a mosaic of competing factions. “Whose side are we supposed to intervene on?” asks a Western diplomat in Tripoli.

The government is apparently weighing whether to ask the International Criminal Court to go after the leaders of these militias. Mark Kersten, who finds this idea pretty rich given Libya’s prior refusal to hand over Saif al-Islam Qaddafi to the ICC, is skeptical that it would do anything:

Libya wants the ICC to be very selective in who it targets. The government wants the ICC to target its adversaries which, at the moment, are those forces responsible for violence at Tripoli airport. According to some estimates, clashes between the Zintani militia (the same one that has Saif al-Islam Gaddafi in its ‘custody’) and the Misratan militia have resulted in the destruction of 90 percent of the airport’s aircrafts. The fighting also prompted the UN to pull its staff out of the country.

But it is hard to see how the Court could become involved. After all, it isn’t clear how one militia attacking another to gain control of an asset like an airport constitutes a crime against humanity. The destruction of Sufi shrines, political assassinations and illegal detention and torture of thousands of former combatants hasn’t led to an ICC investigation. The battle for Tripoli airport pales in comparison.

Face Of The Day

Giselle Fernandez sits with her mother Katy, who is participating in a special naturalization ceremony at the Metropolitan Museum of Art on July 22, 2014. Over fifty people representing countries from Albania to Burundi took part in the morning ceremony at the American Wing of the museum. The Oath of Allegiance was administered by U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) Deputy Director Lori L. Scialabba. By Spencer Platt/Getty Images.

Dating With Mental Illness

Molly Pohlig opens up about seeking a partner while suffering from a “tangle of depression, anxiety, OCD, and borderline personality disorder”:

I am not ashamed of my condition. Or not exactly. I think there is still a lot more stigma than we admit, and every joke someone cracks about being “so OCD” makes it harder to explain that while you all think you’re totally cool with me being obsessive-compulsive, it’s a lot more than lining up pencils and touching the light switch. Men have broken up with me after getting only a glimpse of my worst looming on the horizon, and others have stayed with me through abhorrent behavior because they were afraid of what I might do if they left.

I have no qualms about someone seeing my cellulite, but I am afraid of him seeing my self-inflicted scars; I’m not sure I would trust a person who had caused herself such violence, so why should he trust me? I am getting ready to switch medications, which can be ugly. Can I—should I—invite someone along for the ride? I’ve seen how my illness affects my loved ones, and as much as I long for marriage and children, I often think everyone might be better off if I moved to a secluded fjord in Iceland and just sent postcards.

No Quiet On The ISIS Front

ISIS tells shopkeepers in Iraq to veil their mannequins http://t.co/pBrmBegU2a pic.twitter.com/X9bGcIziVs

— Mona (@MonaChalabi) July 22, 2014

Hanna Kozlowska provides an update on Syria, where as many as 700 people were killed last Thursday and Friday in fighting between ISIS and regime forces – the highest death toll in 48 hours since the start of the war in 2011:

The Shaar gas field in central Syria saw some of the heaviest fighting. It is a crucial gas supply facility for the country’s central region and among the largest in Syria. Islamic State fighters attacked the field Wednesday night — just hours after Bashar al-Assad was sworn in for a third, seven-year term as president — and seized it Thursday, killing 270 government soldiers, guards, and staff. According to the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, a Britain-based NGO, at least 40 militants from the group formerly known as ISIS were killed. Over the weekend the body count grew by 100. More than 170,000 people have died since began in March 2011. And the war created an unprecedented refugee crisis displacing 2.8 million people, including many women and children.

On Monday, Islamic State fighters clashed in Damascus with other anti-Assad rebels who initially embraced the group but now are trying to expel it from the city. They’ve successfully ousted the organization from sections of the capital and its outskirts but the Islamic State’s influence has recently expanded, encompassing an oil-rich area in the eastern Deir Az Zor province. The organization controls much of Syria’s east.

The conflict also continues to have a severe impact on its neighbors. Alice Su takes stock of the ever-heavier burden the Syrian refugee crisis is imposing on Jordan, which is also host to thousands of refugees from Iraq and other war-torn countries:

A year passes, then two, then three. Rents rise—up to 300 percent in some areas—along with gas, electricity, and water bills. The Jordanian economy, already destabilized by disrupted trade and transit routes across the region, wobbles. GDP growth declines. Foreign direct investment shrivels. Budget deficits and public debt grow.

Jordan’s government has drafted a National Resilience Plan to mitigate this kind of damage for its citizens, 14 percent of whom live below the national poverty line. But the plan, along with all the humanitarian work in the country, depends on international funding, which is dwindling. To date, UNHCR has received 33 percent of its 2014 regional appeal for the Syrian crisis, leaving a gap of nearly $2.5 billion.

Jordan is not meant to be a host country indefinitely. Refugees are supposed to stop here for relief until they reach a “durable solution”—meaning returning home or resettling somewhere with permanent residence. So far, 22 countrieshave pledged to receive almost 35,000 Syrians, with UNHCR calling for a further 100,000 pledged spots by 2016. But there are more than 2.6 million Syrian refugees total, and only some of the pledges— just 121 resettled in America and 24 in the U.K., for example—have been fulfilled. The remaining refugees are stuck here, lives frozen, told to wait for a resolution that may not come.