Andrew Sullivan's Blog, page 209

Criminally Bad Parenting, Ctd

A backlash to the latest parenting panic is in full swing. German Lopez highlights the above map, which brings perspective to the question of kids dying when left alone in cars. But just today, another father in Georgia was arrested for leaving his two young children and infant in his car while shopping. This of course on the heels of the 22-month-old Georgia toddler who died recently after his father left him strapped in a hot car for hours.

Meanwhile, as Deborah L. Rhode observes, many pregnant women who take drugs don’t need to wait until giving birth to be charged with bad parenting. And laws against prenatal drug use risk unfair enforcement:

Government statistics indicate that about 5 percent of pregnant women use illicit drugs, 11 percent use alcohol, and 16 percent use tobacco. Although cocaine was once considered to be the most harmful form of substance abuse, many of its supposed symptoms have since been linked to poor nutrition, inadequate prenatal care, and other drugs. Considerable recent evidence indicates that cocaine’s effects are less severe than those of alcohol and are comparable to those of tobacco.

Yet cocaine use is far more likely than alcohol or tobacco use to be a basis for prosecution.

In [Lynn] Paltrow and [Jeanne] Flavin’s study, 84 percent of cases of prosecution or other intervention involved illicit drugs, mainly cocaine. Such selective prosecution reflects class and racial biases that are also evident in reporting practices. In one study, black women were ten times more likely than white women to be reported to governmental authorities for substance use, despite similar rates of addiction. In another survey of New York hospitals, those serving low-income women were much more likely than those serving wealthier patients to test new mothers for drugs, and to turn positive results over to child protection authorities.

Jessica Valenti sounds off:

Obviously, doing drugs while pregnant is a horrible idea. But criminalizing addicted pregnant women who need treatment is bad for babies and their mothers. It’s a short-term, punitive measure with no positive lasting impact to simply ensure that pregnant women who need drug treatment and pre-natal care won’t seek either of those options, for fear of having their children taken away from them.

The Heavy Cost Of Iranian Sanctions

Extends to the US:

A new study published this week by the National Iranian American Council argues that the various trade sanctions the United States has maintained on Iran for more than a decade actually hurts the American economy. The NIAC, a U.S.-based organization that pushes for a peaceful resolution of differences between Washington and Tehran, calculated that between 1995 and 2012, the United States has forfeited between $135 billion and $175 billion in export revenue as a consequence of not doing business with the Islamic Republic. …

In the United States alone, write researcher Jonathan Leslie, NIAC director of research Reza Marashi, and NIAC president Trita Parsi, “this lost export revenue translates into between 51,043 and 66,436 job opportunities lost per year on average. In 2008 alone, as many as 214,657 to 279,389 job opportunities were relinquished.”

Natasha Schmidt talks with Trita Parsi about the study. Schmidt asserts that lifting sanctions will leave the international community “with very little leverage when dealing with Iran on a range of issues, from the nuclear program to human rights.” Parsi disputes this:

On the contrary, the West has very little leverage precisely because there is so little interaction. If the U.S. had not eliminated its trade with Iran in 1995 and if in 2009 there actually was a significant American presence in Iran, do you think the Iranian government would have had a harder or easier time to cheat in the elections? Would the US have had more or less leverage? Part of the reason the US had so little leverage in 2009 is because it had nothing in Iran. No embassy, no diplomats, no companies—no Americans. That’s no guarantee that it would have used its leverage constructively, but it is very difficult to argue that America’s complete absence from Iran has given it more leverage.

Mental Health Break

Airbnb’s new logo looks a little … familiar:

Separate Rules For Sexual Assault

Kat Stoeffel explains why colleges have such a poor track record when it comes to handling rape cases:

Title IX requires administrators to exercise their power to remove sexual offenders from the environment – temporarily, permanently, until the accuser graduates — even if the accused wouldn’t be found guilty in a criminal court. That’s explicit: In a 2011 open letter, the Department of Education reminded colleges that these civil cases have a much lower burden of proof than criminal cases. Instead of proving “beyond a reasonable doubt” that they were raped, victims need only a “preponderance of evidence.” That’s taken to mean showing that it is more likely than not that sexual assault occurred.

Granted, suspension or expulsion is a far cry from being convicted of a felony, imprisoned, and branded a rapist for life. But some experts worry that sending accused rapists off on vague leaves of absence only enables them to land safely at other campuses and victimize more students.

Meanwhile, a reader writes:

I think this story fits in well with your “The Victims Of False Rape Accusations” thread. Here’s an excerpt:

I had a really brief relationship with this girl in college; her dorm room was next to mine, and after a few evenings staying up talking all night, we made out.

We spent a few nights in each others’ rooms, but we never had sex and neither of us pressured the other into doing anything we weren’t comfortable with. After a few nights, I broke things off in the cowardly way that 19-year-old guys do, and I just stopped returning her calls and texts. I can imagine she was hurt by this, I know that I would be hurt if someone broke up with me that way.

I haven’t spoken to this girl in nearly ten years. If she felt I did something wrong in our relationship, she never confronted me about it or brought the issue to the school.

But yesterday, as near as I can tell, she saw a newspaper article about me in the Baltimore Sun, and made a Facebook post attacking me and Cards Against Humanity:

Several people that I went to school with have posted a Baltimore Sun article from 2012 about the success of Cards Against Humanity, a popular indie party game created by a Goucher alum. That is my rapist. Having his face pop up on my news feed unexpectedly in any context has the capacity to ruin my day. Seeing him praised in the press is giving me a panic attack. He should not be held as a good example of the excellence that Goucher grads have, can and will continue to achieve.

Her more recent posts have called for a boycott of my work, and she (or her friends) started a Twitter account to tweet at celebrities and organizations that I work with calling me a rapist.

The Dish’s extensive coverage of sexual assault on college campuses is here.

Kurdistan, Then And Now

Mass City, New Project under Construction On #Erbil – #Massif Road Bashuri / Southern #Kurdistan http://t.co/C4QnEHJZal—
#FreeKurdistan. (@Kurdistan_612) July 11, 2014

Comparing the Iraqi Kurdistan of today with what she saw when she last visited in 2002, Robin Wright views the Kurdish push for independence as the culmination of a longstanding effort:

[E]ven in 2002 the Kurds were drifting into an autonomous statelet. The Kurdish language was making a comeback in government offices and workplaces, displacing Arabic. The school curriculum was Kurdicized; the younger generation barely identified with Iraq. Levies from smuggling and illicit trade produced revenues of a million dollars a day; even trucks exporting goods from Saddam-land to Turkey had to pay bribes to win passage. The Kurds had their own flag, too—a big sun emblazoned over red, white, and green stripes.

So, a dozen years later, it isn’t surprising that the Kurds now increasingly appear to be decoupling from Iraq, whether formally or de facto. When I returned, four months ago, this time on a direct flight from Istanbul to Sulaymaniyah, Kurdistan had evolved from the least developed part of Iraq to its most stable and prosperous region. I stayed at a new five-star hotel and attended a conference at the new American University of Sulaymaniyah, which brought together panellists from around the world. The Kurds also have a new pipeline for transporting oil to Turkey, which could result in exports of up to four hundred thousand barrels a year, with an estimated forty-five billion barrels of crude in reserve.

Luke Harding also observes how oil has transformed Kurdistan’s fortunes over the past decade. All is not rosy, however:

Some worry that this oil-fuelled boom is pushing Kurdistan in the wrong direction.

Kamaran Subhan, a writer based in Sulaimaniyah, wonders if it is becoming not Norway but a rentier Gulf state. A friendly Bangladeshi waiter – there were no Bangladeshis here in 2003 – brings my coffee. “We are becoming lazy,” he says. Subhan worries that culture in Kurdistan has scarcely improved, despite the consumer splurge visible in the shiny new Land Cruisers on the roads.

The town still has only one art gallery, founded in the 1990s, with a mulberry tree in the courtyard and works by Kurdish artists hanging in a bright upstairs floor. “The government has little interest in art,” owner Dilshad Bahadin says. Nearby is a small cafe where Kurdish men discuss ideas and play backgammon. Subhan’s books enjoy a print run of 500-1,000 copies, he adds – not much in a country, or near-country, of 4.5 million people.

Meanwhile, Kurdistan’s two tribal families, the Barzanis and the Talibanis, continue to dominate politics – as well as the economy and employment. The Barzanis run Irbil, while the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan (PUK), headed by Iraq’s former president Jalal Talibani, controls Sulaimaniyah. Critics accuse both of corruption, nepotism and patronage politics, keeping thousands of party workers on the public payroll. In 2007, a breakaway faction of the PUK formed a new, pro-transparency party, the Change Movement or Gorran.

Previous Dish on the prospect of an independent Kurdistan here.

“A Game-Changer For Ukraine”

That’s Feaver’s read the tragedy:

[I]f Ukraine is at fault, then Obama’s options of response are more limited: mainly reinvigorating efforts at negotiation. If Russia or pro-Russian forces are at fault, we will likely see much greater pressure to ratchet up sanctions even more significantly than has happened thus far, albeit in conjunction with reinvigorated efforts along the diplomatic track. Moreover, if Russia or pro-Russian forces are at fault, this puts Putin on the defensive to the point where a meaningful retreat is plausible — not a retreat from Crimea, which appears to be lost, but a retreat on Eastern Ukrainian pressure points — provided that Obama does in fact re-engage at a level commensurate with the stakes.

Ioffe agrees that this is major:

Make no mistake: this is a really, really, really big deal. This is the first downing of a civilian jetliner in this conflict and, if it was the rebels who brought it down, all kinds of ugly things follow. For one thing, what seemed to be gelling into a frozen local conflict has now broken into a new phase, one that directly threatens European security. The plane, let’s recall, was flying from Amsterdam.

For another, U.S. officials have long been saying that there’s only one place that rebels can get this kind of heavy, sophisticated weaponry: Russia. This is why a fresh round of sanctions was announced yesterday. Now, the U.S. and a long-reluctant Europe may be forced to do more and implement less surgical and more painful sanctions.

This also seems to prove that Russia has lost control of the rebels, who have been complaining for some time of being abandoned by President Vladimir Putin.

Did The Rebels Do It?

Max Fisher examines a big piece of evidence:

It looked like the smoking gun: exactly 35 minutes after Malaysia Airlines flight 17 went down over eastern Ukraine, a social media account belonging to the eastern Ukrainian rebel commander Igor Strelkov posted a message bragging of having “brought down” an aircraft.

But there this isn’t as clear-cut as it first seemed:

(1) Strelkov’s post, on the Russian social networking site VK, was quickly deleted. A later post appeared to blame Ukrainian government forces for shooting down the plane.

(2) The VK account may not actually be run by Strelkov at all. BuzzFeed’s Max Seddon spoke to eastern Ukrainian rebels who said the page “is a fake made by fans.” If that’s the case, it may be that Strelkov fanboys saw the plane go down, surmised (perhaps wrongly) that rebels had shot them down, and bragged about it on the VK page. It is also possible, to be fair, that the rebels were lying to Seddon about the VK page.

(3) Strelkov’s post appeared to claim credit for shooting down not a civilian airliner but an Antonov AN-26, a two-prop transport plane that is often used by militaries in eastern Europe. The AN-26 is 78 feet long; MH17 was a Boeing 777, which is 242 feet long. It’s possible that rebels mistook the large Boeing 777 for a much smaller AN-26, especially from thousands of feet away. But this casts a bit further doubt on the idea that people fired on the airplane and then posted on VK about it; if someone fired on the plane they likely would have noticed it was a large jet and not a small-ish prop plane.

Ukraine is blaming Russia:

Breaking: #Ukraine govt says has recordings of calls b/t “terrorists” & Russian intel discussing “shoot-down” of Malaysian jet

— Jim Sciutto (@jimsciutto) July 17, 2014

On The Ground In Gaza: Tweet Reax

Fighting surges in #Gaza with no firm sign of a ceasefire near: http://t.co/0SHqoZW3PK pic.twitter.com/ZpsyYcmcMC

— Reuters Top News (@Reuters) July 17, 2014

#Israel is set to invade #Gaza Strip from three fronts, making it the largest operation since the 2008 Gaza war http://t.co/buoZF9RnfE

— AJELive (@AJELive) July 17, 2014

Hamas spokesman to BBC: ‘start of ground offensive is uncalculated step w serious consequences… there will be more than one (Gilad) Shalit’

— Richard Colebourn (@rcolebourn) July 17, 2014

Our goal is to target Hamas’ tunnels that enable terrorists to infiltrate Israel and carry out attacks. This requires precise operations.

— IDF (@IDFSpokesperson) July 17, 2014

Foreign journalists in Gaza say IDF told them to remain in their hotels http://t.co/Dm527OZBX0

— Haaretz.com (@haaretzcom) July 17, 2014

Sound of Israeli drone over Gaza, via CTV live coverage.

— Andy Carvin (@acarvin) July 17, 2014

View of an explosion following an Israeli strike in Gaza City pic.twitter.com/1Rr5aEvSUt

— Agence France-Presse (@AFP) July 17, 2014

Power just went out. Gaza has gone dark. Israel continues to pound away with artillery.

— Sharif Kouddous (@sharifkouddous) July 17, 2014

Gaza friend disappears from chat. Returns. “Sorry, the Israeli gunboats were firing at the area, had to take refuge. What were you saying?”

— Erin Cunningham (@erinmcunningham) July 17, 2014

Hamas is firing illuminating mortar rounds in likely effort to identify possible Israeli troop incursions. #Gaza

— Daniel Nisman (@DannyNis) July 17, 2014

Plane apparently shot down in #ukraine, now #israel is sending ground troops into #gaza. Not a good day for the world nyti.ms/1p10P7Q

—
Dan Pulcrano (@pulcrano) July 17, 2014

US stocks stumble after the crash of a passenger jet in Ukraine and the start of a ground offensive in Gaza - @CNBC cnb.cx/1r6mf5e

—
Breaking News Money (@breakingmoney) July 17, 2014

LIVE STREAM OF GAZA. ustream.tv/OccupiedAir—
(@SullyR_) July 17, 2014

#Libya BREAKING: thousands of #Misrata militiamen invade #Tripoli! IS THE WHOLE WORLD GOING TO HELL TONIGHT?!? http://t.co/2mmxO3V1eT—
Thomas van Linge (@arabthomness) July 17, 2014

How Hard Is Shooting Down A Jetliner?

Elena Holodny talked to sources on the ground that confirm seeing a Buk missile system near the site of the crash. Alexis Madrigal explains that “it may sound implausible that a group of rebel fighters could take out a 777, but, given the right anti-aircraft weaponry, it is not”:

The Buk system was developed by the old Soviet Union. Its missile batteries are portable. The missiles themselves are radar guided. If one is in the area, and there are people who can operate it, it has the technical capability to shoot missiles far beyond 33,000 feet.

A passenger jet, in particular, would make an easy target, relative to a fighter jet or a rocket. They are big and they move in very predictable straight lines across the sky. Passenger planes emit a transponder signal, too, which could be used for tracking.

Linda Kinstler suspects that whoever “shot down the Malaysia Airlines flight MH17 over Donetsk on Thursday, killing all 295 people aboard, probably didn’t know what they were shooting at”:

It appears that the plane was taken down by a Soviet-era Buk missile system, which separatists claimed to have gotten their hands on when they gained control of a Ukrainian air defense base on June 29. The Buk is a Soviet-era air defense system used by both Ukrainian and Russian defense forces.

“When you’re sitting behind a radar screen of one of these things, there’s no way to tell what it is. With the Buk, there’s no way to distinguish between friendly and foe. You’re just going to take a shot at it,” says Raymond Finch, a Eurasian military analyst at the Foreign Military Studies Office. “If [the separatists] had reports that the Ukrainians were flying over their airspace, they would shoot. It begs the question of who is sitting behind the trigger. Are they highly trained? My guess is no they are not.”

It’s highly possible that the civilian airliner was mistaken for a Ukrainian Il-76 military transport plane, the same model that separatists in Luhansk shot down on June 14, killing all 49 people on board, mostly Ukrainian servicemen.

Tweet Of The Day

WTF? I just witnessed the start of a war via a tweet? “@nytimes Breaking News: Israel Begins Ground Assault in Gaza

nyti.ms/1kAgEOG”—
Saurav Shrestha (@zaurav) July 17, 2014