Andrew Sullivan's Blog, page 220
July 8, 2014
Cracking The Human Code
Matt Quirk chats with Matt Yglesias about his recent novel, The Directive, which involves breaking into the Fed. The premise:
[T]he idea is that, rather than a heist relying on brute force like blowing up the safe, or stealth like doing gymnastics through a laser field, you get in by abusing people’s trust. When I planned out the book, I actually talked to the red teams that work for government facilities to try to break into them, and most of their techniques are based on social engineering and getting people to trust them and let them in.
It could be something as simple as having two cups of coffee — like when I went into the elevator at Vox’s office, somebody saw I was busy and they just swiped me in because I look like I belong here. Another famous one is the smokers’ door. If you get to the smokers’ door before the smokers come out and you seem like you belong there, they’ll let you back in the building because people are very reluctant to challenge people.
To beat social engineering, you would have to challenge everyone, which just isn’t in our makeup. It works at the Pentagon, they have guys with podiums everywhere whose job is to challenge people. But otherwise if you turned around and slammed the door in someone’s face and said, “swipe in,” you would seem so rude, and that’s just so against human nature. That’s the trait that these guys use to break into places.



Yemeni Apparel
Responding to a recent post on Boushra Almutawakel’s “Mother, Daughter, Doll” photo series, a reader reminisces about mid-century Yemeni fashions:
I spent one of the best parts of my childhood living in Yemen in the early- to mid- 1960s, where my father worked at the US Consulate in Taiz. We had the opportunity to mingle in the streets, to shop at the souq (albeit with a guide/male domestic worker who negotiated with the vendors) and to see how Yemenis dressed. Yemeni women did not wear the hijab much at that time – the Yemeni counterpart, called a sharshaf, was generally made of lively colorful printed fabric, and many women did not cover their faces. A number of women wore colorfully embroidered dresses with a head scarf. Yemeni fabrics and clothing were exuberantly colorful, and while I couldn’t know the level of pressure within Yemeni society to conform to modesty requirements, it didn’t appear that there was an expectation that women should be made invisible. (From my Western eyes it did seem very puritanical, but I’d spent the prior two years living in Beirut, where Lebanese women wore bikinis on the beach.)
I’ve since learned from tourists who’ve visited Yemen that there’s now a great deal of pressure to completely cover not only women, but pre-pubertal girls, who in the past were not expected to dress more than modestly. It’s also sad to learn that the famous Yemeni textile industry has gone extinct, as fabrics and retail clothes now come almost exclusively from China. Compared with the problems of poverty, gender inequality and child marriage that Yemeni women and girls must deal with, fashions and textiles are much less important, but there’s no question that their oppression is reflected in their clothing.
(Photo: Yemeni women line-up outside a polling station to cast their vote in the presidential election in Sanaa on February 21, 2012 that brings an end to President Ali Abdullah Saleh’s 33-year hardline rule in Yemen. By Mohammed Huwais/AFP/Getty Images)



The Shocking Truth, Ctd
Recent research into solitary thinking found that a significant percentage of subjects preferred to suffer an electric shock rather than be alone with their thoughts. In a follow-up, Tom Jacobs notes that men were disproportionately likely to give themselves a jolt when faced with boredom:
Amazingly, 67 percent of the men – that is, 12 of 18 – gave themselves at least one shock during this period of thought and reflection. Only 25 percent of the women self-administered the jolt – still a high number when you consider there is physical discomfort involved. “The gender difference is probably due to the tendency of men to be higher in sensation-seeking,” the researchers write.
Meanwhile, Lauren Hitchings gives critics of the study a fair hearing:
[T]he results may have been partly down to the artificial set up. For a start, the very nature of letting your mind wander is that it drifts off on its own. Sitting in an experimental setting with an electric-shock generator might not be a fair representation. The set-up, especially the fact that participants were told to sit still, may have made people feel distracted and uncomfortable, says Jonathan Schooler, who studies the wandering mind at the University of California in Santa Barbara. But he does think there is a need to better understand those people who didn’t struggle with the task. After all, much has been made of the benefits of allowing the mind to wander – for instance, it can help to generate creative insights.
John Timmer zooms out:
[T]he results may indicate that, although we complain that we’re persecuted by things like smartphones and the constant barrage of e-mail, we actually may relish the distractions they bring. And, in terms of even broader perspectives, the study brings to mind a quote from Blaise Pascal: “All human evil comes from a single cause, man’s inability to sit still in a room.”



A Plankton Of Action
David Biello profiles Victor Smetacek, a marine biologist who devised a scheme to use plankton to help cool the earth:
Much of the oxygen we breathe comes from just one species of cyanobacteria, Prochlorococcus. This species was not even discovered until the 1980s: it is so tiny that millions can fit into a single drop of water and no one had produced a sieve small enough to catch it. The oxygen made by these tiny marine plants dwarfs that produced by the Amazon rainforest and the rest of the world’s woodlands combined. By taking in CO2 and exhaling oxygen, these tiny creatures serve as the planet’s lungs, whose steady breathing is limited only by nutrition.
Just as land plants need nitrogen, phosphorus and other elements to thrive, missing nutrients restrain planktons’ growth. Add enough of those missing elements – via dust blown off a continent or fertiliser run-off from farm fields – and the oceans will produce blooms that can be seen from space. Many of these plankton pastures are held back by iron shortages, especially in places that are largely cut off from continental dust and dirt. With access to more iron, the plankton would proliferate and siphon more and more planet-heating CO2 from the atmosphere.
In an experiment in 2004, Smetacek’s ideas worked. He and his crew “fertilized” part of the Southern Ocean, which surrounds Antarctica, and the plankton bloomed with remarkable results:
For two weeks, he was able to induce carbon to fall to the sea floor at the highest rate ever observed – some 34 times faster than normal. Just as marine and terrestrial plants sucked up CO2 from Carboniferous or Jurassic skies only to be buried and cooked with geologic heat and pressure into coal, gas and oil, these modern microbes helped pull back some of the CO2 released when we burned their ancestors to make electricity, or to propel hulks of metal over tarred roads. This marine tinkering could help buffer the ever-increasing concentrations of CO2 in the atmosphere, concentrations that have touched 400 parts-per-million, levels never before experienced in the hundreds of thousands of years that our clever species, Homo sapiens, has existed. Smetacek has given us the blueprints for a man-made portal for our pollution, a column of plankton running between the atmosphere and the deep ocean.
Further experiments, however, were halted due to protests from environmentalists.
(Image via the NASA Goddard Space Flight Center. This true-color image captures a phytoplankton bloom in the Ross Sea on January 22, 2011, as viewed by the Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS) on NASA’s Aqua satellite. Bright greens of plant-life have replaced the deep blues of open ocean water)



Why Pull The Trigger? Ctd
Adding to the theme of a recent thread, a reader wants to see more “feminists against dwelling on trauma, triggering”:
Here’s an essay by a famous queer feminist (Jack Halberstam, formerly Judith) that is getting a lot of positive attention on Facebook and Twitter that I think you should read. It’s an updated argument similar to the one Wendy Brown made in her very popular 1995 academic book, States of Injury, arguing that left identity politics should be very cautious about grounding itself in past harms. (We’ve been thinking about this for a long time, and the argument against framing ourselves as victims is a very well known and widely embraced one – on feminist terms – and has been at least as long as I’ve been in academia. I’m a tenured Women’s Studies professor at a major research university now.)
Anyway, I think it might make a difference to see that arguments like this are popular (though still contested, of course, which is fine) and that feminist and queer scholars have a long tradition of querying the political and theoretical consequences of claiming victimization.
From Halberstam’s essay:
Much of the recent discourse of offense and harm has focused on language, slang and naming. For example, controversies erupted in the last few months over the name of a longstanding nightclub in San Francisco:
“Trannyshack,” and arguments ensued about whether the word “tranny” should ever be used. These debates led some people to distraction, and legendary queer performer, Justin Vivian Bond, posted an open letter on her Facebook page telling readers and fans in no uncertain terms that she is “angered by this trifling bullshit.” Bond reminded readers that many people are “delighted to be trannies” and not delighted to be shamed into silence by the “word police.” Bond and others have also referred to the queer custom of re-appropriating terms of abuse and turning them into affectionate terms of endearment. When we obliterate terms like “tranny” in the quest for respectability and assimilation, we actually feed back into the very ideologies that produce the homo and trans phobia in the first place!
In The Life of Brian, Brian finally refuses to participate in the anti-Semitism that causes his mother to call him a “roman.” In a brave “coming out” speech, he says: “I’m not a roman mum, I’m a kike, a yid, a heebie, a hook-nose, I’m kosher mum, I’m a Red Sea pedestrian, and proud of it!



July 7, 2014
The Best Of The Dish Today
Screenshots from Fox News are often full of hathos:
Only 10 of us left. RT @HToneTastic: This is much better without context. http://t.co/Bu4rxyndaQ—
Nicholas Jackson (@nbj914) July 07, 2014
I’ve long had a simple frustration about national security policy. We debate the merits and otherwise of various anti-terrorism policies – spying, drones, invasions, occupations, torture, etc. – and yet we never really have a solid grip on just how dangerous the threat really is. We still think of it almost entirely in terms of 9/11, even though nothing has been attempted on anything like that scale since. In other words, we know the costs of our anti-terror policies, but we really don’t have much of a grip on the benefits – i.e. real dangers really averted. And so it’s always a relief when someone who has had access to all the necessarily secret intelligence on Islamist terror can give us a better sense of what we’re grappling with. And along comes the former head of MI6 in Britain, Richard Dearlove, telling us this:
He told an audience in London on Monday there had been a fundamental change in the nature of Islamist extremism since the Arab spring. It had created a major political problem in the Middle East but the west, including Britain, was only “marginally affected”. Unlike the threat posed by al-Qaida before and in the aftermath of the 9/11 attacks 13 years ago, the west was not the main target of the radical fundamentalism that created Isis, (the Islamic State in Iraq and the Levant), Dearlove said.
But the premise of the assumption that we somehow have to reinsert ourselves into the Iraq implosion and Syrian civil war is that we will be threatened if we don’t. The Cheneys have even raised the specter of nuclear Armageddon. But what if the most effective way to make ourselves a target in an otherwise distant Muslim sectarian and regional war is to involve ourselves directly in it? What if ignoring it, or keeping a very long distance, is actually the best way to defeat Islamist terror? This isn’t a matter of hawks or doves; it’s about what is the most effective response to specific threats - threats that have and will evolve and change over time. And that doesn’t just apply to the governments in the West; it should also apply to the media:
[Dearlove] made it clear he believed the way the British government and the media were giving the extremists the “oxygen of publicity” was counter-productive. The media were making monsters of “misguided young men, rather pathetic figures” who were getting coverage “more than their wildest dreams”, said Dearlove, adding: “It is surely better to ignore them.”
Advice not from a peacenik, but from a man more directly exposed to the real threat than almost anyone else.
Today, we wrapped up some loose and troubling ends from the Hobby Lobby case; we explored the growing evidence behind the notion of a continuous spectrum of consciousness between humans and other animals; we defended the anti-institutional faith of the Millennial generation; and speculated about the demise of the few lesbian bars left in America.
The most popular post of the day was “The Tears Of An Elephant“, followed by “Map of the Day” on state-by-state painkiller prescriptions in the US.
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. 21 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. One writes:
I’m a founding subscriber who hasn’t re-upped since things lapsed. Part laziness, part selfishness. Also, interestingly, I totally rely on the paywall pop-up to let me know “Ok, that’s enough Dish for today, get back to work/life/whatever.” So I’m re-subscribing, but I’m going to try really hard not to ever log in. I need that pop-up to keep the balance.
With that said, your recent threads on adver-journalism have spurred me to chip in $30. In this society we vote with our dollars. And as they say, you’re either your part of the solution, or part of the problem. Here’s to keeping things honest.
Join him and subscribe instantly here. And see you in the morning.



ISIS’s “Mission Accomplished” Moment
Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi ridiculed for wearing expensive wristwatch during public address fw.to/0o5OaCl http://t.co/mA2MWHlWAR—
The Telegraph (@Telegraph) July 06, 2014
That’s how Jennifer Keister characterizes the declaration of the so-called Islamic State. Good luck, she says, finding skilled technocrats to govern the “caliphate”:
As the BBC’s Jim Muir notes, “if the caliphate project is to take root, it will need administrators and experts in many fields, whom Abu Bakr al Baghdadi is clearly hoping will flood to heed his call.” ISIS has demonstrated some capacity to do this in Syrian cities like Raqqa, where observers note its extensive and coercive reach into residents’ lives. But as any administrator will tell you, competent technocrats are not necessarily easy to come by. For ISIS, much may depend on how its declaration of the caliphate is taken among well-qualified individuals elsewhere, and the group’s willingness to engage in the compromise and politicking to build alliances. It is possible well-qualified personnel may find ISIS’s announcement attractive (augmented by the group’s ability to pay them, at least for now). But such individuals often bring with them their own political and religious preferences. If ISIS refuses to compromise, it will be fishing for administrators in a doubly shallow pool of those with sufficient competence and affinity for its particular ideological brand. Moreover, if ISIS does attract quality personnel, using them for administrative demands means the group cannot simultaneously use their skills in leading or planning attacks to expand or defend ISIS territory.
Thomas Hegghammer analyzes the Islamic State’s long-term position:
Judged by the standards of transnational jihadi groups, ISIS is doing exceptionally well. Never before has an Islamist group this radical had so much territory, so much money, and so many Western recruits. Even if ISIS was literally decimated—that is, reduced to a tenth of its current size—it would still be one of the largest jihadi groups in the world. However, by the standards of national insurgencies, ISIS is in some trouble.
Further expansion—to Baghdad, Saudi Arabia, or Jordan—is highly unlikely given the obstacles in their way. They may preserve much of their territorial gains in Iraq in the next few months, but within a year the Iraqi government should, with U.S. assistance, be able to push them back to where they were in early 2014. In the longer term, ISIS may face governance strain in its remaining areas as locals tire of strict moral policing and economic stagnation. In addition, they face a broad alliance of intelligence services that knows more and more about them. Three years from now, ISIS will probably be substantially weaker than it is today, but for reasons other than the caliphate declaration.
The jihadis’ targeting of shrines, Juan Cole adds, is threatening to undermine its popular support:
Although the so-called “Islamic State” has destroyed several Sunni, Sufi and Shiite shrines and places of worship in the past month, probably the most significant is the tomb of medieval saint Ahmad al-Rifa`i (d. 1183 AD). The Rifa`i Sufi order claims him as its founder. Sufis practice meditation and chanting and they seek mystical union with God. There are plenty of Rifa`is in Syria and the order is popular in Egypt, and still has adherents throughout the Muslim world,from Bosnia to Gujarat. IS is not making a good reputation for itself in most of the Sunni world, where there is still respect for mystics like Rifa`i. One of its allies of convenience is the Naqshbandi Sufi order in Mosul, members of which won’t be happy about all this shrine-bashing.



Grounded In Fact
Sources: 63 women, girls escape Boko Haram. Over 200 schoolgirls taken in April still believed to be with group. cnn.it/VRFjsH—
CNN Breaking News (@cnnbrk) July 07, 2014
Tim Allen, a professor at the London School of Economics, specializes in researching ethnic conflict, forced migration, and development aid. In an interview, he explains why in-person fieldwork is so crucial to understanding international development efforts. He takes Uganda’s Lord’s Resistance Army as an example:
The external perception is that this is a mad group abducting children, not unlike Boko Haram who may well have learnt some of their methodology from the LRA. Actually, the vast majority of those abducted are young adults who might be trained to fight. There was also an interest in taking prepubescent girls because they were thought not to be HIV positive. Those girls were married, using local idiom, to commanders and were not raped indiscriminately. The most disturbing thing is that most of them were reasonably positive about the experience.
Of course some were severely traumatised, but the idea of abducting women for marriage has deep roots in this society. Many women talk about having been captured by their husbands. I’m not excusing this in any way, but they take a local custom of abducting women into marriage and play upon it. Also, the effects of 19th-century slave-raiding, involving large-scale abductions, still resonate here. Working at the local level reveals all sorts of things.
Previous Dish on the LRA here, here, and here.



Echoes Of Emerson
Joshua Ferris shares why he came to prefer the “historically informed, politically conscious, biographically interrogating, socially indicting, and existentially preoccupied” work of Philip Roth to the “idiosyncratic, heightened, elaborately constructed worlds” of Nabokov:
You can hear [a] great American thinker in the rhythms and repetitions of Roth’s prose:
Ralph Waldo Emerson. “I appeal from your customs,” Emerson wrote in “Self-Reliance,” “I must be myself. I cannot break myself any longer for you, or you. If you can love me for what I am, we shall be happier. If you cannot, I will still seek to deserve that you should. I must be myself.”
With uncommon felicity and characteristic lucidity, Roth demonstrates the complex, often fatal consequences of living according to Emerson’s individualist creed. That creed was given legal shelter by the founding fathers, and two and a quarter centuries later, its major dramaturge wrote The Human Stain. Roth dramatizes better than anyone, more so even than Whitman, how Emerson’s elliptical and oracular essays might play out in real life, the consummations and ravages of its single-minded pursuit.
It’s this that I turn to Roth for, which I do now more than Nabokov: for his urgency and relevance, for his argumentation and applicability. He is not as high-minded, nor as metaphysical, nor as sensuous or poetical. But he’s furthering a native tradition of thought that extends through time to this country’s deepest political impulse, namely, the imperial inviolability of the person. There is no higher art than that.
Previous Dish on Roth here, here, and here.
(Photo via Wiki)



A Switch For Consciousness
Scientists seem to have discovered one:
In a [new study], Mohamad Koubeissi at the George Washington University in Washington DC and his colleagues describe how they managed to switch a woman’s consciousness off and on by stimulating her claustrum. The woman has epilepsy so the team were using deep brain electrodes to record signals from different brain regions to work out where her seizures originate. One electrode was positioned next to the claustrum, an area that had never been stimulated before.
When the team zapped the area with high frequency electrical impulses, the woman lost consciousness. She stopped reading and stared blankly into space, she didn’t respond to auditory or visual commands and her breathing slowed. As soon as the stimulation stopped, she immediately regained consciousness with no memory of the event. The same thing happened every time the area was stimulated during two days of experiments (Epilepsy and Behavior, doi.org/tgn).



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