Andrew Sullivan's Blog, page 224

A Water War In The Desert, Ctd

John Vidal argues that “the outcome of the Iraq and Syrian conflicts may rest on who controls the region’s dwindling water supplies”:

“Rebel forces are targeting water installations to cut off supplies to the largely Shia south of Iraq,” says Matthew Machowski, a Middle East security researcher at the UK houses of parliament and Queen Mary University of London. “It is already being used as an instrument of war by all sides. One could claim that controlling water resources in Iraq is even more important than controlling the oil refineries, especially in summer. Control of the water supply is fundamentally important. Cut it off and you create great sanitation and health crises,” he said[.]

Isis now controls the Samarra barrage west of Baghdad on the River Tigris and areas around the giant Mosul Dam, higher up on the same river. Because much of Kurdistan depends on the dam, it is strongly defended by Kurdish peshmerga forces and is unlikely to fall without a fierce fight, says Machowski. Last week Iraqi troops were rushed to defend the massive 8km-long Haditha Dam and its hydroelectrical works on the Euphrates to stop it falling into the hands of Isis forces. Were the dam to fall, say analysts, Isis would control much of Iraq’s electricity and the rebels might fatally tighten their grip on Baghdad.

Previous Dish on the water angle of the Iraq conflict here.

Why Many Liberals Are On Edge Over Hobby Lobby

The pro-life movement is surging at the state level:

Monday’s Hobby Lobby decision is part of a deeper trend: even as Obamacare worked to expand access to contraceptives, decisions by both the courts and state governments have left American women with less access to reproductive health care than they did four years ago. Since 2010, states have moved aggressively to restrict access to abortion and taken new steps to defund family planning programs. Advocates on both sides of the issue describe the wave of changes as unprecedented.

States passed a record 205 abortion restrictions between 2011 and 2013, more than the entire 30 years prior. … In Texas, the number of abortion clinics has shrunk by half, from 40 to 20, since 2011. Arizona had 19 abortion providers in 2010; now it has seven. One clinic that shuttered posted a message on its website, directing clients go to the nearest abortion provider, in Houston, 100 miles away.

Many of those restrictions were squarely firing back at the Affordable Care Act. Twenty-five states, for example, now limit or ban abortion coverage in Obamacare’s new insurance markets. None of those laws existed before health reform.

Face Of The Day

Chinese Muslims of the Hui ethnic minority eat watermelon as they break fast during the holy fasting month of Ramadan at the historic Niujie Mosque in Beijing on July 3, 2014. The Hui Muslim community, which numbers more than an estimated 10 million throughout the country, is predominantly Chinese-speaking. Muslims around the world are marking Ramadan, where the devout fast from dawn until dusk, and is a time of fasting, prayer and charitable giving. By Kevin Frayer/Getty Images.

This Is A Refugee Crisis, Ctd

A reader testifies to the truth of that statement:

I am a leader in my Catholic parish’s decades-old sister parish relationship with a church in San Salvador. I have been visiting regularly since 2009. In these five years, the level of violence and insecurity has increased dramatically. Our parish supports their parish school and our families sponsor about 45 kids there. We measure this crisis in the impact on these kids, not on partisan hyperbole. Here are some of the concrete situations we’ve encountered:

• A teenager’s mom is killed in front of her, because the mom can’t pay extortion money to the gang. The teenager has dropped out of school because she needs to support the rest of her family.

• Half of the older boys in the program can no longer attend the weekend enrichment programs because they have to cross a newly shifting gang boundary due to a split in the local Calle 18 “chapter”. Before, they knew how to navigate between MS-13 and Calle 18. Now, who knows? They stay in their one-room shacks in sweltering heat as adolescence passes them by.

• Kids from Calle 18 are sent to a neighborhood controlled by MS-13 on a mission to beat up someone (doesn’t matter who really). They choose a beloved social worker who is one of the few responsible father figures in the neighborhood.

• A young nun gives presentations on human trafficking and the reality of immigration. She tells adolescents that there is a really high risk of rape. They tell her, “I’ve already been raped by (my father; the police; the gangs). What do I have to lose?” She tells them about dying of thirst in the desert. They tell her about death in their neighborhood because of lack of clean water.

The boys and girls on the border are children fleeing for their lives. They are not economic migrants.

Mental Health Break

More like Metal Health Break:

Toxic Butts, Ctd

A reader notes an unintended consequence of smoking bans:

It’s not hard to determine why there are more cigarette butts on the sidewalks than ever before. Thanks to the smoking bans in virtually all work places, restaurants and most bars, there are no more ashtrays available outside one’s home. So where else can that butt land? You certainly don’t want a smoldering cigarette butt in a garbage can. That’s a recipe for fire. And telling smokers, “Well, just don’t smoke until you get home” is simply unrealistic given the nature of nicotine addiction.

Update from a reader:

When I was in the Peace Corps my roommate smoked. One day we were standing outside and I noticed he finished a cigarette and wiggled the end of the filter between his fingers until the last bit of tobacco and rolling paper fell off. He then put the filter in his pocket. He did a lot of hiking and camping and didn’t like littering the place with stuff that would just sit there forever.

So there is one answer to your reader. Is it convenient? Probably not, but you know there are a lot of things that go along with this addiction. Compared to the inconvenience of lung cancer, emphysema, and heart disease, I don’t think storing the butts in your pocket until you can get to a trashcan is that much of a burden.

Another adds, “In the army we called this field stripping a cigarette.”

Good Luck Finding A Lesbian Bar In Portland

Alexis Clements ponders the decline of America’s “lesbian spaces”:

Two of the most stark examples are bars and feminist bookstores.

In the 1990s, there were literally 100 feminist bookstores in the U.S. Today there are 14. So in 20 years, they’ve almost disappeared. Then if you start to do any kind of research about lesbian bars, you see that they are also disappearing. Philly lost two of them. Chicago lost one. Portland doesn’t have one anymore. West Hollywood – one of the places many people consider to be one of the gayest areas in the United States – doesn’t have a lesbian bar anymore, and it had one of the oldest, the Palms. That’s gone now. …

A lot of people say, “Oh, well, there’s gay marriage now, so essentially queer people can assimilate into the larger culture; we don’t need places to go.” But for both political and romantic reasons, we still need to be able to spend time with people who we want to partner with or who we want to engage in political activities with. Those two things are in many ways core to a lot of lesbian and queer communities. Not every lesbian is a political activist, and not every political activist is queer, but the collision of politics and lesbian identity is longstanding and a very rich and important history.

Update from a reader:

I think that there are fewer lesbian bars because lesbians are much less at war, or at least high tension with straight men.

I’ve lived in Berkeley/Oakland since 1963, which has long been the lesbian’s lower profile mirror to San Francisco’s gay male community. In the ’70s through ’90s, the tough-ass-dyke-man-hater was a local fixture. At some point there was a shift, and the poster person for the lesbian community became much younger and less confrontive. Still tough, but not defined by anger towards males. This new model is also happy to show off her beauty, and less likely to buy into butch/femme sterotypes. I think that this generation doesn’t want to be beholden to a way that they are “supposed” to act.

Perhaps lesbian bars represent the “old” angry worldview. How does the saying go? “Living well is the best revenge”? From my bi-male standpoint, it looks like this generation’s largely having a great time of it, and in that sense is exacting their revenge quite well.

But I’d really like to hear from your lesbian readership. It’s a good question.

The Arab Spring Is Still A Thing?

Summing up the argument of his latest book, The New Arabs, Juan Cole hums a hopeful tune about the long-term fate of the youth-driven uprisings in the Middle East:

The generation of young Arabs who made the revolutions that led to the unrest and civil wars of the present is in fact distinctive — substantially more urban, literate, media-savvy, and wired than its parents and grandparents.  It’s also somewhat less religiously observant, though still deeply polarized between nationalists and devotees of political Islam. And keep in mind that the median age of the 370 million Arabs on this planet is only 24, about half that of graying Japan or Germany.  While India and Indonesia also have big youth bulges, Arab youth suffer disproportionately from the low rates of investment in their countries and staggeringly high unemployment rates.  They are, that is, primed for action. …

[M]any of the millennial activists who briefly turned the Arab world upside down and provoked so many changes are putting their energies into non-governmental organizations, thousands of which have flowered, barely noticed, in countries that once suffered from one-party rule.  In this way, they are learning valuable organizational skills that — count on it — will one day be applied to politics.  Others continue to coordinate with labor unions to promote the welfare of the working classes.  Their dislike of nepotism, narrow cliques, and ethnic or sectarian rule has already had a lasting impact on the politics of the Arab world.  So don’t for a second think that the Arab Spring is over, no matter the news from Libya, Egypt, Iraq, or elsewhere.

Meanwhile, in an interview, Cole notes that the Bush-era neocons may indeed have helped spread democracy in the Middle East – just in the totally opposite way they intended:

To the casual observer, the Arab Spring seemed to come from nowhere. It was an extemporaneous uprising triggered by a Tunisian street vendor who set himself on fire—the proverbial straw that broke the camel’s back. In talking to many of the activists, Cole came to see that organized protests over the invasion of Iraq and the 2008 Israel-Gaza conflict also played a major role. Just as indispensable were a decade’s worth of labor organizing over economic issues.

“In some ways, it was the invasion of Iraq that often produced the first big street demonstrations that these young people were involved in,” explains Cole. “But then the Gaza War in 2008-9—that surprised me in the sense that it seems to have been a really big rallying point for the Tunisian youth.”

(Photo: Bahrainis protest against the government and call for the release of political prisoners on June 20, 2014. By Hussain Albahrani/Pacific Press/LightRocket via Getty Images)

Why Not Just Provide The Pill Over The Counter? Ctd

A reader writes:

I have no problem with forms of the birth control pill being made an over-the-counter drug. Women are intelligent beings who can figure out how to use these drugs correctly, and the side effects from using birth control pills are less severe than those of other drugs currently sold over-the-counter.

That said, just selling a birth control pill over the counter wouldn’t make up for losing contraceptive coverage from health insurance. An IUD can cost upwards of $1,000 upfront for the exam and insertion. That’s a big chunk of change that many women can’t save up for. It also happens to be one of the most reliable forms of birth control because women don’t have to take a pill at the exact same time every day; once it’s in, you can largely forget about it until you want to take it out.

So pushing birth control as an OTC drug does not eliminate the need for women to have contraceptive methods covered on their health insurance.

Another speaks from personal experience to make the case “why birth control pills should not be sold over-the-counter”:

I took the pill on and off for about ten years when I was in my late teens and 20s. At first, it was prescribed by a general practitioner, and then by an elderly OB/GYN. After I married, I moved to Connecticut and needed to find a new OB. I went with the closest provider listed in my insurance booklet, which turned out to be a Planned Parenthood.

I have a history of migraine with aura.

I don’t get severe migraines as these things go, and I don’t get them frequently. Like 1/3 of migraine sufferers, however, I get weird symptoms that precede the headache – mine are visual and include flashes and zigzags of light, which is typical. According to a quick google search, 5-10% of women of childbearing age have migraine with aura, so this is hardly an exotic diagnosis.

The doctor at Planned Parenthood took the time to review my medical history. She started asking probing questions about having checked the box for “migraines” on my medical history form, which seemed bizarre to me. And then she told me she would not be renewing my prescription for the pill. While the absolute risk is still comparatively low, women who have a history of migraine with aura have a greatly increased risk of stroke if they take the combined pill (meaning the pill with both estrogen and progesterone; the vast majority of women on the pill take the combined pill).

I thought she was crazy until I went home and googled it, and she was absolutely correct. The WHO unequivocally states that women with a history of migraine with aura shouldn’t take the combined pill. Women with a history of migraine with aura can safely take progesterone-only versions of the pill, but those are less effective.

The pill is a drug. Drugs have side effects and risks. These risks are greater for some of us than others. When a drug is sold over the counter, people tend to assume the risks are minimal, and with the pill, this isn’t the case.

The Jews Of Shanghai

Julian Gewirtz and James McAuley explore the history of the city’s Jewish community:

As early as 1845, when Shanghai was forcibly opened to foreign trade under the unequal treaties that concluded the Opium Wars, a network of prominent Sephardic Jewish merchant families—the Kadoories, the Hardoons, the Ezras, the Nissims, the Abrahams, the Gubbays, and, most prominently, the Sassoons—took root in the city and eventually joined the ranks of its Western occupying elite.

Small but powerful, this Sephardic merchant class financed many of the Beaux Arts mansions along the stately Bund, Shanghai’s version of Vienna’s Ringstrasse. Completed in 1929, Victor Sassoon’s Cathay Hotel—today the Peace Hotel—was the Bund’s crown jewel, the center of their cosmopolitan social world. In that sense, much of what survives today from prewar, European Shanghai is an artifact of Jewish Shanghai. When Nazi refugees arrived in the mid-’30s, Shanghai’s existing Jewish community became even more visible, swelling in size to nearly 30,000.

It was in this period of traumatic conflict—in Europe and in Asia—that Chinese leaders across the ideological spectrum, relying on stereotype but not necessarily on a Western anti-Semitic vocabulary, began to discuss the Jews as a people worthy of special attention.

The association between Jews and prosperity survives in China today:

Whether this association is philo-Semitic in its enthusiasm or anti-Semitic in its reliance on caricature is difficult to say, perhaps because the Chinese popular imagination seems to have imbued a historically negative Western stereotype with a decidedly positive meaning. At the Shanghai Jewish Refugees Museum, which commemorates the city’s hospitality during World War II, an elderly Shanghai native working as a security guard recalled to us that he had known what Jews were as he was growing up because “Jews lived in Shanghai” and “Jews built the Peace Hotel.” He grinned broadly. “We say that a person who is very shrewd is ‘like a Jew.’” A compliment? At least in Shanghai.

(Photo: The Sephardi Chief Rabbi of Israel, Rabbi Shlomo Amar (C) prays with a group of Orthodox Jews on June 12, 2006 during a tour of the historic Ohel Rachel synagogue which was built in 1920 during the period of the first wave of Jewish migration to Shanghai. The Chief Rabbi is in China to meet government leaders in Shanghai and Beijing and toured the synagogue which is only open to the Jewish community during special religious occassions and used to house up to 700 devotee’s in the period 1920 – 1949 when many Jews sought refuge in Shanghai. By Mark Ralston/AFP/Getty Images)