Andrew Sullivan's Blog, page 307

The Annexation of Eastern Ukraine, Ctd

Adam Taylor uses these maps to explain why Donetsk won’t be such an easy grab for Russia as Crimea was:

That first map is one good reason to doubt the popular support of the “Donetsk People’s Republic,” but the other shows you something else: why Ukraine would care so much about it. The oblast, and in particular its namesake city, are renowned as the economic backbone of Ukraine for their coal mines and steel production (even if the truth about Donetsk’s economic strength may not be so rosy).

Combined, these two maps paint a good picture of why the Ukrainian government seems willing to take a stricter line on Donetsk than it did with Crimea. But they also paint a picture of why Russia’s tactic could be different, too: Less a simple act of annexation, and more an act of provocation.

Ambinder credits Moscow for stirring up resistance in Ukraine’s eastern provinces:

The “resistance” is artificial, of course.

People power in the late 20th and early 21st centuries has been generated more often than not by foreign governments that have their own agendas, and not by indigenous forces. The U.S. national security establishment understands this, because they designed the template the Russians are using. From the first CIA officers who toppled Mohammed Mossagdeh in 1953, to clandestine efforts to prop up and then discredit Asian governments during the Kennedy administration, to the Cuban exiles trained by the CIA to overthrow Fidel Castro, to efforts to overthrow the Taliban in Afghanistan after the September 11th terrorist attacks, to the “indigenous” American-backed Iraqis who took control after the war — the playbook is very familiar. …

The hallmarks of non-linear warfare are operational confusion, mistaken identity, and a sense of brittleness and crisis. Eventually, the combination of agents provocateurs and real protesters blend together. In Ukraine, Putin has already won that war.

Ioffe marvels at Putin’s ability to make his meddling appear local in origin:

One strange by-product of Russia’s tactics is the Kremlin’s deftness in completely reappropriating certain terms, of inverting and perverting them. Just look at the images of the protests in Luhansk and Kharkiv, and you’d be forgiven for thinking you were looking at images of Kiev’s EuroMaidan. Yet the former were whipped up [by] Russia, whereas the latter was a largely grassroots movement. As a result, because the hand of Moscow is so obvious in east Ukraine’s protests, the independence of the protesters in Kiev comes under suspicion: were they too organized externally, perhaps in the West? More simply, it gives the two movements equal moral weight, which Russian journalist Oleg Kashin called a “mocking parody of the Maidan.”

Bershidsky thinks Ukrainian oligarch Rinat Akhmetov might be the best hope for averting a crisis:

The Russian-speaking industrialist, who many Ukrainians think is unofficially behind the pro-Russian protests in Donetsk, has actually played a complex role. In the wee hours of Tuesday, the usually reclusive Akhmetov came out to speak with protesters in Donetsk, cursing in Russian and explaining to protesters that he felt for them but that “Donbass is Ukraine.” Akhmetov promised government forces would not storm the administration building and took some activists for talks with a deputy prime minister sent from Kiev. …

The billionaire, who is still a member of the Regions Party, until recently headed by deposed President Viktor Yanukovych, wants broader autonomy for his home region, something in which Russia supports him and something the Ukrainian government is loath to grant. “Federalization” is a curse word in Kiev, because it would allow Moscow to keep the political situation unstable by making separate deals with corrupt local elites. Making concessions to people like Akhmetov, however, might be the only way to avoid the much less desirable outcome of outright war.

Recent Dish on the developments in Eastern Ukraine here and here.

The Best Of The Dish Today

The most trafficked post of the day remained The Quality Of Mercy; followed by the ever-viral Hounding Of A Heretic. Other popular posts on social media included my long followup to The Quality Of Mercy, a post about the perils of urban sprawl, and a final roundup of reader emails in the highly-charged thread, A Nation Defined By White Supremacy? You can comment on the posts at our Facebook page. See what people are saying about @sullydish here.

Today’s window view from Doha was especially vibrant, and the window contest was easy enough for 100 correct entries (a few dozen of which are featured in the composite seen above).  This month’s book club selection, How Jesus Became God, can be purchased here.

24 more readers became subscribers today, including not one but two readers who set their price at $4.20/month, so today’s mental health break is hereby dedicated to them. The minimum price for a Dish subscription, however, is only $1.99/month or $19.99/year. Thanks to the 28,235 of you currently aboard; you keep this ad-free site up and running.

And see you in the morning.

Ask Dayo Olopade Anything: Trimming The Economic Fat

In the next video from the Nigerian-American author of The Bright Continent, she details how Africans often turn scarcity into an advantage:

To further illustrate those points, she shares the story of a particularly resourceful project in Malawi that would put many American hospitals to shame:

Compare that with a Japanese toilet product that Dayo cited in her recent NYT op-ed on lean economies vs fat economies:

The story of Toto, a Japanese company that created the Otohime, or “Sound Princess,” illustrates the great divide. Now installed in thousands of restroom stalls across Japan, the device mimics the sound of flushing water. The Sound Princess solved a problem of affluence: women were continuously flushing public toilets to mask the sounds that come with using them. Toto’s innovation saves them the embarrassment. The portable, purse-friendly version is a best-selling consumer product in Japan.

In a lean economy, toilet-related innovation looks a lot different. In the densest areas of African cities, one time-honored form of waste disposal is the “flying toilet”:

bundling refuse into a plastic bag and chucking it as far as possible. It’s understandable: Most people in Africa’s informal settlements lack the basic dignity of modern sanitation. Waste-contaminated water breeds disease, and fear of crime keeps many from using public toilets at night. The “flying toilet” is a stopgap solution — with obvious drawbacks.

The Umande Trust, a community organization in Kenya, came up with a better plan. They helped build a massive cylindrical biodigester that composts the output of a fleet of toilets. Umande charges a few pennies per use, making about $400 per month. Better yet, the system doesn’t drain the water supply like traditional flush toilets, and it creates biogas that powers a community center and heats water for the 400 residents who also shower there every day.

The Sound Princess represents a vanity innovation for the top of the pyramid, where you can also find software that will allow you to find a parking spot or a date, to “farm” fake digital crops, to shake your iPhone to simulate the sound of a whip. They solve problems that arise when the basics are taken care of. But when the status quo is a flying toilet, anything goes. Lean economies — however challenged they might appear — translate minimal resources into maximum social impact.

In another followup on the lean/fat dynamic, Dayo reflects on the consumption bloat often found in the West:

The Bright Continent: Breaking Rules and Making Change in Modern Africa can be purchased here. Dayo’s previous videos are here.

(Archive)

The Freedom Of Fiction

Anne K. Yoder interviewed Adam Klein about his story collection, The Gifts of the State: An Anthology of New Afghan Writing, which he developed while teaching writing workshops in Kabul:

Q: You write in your introduction: “Stories keep silence and amnesia from rising like dust and obliterating life as we know it.” Reading this anthology made me realize anew how we as a nation can remain so ignorant of another culture’s narratives despite its constant presence in our newsfeed and our military presence on their soil. Given this desire to carry these voices across cultures, what was the impulse to tell fictional stories as opposed to memoir or personal accounts? Is there a greater freedom that fiction allows?

AK: Well, of course we’ve lost our own narrative, or greatly perverted it. I find American amnesia a dangerous tragedy. Guantanamo, Vietnam, our own history of slavery and systemic racism and inequality, our relationship to immigrants, to the Islamic world, and to our own aggression — these often-dishonest military interventions disappoint me. I don’t mean this as a purely liberal critique of American injustice. … I’m deeply concerned by the loss of authentic voices, investigatory voices in our leadership. …

I don’t think Afghanistan is the only country that must use fiction to reconstruct both memory and future.

Every country has a responsibility to counter the extremes of its ideological spectrum. So why did I collect fiction? It allows for the speculative, it encourages empathy, and it doesn’t limit a writer exclusively to what they believe they know. I love memoir and creative nonfiction, but in a country that has been riven by war, the narratives might not just need to be recalled, but recast, and re-imagined. I have tremendous faith in fiction and significantly less faith in memory.

In another piece exploring the literature of Afghanistan, Jay Deshpande praises I Am the Beggar of the World, a compilation of landays – traditional two-line poems – by contemporary Afghan women:

Principally at stake in I Am the Beggar is the understanding that, in a corner of the world far from the western imagination, poetry may stand for something vibrant, illicit, honest, and subversive. I Am the Beggar collects landays because they are reportorial artifacts, documenting the voices that remain silenced and sequestered in Afghanistan today. Importantly, it presents landays as a monument of feminism, enacting the “cloak-and-dagger dance around honor” that governs Afghan women’s lives.

Don’t shout, my love, my father isn’t giving me to you.

Don’t shame me in the busy street by crying out, “I’ll die for you.”

My darling, you are just like America!

You are guilty; I apologize.

I Am the Beggar groups landays by theme, crosscut with Griswold’s commentaries and Murphy’s photographs. The poems run the gamut: here are young lovers, bawdy jokesters, sexual challengers, and proud sisters. Some speak of nationalism, grief, or anger at the unfairness of the world. In total, the landays invoke a full community of female experience. And, as the poems are essentially author-less, each one carries within it the voices of hundreds of Pashtun women.

A recent series of landays was featured on the Dish here.

Our Mystery Ancestors

Michael Marshall describes how the Denisovans – a now-extinct group of hominids known only through a single fragment of bone and a handful of teeth – may have colonized more of the globe than the Neanderthals:

When Pääbo and Reich published the first Neanderthal genome, the big news was that on average 1.7 per cent of the DNA in modern people other than Africans comes from Neanderthals. In other words, our ancestors interbred. Did they also interbreed with Denisovans? To find out, the geneticists looked at the few parts of the genome that vary from person to person, searching for individuals who carry Denisovan versions of these sections. Most of the people the sampled had no sign of Denisovan DNA, even if they were from mainland Asia, where our ancestors might have been expected to run into Denisovans. However, as part of the Neanderthal study, the researchers had sequenced the genome of someone from Papua New Guinea. “That was a fortuitous choice,” says Reich. “When you analysed the Papuan sequence, bang: you got this huge signal.” More comparisons showed that other Melanesian people also carried Denisovan DNA, with an average 4.8 per cent of their genome coming from Denisovans.

Clearly interbreeding did occur. But if Denisovans lived in southern Siberia, how on earth did their DNA wind up in Melanesia, thousands of kilometres away across open sea? The most obvious explanation is also the most startling: Denisovans ranged over a vast swathe of mainland Asia and also crossed the sea to Indonesia or the Philippines. That means they had a bigger range than the Neanderthals.

Previous Dish on the Denisovans here and here.

Face Of The Day

An Indian artist dressed as the Hindu goddess Kali participates in a procession to celebrate the Ram Navami festival in Allahabad on April 8, 2014. Hindu devotees across India celebrate the festival of Ram Navami, the birth anniversary of Lord Rama, which also marks the end of the nine-day long fasting and Navaratri festival. By Sanjay Kanojia/AFP/Getty Images.

Hungary’s Unappetizing Election

Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán won re-election on Sunday in a vote widely criticized as unfair. Bershidsky argues Hungary may be the EU’s only dictatorship:

Orban has a lot in common with Russia’s Vladimir Putin and Turkey’s Recep Tayyip Erdogan. He has pushed through constitutional changes outlawing gay marriage and proclaiming Christianity’s special role as a cornerstone of Hungarian statehood. He fans the flames of Hungarian nationalism, issuing Hungarian passports to ethnic Hungarians living in neighboring countries and, in a recent speech, calling Serbian and Romanian towns by their Hungarian names. …

His approach to elections flies in the face of European ideals of fairness. Before Sunday’s election, the parliament, dominated by his Fidesz party, gerrymandered the constituencies to make sure its biggest rival, the Social Democrats, could not win. Fidesz also effectively controlled outdoor advertising, the only channel for campaign ads after the constitutional amendments.

But Orbán’s victory isn’t the worst news, Kirchick explains:

[T]he real news out of Hungary is the continued rise of Jobbik, a neo-fascist movement that gained 21 percent at the polls. By means of comparison, consider that Fidesz earned 630,000 fewer votes this election than it did four years ago, while Jobbik picked up 130,000.

The party, which rails against “Gypsy crime” and promotes Jewish conspiracy theories, shocked observers four years ago when it entered parliament for the first time with 16 percent of the national tally. Due to infighting amongst the country’s left and liberal opposition, which unified solely for the purpose of the election and will now have to divide its 38 seats among five separate parties, Jobbik is now likely to be the second largest parliamentary bloc, even though Hungary’s voters are in a much less revolutionary mood now than they were four years ago.

Matthew Feeney is dismayed:

Last year, Jobbik supported the building of a statue of Miklós Horthy, the Hungarian wartime leader and Hitler ally who passed a range of anti-Semitic laws and allowed hundreds of thousands of Hungarian Jews to be sent to Auschwitz. Protesters, some of whom wore yellow stars, clashed with supporters of the statue when it was presented.

… It is a sad reality that over 60 percent of Hungarians who voted in yesterday’s election backed either a revolting antisemitic party or a party led by a man who has overseen some very worrying erosions of personal liberties.

Engagement Works

A new study finds that people opposed to marriage equality shift dramatically when they are engaged in argument – especially when a gay person does the engagement. A better approach, I’d say, than writing them all off as bigots.

Sizing Up The Pay Gap

To mark “Equal Pay Day,” Obama is signing two executive orders setting new pay equity rules for federal contractors. Waldman explains what these EOs will do:

The first order will bar contractors from retaliating against employees who discuss their compensation with each other. This was a factor in [Lilly] Ledbetter’s case — like many victims of pay discrimination, it took her years to discover she was being paid less than her male colleagues, because no one talked about it. And there are many employers who actually bar their employees from discussing their pay. The second order requires contractors to provide data to the government on employee compensation, broken down by sex and race. With those data in hand, the government will be able to see whether employees are being treated equally.

Jay Newton-Small examines the Democrats’ full-court press on pay equity. But Z. Byron Wolf notes that the much-cited “77 cents on the dollar” figure is misleading:

Whether or not there is an actual pay gap and how large it is remain the subject of some debate.

The census data that shows women make 77 cents for every dollar men make is calculated by adding all the wages of women and dividing the total by all the wages of men. But that doesn’t take into account a lot of factors, like women taking time off work to have children or choosing different career paths.

Professional fact checkers at Factcheck.org (“exaggeration”), Politifact (“Mostly False”) and The Washington Post (“one Pinocchio”) have all found problems with the claim. The American Association of University Women released a report that concluded the pay gap was closer to 7% than 23%.

Andrew Biggs and Mark Perry argue that the wage gap is even smaller:

While the BLS reports that full-time female workers earned 81% of full-time males, that is very different than saying that women earned 81% of what men earned for doing the same jobs, while working the same hours, with the same level of risk, with the same educational background and the same years of continuous, uninterrupted work experience, and assuming no gender differences in family roles like child care. In a more comprehensive study that controlled for most of these relevant variables simultaneously—such as that from economists June and Dave O’Neill for the American Enterprise Institute in 2012—nearly all of the 23% raw gender pay gap cited by Mr. Obama can be attributed to factors other than discrimination. The O’Neills conclude that, “labor market discrimination is unlikely to account for more than 5% but may not be present at all.”

Bryce Covert pushes back against these claims:

It’s fair to say that not all of the gap is due to discrimination. Certainly women are clustered in low-wage work — they are about two-thirds of the country’s minimum wage workers — and often have to interrupt their careers to care for family members, all of which impacts their earnings. But even when various factors like these are taken into account, the entire gap doesn’t disappear. When the Government Accountability Office last looked at the gap, it couldn’t explain 20 percent of the disparity in pay between men and women, something that could be at least in part caused by discrimination. A more recent study by economists Francine Blau and Lawrence Kahn found that while experience, occupation, and industry explain much of the gap, there is still more than 40 percent of it that remains unexplained, the part that could be chalked up to discrimination. We can also look to the real world to see instances where it’s clear that outright discrimination is still at play, such as the details of a recent class action lawsuit against the country’s largest jewelry store, where female employees across the country and with substantial experience say they were still paid less than less qualified men.

(Chart from The American Association of University Women (pdf))

“Waterboard Him Some More”

If you’re still in any way curious why several CIA figures – and Liz Cheney – are losing their shit right now – and getting space to say nothing in the Washington Post – this piece by Katherine Hawkins might help. It confirms one particular instance that Senator McCain told the National Journal on Monday:

Officials waterboarding a terror suspect reported to CIA headquarters that they had “gotten everything we can out of the guy.” The message came back, ‘Waterboard him some more.’ That is unconscionable,” McCain said.

I wonder if Jose Rodriguez had anything to do with that.