Andrew Sullivan's Blog, page 34

Meanwhile, In Nigeria …

Over the past few days, Boko Haram has massacred hundreds of people in what Amnesty International is calling the deadliest attack in the jihadist group’s history:

Mike Omeri, the government spokesman on the insurgency, said fighting continued Friday for Baga, a town on the border with Chad where insurgents seized a key military base on Jan. 3 and attacked again on Wednesday. “Security forces have responded rapidly, and have deployed significant military assets and conducted airstrikes against militant targets,” Omeri said in a statement. District head Baba Abba Hassan said most victims are children, women and elderly people who could not run fast enough when insurgents drove into Baga, firing rocket-propelled grenades and assault rifles on town residents. … An Amnesty International statement said there are reports the town was razed and as many as 2,000 people killed.

Emphasis added. Aryn Baker provides some background:

The offensive started on Jan. 3 with a daring raid on a multinational military base near Baga that had been established to combat crime in the lawless border region where Nigeria, Niger, Chad and Cameroon meet. It has since been repurposed to address the growing regional threat of Boko Haram, a militant Islamist group that got its start in northeastern Nigeria in 2002 and has used kidnapping—most notably of more than 200 schoolgirls last year—as an effective tactic. The base fell to the militants early Sunday morning, Jan 4, after several hours of intense fighting.

The second assault, which started in Baga itself on Jan. 6, appears to be an attempt by the rebels to assert their authority in an area of divided loyalties, according to Roddy Barclay, senior Africa analyst at Control Risks, a political risk consultancy based in London. “Boko Haram has frequently attacked communities perceived to support the government,” he says. “The use of violence is designed to drive community fear and compliance in order to further Boko Haram’s agenda.”

Jessica Schulberg adds that Boko Haram’s last headline-grabbing atrocity remains unresolved:

Meanwhile, the more than 200 Nigerian girls who were abducted by Boko Haram last year are approaching their ninth month of captivity. The U.S. has contributed hostage negotiators, surveillance drones, and intelligence analysts to the search. In May, Robert Jackson, a State Department specialist on Africa told the Senate Foreign Relations subcommittee, “Resolving this crisis is now one of the highest priorities of the US government.”

Terrence McCoy is at a loss for what to do about this bloodthirsty insurgency:

It’s hard to find contemporary precedent for the delight Boko Haram takes in killing. Even the Islamic State, which has killed thousands and purposely targets minorities, doesn’t seem to be as wanton in its acts of carnage. It appears everyone — Muslim, Christian, Cameroonian, Nigerian — is a target for Boko Haram. … Is there any stopping it? For the time being, it appears not. The administration of Nigerian President Jonathan Goodluck and his military, beset by corruption and ill-equipped, have been unable to match both Boko Haram’s firepower, discipline and fundraising. And now, with Boko Haram’s campaign to control northeast Nigeria complete, analysts said its territorial ambitions have outgrown Nigeria’s porous borders.

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A Poem For Friday

Dish poetry editor Alice Quinn – giving us a brief respite from all the mayhem in France right now – builds on this poem and this one from last weekend:

Our last choice (so far!) from the Irish anthology, Lifelines: New and Collected, Letters from Famous People About Their Favourite Poem, is Elizabeth Bishop’s poem “Manners,” chosen by contemporary Irish poet Vona Groarke, who wrote, “It records an age and a state of mind entirely without cynicism: a secure, small world in which no-one can lose his way. The child-like speaking voice is brilliantly achieved with rudimentary, sing-song rhymes which accommodate the jolly generosity and good faith of the child and her grandfather….

Hovering at the edge of its simplicity is something much darker, suggested by the obscured faces of the passengers in the cars: a future in which the values of the child and her grandfather will be as outmoded as their wagon seat; an impersonal, technological world which will have no place for the gentle intimacy of manners. The poem marks the belated transition from the nineteenth to the twentieth centuries, and from innocence to painful experience. Its success lies, I think, in doing so without the slightest trace of either rhetoric or sentiment.”

“Manners” by Elizabeth Bishop (1911-1979):

For a Child of 1918

My grandfather said to me

as we sat on the wagon seat,

‘Be sure to remember to always

speak to everyone you meet.’

We met a stranger on foot.

My grandfather’s whip tapped his hat.

‘Good day, sir. Good day. A fine day.’

And I said it and bowed where I sat.

Then we overtook a boy we knew

with his big pet crow on his shoulder.

‘Always offer everyone a ride;

don’t forget that when you get older,’

my grandfather said. So Willy

climbed up with us, but the crow

gave a ‘Caw!’ and flew off. I was worried.

How would he know where to go?

But he flew a little way at a time

from fence post to fence post, ahead;

and when Willy whistled he answered.

‘A fine bird,’ my grandfather said,

‘and he’s well brought up. See, he answers

nicely when he’s spoken to.

Man or beast, that’s good manners.

Be sure that you both always do.’

When automobiles went by,

the dust hid the people’s faces,

but we shouted ‘Good day! Good day!

Fine day!’ at the top of our voices.

When we came to Hustler Hill,

he said that the mare was tired,

so we all got down and walked,

as our good manners required.

(From Poems by Elizabeth Bishop © 2011 by the Alice H. Methfessel Trust. Publisher’s Note and compilation © 2011 by Farrar, Straus and Giroux. Reprinted by permission of the publisher. Photo by David Prasad)

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Nous Sommes Charlie, But Do We Really Want To Be? Ctd

I've been told that calling this cartoon racist means you hate free speech & endorse mass murder. #CharlieHebdo pic.twitter.com/Y5Ajmfb6N6

— Rania Khalek (@RaniaKhalek) January 8, 2015

Update from a reader on the above image:

That cartoon looks bad, but if you understand the French, the meaning seems to me to be actually anti-racist. “La GPA” is “la gestation pour autrui,” or in English “surrogate motherhood.” The point of the cartoon is that when wealthy white couples pay poor women of color to be their surrogates, they are exploiting them. The point is somewhat bluntly and crudely made, but not at all offensive to my sensibilities. Others may differ, I suppose.

Jordan Weissmann urges us not to be afraid to criticize Charlie Hebdo‘s over-the-top (and often lame) humor even as we stand in solidarity with the victims of Wednesday’s terror attack:

So what should we do? We have to condemn obvious racism as loudly as we defend the right to engage in it. We have to point out when an “edgy” cartoon is just a crappy Islamophobic jab. We shouldn’t pretend that every magazine cover with a picture of Mohammed is a second coming of The Satanic Verses.

Making those distinctions isn’t going to placate the sorts of militants who are already apt to tote a machine gun into a magazine office. But it is a way to show good faith to the rest of a marginalized community, to show that free speech isn’t just about mocking their religion. It’s hard to talk about these things today, when so many families, a country, and a profession are rightfully in mourning. But it’s also necessary.

In Arthur Chu’s view, Charlie often violated satire’s unspoken rule to “punch up, not down”:

I mean, Muslims in France right now aren’t doing so great. The scars of the riots nine years ago are still fresh for many people, Muslims make up 60 to 70 percent of the prison population despite being less than 20 percent of the population overall, and France’s law against “religious symbols in public spaces” is specifically enforced to target Muslim women who choose to wear hijab—ironic considering we’re now touting Charlie Hebdo as a symbol of France’s staunch commitment to civil liberties.

Muslims in France are clearly worse off overall than, say, Jean Sarkozy (the son of former president Nicholas Sarkozy) and his wife Jessica Sebaoun-Darty, but Charlie Hebdo saw fit to apologize for an anti-Semitic caricature of Ms. Sebaoun-Darty and fire longtime cartoonist Siné over the incident while staunchly standing fast on their right to troll Muslims by showing Muhammad naked and bending over—which tells you something about the brand of satire they practice and, when push comes to shove, that they’d rather be aiming downward than upward.

The firing of Siné indeed showed a shameful double standard. Jonathan Laurence’s concern is that the chorus of “je suis Charlie” will play into the hands of the far right and normalize nastiness toward Muslims:

When the shock and sadness recede, it will become apparent that despite hashtags to the contrary, not all French “are Charlie Hebdo.” Numerous Catholic and Muslim groups offended by their cartoonists regularly filed lawsuits for incitement of racial or religious hatred against the newspaper—including after they republished the Danish prophet cartoons. Despite the understandable temptation to enter into a clear-cut opposition of “us versus them,” we can only hope that other political leaders will emerge to urge caution and respect while rejecting the murderers with every fiber of their being. It would be an unfortunate irony, and a distortion of these satirists’ legacy, if “politically incorrect” became the new politically correct.

Dreher asks whether Americans would be so quick to say “je suis” if the victims were from an organization we were more familiar with:

I can’t speak for French sensibilities, obviously, but here in America, it’s easy for us on both the Left and the Right to join the Je suis Charlie mob, because it costs us exactly nothing. Nobody here knows what Charlie Hebdo stands for; all we know is that its staff were the victims of Islamist mass murder, of the sort with which we are all familiar. We know that this murder strikes at one of the basic freedoms we take for granted: freedom of speech, and freedom of the press. Feelings of solidarity with those murdered souls are natural, and even laudable.

But what makes it kitschy is that we love thinking of ourselves standing in solidarity with the brave journalists against the Islamist killers. When the principle of standing up for free speech might cost us something far, far less than our lives, most of us would fold. You didn’t see liberals wearing “I Am Brendan Eich” slogans; many on the Left think he got what he deserved, because blasphemers like him don’t deserve a place in public life. Nor did you see conservatives brandishing “I Am Brendan Eich” slogans, because they feared they might be next.

Hear hear. Beutler, for his part, doesn’t think we need to praise Charlie in order to stand against terrorism:

The massacre in Paris has awakened a liberal tendency to valorize all objects of illiberal enmity. If an Islamist kills a westerner for a particular blasphemy, then the blasphemy itself must be embraced. We saw something similar just last month when countless Americans, rightly aggrieved by the extortion of a U.S.-based movie company, became determined to find reason to praise a satirical film they would’ve otherwise panned. This is clearly not always the correct reaction to terrorism or extortion. Here, liberals can learn a lesson from Second Amendment absolutists who nevertheless condemn open-carry demonstrations in fast food restaurants.

Likewise, Drum objects to the Dish’s framing of decisions by the WaPo and other news outlets not to republish Charlie’s cartoons as “capitulations”:

Anyone who wishes to publish offensive cartoons should be free to do so. Likewise, anyone who wants to reprint the Charlie Hebdo cartoons as a demonstration of solidarity is free to do so. I hardly need to belabor the fact that there are excellent arguments in favor of doing this as a way of showing that we won’t allow terrorists to intimidate us. But that works in the other direction too. If you normally wouldn’t publish cartoons like these because you consider them needlessly offensive, you shouldn’t be intimidated into doing so just because there’s been a terrorist attack. Maintaining your normal policies even in the face of a terrorist attack is not “capitulation.” It’s just the opposite.

But the WaPo is a news organization, and these cartoons are at the heart of the news story of the Western world right now. News outlets can post the Charlie cartoons simply to show what all the fuss is about, without endorsing the images in the slightest. But as Dan Savage rightly asserts, they refuse to do so out of fear – the kind of fear that terrorists thrive on. The Dish, as it happens, has never posted anything from Charlie Hebdo outside the context of Islamists threatening or attacking them, mostly because their satire isn’t terribly good. Several years ago we posted a few cartoons from Carlos LaTuff before discovering that he’s a vile anti-Semite and that many of his cartoons reflect that (though not the two we posted), so we have since refused to feature any of his work. But if LaTuff became part of a news story like Charlie Hebdo has, we would certainly post his offending cartoons – like we did earlier this afternoon. Stephen Carter gets it right:

Many news organizations, in reporting on the Paris attacks, have made the decision not to show the cartoons that evidently motivated the attackers. This choice is sensibly prudent — who wants to wind up on a hit list? — but from the point of view of the terrorist, it furnishes evidence for the rationality of the action itself. Killing can be a useful weapon if it gets the killer more of what he wants. Terror seeks to raise the price of the policy to which terrorists object. In that sense it’s like a tax on a particular activity. In general, more taxes mean less of the activity. If you don’t want people to smoke, you make smoking more expensive. If you don’t want people to mock the Prophet Muhammad, you kill them for it. The logic is ugly and evil, but it’s still logic. …

The terrorist knows what scares us. He believes he also knows what will break us. Our short-run task is to prove rather than assert him wrong. In the long run, however, the only true means of deterrence is the creation of a new history, in which the terrorist is always tracked to his lair, and never gets what he wants.

Sighting Elvis

Today would have been the music legend’s 80th birthday, assuming you believe he’s dead. Adrienne LaFrance ponders our varied perceptions of the man and his demise:

The tricky thing about Elvis [is] that people can’t agree on the Elvis they think they know. There’s the Elvis who died in 1977, and the Elvis who’s still alive and eating cheeseburgers in western Michigan. There’s Elvis the hip-swiveling hunk who could break your heart, and Elvis the doughy 40-something who couldn’t get through a performance without stumbling over his words. This duality was strong enough that it prompted debate about which Elvis ought to be depicted on a postage stamp. From The New York Times in 1992: “Postal authorities are not sure which Presley likeness to use: the young, svelte, hip-gyrating Elvis of the rock-and-roll ’50s, or the rotund, road-worn Elvis who died in 1977 near the end of the Age of Aquarius, reportedly after a struggle with drugs.”

If conspiracy theories are a way to impose order on events that can’t be controlled, Elvis sightings are perhaps a way of rejecting mortality, and preserving the American dream he came to represent. After all, it wasn’t just Elvis’ death that challenged his place in American culture, but his actual life. Insisting Elvis never died is also, then, a way of rejecting what he had become.

(Photo by Flickr user Cliff.)

Correction Of The Day

“An earlier version of this article misidentified the country whose army chased Tommy Caldwell’s kidnappers. It was Kyrgyzstan, not Kyrzbekistan, which does not exist,” – The New York Times. The ambassador to Dirkadirkastan couldn’t be reached for comment.

Face Of The Day

A woman tries to stay warm as she waits on an L platform in Chicago during the early morning rush while temperatures hovered around zero degrees Fahrenheit on January 7, 2015. Most of the city’s schools were cancelled today as wind chill temperatures were expected to exceed -30. By Scott Olson/Getty Images.

The Shrinking Economic Payoff Of Keystone

Michael Levi considers how pummeling oil prices might affect the pipeline:

Lower oil prices reduce both the costs and the benefits of approving the Keystone XL pipeline by reducing the odds that it will ever be fully used. There’s an outside chance that, if prices are sustained at an extremely low level, the Keystone XL pipeline won’t get built. That scenario isn’t likely – among other things, if Canadian production doesn’t grow, the odds of sustained low prices decline substantially – but it’s not zero. Lower prices also raise the odds that the pipeline will be built but not fully utilized. In that case, you still get the up-front construction stimulus, but you get less benefit from greater oil production, and less climate damage from the same. You also have a waste of economic resources.

The more likely scenario, though, is that the Keystone XL pipeline gets built and used. In that case, lower oil prices reduce its economic benefits without any clear impact on its climate costs.

Jordan Weissmann contends that “Keystone is neither irrelevant, nor especially critical to the future of Canadian oil”:

Keystone would probably be a small boon to the American fossil-fuel industry, even at this late date. Remember, the pipeline would send crude to refiners on the Gulf Coast. And what do refiners do? They buy oil, then transform it into gasoline, diesel, and other products to sell. The less expensive the oil, the easier it is for them to turn a profit, and the heavy crude found in the tar sands—which gulf refiners are specially equipped to process—is especially cheap, even compared to similar low grades from Mexico and Venezuela. This week, for instance, Western Canadian Select has traded at around just $33 a barrel. The refinery owners of Houston would surely love to get their hands on more it, but in a world of generally low oil prices, doing so isn’t exactly a matter of life and death for them.

Rebecca Leber wishes the Dems’ amendments to the Keystone bill didn’t focus on jobs:

Keystone emerged as a national issue when it became a symbol of climate change. Democrats ought to be marshalling their resources to remind people that Keystone is more about polution than it is about jobs. The pro-environment amendments have a slim chance at passing anyway. If Democratic amendments are hopeless from the start, they might as well go for bolder proposals, like a carbon tax, that will help at least to remind us of bigger things at stake than a few dozen jobs.

But Morrissey imagines that those amendments might get Obama to sign the bill:

If Democrats offer amendments that Republicans can support, the White House can claim that the bill has changed enough to their satisfaction — in essence, declare victory and depart the field before anyone asks too many questions.

Who Won’t Republish Charlie‘s Cartoons?

Mark Steyn wishes the MSM would grow a pair:

Amen. Christopher Massie finds a clear divide between digital and legacy publications:

With few exceptions, it has been digital outlets like The Huffington Post, The Daily Beast, Business Insider, BuzzFeed, Vox, and Slate that have exercised their constitutional right by republishing the cartoons that are thought to be the basis for the attacks. In contrast, many “legacy” organizations, from CNN, to The Washington Post, to The New York Times, largely withheld the images.

A Dish reader also called out the CBC, as well as an egregious example from the WaPo. Massie talks to Daily Beast editor Noah Shachtman, who calls not publishing the images “giving in to the monsters that just massacred a bunch of people.” Massie is on the same page:

While editors are regularly forced to make difficult calls about publishing sensitive material, and while yesterday’s murders show that worries about angering jihadists are not without basis, in this case, the obvious news value of the cartoons ought to have outweighed any trepidation. The absence of a confirmed storyline as to whether a specific cartoon ignited the attack means that a wide array of context, including the images, is potentially relevant. Furthermore, if readers want to understand the tragic affront to free speech, there is no replacement for seeing the cartoons, in their unabashed irreverence.

The Fossil Fuels We Can’t Burn

Christie Aschwanden reads through a new study which “shows, in the finest detail yet, which fossil fuel reserves can be exploited and which should remain untouched if we’re to have at least a 50 percent chance of meeting the 2-degree limit”:

The calculations show that some large reserves simply shouldn’t be tapped. For instance, essentially all Arctic oil reserves and 99 percent of Canadian oil sands are rated as unburnable under the model, a calculation that will surely give ammunition to those opposing the Keystone pipeline. More than half the world’s unburnable oil lies in the Middle East, but the model shows that the region could exploit more than 60 percent of its reserves without blowing the global carbon budget. The U.S. and Europe have the greatest flexibility to extract its reserves and remain within budget, in part because their proximity to energy users makes it more economical.

Scott K. Johnson also examines the report:

The fact that we can’t even use all of our current reserves calls into question the value of discovering or developing new sources of fossil fuels.

No new production of oil and gas takes place in the Arctic, for example, in the simulations that meet the total emissions target. In an associated article about the study, Potsdam Institute for Climate Impacts Research scientists Michael Jakob and Jérôme Hilairenote, “Fossil-fuel companies must therefore ask themselves whether they should continue to invest in exploration for, and processing of, oil, gas, and coal, or risk losing billions of dollars of stranded assets.”

“To conclude,” the study’s authors write, “these results demonstrate that a stark transformation in our understanding of fossil fuel availability is necessary. Although there have previously been fears over the scarcity of fossil fuels, in a climate-constrained world this is no longer a relevant concern: large portions of the reserve base and an even greater proportion of the [total] resource base should not be produced if the temperature rise is to remain below 2°C.”

Andrew Freedman focuses on the coal industry:

[Study author Christophe] McGlade told Mashable the countries that will be hurt the most by the carbon budget constraints are those that are heavily dependent on coal the countries that will be hurt the most by the carbon budget constraints are those that are heavily dependent on coal, which is among the most carbon-intensive fossil fuels. “It’s companies and countries that hold large coal reserves that are going to suffer under a 2 degree scenario, and also the Arctic oil,” McGlade said.

For example, McGlade said that meeting the temperature target in the most cost-effective way means foregoing the exploitation of 80% of the world’s coal reserves. Over the past few years, coal has become more expensive in many countries, including the U.S., compared to natural gas, thanks to fracking technologies that have produced a glut of gas.

Tim McDonnell adds two cents:

Of course, the model has to make assumptions about future oil and gas prices that are basically impossible to be certain about. Unexpected changes to the price of oil, for example, could upset the cost equation for drilling in the US and re-shuffle the entire regional breakdown. But even as an estimate, the study really illuminates the vital need for policies all over the world that dramatically cut our dependence on coal.

Mental Health Break

Who needs a mouse when you have a weasel: