Andrew Sullivan's Blog, page 343

Ukraine On The Brink

Russian Patrol at Perevalnoe http://t.co/xhVcizQczw—
Daniel Sandford (@BBCDanielS) March 02, 2014

In the north of Crimea, at Armyansk on the Isthmus of Perekop, the BBC saw Russian soldiers digging trenches bbc.com/news/world-eur…—
Jason Corcoran (@jason_corcoran) March 02, 2014

10s of 1000s march in Odessa today to protest against Russian invasion reporter.com.ua/news/jao/ http://t.co/g4yWzH3Gx4—
  (@Kateryna_Kruk) March 02, 2014

Long queues at #Ukraine army recruitment posts.Sergeant tells volunteers 3 million signed up in 24 hours, eager to fight #Russia in #Crimea—
Maxim Tucker (@MaxRTucker) March 02, 2014

I'm outside the Marines base in Feodosia, surrounded by Russian troops. Tense negotiations going on inside http://t.co/WTxRcldSet—
Shaun Walker (@shaunwalker7) March 02, 2014

U.S. official: "thousands more" Russian troops flowing into Crimea: interpretermag.com/ukraine-livebl…—
  (@michaeldweiss) March 02, 2014

BREAKING NEWS: Ukraine dismisses navy chief after he switched allegiance to Crimea pro-Russia authorities. He was appointed two days ago.—
PzFeed Top News (@PzFeed) March 02, 2014

These are the images you *won’t* see on Russia Today right now. http://t.co/eDsgPT6gDD pic.twitter.com/EEbn6VisAi

— The New Republic (@tnr) March 2, 2014

If Putin’s forces continue to occupy Crimea, Mary Mycio warns that the mini-state won’t be so easy for Russia to govern:

Most of the Crimea is basically a desert, with less annual rainfall than Los Angeles. It is impossible to sustain its 2 million people—including agriculture and the substantial tourist industry—without Ukrainian water. Current supplies aren’t even enough. In Sevastopol, home of the Black Sea Fleet, households get water only on certain days. In fact, on Feb. 19, when snipers were shooting protesters on the streets of Kiev, Sevastopol applied for $34 million in Western aid (note the irony) to improve its water and sewer systems.

The Crimea’s dependence on Ukraine for nearly all of it electricity makes it equally vulnerable to nonviolent retaliation. One suggestion making the rounds of the Ukrainian Internet is that the mainland, with warning, shut off the power for 15 minutes. It may not normalize the situation, but it could give Moscow pause. Of course, Russia could retaliate by cutting off Ukrainian gas supplies, but that would mean cutting off much of Europe as well. Besides, Ukrainians proved this winter that they aren’t afraid of the cold, and spring is coming.

And Russian occupiers would have to face down the dogged Tatars. Oleg Kashin describes how ordinary Russians view the Ukraine:

Russia and Ukraine split up 23 years ago. A whole generation has grown up in each country since then. … The Russian public views the Ukrainian state with a sense of irony and even contempt. This attitude is often unfair, but it [sees] Ukraine as a culturally heterogeneous patchwork. Travelling from a place like Lviv or Lutsk to a place like Kharkiv or Odessa, it is often hard to believe that these cities are part of the same country: Post-Soviet Ukraine is like Austria-Hungary—an empire made up of incongruous parts. In the mind of the Russian public, the justification for a possible Russian invasion of Ukraine settled into place many years ago: Russia has been unable to shake off the view that eastern Ukraine is Russian territory.

Matt Ford adds that other former Soviet states are now watching nervously:

Fifteen independent countries, including Russia, emerged from the Soviet Union’s disintegration. Six of them—Ukraine, Belarus, Moldova, and the three Baltic states of Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania—are in Europe, and all of them have a complicated relationship with modern Russia. Seven other countries once belonged to the Warsaw Pact, the Soviet Union’s military alliance in Eastern Europe. With the Cold War’s end, none of them had faced the threat of military intervention by the communist superpower’s successor state—until now.

Eugene Rumer and Andrew S. Weiss outline the potential impact for neighboring countries:

Any invasion—which is what it would be—of a vast country of 46 million in the heart of Europe, sharing borders with NATO allies Poland, Hungary, Slovakia and Romania, would pose a major security challenge for the United States and other key European powers.

Even without further Russian action, allies such as the Baltic countries will be seeking U.S. reassurance. Lithuania has already asked for Article IV consultations under the NATO Treaty in response to a clear threat to its security. These countries likely will also ask for hard reassurances—such as deployments of U.S. and other allied troops and equipment on their territory—as Turkey did in 2012 when Syria shot down a Turkish jet. They will also need help to shore up their eastern borders and prepare for possible flows of refugees from Ukraine. The Baltic states will probably ask for similar reassurances.

But Zack Beauchamp isn’t worried about Cold War II:

Russia’s turn to blunt military force in Ukraine is emblematic of the basic flaws behind its push to regain its global and regional standing. The reality is that Russia is a middling power with nuclear weapons; it can frustrate America in Syria, but it can’t make progress towards bending the world to its will using the sort of strategies it has tried to date.

Military power alone can’t do the trick. In a world of free trade and highly globalized markets, territorial conquest simply isn’t a good way to make your country stronger. In fact, it’s harmful. “War has lost its evident appeal,” political scientist John Mueller correctly notes, “because substantial agreement has risen around the twin propositions that that prosperity and economic growth should be central national goals and that war is a particularly counterproductive device for achieving these goals.” War won’t bring Ukraine into Russia’s fold, let alone a broader swath of Eastern Europe and Central Asia.

Drum believes Putin is acting out of desperation:

The reason Putin has sent troops into Crimea is because everything he’s done over the past year has blown up in his face. This was a last-ditch effort to avoid a fool’s mate, not some deeply-calculated bit of geopolitical stategery.

Make no mistake. All the sanctions and NATO meetings and condemnations from foreign offices in the West won’t have much material effect on Putin’s immediate conduct. But that doesn’t mean he doesn’t care about this stuff: he does, and he’s been bullying and blustering for a long time in a frantic effort to avoid it. Now, however, having failed utterly thanks to ham-handed tactics on his part, he’s finally decided on one last desperation move. Not because the West is helpless to retaliate, but because he’s simply decided he’s willing to bear the cost. It’s a sign of weakness, not a show of strength.

Mark Adomanis predicts that the economic impact on Russia will be devastating:

The Moscow stock market is going to get absolutely clobbered when it opens tomorrow, and many foreign investors are going to bolt for the exits as quickly as they can. Depending on the severity of the situation in Ukraine, the Russian financial system could come screeching to a halt. It’s a given that many of these decisions impacting Russia’s economy will be made in haste and without a sober calculation of costs and befits, but that’s the way the world works: investors often overreact to political events and they will certainly overreact to a military invasion of a neighboring country.

David Satter claims that the invasion has more to do with Russia’s internal worries than external:

Russia and Ukraine under Yanukovych shared a single form of government – rule by a criminal oligarchy. This is why the anti-criminal revolution that overthrew Ukrainian president Viktor Yanukovych is a precedent that is perfectly applicable to Putin’s Russia. It is also the reason why, from the Russian regime’s point of view, the Ukrainian revolution must be stopped at all costs. …

In 2011 and 2012, Moscow witnessed the biggest protests since the fall of the Soviet Union over the falsification of elections and Putin’s decision to run for a third term as president. The protests eventually fizzled but, given the worsening economic situation, they could be reignited.

Remnick highlights the expanding crackdown within Russia:

At the same time that he is planning his vengeful military operation against the new Ukrainian leadership, he has been cracking down harder on his opponents in Moscow. Alexey Navalny, who is best known for his well-publicized investigations into state corruption and for his role in anti-Kremlin demonstrations two years ago, has now been placed under house arrest. Navalny, who won twenty-seven per cent of the vote in a recent Moscow mayoral ballot, is barred from using the Internet, his principal means of communication and dissidence. The period of Olympic mercy has come to an end.

He sees a grim future for Ukraine:

These next days and weeks in Ukraine are bound to be frightening, and worse. There is not only the threat of widening Russian military force. The new Ukrainian leadership is worse than weak. It is unstable. It faces the burden of legitimacy. Yanukovych was spectacularly corrupt, and he opened fire on his own people. He was also elected to his office and brought low by an uprising, not the ballot; he made that point on Friday, in a press conference in Rostov on Don, in Russia, saying that he had never really been deposed. Ukraine has already experienced revolutionary disappointment. The Orange Revolution, in 2004, failed to establish stable democratic institutions and economic justice. This is one reason that Yulia Tymoshenko, the former Prime Minister, newly released from prison, is not likely the future of Ukraine. How can Ukraine possibly move quickly to national elections, as it must to resolve the issue of legitimacy, while another country has troops on its territory?

The Academy Award For Grotesquerie

Daniel D’Addario is looking forward to tonight’s “Best Makeup and Hairstyling” award – “the place where Oscar honors those films unlikely to get love anywhere else” and “a great reminder that Hollywood isn’t solely defined by its most tasteful work”:

To their credit, the makeup branch of the academy finds great work in movies that the rest of the academy, to its own credit, overlooks. The Wolfman certainly deserved no Oscars for acting, directing or writing. But the moment at the 2011 Oscars during which presenter Cate Blanchett couldn’t bear to look at the footage and announced, “That’s gross,” was revelatory. How many performances are so viscerally affecting that an awards presenter would look away and say, “That’s moving”?

We’d really lose something if the best makeup category were filled out, each year, by whichever of the three best picture nominees had the most good-looking hairdos and foundation. Best makeup is a valuable reminder not merely that Hollywood, which brings out its marquee biopics and historical dramas at year’s end for awards time, is founded on cheap and visceral thrills. It’s a reminder, too, that those projects we’re inclined to dismiss out-of-hand employed people who didn’t know the movie was destined to be dismissed by the blogging class. They wanted not necessarily be the best but to scare, to delight, and to convince.

Update from a reader:

The nominees for Best Makeup for Dallas Buyers Club had a makeup budget of only $250. The film is remarkable in its technical quality on a budget. It took years to get this film made and the dedication and skill by the filmmakers to shoot on the cheap has much to do with the accomplishment.

A Poem For Sunday

“Glutton” by Frank Bidart:

Ropes of my dead

Grandmother’s unreproducible

sausage, curing for weeks

on the front porch. My mother,

thoroughly

Americanized, found them

vaguely shameful.

Now though I

taste and taste

I can’t find that

taste I so loved as a kid.

Each thing generates the Idea

of itself, the perfect thing that it

is, of course, not—

once, a pear so breathtakingly

succulent I couldn’t

breathe.  I take back that

“of course.”

It’s got to be out there again,–

. . . I have tasted it.

(From Metaphysical Dog by Frank Bidart © 2013 by Frank Bidart. Reprinted by kind permission of Farrar, Straus and Giroux. Photo by Tim Samoff)

Face Of The Day

Archbishop Clement of Ukrainian Orthodox church human shields Ukr army base in #Perekopne pic via @euromaidan pic.twitter.com/2RAn4rqZKm

— Myroslava Petsa (@myroslavapetsa) March 2, 2014

Is Breast Still Best?

Jessica Grose flags a new study questioning the long-term benefits of breastfeeding:

[Ohio State University professor Cynthia Colen] looked at more than 8,000 children total, about 25 percent of whom were in “discordant sibling pairs,” which means one was bottle-fed and the other was breast-fed. The study then measured those siblings for 11 outcomes, including BMI, obesity, asthma, different measures of intelligence, hyperactivity, and parental attachment.

When children from different families were compared, the kids who were breast-fed did better on those 11 measures than kids who were not breast-fed. But, as Colen points out, mothers who breast-feed their kids are disproportionately advantaged—they tend to be wealthier and better educated. When children fed differently within the same family were compared—those discordant sibling pairs—there was no statistically significant difference in any of the measures, except for asthma. Children who were breast-fed were at a higher risk for asthma than children who drank formula.

But the study does not dispute the other benefits of breastfeeding:

Colen and [co-author David] Ramey did not examine the short-term protection against chest and gut infections, because these have been most clearly demonstrated by previous research. Breast is still best, says Colen, but the findings suggest that health systems should put less effort into promoting breastfeeding and more into other ways to help poorer households, she says.

Another recent study attributes the higher IQs commonly associated with breastfeeding to other factors:

[A] new study by sociologists at Brigham Young University pinpoints two parenting skills as the real source of this cognitive boost: Responding to children’s emotional cues and reading to children starting at 9 months of age. Breastfeeding mothers tend to do both of those things, said lead study author Ben Gibbs. “It’s really the parenting that makes the difference,” said Gibbs. “Breastfeeding matters in others ways, but this actually gives us a better mechanism and can shape our confidence about interventions that promote school readiness.”

Mental Health Break

An Oscar-worthy set of impressions:

The Birth Of Boredom

Kate Greene explores it:

According to the contemporary Norwegian philosopher Lars Svendsen, the concept of boredom as we understand it today is distinctly modern. In A Philosophy of Boredom (2005), Svendsen notes that while it’s ‘always possible to find earlier texts that seem to anticipate the later phenomenon… boredom is not thematised to any major extent before the Romantic era’. It was during that time, he writes, that the concept became democratised, and not solely ‘a marginal phenomenon reserved for monks and the nobility’. ‘Boredom is the “privilege” of modern man,’ he adds.

Greene goes on to note that some claim “there are generative benefits that come from spending time in a state of low arousal and monotony, as though boredom primes their minds to receive new ideas and connections.” She highlights a note that David Foster Wallace attached to his manuscript of The Pale King, a novel that explores the boredom of IRS employees:

Bliss – a second-by-second joy and gratitude at the gift of being alive, conscious – lies on the other side of crushing, crushing boredom… Pay close attention to the most tedious thing you can find (Tax Returns, Televised Golf) and, in waves, a boredom like you’ve never known will wash over you and just about kill you. Ride these out, and it’s like stepping back from black and white into colour. Like water after days in the desert. Instant bliss in every atom.

Leaving God On The Cutting Room Floor?

A former Columbia Pictures producer, Michael Cieply, recently waxed nostalgic (NYT) for a time when “studios routinely made movies with overtly religious themes for the mainstream audience.” He’s not sure films like the soon-to-be released Noah (trailer above) can undo the “years of neglect or occasional hostility” that made believers wary of Hollywood:

For months, Hollywood has been buzzing about the film’s postproduction woes. Under the guidance of Paramount’s vice chairman, Rob Moore, who says he is a devout Christian but has also been eager for a mainstream hit, “Noah” has been screened for test audiences, who have been lukewarm, regardless of their beliefs.

As described recently in The Hollywood Reporter, various editing teams tried to make the film more appealing to Christian audiences without much improving the results, eventually leaving creative control with [director Darren] Aronofsky. One complaint, according to the publication, was a sense among religious viewers that the movie, at its core, was appropriating the biblical account of the flood to preach about current concerns like overpopulation and environmental abuse. That churchgoers should be leery of a progressive agenda wrapped in Scripture is perhaps understandable, given Hollywood’s recent treatment of religious characters, who are often hypocrites and villains, driving plot lines that make, at best, a token bow toward the virtues of a faith-based life.

In response, Linker argues that religious people should be happy that Hollywood doesn’t offer them more:

Cieply’s article will no doubt provide aid and comfort to the religious right by confirming its suspicions about Hollywood’s barely concealed contempt for faith. But those who care more about artistic quality than quantitative point-scoring will have a hard time getting worked up about Cieply’s lament.

Yes, Hollywood produces relatively few films about religious subjects and themes. But that might not be a bad thing for religion. Religion is a serious subject, and Hollywood doesn’t do well with serious subjects — because Hollywood’s goal is to make money, not art. If the major studios started producing more big-budget movies on religious topics, all we’d end up with are more dumbed-down portrayals of religion.

Millman contends that economics, more than animus toward religion, drives Hollywood:

Cieply’s complaint seems to be about marketing rather than about substance – he’s interested in films that “appeal to a Christian audience.” As Cieply knows, there is a whole industry of Christian filmmaking out there providing that kind of product. Hollywood is perfectly good at flattering its audience – that’s its standard modus operandi, so I wouldn’t be at all surprised if Hollywood tried to break into a lucrative niche market. And if it doesn’t, then Christian filmmakers will fill the void – they are already doing so, much as Tyler Perry has done with a different lucrative niche market that Hollywood has had trouble cracking.

But what Cieply seems to want is a variety of mass-market films with a sensibility that flatters a specifically religious audience. The barriers to that, though, aren’t some kind of anti-religious bias in Hollywood, which was likely as secular in the 1950s as it now, and just as focused on the bottom line. It’s changes in film economics – and cultural changes in the larger society.

Whole Foods Worship

Michael Schulson wonders why educated liberals “get riled up about creationists and climate-change deniers, but lap up the quasi-religious snake oil at Whole Foods”:

At times, the Whole Foods selection slips from the pseudoscientific into the quasi-religious. It’s not just  the Ezekiel 4:9 bread (its recipe drawn from the eponymous Bible verse), or Dr. Bronner’s Magic Soaps, or Vitamineral Earth’s “Sacred Healing Food.” It’s also, at least for Jewish shoppers, the taboos thathave grown up around the company’s Organic Integrity effort, all of which sound eerily like kosher law. There’s a sign in the Durham store suggesting that shoppers bag their organic and conventional fruit separately – lest one rub off on the other – and grind their organic coffees at home – because the Whole Foods grinders process conventional coffee, too, and so might transfer some non-organic dust. “This slicer used for cutting both CONVENTIONAL and ORGANIC breads” warns a sign above the Durham location’s bread slicer. Synagogue kitchens are the only other places in which I’ve seen signs implying that level of food-separation purity.

Look, if homeopathic remedies make you feel better, take them. If the Paleo diet helps you eat fewer TV dinners, that’s great – even if the Paleo diet is probably premised more on The Flintstones than it is on any actual evidence about human evolutionary history. If non-organic crumbs bother you, avoid them. And there’s much to praise in Whole Foods’ commitment to sustainability and healthful foods. Still: a significant portion of what Whole Foods sells is based on simple pseudoscience. And sometimes that can spill over into outright anti-science (think What Doctors Don’t Tell You, or Whole Foods’ overblown GMO campaign, which could merit its own article).

(Photo by Flickr user Bookchen)

When Nonmonogamy Was The Norm

Jessica Gross captions the above TED talk:

Christopher Ryan, the co-author of Sex at Dawn with Cacilda Jethá, takes a deeper look at the standard narrative of human sexual evolution we’ve long upheld: men provide women with goods and services in exchange for women’s sexual fidelity. According to this model, Ryan points out, the war between the sexes is built into our DNA.

But based on their research, Ryan and Jethá have quite a few bones to pick with this narrative. Ryan explains that our sexual patterns are an outgrowth of agricultural models—which accounts for only about five percent of human history. For the other 95 percent, human sexuality was “a way of establishing and maintaining the complex flexible social systems, networks, that our ancestors were very good at.” In hunter-gatherer societies, there were overlapping sexual relationships between members of a community—a more fluid system than the Victorian model we’re wedded to today. In fact, several contemporary societies around the world argue against the sexual myth we’ve built up, too.

Watch our Ask Christopher Ryan Anything videos here.