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Another Rescue Gone Wrong

Luke Somers family said he would be alive if not for failed U.S. rescue attempt in Yemen – http://t.co/ObGUUZudPK pic.twitter.com/27iVtwVXGU

— CBS News (@CBSNews) December 8, 2014

Late Friday night, American photojournalist Luke Somers and a South African teacher Pierre Korkie, who were being held hostage in Yemen by al-Qaeda militants, were killed by their captors during a failed rescue attempt by US special forces:

It was the second U.S. attempt to free Somers in 10 days and Kerry said it had been approved because of information that Somers’ life was in imminent danger. “It was our assessment that that clock would run out on Saturday,” one U.S. official said. However, the Gift of the Givers relief group, which was trying to secure Korkie’s release, said it had negotiated for the teacher to be freed and had expected that to happen on Sunday and for him to be returned to his family.

Somers’s death, after two attempts to free him, has reignited the debate over whether the US’s policy of never paying ransoms for captives held by terrorist groups is appropriate. Joel Simon argues that it’s time to rethink that blanket prohibition:

The US government has said it will not review the prohibition on paying ransom, which I believe is a missed opportunity.

While I accept the US government’s logic that the payment of ransom increases the risk for kidnapping, there should be some flexibility built into the policy to address extenuating circumstances. The review should certainly explore ways to engage with hostage takers through other means. According to Diane Foley, her son’s kidnappers were angered by the fact that the US government refused to respond to their emails. Communication with kidnappers is not the same thing as negotiating with kidnappers. It is akin to the local police talking through a bullhorn to someone holding up a bank in order to buy time, gain intelligence, and seek a possible resolution. Talking should be a normal and natural response when lives are at stake.

But the Bloomberg View editors are still resolutely opposed to changing the policy:

Since 2008, the kidnapping-for-ransom industry has raised as much as $165 million for terrorist organizations, most of it paid by European governments. Those governments routinely deny making the payments, because they know it’s bad policy: It encourages further kidnappings, and it funds terrorist operations as well as the slaughter of civilians in the Middle East and Africa. It also contravenes multiple international commitments.

As for the U.S. and U.K. governments that ran the unsuccessful military raid, there are certainly questions as to how they failed to know that Korkie’s release was to happen on Saturday, or that he might be with Somers. But whatever the answers, they are irrelevant to the question of whether governments should ransom their citizens. That calculation remains the same: The only way to end the ransom business is to close the market.

Jonathan Tobin criticizes the South African charity that was working to ransom Korkie:

Unfortunately, the problem with ransoms is not limited to the aid the transactions give to the terrorists. By not coordinating with Western governments, the efforts of groups like the Gift of the Givers charity—the organization that was working for Korkie’s release—make it difficult, if not impossible for the U.S. military to avoid operations that might interfere with a hostage’s release. Instead of castigating the United States for a rescue operation that went wrong, those who, even for altruistic reasons, conduct negotiations that aid the terrorists are ultimately to blame.

Jazz Shaw zooms out:

I’m sure there will be some backlash since we failed to get Somers out alive, but given the circumstances it doesn’t sound like the odds were very good in the first place. A better question is what we should be doing about Yemen in the long run. The government there, such as it is, appears to be on the brink of collapse. Their leadership has been pointing their fingers at Washington and accusing the Obama administration of fomenting unrest. They lost control of their own capital, Sana, earlier this year to a group of rebels called the Houthis. Outside of a couple of major population centers, nobody is in control, which is probably what made it such an attractive destination for al Qaeda.

With no reliable governmental partner to work with, our options appear limited except for high risk military incursions such as this one. And until the larger problem of terrorist networks is dealt with, I’m afraid we can expect repeat performances of this raid in the future.

Would You Report Your Rape?

Danielle Campoamor shares her own experience:

I always thought that if I ever became a victim of sexual assault, I’d say something. I’d be the girl reporting it, sitting on a witness stand and pointing a defiant finger, just like the actresses on SVU. There wouldn’t be a second thought or a deliberate pause; I’d simply speak up because that’s, of course, what you do. And then I became a victim of sexual assault.

When the police officer was standing in front of me, a pad of paper in one hand and an overworked pen in the other, and asked me if I wanted to file charges, I paused. Tears were running down my cheeks and my legs wouldn’t stop shaking and my best friend’s hand, honorable in its intentions, failed to comfort me. The officer had already asked me how many drinks I had consumed. In fact, he asked me on three separate occasions. He had already asked what I could have possibly said or unintentionally inferred, prior to being forced onto a bed. He had already raised his eyebrows and tightened his lips and wrinkled his brow.

And a part of me already knew. So, I said no. I just wanted it over.

She did eventually report the assault, only to be met with condescension:

The detective explained to me that women get “confused” rather regularly. He explained that many a woman sat in my chair, defiantly lying until they couldn’t lie anymore. He told me that drinking and judgment and embarrassment, even boyfriends, can contribute to a woman continuing to cry wolf. He asked me if this was what I was doing. Was I confused? Was I ashamed? After all, I had been drinking.

I said no.

The detective nodded, almost annoyed that I didn’t save him the extra paperwork. He told me he would do what he could, but often times the “he said/she said” cases don’t go anywhere. He assured me that even if it didn’t, a report would be on record. I guess he thought that would be comforting.

That was almost two years ago. Nothing has happened. The evidence is backlogged and the detective is out of contact and the monster is still hiding.

McArdle tries to relate to such stories:

When I was in college, I was the victim of someone who stole a bunch of money from me. I knew who it was, and I didn’t report it to anyone except a couple of friends. Why not? Years later, I’m not sure I can say. I can cite a deeply ingrained aversion to asking for help from authorities, which is certainly a part of my character, or point out that the accusation would have been hard to prove, even though, for tedious reasons I won’t go into, I was quite certain who had committed the theft. But that could just be post-hoc rationalization; what I actually remember is that it happened, and I didn’t report it. Instead, I stopped buying food for about a week. And I wasn’t even faced with having to rehearse hours of unimaginably gruesome trauma over and over to investigators.

So I find it extremely easy to believe that a girl stumbled out of a fraternity house, bruised and humiliated, and just wanted to go home and pretend it never happened. But even if I couldn’t, that wouldn’t be evidence of much of anything, except the contours of my imagination. People do crazy, insane, unaccountable things all the time — if you found it hard to believe that fraternity brothers committed a premeditated gang rape, why was it so easy to imagine that a girl made up a rape story to recount to a national magazine, where she risked humiliating exposure? Whichever you believe, the explanation for this seemingly insane behavior is the same: Sometimes, people aren’t very good at counting the consequences of their own actions.

Keeping Excessive Punishment In Check

Reihan sketches out a plan to do so:

What government routinely fails to do is account for the costs the criminal justice system imposes on the civilians who get caught in its web. Mark A.R. Kleiman, a public policy professor at UCLA and author of When Brute Force Fails, made this point vividly in a Democracy Journal essay published last spring. Instead of fixating on the dollar costs of running the criminal justice system, he asks that we also account for “the suffering inflicted by arrest, prosecution, conviction, and incarceration, including all of the residual disabilities that go with the label ‘ex-convict,’ and the fear created by overaggressive policing.”

Imagine if, as Cardozo Law School professor Richard A. Bierschbach has suggested, we had in place a “punishment budget.”

Given such a budget, we would accept that the criminal justice system would cause some degree of suffering. At the same time, we’d insist that if you pass some measures that increase suffering in some way—say, by making more arrests—you’d have to reduce the sum total of suffering in some other way, for instance by reducing prison sentences for nonviolent offenders. This would impose a useful check on the creep of new laws, rules, and regulations that steadily increase the government’s coercive powers, as if on autopilot.

He also recommends getting “better, more reliable data on policing so that communities have a clear sense of what local law enforcement agencies are doing in their name.” Along the same lines, Josh Voorhees wants the president to “call for all law enforcement agencies to keep an accurate count of how many people the police kill each year”:

Without a formal and comprehensive reporting system, the president, lawmakers, and everyone else have no way of knowing the true scope of the problem. Even if the government is willing to believe that police officers are almost always justified when they kill suspects in the line of duty, Washington still owes the nation a full accounting of those killings that it has implicitly sanctioned. How can the president hope to limit the number of lives lost if he has no way of knowing how many lives are actually lost? How will Congress evaluate whether policies aimed at curbing police shootings are successful if it has no way of tracking the success or failure of those policies?

Buried In Berries

Josh Barro registers a shift in Americans’ eating habits:

According to statistics published by the United States Department of Agriculture, per capita consumption of fresh raspberries grew 475 percent from 2000 to 2012, the most recent year for which data are available. Blueberry consumption is up 411 percent, and strawberries are up 60 percent.

He notes, to his surprise, that “the main factors changing what fruits we eat are on the supply side”:

If people are eating more of some kind of fruit, it’s probably because farmers have figured out how to deliver more of it, at higher quality, throughout the year.

Of course, there is the “superfood” factor: Both raspberries and blueberries have been praised for their nutrient value. But Chris Romano, who leads global produce procurement for Whole Foods, attributes the boom in berries largely to taste and availability. “Techniques in growing raspberries, blueberries and blackberries have gotten much better over the last 15 years,” he said. Growers are planting better breeds of berry, with higher sugar content; they’re using pruning and growing techniques that extend the season, including growing berries inside greenhouse-like structures called tunnels that retain heat; and most important, they’re growing berries in places they didn’t used to, where production is possible at different times of year.

(Photo by Flickr user swong95765)

The Distinctiveness Of DFW

Adam Kirsch finds it in his Americanness – especially the writer’s conviction that his unhappiness was “a specifically American condition”:

Like many classic American writers but few contemporary ones, he genuinely experienced being American as a bitter, significant fate, a problem that the writer had to unravel for the benefit of his fellow sufferers. In a late story, “The Suffering Channel,” Wallace theorizes about “the single great informing conflict of the American psyche,” which is “the conflict between the subjective centrality of our own lives versus our awareness of its objective insignificance.” All of “Infinite Jest” can be seen as a demonstration of the thesis Wallace advances early in the novel: “American experience seems to suggest that people are virtually unlimited in their need to give themselves away, on various levels.”

When Wallace wrote about how difficult it was to be an American, he specifically meant an American of his own generation—the post-sixties cohort known as “Generation X.” “Like most North Americans of his generation,” Wallace writes about the teenage hero of ”Infinite Jest,” “Hal tends to know way less about why he feels certain ways about the objects and pursuits he’s devoted to than he does about the objects and pursuits themselves.” Likewise, in “Westward,” he writes, “Like many Americans of his generation in this awkwardest of post-Imperial decades . . . Sternberg is deeply ambivalent about being embodied.” It is no wonder that readers born between 1965 and 1980 responded to this kind of solicitude, with its implication that they were unique, and uniquely burdened.

Recent Dish love for David Foster Wallace here and here.

The Best Of The Dish This Weekend

Ross made a crucial point about TNR today:

The New Republic as-it-was, the magazine I and others grew up reading, was emphatically not just a “policy magazine.” It was, instead, a publication that deliberately integrated its policy writing with often-extraordinary coverage of literature, philosophy, history, religion, music, fine art. It wasn’t just a liberal magazine, in other words; it was a liberal-arts magazine, which unlike many of today’s online ventures never left its readers with the delusion that literary style or intellectual ambition were of secondary importance, or that today’s fashions represented permanent truths.

That’s why the Dish’s coverage of the world every day includes philosophy, theology, art, photography, literature, film and poetry alongside our bread and butter political and policy analysis. If you want to know why we don’t take the weekends off – but try to curate and aggregate some of the more thoughtful essays and reviews and posts on what might be called “the eternal things”, this is why. Because we’re trying in our inevitably limited bloggy way to keep the worldview of the now-disappearing literary and political magazines alive in a new medium and a new form. If we had the resources, we would do more – finding ways to add many more original essays and reviews to Deep Dish, for example. We’re brainstorming the future of our little experiment all the time – but the demise of places where high and low culture, politics and poetry, human life and abstract argument can jostle for space and inform each other makes me particularly aware of the need to fill this cultural void, while some of us still retain the institutional memory to replicate it. Culture needs stewards, and they can come in all sorts of shapes and sizes.

I struggle with blogging all the time – it’s a very intense and public way of being a writer, it’s extremely strenuous, and doing it for fifteen years every day can get you exhausted by exhaustion. Part of me wants to drop off the planet all the time and just grab a book or ten, or debate something in the news without anyone but my friends to tell me I’m full of shit, or just not go online for a few weeks on end. Part of me would like to go a week without being called a racist, a sexist, a homophobe, an anti-Semite or a misogynist (I guess that was Burning Man). But I’m not delusional, and when I see the little lifeboat that we, with your help, have managed to create over a decade and a half, it seems a vital thing to figure out a way for it to survive and thrive. As more old-school magazines become shipwrecks, or unrecognizable, we have to keep that boat buoyant until the seas calm … or this metaphor completely runs out of steam.

This weekend, we discovered aspects of Kafka’s life that were straight from a sit-com; explored Pope Francis’ view of sexual complementarity; worried about the decline of male friendship and love (see Martin Amis talk about Hitch here); celebrated the art of toilet graffiti; and revealed the video-photo-shopping of movie-stars in movies – to make them flawless, of course.

Some other quotes:

Bad sex writing: “The universe was in her and with each movement it unfolded to her. Somewhere in the night a stray rocket went off.”

Faith: “The yearning for an afterlife is the opposite of selfish: it is love and praise for the world that we are privileged, in this complex interval of light, to witness and experience.”

Good luck: “Updike’s literary setbacks were those of a lottery winner who stubs his toe on the way to the bank and then has to wait in line before he can cash his check”

Jed Perl on Picasso: “A product of modernism, Picasso trumped modernism. By rejecting the idea of art as having a past or a future, he has somehow managed to stay with us in the present.”

And Mark Strand on his own death, and on life:

The weather, like tomorrow, like your life,

is partially here, partially up in the air.

There is nothing you can do.

The most popular post of the weekend was TNR RIP – my reflections on the implosion of an institution. Next up: A Smaller Screen For Sex.

If you want to help keep this blog alive, and haven’t yet subscribed, please do here. It matters for all the reasons above. If you have, thank you – and you can help some more by buying a Christmas gift subscription for a friend or family member, or by buying our new coffee mug. Some Dishheads’ pets – here, here and here – are more excited than others:

Mug just arrived! Gorgeous!

One more email for the weekend, from the reader who sent the window view above:

Because I’m a recent first-time subscriber, I don’t know the unspoken decorum to go about submitting a Window View for the daily shots or the weekly contest, but here it is: a shot from the elementary school I work at in Boiro, Spain, taken at 3:33pm. I’ve been reading since around March or so and subscribed in July and am happy to contribute even a small amount to support such a high quality curation of links and articles from across the ‘net as well as the rich discussion that is hosted here. Keep it up.

We will in the morning; see you then.

Liberalism, Conservatism, Skepticism

Thanks to the Washington Post, Tom Maguire and Hanna Rosin, we have a glimpse of what might have actually happened to UVA’s “Jackie”:

A group of Jackie’s close friends, who are advocates at U-Va. for sex-assault awareness, said they believe that something traumatic happened to her, but they also have come to doubt her account. A student who came to Jackie’s aid the night of the alleged attack said in an interview late Friday night that she did not appear physically injured at the time but was visibly shaken and told him and two other friends that she had been at a fraternity party and had been forced to have oral sex with a group of men. They offered to get her help and she said she just wanted to return to her dorm, said the student, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because of the sensitivity of the subject.

That’s a horrific story, if it pans out. The failure of the school to investigate more assiduously remains salient. The climate for young women on a campus where many readily believed the gang-rape-broken-glass-“grab it by its leg” version does not cease to be a pressing issue. The truth could be damning enough.

So why did an inflammatory, lurid, and apparently fallacious story get into print – with only one source and no corroboration – breaking most basic journalistic rules in a serious publication? Rich Bradley is surely right: it was a too-good-to-check story that echoed what many truly wanted to hear. It managed to suggest that the “rape culture” we are now told is endemic is even worse than you could possibly imagine, and ignored in plain sight. It implicated individuals in various stigmatized groups (among many journalists and activists) – i.e. the dreaded evil trifecta of “white”, “men” and “Southern”. Its details – from the shattered glass and the beer bottle sodomy – had an irresistible allure. Questioning it was like questioning whether Saddam Hussein actually did have WMDs – it seems as if you are excusing an evil figure, or being terminally naïve, or minimizing the danger. We believe what we want to believe – and, in our public debates, we also keep searching for the perfect anecdote or fact or story to refute our opponents for good and all.

Both sides do this. Republicans couldn’t accept the already-damning and uncontested facts about Benghazi – that the danger to the consulate was under-estimated, security was lax, and people died as a consequence. They had to make the story fit a bigger narrative – of treachery and betrayal at the highest levels, a story that could dispatch Obama and Clinton in one news cycle swoop. And so they have made an ass of themselves as much as Rolling Stone has. I’ve done this too – in 2002 and 2003, when I simply did not see what was in front of my nose on Iraq. So I don’t think that the lesson of this latest embarrassment is that we do not have a grave problem of campus rape; or that anything more than a tiny fraction of those claiming rape are fraudulent. I think the lesson is to be more skeptical of things you want to believe than of almost anything else.

This is difficult, especially when you believe you are in the vanguard of social justice – and the ends can justify the means. It is much easier, for example, to believe that the vicious murder of Matthew Shepard vindicates a worldview where every straight man is a gay-basher until proven otherwise, and that the hatred of gays is close-to-pathological in its fury. It is much harder to absorb a still-terrible but much more complicated story of a horrible mixture of homophobia, the meth subculture and petty criminality.

This is why liberalism matters as much as progressivism, which is on my mind a little as the demise of TNR has sunk in. For many, TNR’s legacy of airing internal dissent, its controversial questioning of progressive shibboleths, its inclusion of some conservatives in its ranks, its constant sallies against liberals as well as conservatives, and its airing of taboo subjects, make it a risibly racist/sexist/homophobic/classist institution that deserves to die. I dissent. What it long represented was the spirit of liberalism in the American tradition – a spirit of fearless inquiry, serious argument, and a concern for the truth. That TNR failed in some of these attempts does not damn it. Not to try to confront feelings with reason, or ideology with fact is a far worse inclination. In fact, as so many instant hysterical and self-serving stories flicker across our screens and phones, we need TNR’s beleaguered liberal spirit as badly as we always did. We need it among publications on the right as well as the left. In these polarized, self-cocooning days of Facebook “likes” and doxxing, of intensifying groupthink and moral posturing, of Twitter lynch-mobs and instant fads, we need more voices willing to question their own “side”, more turds in more punchbowls, more writers willing to be open to facts that undermine their own ideology, to express skepticism precisely in those areas where dogmatism is creeping in.

We try to do that every day here at the Dish – because, in part, I was trained and influenced and formed by some of the best minds in this great liberal tradition in American letters, and because I have tried to learn from my own errors. It isn’t easy and it isn’t fool-proof. But that tradition must not die; or, sooner rather than later, our democracy will.

God, Aliens, And Us

If intelligent life was discovered elsewhere in the universe, could monotheistic faiths successfully adapt? Damon Linker is pessimistic:

Think of it as a theological Copernican Revolution. Just as the scientific Copernican Revolution destabilized and downgraded humanity’s place in the cosmos by substituting heliocentrism for a geocentric view that placed the Earth and its inhabitants at the center of creation, so the discovery of advanced life on other planets would imply that human beings are just one of any number of intelligent creatures in the universe. And that, in turn, would seem to imply either that God created many equally special beings throughout the universe, or that God cares for us more than he does for those other intelligent beings.

How the latter view could be rendered compatible with basic tenets of monotheism (including divine omnipresence, omnipotence, and omnibenevolence) is beyond me. Did God create those other intelligent creatures, too, but without an interest in revealing himself to them? Or did they, unlike human beings, evolve all on their own without divine origins and guidance?

How believers answer those questions will be a product, in part, of what the extraterrestrials look like. If the aliens have symmetrical body structures — two legs, two arms, two eyes, two ears, two nostrils — then it may be plausible to assume that they were created in the image and likeness of the same God as we were. But if they look nothing like us at all, the case for separation between “our” God and these alien intelligences would grow much stronger.

Noah Millman, however, offers a more sanguine take:

Religions do not grow and shrink in response to reasoned analysis. Their origins are mysterious and their subsequent trajectories are the function of too many variables to be easily teased out. Why did Mohammed’s conquests lead to the formation of a new world religion, while Genghis Khan’s did not? Why did Jesus beat out Mithra in the contest to succeed Roman paganism? Why was there any such contest in the first place? What, for that matter, do the Abrahamic religions offer that is so appealing that they continue to grow at the expense of non-Abrahamic traditions that, objectively speaking, require much less of a leap of faith, much less suspension of disbelief in the objectively absurd?

I don’t know the answer to these questions. But they have more bearing on the prospective future of Christianity – and what that future will look like – than the possibility that Christianity will seem absurd in the face of this or that scientific development. Even so revolutionary a development as the encounter with extraterrestrial intelligence.

(NASA’s Hubble shows the Milky Way is destined for head-on collision)

The Science Of Sibling Rivalry

Peter Toohey mulls it over:

[Animal behaviorist Scott] Forbes describes how herpetologists, ornithologists, and mammalogists found that “infanticide – including siblicide – was a routine feature of family life in many species,” most commonly seen in birds. Some birds lay two eggs “to insure against failure of the first egg to hatch. If both hatch, the second chick is redundant to the parents, and a potentially lethal competitor to the first-hatched progeny.” The healthy older chick often kills the younger to eliminate the competition, and some parents actually encourage siblicide when the death of the nest-mate doesn’t naturally occur.

After all, if resources are scarce, it’s better that the strongest offspring survive and that their potential efforts go to ensuring that happens. (It’s the old story of genetic replication again: Surviving offspring are more likely to have the strongest genes, and they are the ones that have the best chance of reproducing later and passing those genes on.) Forbes thinks that such extreme jealous reactions are not common in the human species, but “the more modest forms of sibling rivalry that are ubiquitous in species with extensive parental care – the scrambles for food and begging competitions – resemble more closely the dynamics that occur in human families.”

Painting In The Present

Jed Perl recently visited two exhibitions of Picasso’s work – one in Paris, one in New York City – leading him to consider why the artist still resonates so powerfully:

Progress, at least in modern art, has often been related to ideas of purification, simplification, and reduction. Picasso was never committed to any of that, at least not for long. Sometimes he simplified, but as frequently he complicated. For Picasso, Cubism was as much complication as simplification, as much a matter of feeling as of form, the world comically and tragically disassembled and reassembled. Neoclassicism’s porcelain-perfect verisimilitude was as natural an outcome as the abstract web of the 1928 design for a monument to Apollinaire. If Picasso’s work strikes with particular urgency now, it is because his skepticism about the promise of progress and his heartfelt and disorderly humanism accord with our moment, when we often feel that the best we can do is to take things as they come, the tragic and the comic bewilderingly mixed. Like Picasso, we do not see catharsis in the old modern dream of progress.

A product of modernism, Picasso trumped modernism. By rejecting the idea of art as having a past or a future, he has somehow managed to stay with us in the present. Going through the rooms full of Picassos in New York and Paris, confronting at every turn the faces and figures of his lovers and friends and mythological imaginings, we find ourselves happily besieged by humanity in all its crazy, wonderful, awful profusion. For those who had imagined that Picasso would recede with the modern century, there is quite a shock in finding that he is right here beside us as we stand blinking in the harsh light of the day after modernism died.

(Photo by Antonio Rubio)