The Best Of The Dish Today

Screenshots from Fox News are often full of hathos:

Only 10 of us left. RT @HToneTastic: This is much better without context. http://t.co/Bu4rxyndaQ—
Nicholas Jackson (@nbj914) July 07, 2014

I’ve long had a simple frustration about national security policy. We debate the merits and otherwise of various anti-terrorism policies – spying, drones, invasions, occupations, torture, etc. – and yet we never really have a solid grip on just how dangerous the threat really is. We still think of it almost entirely in terms of 9/11, even though nothing has been attempted on anything like that scale since. In other words, we know the costs of our anti-terror policies, but we really don’t have much of a grip on the benefits – i.e. real dangers really averted. And so it’s always a relief when someone who has had access to all the necessarily secret intelligence on Islamist terror can give us a better sense of what we’re grappling with. And along comes the former head of MI6 in Britain, Richard Dearlove, telling us this:

He told an audience in London on Monday there had been a fundamental change in the nature of Islamist extremism since the Arab spring. It had created a major political problem in the Middle East but the west, including Britain, was only “marginally affected”. Unlike the threat posed by al-Qaida before and in the aftermath of the 9/11 attacks 13 years ago, the west was not the main target of the radical fundamentalism that created Isis, (the Islamic State in Iraq and the Levant), Dearlove said.

But the premise of the assumption that we somehow have to reinsert ourselves into the Iraq implosion and Syrian civil war is that we will be threatened if we don’t. The Cheneys have even raised the specter of nuclear Armageddon. But what if the most effective way to make ourselves a target in an otherwise distant Muslim sectarian and regional war is to involve ourselves directly in it? What if ignoring it, or keeping a very long distance, is actually the best way to defeat Islamist terror? This isn’t a matter of hawks or doves; it’s about what is the most effective response to specific threats - threats that have and will evolve and change over time. And that doesn’t just apply to the governments in the West; it should also apply to the media:

[Dearlove] made it clear he believed the way the British government and the media were giving the extremists the “oxygen of publicity” was counter-productive. The media were making monsters of “misguided young men, rather pathetic figures” who were getting coverage “more than their wildest dreams”, said Dearlove, adding: “It is surely better to ignore them.”

Advice not from a peacenik, but from a man more directly exposed to the real threat than almost anyone else.

Today, we wrapped up some loose and troubling ends from the Hobby Lobby case; we explored the growing evidence behind the notion of a continuous spectrum of consciousness between humans and other animals; we defended the anti-institutional faith of the Millennial generation; and speculated about the demise of the few lesbian bars left in America.

The most popular post of the day was “The Tears Of An Elephant“, followed by “Map of the Day” on state-by-state painkiller prescriptions in the US.

Many of today’s posts were updated with your emails – read them all here. You can always leave your unfiltered comments at our Facebook page and @sullydish. 21 more readers became subscribers today. You can join them here - and get access to all the readons and Deep Dish - for a little as $1.99 month. One writes:

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