Month: June 2011

A Syrian Recruit

Esther Adorno has a heartbreaking dispatch. A young Syrian, Qassem, explains the government's recuitment efforts:

“They take you for two weeks, place you in squads of ten men each, and use you as irregular, non-uniformed snipers. They give you a weapon and tell you to shoot. If you don’t shoot, they shoot you … they return you to your family wrapped in a white bedsheet, calling you a martyr and saying it was the terrorists who killed you."

Deconstructing The Smurfs

Antoine Buéno, a lecturer at Sciences Po university in Paris, argues that the fictional creatures "live in a world where private initiative is rarely rewarded, where meals are all taken together in a communal room, where there is one leader and where the Smurfs rarely leave their small country":

"Does that not remind you of anything? A political dictatorship, for example?" asks Buéno, going on to compare the Smurfs' world to a totalitarian utopia reminiscent of Stalinist communism (Papa wears a red outfit and resembles Stalin, while Brainy is similar to Trotsky) and nazism (the character of the Smurfs' enemy Gargamel is an antisemitic caricature of a Jew, he proposes). A story about the Black Smurfs, meanwhile, in which the Smurfs are bitten by a fly which turns their skin black and renders them unable to speak, has colonial overtones.

The analogies are nothing new, as evidenced by the above video by Evan Topham from a few years back.

Rightsizing Defense

Ackerman says "defense analysts are itching to hear how Panetta will adjust U.S. defense strategy to make the impending budget cuts make sense":

It’s too glib to say Panetta’s test as defense chief will be to execute Obama’s desired 12-year, $400 billion budget cut. Panetta will take over the Pentagon from Robert Gates at a time when not only is the budget out of whack, but so is U.S. defense strategy. The U.S. is fighting three wars at once, all of which have a debatable relationship to the national interest. His real test is how he can craft a smaller budget that supports a more sustainable strategy — one that cuts back on ground wars and personnel costs and emphasizes maritime, air and cyber dominance.

The Economist puts our defense spending in context.

The Profound Unseriousness Of Tim Pawlenty, Ctd

Chait watches Republicans swallow Pawlenty's economic nonsense:

Alarmingly, Pawlenty's plan is being greeted by conservatives not as some nee plus ultra supply-side vision but as an opening bid. The Wall Street Journal editorial page asks, at the end of a glowing editorial, "Now that Mr. Pawlenty has laid down his marker, what do his competitors have to offer?" Once you've eliminated all tax on capital income and slashed the rates, how much further can you go? Romney hasn't come out with his plan yet, but he can't let Pawlenty outflank him. I hesitate to even think of where the bidding will stand by the time Michelle Bachmann unveils her proposal.

R.M. at DiA makes the same point:

As the candidates try to out-tea-party one another, they push the Overton window of acceptable economic policy to the absurd right. This makes it much more difficult for a reasonable Republican candidate to win office, and for any Republican politician to support reasonable economic policy. And no matter what party you belong to, you should find it troubling that Mr Pawlenty's ridiculous economic plan could ever be considered acceptable by a large portion of the population.

Chart Of The Day

Chart

Alex Tabarrok points out that median female income "tracks real GDP per capita much more closely than does median male income." Yglesias parses the increase in female labor:

[I]nstead of accelerating growth, what we got from this increase in labor supply was a loss of earning power by working class men.

Arnold Kling goes into more detail:

To me, the explanation for the data in Alex's post is that the job structure has changed to diminish the relative importance of physical strength. This brought more women into the labor force, and it reduced wages and employment prospects for a significant proportion of the male population. This changed marriage, as Wolfers and Stevenson have pointed out, from something based on production complementarity (women do housework, men do factory or farm work) to consumption complementarity. This results in more assortive mating by income, creating lots of household inequality.

Born This Way

Alyssa calls the new X-Men movie "a great gay rights metaphor" and the fight between Professor X and Magneto a "rehash of old-school gay rights debates, about whether the goal should be assimilation with straight society or the preservation of a separate, rich gay culture." Paul Schrodt provides background on the movie franchise:

The agenda was set with the original X-Men in 2000, directed by the openly gay Bryan Singer. "It's not just a fantasy story," Singer reportedly told actor Ian McKellen, a fervent LGBT-rights activist, to lure him into a starring role as Magneto. "It's a parable." And indeed, it has been. In the first film, the superheroes are opposed by a U.S. senator who cries out, in a nod to Anita Bryant's "Save Our Children" campaign, "I think the American people deserve the right to decide whether they want their children … to be taught by mutants!" The follow-up, 2003's X2, made its point more boldly, in a scene that so closely resembles a "coming out" it borders on camp—the mother asks her son, "Have you ever tried not being a mutant?" before she gives up entirely and says, "This is all my fault."

When The Troops Leave, Who Stays?

Peter Van Buren wants to shrink the US embassy in Iraq. These basic facts are worth noting:

[T]he State Department hasn't exactly been thinking small when it comes to its future "footprint" on Iraqi soil. The U.S. mission in Baghdad remains the world's largest embassy, built on a tract of land about the size of the Vatican and visible from space. It cost just $736 million to build — or was it $1 billion, depending on how you count the post-construction upgrades and fixes?

In its post-"withdrawal" plans, the State Department expects to have 17,000 personnel in Iraq at some 15 sites. If those plans go as expected, 5,500 of them will be mercenaries, hired to shoot-to-kill Iraqis as needed, to maintain security. Of the remaining 11,500, most will be in support roles of one sort or another, with only a couple of hundred in traditional diplomatic jobs. This is not unusual in wartime situations. The military, for example, typically fields about seven support soldiers for every "shooter." In other words, the occupation run by a heavily militarized State Department will simply continue in a new, truncated form — unless Congress refuses to pay for it.

Ted Galen Carpenter is in the same ballpark. Nation-building occupations are like welfare programs or Mohair subsidies. Once enacted, they never end.