Palestinian protesters are reflected on the helmet of an Israeli border policeman during a demonstration against a film mocking Islam after the Friday prayers at Al-Aqsa mosque compound in Jerusalem's old city on September 14, 2012. Palestinians protested against an amateur anti-Muslim film with thousands gathering in the Gaza Strip and hundreds in Jerusalem where they clashed with Israeli police. By Menahem Kahana/AFP/Getty Images.
Noah Shachtman takes us ever further down the rabbit hole with the world’s least favorite filmmaker, Nakoula Basseley Nakoula:
In August of 1991, he was convicted on two counts of selling watered-down gasoline. And then came the arrest for PCP manufacturing in 1997. …. According to The Daily Beast, Nakoula and Abraham weren’t just attempting to make PCP. The news site claims that the pair were arrested for trying to mass-produce methamphetamine. Nakoula was arrested on March 27, 1997, according to the Beast, with $45,000 in hundreds and twenties in a paper lunch bag on the seat beside him.
Leah Nelson has more on the other fanatics behind the film:
For years, [film consultant Steve] Klein has been cultivating relationships with Middle Eastern Christians in California – in particular, Joseph Nasralla, a California Coptic Christian who spoke at an anti-Muslim rally hosted by hate group leaders Pam Geller and Robert Spencer on Sept. 11, 2010. Now, Nasralla has been identified as president and CEO of Media for Christ, a California nonprofit that allegedly produced “The Innocence of Muslims.” … The Vietnam veteran, who says Muslims have “no choice but to hunt Jews and Christians down, torture us and murder us,” has been pushing Coptic Christians to join his anti-Muslim crusade for years. A hard-line Christian nationalist who conducts paramilitary trainings with Christian groups across the country, he believes that Copts have a divine destiny to “save” America from the twin evils of secularism and Islam.
To read all Dish coverage of the embassy attacks in one convenient place, including our previous posts on Nakoula, go to the “Embassy Attacks In Libya and Egypt” thread page.
A reader writes:
I've been reading your posts on the hookup culture with increasing dismay, and just want to chime in with my own experience. I specifically want to respond to the comment one of your other readers made: "I … don't want [my daughters] to marry as virgins and find out they're completely incompatible with their husbands."
Certainly many of your readers see this line and nod in approval. "Yes," they say to themselves, "that is a true danger." I just want to point out that that idea – being "sexually incompatible" – is a complete construct of … wait for it … the hookup culture! And, in my opinion, is a large reason marriages and relationships fall apart so often.
Full disclosure: I'm a Mormon. I was brought up in many places around in the country, including Utah, California, and Iowa. I have seen dozens of my Mormon friends marry and have (so far) extremely happy relationships. To the person, we were all virgins when we got married, including all of our spouses. And you know what? Nobody cares! I had never even heard the term "sexual compatibility" until after my marriage, and it made me laugh out loud.
Why?
Because of all the things to cause strife in a marriage, this one seems strangest of all. My wife and I have never had sex with anyone but each other. I have no idea if I would be "more" or "less compatible" with someone else; but I don't care, because sex is not the centerpiece of our relationship. Physical intimacy certainly is important – sex is a happy, beautiful, wonderful part of our marriage. But the very idea that sex should be a determining factor of our "compatibility" in marriage to me is merely evidence of the over-sexualization of our culture.
I once spoke with friends in Iowa about the fact that my wife and I never lived together (including never having sex) before our marriage. We moved in after our honeymoon. Our first sexual experiences were together, and on our honeymoon. And these friends asked, "But how can you know if you're compatible if you don't live together? What if you find out things that bother you about that person?"
My response is still this: anything you can only learn by living with (or having sex with) someone is not something that should affect the quality of your marriage. Marriage is about love, commitment, service, not about pleasing each other. My wife has some small quirks that bother me, that I didn't know about prior to my marriage. Who cares? Our sex life is wonderful, and both of us happily have nothing to compare it to. Great! If we had "shopped around" or experienced sex with many different people, it would have ruined the beauty and simplicity of what we have.
So please don't tell me it's necessary to have many sexual experiences to learn whether we are "compatible" with others. This is a creation of a sexualized society, which puts the largest weight on the lightest and least significant things.
To read every post in this Dish thread, go here.
Today the Obama campaign pushed back on yesterday's China-focused Romney ad with a new nine-state spot rehashing their outsourcing rhetoric (ad buy amount unknown):
And series of new Spanish spots are out supporting the president, two from the campaign and another two as a joint effort from SEIU and the pro-Obama Super PAC Priorities USA. One ad from the Obama campaign, which is going up in Florida, reminds voters that Romney did not support Sotomayor's nomination to the Supreme Court. The other touts popular talk-show host Cristina Saralegui:
Geneva Sands translates:
"Let’s talk facts. When President Obama took office our economy was on the verge of disaster. Hundreds of thousands of Americans lost their jobs every month. The policies of the last Republican President were disastrous. Obama stopped the crisis and we are recovering. And now Romney and Ryan ask us to return to the policies that caused the crisis. Back to the future? No way. Forward … with Obama!"
The other two outside-spending Spanish ads will go up in Colorado, Florida, and Nevada and have $4 million behind them. They are one-minute spots hitting Romney on a variety of issues that relate to Hispanic voters. One is here, the other is below (note the use of the misleading, edited-down "I like to be able to fire people" line, only leaving in the "who provide services to me", which is usually cut):
From the other side, Rove's dark-money group, Crossroads GPS, is going on the offensive against Obama regarding taxes, part of a one-week $5.3 million buy across six states. The ad frames Obamacare as a tax increase and says the president is "dishonest":
Another outside spender on Team Romney, the Super PAC Restore Our Future, is getting ready to go on-air in Wisconsin and – here's a surprise – Michigan, where the Romney campaign had recently seemed to abandon because of Obama's strong lead in the polls. The size of the buy is not yet known. In other news, a new WaPo/ABC poll looked at how much voters trusted the candidates, with unsurprising results regarding the correlation between opinion and partisanship. And lastly, Mike Shields writes of an interesting place the Obama campaign is placing some GOTV advertising:
Starting today, the Obama campaign will begin running ads across multiple video game titles from Electronic Arts, including the new Madden NFL 13, in the key Electoral College-tilting states of Ohio, Nevada, Colorado, Iowa, New Hampshire and Virginia. The ads are aimed at encouraging the gaming demographic to take advantage of early voting in these states.
It's worked before:
According to Dave Madden, EA’s svp of global media solutions, the strategy paid off for team Obama. Based on surveys conducted by EA during the 2008 ad effort, gamers were 120 percent more likely to feel positively about the candidate and 50 percent more likely to consider voting for him after seeing the in-game ads.
Ad War archive here.
Chris Beam, who considered himself good at ping-pong back in states, got skunked repeatedly in China by prepubescent boys:
My first opponent at Shichahai, a smiley kid named Wang, stands eye-level with my chest. On the orders of Coach Chang, we edge up to a nearby table and start rallying. Though rallying couldn't be less accurate. Wang serves. The ball bounces over the net and hits my side of the table. I strike it with my paddle, it springs over the net, and does not hit his side of the table. It doesn't hit anything. This must happen 25 times in a row. The physics are all wrong. It's like instead of a paddle I'm holding a pancake.
One reason the Chinese dominate the sport:
China's greatest strength may be its sheer numbers. Teodor Gheorghe, the coach of the U.S. women's Olympic ping-pong team, remembers visiting China with the Romanian team in 1970 and hearing a Guangdong official lament that the province had "only 5 million players." "You can imagine how we were shocked," Gheorghe says. Unlike soccer or basketball, ping-pong doesn't require much space or equipment—just a table, two paddles, and a net (or lacking that, a row of bricks). Just as no one can throw a baseball quite like an American boy or dribble a soccer ball like a Brazilian kid, your average Chinese child grows up knowing his or her way around the table.
Here are all the Dish posts that make up our thread following the role of women in hookup culture.
Ask Hanna Anything: Is Today’s Hookup Culture A Positive Thing?
Hanna Rosin has a new book out, The End Of Men. Previous videos of Hanna here, here and here. “Ask Anything” archive here.
Women Aren’t Victims Of The Hookup Culture
In the Atlantic piece she discussed in Monday’s “Ask Anything” video, Hanna Rosin stands up for the sexual choices of Millennials:
When they do hook up, the weepy-woman stereotype doesn’t hold. Equal numbers of men and women—about half—report to England that they enjoyed their latest hookup “very much.” About 66 percent of women say they wanted their most recent hookup to turn into something more, but 58 percent of men say the same—not a vast difference, considering the cultural panic about the demise of chivalry and its consequences for women. And in fact, the broad inference that young people are having more sex—and not just coarser sex—is just wrong; teenagers today, for instance, are far less likely than their parents were to have sex or get pregnant. Between 1988 and 2010, the percentage of teenage girls having sex dropped from 37 to 27, according to the latest data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. By many measures, the behavior of young people can even look like a return to a more innocent age.
Kate J.M. Baker claps. Dreher gets defensive:
I wrote the other day about how a gay culture of promiscuity is a “culture of death.” This is a heterosexual version of the same. It is a culture of spiritual death. I see one of my primary jobs as a father as raising my sons and my daughter to hate this culture, and to resist it, mostly by learning to love what is good, true, and beautiful. Nothing — nothing — about the hook-up culture is good, true, or beautiful.
Maggie Gallagher waves a study suggesting that women prefer hookups much less than men do. David French, in a defense of Nathan Harden’s Sex and God at Yale against critiques by Hanna and Nora Caplan-Bricker, is on the same page as Maggie and Dreher:
One has to be willfully blind to believe that men and women approach sex on the same terms.
Sure, there are some women who sleep around with gusto and some men who just want to settle down, but to believe that there aren’t profound differences in the way men and women experience the world is to live in a fairy land. If Ms. Rosin and Ms. Caplan-Bricker want to see the true fruits of the sexual revolution, I suggest that they get out just a bit more — out of the world of wealth and privilege (which can absorb a multitude of sins) and into the working-class world of skyrocketing illegitimacy, generational fatherlessness, and deepening poverty. … Ask a woman working two jobs to provide for three kids by two different deadbeat dads if the hook-up culture has empowered her.
A reader quotes David French from our previous post:
Ask a woman working two jobs to provide for three kids by two different deadbeat dads if the hook-up culture has empowered her.
Nothing in hookup culture prevents the use of birth control. The root causes of generational fatherlessness and poverty are more about lack of comprehensive sex education in schools and access to health care, ie, birth control. Yet why am I not surprised that the same cultural conservatives who decry sexually liberated behavior also oppose anything but abstinence-only programs and try to defund Planned Parenthood? Opposition to sexual freedom is all about the rear-guard action of cultural conservatives unable to adapt to modernity.
Another writes:
Rod Dreher doubled down on his belief that gay promiscuity is a “culture of death” by saying that the heterosexual “hook-up” culture is also part of a “culture of death.” He brought up his daughters and how he’s trying to raise them to be, I guess, virgins till they’re married. I’m also the father of two girls, and I see youthful sexual adventure as normal healthy exploration of this beautiful world – finding out what their bodies do, trying out relationships and especially trying out sex without relationships.
I don’t want my girls to become self-destructive with compulsive, dark, promiscuous sex. But I also don’t want them to marry as virgins and find out they’re completely incompatible with their husbands. It’s so normal and healthy to explore sex as a young person that it seems weird and life-denying and actually kind of perverted to abstain completely. I know some people find happiness and security in a difficult virtue. But it’s mostly the phrase that keeps sticking in my craw – culture of death. Culture of death? Sex is the foundation of life!
Another is also animated over the phrase:
Gay culture is the “culture of death”? Conservatives like Dreher spend most of their time insisting that gays cannot participate in traditions like marriage, while then turning around and lamenting the iniquity of gays who won’t settle down. You can’t lambast people for not making the choices you would deny them or not accept. Conservatives have the power to promote monogamy and commitment in the gay community by simply allowing gay people to get married (which they’re going to do whether anyone recognizes it or not) and not being huge assholes about it. Calling out the promiscuity of parts of the gay community while refusing to recognize the monogamous inclinations of so many other gay men is just dishonest. Refusing gays marriage in their culture, and then complaining that not enough gay men get married is ridiculous. They can’t have it both ways.
Another:
About all this hookup culture stuff: I just don’t get it. When was this magical time when nobody was having sex except when they were in love? Was it in the ’60s, during the “Summer of Love”? Probably not. Was it in the ’70s, when cocaine was everywhere and HIV was nowhere? Not exactly. Was it in the ’80s, the days of hair metal and still more cocaine and clothes so overtly sexualized that they’re a joke now? (I mean, I wouldn’t have had sex with anyone with that hair, but it didn’t seem to bother them then at all.) So it must have been the ’90s, when Ecstasy set off a new generation of ravers obsessed with physical pleasure.
You see where I’m going with this. All this noise about a “hookup culture” is the anxiety of a generation who screwed their way through their youth and are now raising children, desperate to find some line of demarcation between their own behavior and what they wish their children wouldn’t do. I don’t care what the statistics say, I really don’t. I don’t think for a minute that you can trust ANY self-reported sex or drug statistics.
So what are we worried about? America hasn’t had a prudish culture since at least the ’50s, and even then, I’d bet my boots it was just going on behind closed doors. My grandmother got pregnant out of wedlock at 17 in 1951, after all. The only difference was that she was bundled off, married at shotgun-point, and forced into the kitchen for 40 years. Goodbye and good riddance, as they say, to all of that.
A reader quotes another:
The root causes of generational fatherlessness and poverty are more about lack of comprehensive sex education in schools and access to health care, ie, birth control.
Really? Access and education? Do you really believe that that there are more than a handful of single moms that did not know about birth control at the time of their pregnancy? When pretty much every convenience store (at least in New York City) has a slew of condoms hanging behind the counter, there is no access? That any woman that has already had a child is ignorant of birth control? Come on. This reply was just another example of liberals treating people like idiots.
Another pounces on another:
But it’s mostly the phrase that keeps sticking in my craw – culture of death. Culture of death? Sex is the foundation of life!
Yes. Yes, it is. Therefore, a culture that constantly tells people to take the act that is the foundation of all life, strip it of its pesky life-giving properties using devices and/or chemicals, and use it as a recreational activity in superficial encounters with people you don’t care about and may never want to see again (any accidental offspring of which have a good chance of being aborted) … is viewed by many as a culture of death.
A reader writes:
I’ve been reading your posts on the hookup culture with increasing dismay, and just want to chime in with my own experience. I specifically want to respond to the comment one of your other readers made: “I … don’t want [my daughters] to marry as virgins and find out they’re completely incompatible with their husbands.”
Certainly many of your readers see this line and nod in approval. “Yes,” they say to themselves, “that is a true danger.” I just want to point out that that idea – being “sexually incompatible” – is a complete construct of … wait for it … the hookup culture! And, in my opinion, is a large reason marriages and relationships fall apart so often.
Full disclosure: I’m a Mormon. I was brought up in many places around in the country, including Utah, California, and Iowa. I have seen dozens of my Mormon friends marry and have (so far) extremely happy relationships. To the person, we were all virgins when we got married, including all of our spouses. And you know what? Nobody cares! I had never even heard the term “sexual compatibility” until after my marriage, and it made me laugh out loud.
Why?
Because of all the things to cause strife in a marriage, this one seems strangest of all. My wife and I have never had sex with anyone but each other. I have no idea if I would be “more” or “less compatible” with someone else; but I don’t care, because sex is not the centerpiece of our relationship. Physical intimacy certainly is important – sex is a happy, beautiful, wonderful part of our marriage. But the very idea that sex should be a determining factor of our “compatibility” in marriage to me is merely evidence of the over-sexualization of our culture.
I once spoke with friends in Iowa about the fact that my wife and I never lived together (including never having sex) before our marriage. We moved in after our honeymoon. Our first sexual experiences were together, and on our honeymoon. And these friends asked, “But how can you know if you’re compatible if you don’t live together? What if you find out things that bother you about that person?”
My response is still this: anything you can only learn by living with (or having sex with) someone is not something that should affect the quality of your marriage. Marriage is about love, commitment, service, not about pleasing each other. My wife has some small quirks that bother me, that I didn’t know about prior to my marriage. Who cares? Our sex life is wonderful, and both of us happily have nothing to compare it to. Great! If we had “shopped around” or experienced sex with many different people, it would have ruined the beauty and simplicity of what we have.
So please don’t tell me it’s necessary to have many sexual experiences to learn whether we are “compatible” with others. This is a creation of a sexualized society, which puts the largest weight on the lightest and least significant things.
A reader quotes another:
When pretty much every convenience store (at least in New York City) has a slew of condoms hanging behind the counter, there is no access? That any woman that has already had a child is ignorant of birth control? Come on. This reply was just another example of liberals treating people like idiots.
People are not ALL idiots, but when abstinence-only public sex ed insists that condoms are fallible and therefore only abstinence works, the relative abundance of condoms in convenience stores does not matter. I’d also point out that the vast majority of the American landscape is not New York City, and there are millions of sexually active teenagers and young men and women who do not have the easy access to condoms that our New Yorker enjoys. Maybe a small-town drugstore stocks condoms too, but can a young person buy them without worrying that Mom and Dad will hear from the druggist, who’s in their church (where birth control is demonized)? I love New York City, don’t get me wrong, but to generalize about the accessibility of ANYTHING from NYC to the rest of America is … idiotic.
Another adds, “Any prescription based birth control is expensive, and also difficult to access if you are uninsured or in a rural area or under 18.” Another:
In the South, schools are frequently not allowed to teach about contraception, and when they are, parents are given advance warning and many withdraw their children from the sex ed classes rather than have them be educated. Birth control urban legends are legion, including, but hardly limited, to the idea that an aspirin inserted in the birth canal will prevent pregnancy (I’ve also heard coca cola because it is acidic, and soap because it will wash out the semen, amongst other similarly idiotic – these days weirdly mutated into the ‘joke’ that holding an aspirin between your knees will prevent pregnancy). When children-becoming-adolescents don’t get official information from parents or teachers, they fall back on one another. I remember hearing the myth that you can’t get pregnant on your first attempt. All these and more are still frequently circulated amongst teens all over the Western world (and while hardly an expert, I’d be surprised if the rest of the world cultures don’t have similar legends amongst their teenaged population).
Another points to some stats:
The latest CDC survey (released January of this year) of teenagers ages 15 to 19 found that over half didn’t use birth control and of those 31.4 percent believed that they couldn’t get pregnant. Those teens who did get pregnant, as would be expected, were much less likely to use birth control.
Another takes a different tack:
I have to respond to this: “The root causes of generational fatherlessness and poverty are more about lack of comprehensive sex education in schools and access to health care, ie, birth control.” Poverty doesn’t mean people don’t have the same wishes and dreams as people not living in poverty. Isn’t it entirely possible that some poor women have children because they are not immune from wanting children? Isn’t it possible that some poor women want children because they suspect they will never ever, have something that is unconditionally theirs and unconditionally loves them, besides a child? Isn’t it possible that some poor women have children because they were raised by a single mother and model what she did because THAT IS WHAT THEY KNOW? Isn’t it possible that some poor women feel they will never do anything as meaningful as raising another human being and they want that meaning and purpose in their lives?
By the way, single motherhood is not a plight reserved for the urban poor. It is a mainstream occurrence now.
Felix Salmon unravels the findings of a paper (pdf) by Tim Kane on the implosion of startup-driven job creation:
Concentrating on startups is not going to move the broader employment needle very much. But the dynamic here is surprising and troubling, all the same. Intuitively, if people can’t find work for an existing company, they should be more likely, not less likely, to go out and found a new company themselves, instead. But that doesn’t seem to be happening.
Salmon adds:
[F]or all that we think of startups as being largely high-tech things, in reality a huge number of them are in the construction industry, in one way or another. In a word, subcontractors. And no one’s starting new granite-countertop installation companies right now.
A new Fannie Mae study of the ailing residential construction industry digs (pdf) into how the housing bust factors into the anemic recovery:
[J]ob loss, as opposed to average wage decline, is the principle culprit underlying the weak aggregate earnings recovery. What’s more, the analysis identifies construction job losses, in particular, as a primary force behind this business cycle’s comparatively weak aggregate earnings performance.
Nicole Pasulka explores the history of Hawaiian land grabs:
The standard tourist narrative downplays or disregards disease epidemics, violence against native Hawaiians, and movements for native sovereignty. Because who wants to be reminded they’re taking a holiday on illegally annexed land? …
For around a thousand years, Hawaiian kings and chiefs—known as ali’i—controlled the land, and access was determined by social order. As the Hawaiian monarchy adopted a constitution and began to democratize in the 1830s and ’40s, a series of land-ownership laws called "the Great Mahele" made it possible for private citizens to own property on the islands for the first time. The Great Mahele was intended to provide a substantial amount of land for Hawaiian commoners, but the concept of property ownership was alien to Hawaiians, and only about 1 percent of native Hawaiians ended up being able to take advantage of the law. American entrepreneurs and industrialists managed to acquire land that would become hugely lucrative sugar, pineapple, and coffee plantations, and 70 percent of native Hawaiians found themselves landless by the end of the nineteenth century.
Blake Zeff believes Romney is being forced to veer away from a more coherent campaign strategy – exactly the same way Hillary Clinton and McCain were in 2008:
[Clinton and McCain] both became so vexed by their inability to puncture [Obama's] positive image that they lost control of their campaigns against him. Frustrated with their inability to win a single news cycle, their strategy ultimately devolved into a simple determination to score points wherever possible, even when it put them at odds with their original strategy. With Hillary Clinton, a campaign based on superior experience turned to accusations of plagiarism and flip-flopping. In the case of John McCain, a campaign based on patriotism and straight talk came to revolve around a random encounter Obama had with a plumber about taxes (and, in the ultimate demonstration of their anything-to-break-through mentality, Sarah Palin).
And now look at Romney, who set out in the general to focus voters' attention, with relentless intensity, on the lackluster economy. As a result of losing news cycle after news cycle, he's now throwing spaghetti, rigatoni, and fettuccine against the wall, and hoping something will stick.
(Photo: Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney campaigns at Van Dyck Park September 13, 2012 in Fairfax, Virginia. By Win McNamee/Getty Images)
Juan Cole weighs in on the ally debate:
Egypt is among about 14 countries designated at “major non-NATO allies” by US presidents. This status recognizes that they do joint military exercises with the US, and gives them special access to advanced US weaponry. However, some of them are not allies in the precise legal sense. That is, there is no obligation of mutual defense. A true ally, as with NATO states, is one that the allied country is pledged to defend from attack. Still, US officials typically have referred to Egypt as an ally, and the State Department made clear that it continues to do so.
So Obama was technically correct that Egypt is not an ally in the sense that Britain or even Turkey is. But unlike what some media outlets wrote, this statement was no gaffe. Rather, Obama was playing hardball with Morsi, trying to impress upon him that the status of ‘major non-NATO ally’ is not automatic now that the Muslim Brotherhood is in control. It will have to be re-earned, at least from Obama’s point of view. And the lack of response on the embassy attack is not consistent with ally status. Non-NATO ally status is bestowed by a stroke of the presidential pen, so Obama could take it away.
Cole also details how he believes Morsi and his administration have finally caved to US pressure by publicly denouncing the attacks:
Obama has enough assets in his contest with Morsi to influence the Egypt situation– loan reduction, civilian and military aid, and the danger that a US State Department travel warning could devastate Egypt’s tourist industry, which is worth billions a year. Even Obama’s willingness to play a politics of reputation with Morsi’s Egypt seems to have had some effect. [Obama's ally comment] wasn’t a ‘gaffe.’
The Dish 
