Month: November 2012

The Guardian reports that "Egypt's Islamist-dominated constituent assembly appears to trying to rush through a final draft of the constitution, in move that is likely to stoke further anger towards President Morsi and his Muslim Brotherhood supporters." Abdel-Rahman Hussein says it appears to be another cynical power play:

It looks like Morsi is attempting some sort of pincer movement – giving Egyptians a stark choice to either pass the constitution he favours or continue to live with his newly-issued expansive powers. It's like he's created a crisis to usher people towards the solution he desires – a quick yes vote on the popular referendum to pass the constitution. I don't think it's going to be an acceptable way out for opposition forces who don't want Morsi to have sweeping powers, but don't want to pass a constitution written by a Brotherhood-dominated assembly.

The Arabist unpacks this new development:

Even if it's approved tomorrow, there has to be a referendum on it. Victory is not guaranteed and a referendum will take at least a couple of weeks to organize. The supervisory commission to run it would be difficult to form, because it has to include senior judges who would likely boycott it, and judges are supposed to also be present at polling stations. All this points to a royal mess, a constitution that has no legitimacy among a big part of the public, and gives the opportunity to the Salafis — whose votes the Brothers now need to approve the latest draft — to introduce modifications to the text.

Chait contemplates the Dems' advantage among young voters:

Democrats today must amass huge majorities of moderate voters in order to overcome conservatives’ numerical advantage over liberals. They must carefully wrap any proposal for activist government within the strictures of limited government, which is why Bill Clinton declared the era of big government to be over, and Obama has promised not to raise taxes for 99 percent of Americans. It’s entirely possible that, by the time today’s twentysomethings have reached middle age, these sorts of limits will cease to apply.

Drum adds:

The Pew study reminds me of a great chart that the New York Times produced back in 2006 showing the effect that presidents have on brand loyalty to their party. Basically, a popular president gains the votes of 20-year-olds, and those voters retain much of their loyalty to the president's party for the rest of their lives. The opposite happens with an unpopular president. So Democrats spent eight years with a president that 20-somethings liked (Clinton), then Republicans suffered through eight years with a president they hated (Bush), and now Democrats have eight years of a president that 20-somethings like again (Obama). That's 24 years worth of 20-year-olds who are likely to retain a fairly strong loyalty to the Democratic Party.

(Chart from Pew)

… does not, alas, extend to his Republican colleagues. It’s worth noting, by the way, that Simpson Bowles began its tax reform on the basis of the Bush tax cuts all being sunsetted. Obama is to the right of them, if you think being on the right means minimizing taxes. In a sane world, couldn’t you just agree to an initial tax hike for the $250,000 to slightly lower than the Clinton rates, giving the GOP a fig leaf, while keeping the other tax cuts in place, and then hash out a comprehensive Simpson-Bowles style deal? Or are we really – even after a clarifying election – be playing a game of chicken till New Year’s Eve?

A reader quotes me:

“For others, it need not require much medical cost, except smaller balls, and the danger of losing your own endocrine system through abuse.” Are you kidding?! Read this:

Anabolic steroid use causes decreased levels of HDL or “good” cholesterol, increased levels of LDL or “bad” cholesterol, and serious liver toxicity within 12 weeks, according to a study [published in the March 2006 issue of the Journal of Acquired Immune Deficiency Syndromes] that measured the effects of anabolic steroids on men with HIV wasting disease.

As a side note: I am a 49-year-old HIV positive male (16 years positive) and have known more friends to die of a heart attack in their 40s than I have known die of HIV. Your comments are potentially very harmful!

Longer HIV survival is associated with higher chance of side-effects, like heart attacks. But it’s not clear what the precise connection is, or whether it’s HIV, HIV meds or testosterone therapy. But the latter – what I’m on – is not extra testosterone; it’s replacement testosterone to bring you up to normal levels. My own bloodwork, like most others with HIV, monitors for the impact on cholesterol, and can correct for it. Another writes:

Not to hate on guys who are crushing it with their rippling abs, but I recoiled at the casualness (both moral and medical) with which you treated the increase in steroid use.

The implication of your piece is that any guy who wants to preen or whatever – and who doesn’t? – should “use the right, responsible mix of steroids.” That’s crazy. Do you think those 15 year olds in the Times story are using steroids responsibly? Hell no.

Sure, if there’s a medical need, then by all means, people should roid up. But wanting to get jacked is not a medical need, and most non-celebrities are never going to have the access to the kinds of doctors and nutritionists that would make steroid use safe and routine. Nor should they. We live in a society with too few doctors, soaring healthcare costs, and an overmedicated population.

I also think your shoulder shrug at all this steroid use – “because it’s hotter” – is somewhat troubling. The notion that guys who want to get laid should mess with their body chemistry is just as revolting as the notion a woman who wants to be thought attractive should starve herself and have silicon surgically implanted into her tits. They’re both gross, if you ask me, and worth fighting against.

Good luck with that. My reader is right, though, that teenagers using this stuff are doing great harm to their own testosterone production, and that this should be prevented for men under 25 at the youngest. It’s also true that the use of steroids is a science that is dangerous if unsupervised. But that would be an argument for relaxing prohibition on steroids, to put doctors who dispense steroids or other drugs like growth hormone on the same plane as cosmetic surgeons.

Look: I’m a libertarian when it comes to doing what one wants with one’s own body. Added to that, the desire to get laid is about as powerful a drive as anything men experience. If added hormones help get you laid, the government can try to get in the way, but I suspect it will be futile. And I shouldn’t be the one bearing the blame here. Hollywood and the NFL are the primary cultural drivers – and reflections – of this.

Is this the shallowest part of manhood? Yep. But men are shallow when it comes to sex. I wish I could say I find scrawny guys as hot as built ones. I just can’t. Like straight men with big boobs, gay men cannot resist the siren call of big chests or an ass you can rest a jager shot on. As long as that is true, and the science exists to make you hotter, you can growl with naivete like Richard Cohen or you can face reality and try to make the best of it. That’s all I’m really saying.

"The conspiracy therefore was not to mislead the American public but to mislead America's enemies. If Rice had gone beyond her unclassified talking points and said that Ansar al-Sharia was suspected to be behind the Benghazi attacks, no doubt she would now be being hounded for the unauthorized disclosure of classified information," – Peter Bergen, CNN.

The decision by pro Morsi protesters to go to Tahrir Saturday could be the most dangerous decision taken by anyone since February 2011.

— Bassem Sabry باسم (@Bassem_Sabry) November 28, 2012

Islamist protests in support of Morsi are being planned for later this week, and while there have been continuing clashes between anti-Morsi protestors and security forces, the mixing of rival mass protests in Tahrir Square could ignite an explosion of violence. If that happens, Ashraf Khalil warns:

[I]f the violence spirals out of control, will the army step in? So far, the military has not tipped its hand publicly. After more than a year of running the country, the army basically withdrew from public life in August after Morsy won a power struggle with the Supreme Council of the Armed Forces and sent Defense Minister Hussein Tantawi and his deputies into early retirement. But speculation has grown over the military’s stance on things and Air Force jets have been flying low over multiple areas of Cairo for several days. 

Coverage of yesterday’s anti-Morsi protests here.

(Photo: Protesters face Egyptian riot Police during clashes on Omar Makram street, off Tahrir Square, on November 28, 2012 in Cairo. Police fired tear gas into Cairo’s Tahrir Square, where several hundred protesters spent the night after a mass rally to denounce President Mohamed Morsi’s assumption of expanded powers. By Gianluigi Guercia/AFP/Getty Images)

Goldblog thinks Abbas should abandon the statehood bid, acknowledge the occupation will never end – and ask for Palestinian voting rights within Israel instead:

Reaction would be seismic and instantaneous. The demand for voting rights would resonate with people around the world, in particular with American Jews, who pride themselves on support for both Israel and for civil rights at home. Such a demand would also force Israel into an untenable position; if it accedes to such a demand, it would very quickly cease to be the world’s only Jewish-majority state, and instead become the world’s 23rd Arab-majority state. If it were to refuse this demand, Israel would very quickly be painted by former friends as an apartheid state.

Israel’s response, then, can be reasonably predicted: Israeli leaders eager to prevent their country from becoming a pariah would move to negotiate the independence, with security caveats, of a Palestinian state on the West Bank, and later in Gaza, as well. Israel would simply have no choice.

It's a fruitful and constructive idea. Its greatest benefit, I think, would be integrating the Palestinian fight for democracy with the democratic forces at work elsewhere in the Middle East. It would mean that the Arab Spring might save, rather than threaten, Israel. Maybe such a policy – and a big Palestinian majority in Palestine – would encourage many of the less fanatical settlers to, er, self-deport back to their own country. What I fear is that this maneuver would go nowhere, weaken Abbas still further at home, and be blocked from progress by AIPAC-Christianist front in the US. But, hey, if Goldblog is optimistic, who am I to rain on the parade? It's something. Instead of an increasingly deadly and intractable dead end.

Cambridge, England, 12 pm

A new development in Greater Israel:

Police have begun ordering Palestinian laborers with legal work permits off buses from the Tel Aviv area to the West Bank, following complaints from settlers that Palestinians pose a security risk by riding the same buses as them. The Transportation Ministry says it is considering adding bus lines between West Bank roadblocks and central Israel; these would be geared toward Palestinian laborers.

Notice that these are laborers, not terrorists. Notice that their only crime is to be Arab. And notice how segregation’s logic leads inevitably toward a version of Jim Crow or apartheid. On Open Zion, which is on a hot streak right now, Emily Hauser sighs:

It’s important to note that separate bus lines would in many ways simply represent the codification of an ad hoc system already in place. Haaretz reports that West Bankers are frequently ordered off of buses well ahead of their destinations, forced to walk several miles to the nearest official checkpoint and then, having already paid for the bus, pay for a taxi to get home. +972 reported a case in August in which an Israeli bus driver travelling from Tel Aviv to Ariel, the West Bank’s largest settlement, refused to allow Palestinians to board, and “was then instructed by police that he had to by law, but ultimately kicked them off later on anyway.”

Remember that this entire system is effectively under-written by you, the American tax-payer. And the settlements keep growing, sustained by the American Jewish establishment and the Christianist faction in the GOP.

Goldblog, J.J. Gould and Scott Meslow are having an ongoing discussion about the current season of the zombie apocalypse. In response to the latest episode, Gould reflects on the show's moral implications:

The elementary struggle for survival in the zombie apocalypse isn't a struggle against evil; it's a struggle against an amoral horror. But it's also the context for another kind of struggle that determines all of the drama in The Walking Dead: the struggle among the survivors to remain human, to maintain their human identity. And as we've seen through Rick, through Andrea, through everyone from their group, this isn't a struggle against change as such; it's a struggle to change, to adapt, without losing yourself. … 

I still think [Goldberg's] right that the show makes a central [conservative] theme of what it means to "grapple with the tragic reality in front of you, rather than make believe that the world, and human nature, are things that they are not." I just don't think that's what the struggle against the zombies represents. Grappling with them, after all, ultimately means realizing that you're up against creatures among whom human nature is precisely and entirely beside the point. More than that, when you over-learn from the new world, when you over-adapt to it — becoming cynical and suspicious to the point of your own inhumanity — you don't necessarily become better suited to it; you may just become [dangerously amoral character] Shane.

I'm one episode behind, because Aaron was away and watching it without him would violate our marriage vows. But as a huge fan of the series, I agree with both John and Jeffrey. The series strips the infrastructure of civilization away, and sees what imprint it has left on the minds and souls of the human survivors. Civilization now exists entirely within their own selves. Yes, they just have to grapple with reality – and are no longer insulated from the cruel moral choices in which the lesser evil is the only option.

But they also seem to me to be defined by their need to retain some kind of hope.

For me, the most electrifying moment recently was watching a woman choose to die in order to give birth. Only one of them could live (at best); and the mother sacrificed herself for her off-spring. If you believe, as I find myself doing in my darker moments, that our modern civilization is environmentally and spiritually unsustainable – that it cannot go on like this as it has in the past – then the series helps you think through that likely collapse, whenever it may happen. And what's left is us and nature. And the audacity of believing in a better future that will almost certainly never come, if we do not collectively summon the courage and selflessness of that mother.

(Video: From the previous season's 11th episode, which centers on the debate over whether to execute a prisoner from an enemy camp.)