Month: November 2012

Towards A Cease Fire? Ctd

Evidently not tonight:

For a glimpse at the other side, check out this gripping footage of a rocket attack interrupting a film crew in Ashkelon. Previous coverage here.

Netizens Wait For No One

Nicholas Carr contemplates the effects of faster and faster page-load times on our collective patience:

Back in 2006, a famous study of online retailing found that a third of online shoppers (those with broadband connections) would abandon a retailing site if its pages took four seconds or longer to load and that nearly two-thirds of shoppers would bolt if the delay reached six seconds. The finding became the basis for the Four Second Rule: People won’t wait more than about four seconds for a web page to load.

In the succeeding six years, the Four Second Rule has been repealed and replaced by the Quarter of a Second Rule. Studies by companies like Google and Microsoft now find that it only takes a delay of 250 milliseconds in page loading for people to start abandoning a site. "Two hundred fifty milliseconds, either slower or faster, is close to the magic number now for competitive advantage on the Web," Microsoft search guru Harry Shum observed earlier this year. To put that into perspective, it takes about 400 milliseconds for you to blink an eye.

Relatedly, a new study (pdf) found that a two-second delay in videos causes people to start jumping ship.

Pinning Down Suspects

Screen shot 2012-11-19 at 2.36.23 PM

Law enforcement is starting to harness a new force in social media:

A few months ago, we told you about the Pinterest page set up by the Pottstown Police Department, where they uploaded (or pinned, or whatever) pictures of wanted criminals. As a result, arrests in Pottstown were up 58 percent.

Now, following Pottstown’s lead, the Philadelphia Police Department has set up their own Pinterest page, though it is still in the early stages. Over on their "board" you can see images of robbery suspects, wanted criminals, smiling policemen with their dogs, and Charles Ramsey looking like he’s trying to figure out how his Blackberry works. Some pictures are more important than others.

(Above screenshot is from the Philly page)

Cyber-Shaming Racists

The tumblr Hello There, Racists! calls out kids for racist online comments. Emily Bazelon believes this effort is misguided:

My reporting on cyberbullying has persuaded me that the reason kids (and adults) post stupid things semipublicly is that almost every time, no one notices or cares. The chances of being embarrassed are still too remote to register in that nanosecond before people push the send/post/tweet button—even though the consequences are dramatic when you end up as one of the unlucky few with your 15 minutes of Internet infamy. I guess that becomes a little less true every time someone puts up this kind of Tumblr. But the learning process should happen at the expense of the big trolls, like Michael Brutsch. As Emily Yoffe points out, "these sites are pinning kids like butterflies as permanent racists. These idiotic, repulsive remarks will follow them for years and have potential effects on their ability to go to college, to get jobs. We need to tread very lightly with the privacy of minors."

A Partner For Peace?

Nathan Brown argues that Hamas can moderate:

The most promising way to force Hamas to become more moderate is to force it to be more responsive to its own public. (As a leading Muslim Brotherhood parliamentarian in neighboring Egypt told me when I asked him whether Hamas would ever accept a two-state solution: "They will have to. Their people will make them.") And the most promising way to ensure such responsiveness is to speed up the reconciliation between the governments in the West Bank and Gaza, so that those governments can agree to hold elections rather than jealously hold on to their own fiefdoms in a fit of paranoia. But that, in turn, will require that Israel and the international community show a greater willingness to countenance Palestinian reconciliation.

Well that puts a quick end to that idea. Matt Duss fears that Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas "may prove to be the most significant casualty of this episode":

He was the biggest political loser of the last Gaza war, where the perception was that he supported the attack against his rivals. Abbas’s failure to achieve any tangible goods for the Palestinians, either through now-dead negotiations with Israel or through his half-hearted efforts to upgrade Palestine’s status at the U.N., make him more irrelevant by the day. It seems likely that this latest round of war will end with Israel’s most implacable enemy still in place, and its more moderate peace-partner even more weakened.

And Yossi Klein Halevi finds that Israelis are pessimistic about the peace process:

Most Israelis would surely agree that a peace agreement with the Palestinians is far preferable to yet another round of fighting. But few Israelis, whatever their politics, blame Netanyahu for the absence of peace. There is a consensus that peace with the Palestinian national movement—or rather that half of the Palesitnian national movement represented by Mahmoud Abbas, rather than the explicitly theocratic Hamas—isn’t possible at this time. Indeed, that is precisely why the left-liberal opposition Labor Party had intended to shift its focus from the non-existent peace process to social issues. (The polls suggested this was a promising pivot: Before the latest fighting, Labor was expected to grow from an embarrassing 8 seats to 20 or more in the 120 seat Knesset.) Whether Labor will be able to plausibly keep the spotlight on domestic issues depends entirely on what now happens in Gaza.

Embracing The New Burma

Earlier today, Obama met with Burmese President Thein Sein and opposition leader Aung San Suu Kyi in Rangoon, making him the first sitting US president to visit Burma. Days before, the Treasury Department announced that it was relaxing trade sanctions that were instituted nearly a decade ago. Josh Kurtlantzick worries about the pace of the administration’s diplomatic shift:

Certainly, the United States and other leading democracies should support Thein Sein and Suu Kyi’s reform efforts, help address the refugee crises in Kachin State and Arakan State, among other places. … But the White House is moving much faster. It is restoring military-military ties with Myanmar, despite the history of atrocities and the possibility that the army may be involved in stirring up the violence in Arakan State. It is pushing forward with closer diplomatic cooperation, and increasingly is trying to involve Myanmar in its broader Asia-Pacific strategy, known as the “pivot” to the region.

He argues that the “White House should consider waiting to see more concrete outcomes before going ahead with significant military ties, greater aid, and lifting sanctions forever.” Maung Zarni notes that the military junta still operates behind the scenes, calling the shots on reform:

The generals are … pursuing reforms only for their own long-term survival, both as powerful military families and as the most powerful institution in the country. As a direct consequence, they will remain wholly unprepared to do the needful in terms of what will really promote public welfare and advance the cause of freedom, human rights and democracy. As a matter of fact, the generals’ reforms are contradictory, reversible and fragile, as Aung San Suu Kyi herself has repeatedly stressed. They are confined to such narrow domains as freedom of speech, new business regulations and investment laws—that is, the areas important to middle-class Western liberals and attractive to venture capitalists and corporations. 

Evan Osnos, meanwhile, hails Obama’s visit:

For all the fears of what lies ahead for Burma, it is impossible not to marvel at the sheer improbability of all that has happened already: that Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama would be sitting in the open air in Rangoon, in the garden of the home where Aung San Suu Kyi once endured years of house arrest. If the Administration has been aggressive—hasty, some charge—in pushing for signs of progress in Burma, it is perhaps because moments of such stark political change are exceedingly rare, and they are desperate to seize it.

Burma has always carried more symbolic power than its obscure profile suggests. Orwell knew that, and it seems Obama does, too. Burma’s becoming, he said today, “a test of whether a country can transition to a better place.”

The Mood In Israel

Dahlia Lithwick relays it:

You want to hear about what it’s like here? It’s fucking sad. Everyone I know is sad. My kids don’t care who started it and the little boys in Issawiya, the Arab village I see out my window, don’t care much either. I haven’t met a single Israeli who is happy about this. They know this fixes nothing. The one thing we learned this week is how quickly humans can come to normalize anything. But the hopelessness seeps right into your bones as well.

Towards A Cease Fire?

Ian Black explains the truce talks currently underway in Egypt:

Hamas wants a guarantee from Israel that it would end “targeted assassinations” of the kind that killed Ahmed al-Jaabari last Wednesday. It would also need pledges about opening crossing points into Egypt and Israel – effectively lifting the five year blockade. Israel is insisting at a minimum on stopping the cross-border rocket fire which has united public opinion behind Operation Defensive Pillar. Israeli casualties have been low because the weapons are inaccurate and many of them were quickly destroyed.

Any deal would include other understandings that are unlikely to be formulated explicitly or made public. Israel certainly wants the Egyptians to shut down the network of tunnels that are Gaza’s lifeline to the outside world. Food and consumer goods are one thing, but the longer-range missiles that allow Hamas or more militant groups to strike targets in Tel Aviv and elsewhere in Israel’s urban heartland are another.

Hussein Ibish says an “Egyptian-brokered deal potentially provides something for everybody”:

Israeli leaders can claim they restored deterrence, took out key militant leaders, destroyed infrastructure and demonstrated that there is a heavy price for anyone attacking Israel from Gaza. Hamas leaders can claim to have stood up to Israel, shown the Israeli public they can reach Tel Aviv, once again unfurled the banner of armed resistance, and achieved major diplomatic breakthroughs with the recent high level visits to Gaza.

Morsi can achieve the neatest trick of all: he can continue with what are effectively Mubarak-era policies—Egypt serving as a broker of cease-fires and a liaison between Hamas and Israel—while presenting the whole thing as a reassertion of Egypt’s regional leadership, and a new foreign policy that stands closer to Hamas (mainly by symbolically dispatching his prime minister to Gaza). So he can create the appearance of popular change without actually changing policies that would aggravate relations with Israel or the United States.