Month: November 2013

The Best Of The Dish Today

Israeli PM Netanyahu weekly cabinet meeting

The debate over the breakthrough with Iran is striking for several reasons. The deal makes the most sense, it seems to me, from a classic George H W Bush perspective on foreign policy. It’s deeply pragmatic and realist, grasping the importance of Iran as a regional power, and picking the least worst of the options George W Bush frittered fecklessly away while in Iraq. It’s not final – and will only become more expansive if the virtuous cycle of engagement, moderation, and a more empowered, democratically backed, moderating force in Iran continues its momentum. It’s betting on changes within Iran that may not eventually pan out, on the US president being able to restrain Senate hawks from sabotaging the agreement, and on Rouhani being able to out-maneuver the reactionary elements in Iran.

Any sane response would therefore be to wait and see – and indeed, the Israeli government, after having an embarrassing conniption in front of the entire world (and thus paradoxically making the agreement gain more traction within Iran), has now decided to send a security team to the White House as the negotiations for a final deal continue. It feels a little like a spoiled child refusing to eat dinner, being banished to his room and then emerging slowly down the stairs to ask for dessert.

And if you care about Israel, the conduct of the Netanyahu government cannot but be dismaying. Gershon Gorenberg today brilliantly skewered the lose-lose scenarios and dead ends that Netanyahu has repeatedly set up for himself and his country. He notes that Netanyahu not so long ago opposed any deal with the Syrian regime over its WMDs and distributed gas masks for a potential attack from Syria in its wake. Now that the accord has patently made Israel more secure, the sheer incompetence of Netanyahu’s response – his complete misreading of what was actually happening – seems even more pathetic. Netanyahu – rather like Rumsfeld in the new Errol Morris documentary – then actually fumbles a key rhetorical trope, thereby revealing how degenerate his leadership has become:

At a military ceremony, [Netanyahu] proclaimed that Israel could depend only on itself. “If I am not for myself, who is for me?” Netanyahu said, quoting the first half of an ancient Jewish maxim, without the second part, which says that someone who is only for himself is nothing. “We are for ourselves!” he declared.

And here, for good measure, is what someone in the Israeli government leaked to the Jerusalem Post:

“The prime minister made it clear to the most powerful man on earth that if he intends to stay the most powerful man on earth, it’s important to make a change in American policy because the practical result of his current policy is liable to lead him to the same failure that the Americans absorbed in North Korea and Pakistan, and Iran could be next in line,” Likud Beytenu MK Tzachi Hanegbi told the Knesset Channel.

I guess one should be grateful that this time the Israeli prime minister didn’t treat the US president with that kind of contempt in public. But what still manages to shock me is that after Netanyahu has treated the US president this way, and done his best to sabotage an agreement made in America’s core interests, some Americans take the side of a foreign country and not their own. John Bolton actually took directly to the pages of The Weekly Standard to urge Israel to launch a war against Iran – in order to scupper his own country’s core negotiations with Iran. This is not simple and reasoned opposition to the foreign policy of the United States; it is attempted active sabotage of it through a foreign country. Even when the neocons were assailing Reagan, they didn’t urge our allies to actually sabotage negotiations with the Soviets.

And here is Senator Chuck Schumer, vowing to destroy the foreign policy of a president of his own party by urging – along with others – that the Senate do what it can – again – to sabotage the president’s careful negotiations with a foreign power, which are clearly part of his executive responsibilities:

This level of open sabotage against the American president – decried by Democrats when it was the GOP attempting to bring down the global economy, and lamented when it meant gutting the president’s ability to appoint judges to vacant seats, and denigrated when Republican governors refuse to expand Medicaid – is nonetheless subject to no push-back at all when it comes to the Middle East. I still don’t get it. But I guess I never will.

More analysis of the Iran deal here, here and here; and the health industry’s vested interest in making the ACA work is explored here.

I never fully grasped how the phrase “that sucks” has something to do with cock-sucking. So maybe I’ve been a homophobic bigot lo these many years as well.

Some amazing things happened to me today. I was walking across a pedestrian crossing in London, with no stop lights to guide traffic, and a cab actually voluntarily slowed down and stopped in order to let me cross to the other side of the street. When I was on the tube, people waited for others to leave before entering the train. I saw people lining up in a row for a bus. I’ve been in New York too long, haven’t I?

The most popular post today was The Liberal Reagan, Ctd. The runner up was the post that pissed off the atheists, “Of Gods, God and Men.”

See you in the morning.

(Photo: Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu attends the weekly cabinet meeting at his office on November 24, 2013 in Jerusalem, Israel. By Abir Sultan – Pool/Getty Images.)

The Self-Taught Weapons Inspector

Patrick Radden Keefe profiles (paywalled) the remarkable Eliot Higgins, a 34-year-old college dropout and autodidact who transformed himself into an expert on Syrian arms – thanks to YouTube:

Unlike the wars in Afghanistan or Iraq, the war in Syria has not produced a huge body of journalism by international reporters on the ground. According to the Committee to Protect Journalists, Syria is currently the most dangerous dateline in the world; the regime of Bashar al-Assad has effectively banned the international press. More than fifty reporters have been killed while covering the conflict, and dozens more are missing, presumably detained by the authorities. Yet Syrians have managed to access the Internet, and all the factions in the ongoing civil war have uploaded videos onto YouTube.

They film their own military offensives and release propagandistic recruitment videos. They document civilian casualties and the ritualized speeches of regime officials who have defected to the opposition. They present evidence of war crimes, including torture, mutilations, and executions. And they show weaponry: rifles, bombs, and rockets.

Although Higgins has never been to Syria, and until recently had no connection to the country, he has become perhaps the foremost expert on the munitions used in the war. On YouTube, he scans as many as 300 new videos a day, with the patience of an ornithologist. Even when a rocket has largely been destroyed, he can often identify it by whatever scraps survive. When he doesn’t recognize a weapon, he researches it, soliciting information from his many followers on Facebook and Twitter. In June 2012, he revealed on his blog that the Free Syrian Army, the leading armed opposition group, had obtained anti-aircraft guns. The next month, he presented video evidence that Assad’s regime had deployed cluster bombs. “It’s very incongruous, this high-intensity conflict being monitored by a guy in Leicester,” Stuart Hughes, a BBC News producer in London, told me. “He’s probably broken more stories than most journalists do in a career.”

Follow Higgins at his blog here.

The Misery Of Miscarriage, Ctd

More readers join the intimate thread:

I had two miscarriages before we tried IVF. The first one occurred on the same day I got a positive on the home pregnancy test. Both were physically quite painful and emotionally draining. My third miscarriage was my daughter’s twin. They were IVF babies, so I was being monitored via ultrasound through the first trimester. I lost the twin around nine weeks. I saw on them both during the ultrasound, my daughter blinking brightly and the sibling a dark silent mass.

I remember exactly the due dates of what would have been my first and second child’s births, and I am very aware that had they lived, I would not have had my awesome mini-me daughter. Every year on her birthday, I remember that there should be two cakes for two children. But now, as then, I am supposed to simply be grateful for her alone. I could have lost them both after all. Count your blessings and all of that.

I haven’t told my daughter she had a twin. Perhaps when she is older. I have mixed feelings about sharing this grief with her. Why should she grieve for someone who was never more than a possibility? Of course that begs the question – why do I?

Another reader:

This thread has meant a lot to me. I will not tell you another miscarriage story, but I would like to share something that might help your readers. After my first miscarriage, what helped me most was giving my lost baby a name. It didn’t occur to me until a week after I was in the hospital to do so, but it made such a difference in my recovery. I did the same with my second miscarriage. Although I am politically pro-choice, I am also an observant Catholic and I think of myself as having five children (two in Heaven). Just that decision to acknowledge what I had lost as real, a person to be named, made the pain easier to bear.

Another:

My first child – a daughter, Lola – was stillborn on Christmas Day, 2008. It was completely unexpected. We went to the hospital as scheduled, planning to bring home our healthy child. Instead, we brought home a box containing a photograph of a dead baby and a pamphlet about grief.

It sent me down a spiral of rage and despair. The tiniest little setback was debilitating for a while. I’d fly into a rage at not being able to find my keys in the morning. Many nights I’d wind up on the floor in my closet, exhausted at having spent the night shouting in anger and frustration because we hadn’t cooked the rice properly or something equally trivial. I hope that it’s the hardest thing I’ll ever have to go through.

All of it – her death, my rage, the sadness that utterly consumed us for a while – was something I was totally unprepared for. The masculine side of grief wasn’t something we understood at all and it took us several years to get past it. We have a beautiful two-year-old boy now who is like a healing balm. We’re just scarred now, no longer wounded.

I want to let your readers know about HAND, an amazing organization that helped us. They are nothing short of amazing, providing space and counseling for us to heal. Imagine what it would be like to “hold grief support group meetings for parents who have experienced the death of their baby through miscarriage, stillbirth, interruption of a wanted pregnancy after prenatal diagnosis, or death in the first year of life,” week in and week out. Friends and family often can’t really understand what you’re going through after something like that happens to you, and groups like this can provide space to come to terms with grief and despair. I’m an atheist, but I know that Chris Lehr, who runs the program, is a saint.

Thanks for shining light on this dark place.

Another:

I know you must have been slammed with responses to your miscarriage thread. I’m so glad it came up. I want to respond with my own experience to the woman who commented on the insensitive comments that people make when they find out about a miscarriage. She said, “For a time I felt like the tainted one. Friends who were getting pregnant for the first time didn’t want me around because I was living proof of what can go wrong.” For me, it wasn’t about taint at all. I still wanted to share with my friend, and give her as much support as I could. For me, it was about feeling guilty at accidentally making someone’s grief worse simply by being in the same room.

A friend and I got pregnant around the same time, myself a month ahead. It was a complete surprise to her. She could not have been happier. She announced her pregnancy well before she was even eight weeks along, absolutely glowing – much happier than I was, since I had aggressive morning sickness that didn’t seem to touch her. She gushed to me about how our babies would bond us closer together.

You can guess the rest.

She lost hers at 10 weeks and was absolutely devastated. I did my best to say I was sorry, and to continue communicating with her, but I can’t describe to you the look on her face the first time she saw me after her miscarriage, with my pregnancy clearly showing. Our other friends there were clearly a comfort to her. I was not. I felt like my pregnancy – the visibility of it, the reality of it – were a knife in her. It clearly upset her greatly, and just as clearly she was trying not to let it, or at least not to let it show. I tried to avoid platitudes, tried to pick up the tone she seemed to want while her grief was still fresh, as I would for any grieving friend – but it seemed to me that the best thing I could do was to step back and not act as a reminder every time she saw me.

I don’t blame her for her reaction. She was trying to be happy for me while dealing with massive grief. My sister-in-law’s reaction (having gone through several miscarriages herself) was nearly identical when I told my brother I was pregnant – happy for me, but sad, with an immediate new emotional distancing from me. I don’t know what the answers are – if there was even anything I could have done better to make it easier. Grief is always tricky, since everyone experiences it differently. But what exactly can be said to a grieving family, except, “I’m sorry”?

Another:

I’m not sure that my miscarriage story fits the thread because although I certainly empathize with all the people who have written, my miscarriage experience was a little different.  My husband and I had been trying for two and a half years to get pregnant.  We tried most everything and finally discovered that he had a problem.  The doctor prescribed some medication for him and a couple of months later, I thought I was pregnant.

We had no time to take it in because all of a sudden, I miscarried.  My husband took me off to the emergency room and the young resident was so nice.  When I started to cry, he reassured me that just because I had had one miscarriage, the odds of having another were no different – if I remember correctly, 1 in 15 or so.  I smiled through my tears and said, “I’m not crying because I miscarried. I’m crying because I know now that I can get pregnant!”  He looked a little surprised but smiled back and took me off to have a DNC.

Two months later I got pregnant with our first child, a daughter whom we both celebrated and are so pleased that she is in our life.  She was followed by our son, who after a few trials and tribulations, we feel exactly the same way about.  There are times when I wonder what that other child would have been like, but would I trade either of my children for that unknown one? Absolutely not.

Facing The Nation

Maria Konnikova details research suggesting that judgments of political candidates are “made on the basis of intuitive responses to basic facial features rather than on any deep, rational calculus”:

[Princeton psychologist Alexander] Todorov showed pairs of portraits to roughly a thousand people, and asked them to rate the competence of each person. Unbeknownst to the test subjects, they were looking at candidates for the House and Senate in 2000, 2002, and 2004. In study after study, participants’ responses to the question of whether someone looked competent predicted actual election outcomes at a rate much higher than chance—from sixty-six to seventy-three per cent of the time. Even looking at the faces for as little as one second, Todorov found, yielded the exact same result: a snap judgment that generally identified the winners and losers. Todorov concluded that when we make what we think of as well-reasoned voting decisions, we are actually driven in part by our initial, instinctive reactions to candidates.

What’s So Wrong With “Sucks”?

A reader writes:

In light of the discussion of Alec Baldwin’s homophobic rants and your insistence that his use of the phrase “cocksucking fag” reveals much about his deeply-held views on homosexuality (a point I agree with, whole-heartedly!), I’d like to push the discussion in the direction of considering the use of the word “sucks” in general. It is remarkable to me, a heterosexual man, that people in America use the word “sucks” in a pejorative way. Here we have reference to a sexual act that is generally acknowledged as being particularly enjoyable by most men – gay or straight and anywhere in between. And yet, we use the term “sucks” pejoratively. Why?

I believe that the connotations are nothing more than homophobia and sexism in their plainest, ugliest forms. Now, maybe “sucks” is meant metaphorically in some other way. For example, “Broccoli sucks!” could mean that broccoli metaphorically sucks all the enjoyment out of dining. Maybe. But my gut says, no, that’s not what is meant at all.

Something sucks. Sure. But what does that something suck? The answer is often given: it sucks dick! Or, in a few cases that I’ve heard, it sucks ass. I think the answer is plain, that when something sucks, we’re referring to fellatio (or the sexual act of “rimming”, which carries many/most of the same connotations in this particular usage). Something sucks because it is not powerful; it is not manly; it is less than.

I know I sound like an earnest “queer studies” student in my email above. I don’t mean to be. I don’t want to police language, and I don’t want the world to be a sterile place where the use of a particular word can destroy a person. But, as I try to become more understanding of how my privilege as a white-looking heterosexual male affects my life, I can’t help but consider the use of the word “sucks” as being ultimately destructive. And, so, I have stopped using it. I hope you’ll do the same.

The Hot Air Of Iran Hawks

Drezner warns them against freaking about the Iran deal. He observes that “the only thing going ballistic on this deal accomplishes is demonstrating your utter unreasonableness on negotiations with Iran”:

Now the key words in that last sentence are “going ballistic.”  I’m not saying you should love the deal.  You distrust both Iran and the Obama administration.  I get that.  The thing is, you’re distrusting the wrong agreement.  This is an interim deal that is easily revocable in six months if a comprehensive deal falls apart.  Objecting to this deal now does nothing but erode your credibility for future moments of obstructionism if a comprehensive deal is negotiated.

Seriously, game this out.  Let’s assume you implacably oppose the negotiations going forward.  If the deal holds up — and before you laugh, consider that Netanyahu is now describing the much-derided-at-the-time Syria deal as a “model” to follow — then you’ve undermined your reputation before the really big negotiations start.  So whatever justified opposition you might have to such a deal will be largely discredited.  On the other hand, if the deal falls apart — and there’s a decent chance of that — then you’ll get blamed for obstructionism for reflexively opposing it from the get-go.

Larison explains the lockstep opposition of Iran hawks:

Drezner may be right that Iran hawks would retain more credibility with everyone else if they held their fire for a later, comprehensive agreement, but among other Iran hawks they would lose credibility if they endorsed any deal with Iran. So they denounce the current deal, and they will denounce future agreements in the same terms, because they really are opposed to diplomatic engagement with Iran all together. Besides, Iran hawks have raised the bar so high on what it means to be “tough” on Iran that they are stuck defending ludicrous positions that they were compelled to adopt to confirm their status as a hard-liner.

Drum is on the same page:

The sad truth is that supporting the interim deal, even tentatively, is a lose-lose proposition for most Republican politicians these days. They don’t care about you or me or the Beltway consensus. They care about the base. And the base has no interest in seeing Satan make a deal with the devil.

Locked Out Of The Mainstream

Sociologist Alice Goffman, author of the forthcoming On The Run: Fugitive Life In An American City, found that the fear of prison keeps urban criminals out of steady jobs, long-term relationships, and other conventional institutions:

Goffman argues that the system encourages young men to act shady – “I got to move like a shadow,” one of [research subject] Mike’s friends told her – because a stable public routine could land them back behind bars.

Take work. Once, after  Mike was released on parole to a halfway house, he found employment at a Taco Bell. But he soon grew fed up with his crowded house and decided to sleep at his girlfriend’s. That resulted in a parole violation. When Mike went back to the Taco Bell to pick up his paycheck, two parole officers arrested him. He had to spend another year upstate.

Goffman’s research subjects avoided hospitals for similar reasons. One night Mike and his friends Alex and Chuck were shooting dice. On the way home, a man robbed Alex, pistol-whipped him, and pounded his face into a concrete wall. When Goffman and Mike got to Alex, he was drenched in blood, searching for his teeth on the ground. His nose and chin were broken. Yet Alex vehemently resisted being taken to the hospital. Police crowd the emergency room, running the names of young black men through their database, Goffman explains. Alex was on parole, close to completing his two-year sentence. He feared that the police would arrest him or slap him with a parole violation. That would send him back to prison.

Of Gods, God, And Men, Ctd

This post made a lot of readers bristle:

You have to be kidding. “We don’t know what God is” has got to be just about the most unintentionally hilarious statement about religion I have ever heard. For the longest time, atheists have been trying to make the point that the concept of God as defined in every faith is impossible. The concept of an omnipotent, omniscient, omnipresent, omni-benevolent deity is self-contradictory using elementary logic.

Now that the New Atheism has gained traction by pointing out the absurdities of this belief, you and your co-believers are evidently so desperate to cling to legitimacy that you are willing to concede the whole argument in order to perform a little bit of rhetorical jujitsu, i.e., “we don’t know what God is, but he is the reason there is a universe at all.” McCabe states this, and you apparently endorse it, with no justification or support at all. It’s just a claim of knowledge backed with a whole lot of nothing. Presumably the purpose of this is to move the argument away from where atheism is succeeding on the merits – pointing out the logical inconsistencies of religious belief – into more favorable and murky territory. “Richard Dawkins get it wrong, because our God isn’t like all those other gods. Because we say so.” This is utter piffle, unworthy of you or your blog.

Every religion ascribes the very existence of the universe to their deity or deities. Otherwise they wouldn’t be gods. Saying “God is in everything” is meaningless. It doesn’t change the fact that religious belief is based on pure faith and nothing else.

Another reader:

Whenever I hear about the version of god that is beyond our comprehension and beyond our reality I just don’t understand how this helps the theist make their case for their particular religion.

Such a god could be any god.  Such a god could be an alien machine intelligence running a simulation on an alien supercomputer to see how organics may have created the first machine intelligence (and we are that simulation).  Such a god could be as concerned about humanity as we are about the bacteria that grows around volcano vents a mile below the ocean.

How exactly does such an undefinable god tie back to the beliefs of any religion?  How does that help make the case that Jesus was anything other than a man that was killed by other men?  How does that help make the case that Moses didn’t carve the Ten Commandments himself?  How does it make the case that Joseph Smith was wrong?

In the attempt to not be pinned down to any part of reality, this argument makes the case that man cannot know the mind of god and hence know what god wants, expects or demands.  If that is the case, you are better off believing in no gods and just trying to be a good person lest you believe something based on the wrong religion and get punished for doing so.

Another:

Argh, I wish I hadn’t broken my rule to avoid your site on Sundays, but I wanted to see what you’d said about the Iran nuclear deal.

I am no fan of Dawkins – I don’t need to buy a book to feel good about my Atheism – but this sort of pseudo-philosophy drives me bonkers.  Why is it hard to imagine that religion, like every other social construct, has evolved over time to fulfill whatever role people need it to do in their own lives? We had an angry sky father in the past, and an unexplainable cosmic something else now. Dawkins’ quip simply suggests that you consider your cosmology is, perhaps, as much a fantasy as those of all the other religions you dismiss as false.  You really can’t reject this suggestion by declaring that your god isn’t like all those other gods because he’s different and beyond human comprehension.  Can’t you see that someone outside your beliefs might think that claim absurd?

I promise to avoid the Dish on Sundays henceforth.  Please keep any breaking news to the remainder of the week if you could. [The above video of] Bender talking to God is my penance for breaking my own rules and letting myself get irritated.

Update from a reader:

A couple of things struck me about your reader who brags that he tries to avoid your page on Sundays.  (1) Haven’t you posted a fair amount of atheist thoughts, links, and quotes on Sundays? (2) If theists are routinely accused of being insular and closed minded, how is it any different when an atheist refuses to engage with a thinker merely because that thinker expresses a Jewish, Christian, or Muslim thought?  If I change the channel when Richard Dawkins comes on, your reader would accuse me of being afraid of the truth.  But when they refuse to read your page on Sunday because there might be a Francis Spufford quote, they think this makes them open minded in comparison with the narrow-minded theists.  The inconsistency is glaring.

Another:

As many have said before, we made God in our own image and imbued it with human characteristics.  In some cases it’s a good way for people to understand that we’re part of something far greater and to seek meaning beyond the materialistic world we’ve created, but mostly it’s just an excuse for people to pretend they’re morally superior to others, to justify their own bigotry, and occasionally to kill each other, sometimes over very benign differences in belief. Christians may not be as bad now as they were in previous days, but they’re still quite capable of violence.  Frankly, I think the human race cannot grow until we purge ourselves of these superstitions. The universe is a vast and wonderful thing, and we do it a disservice to humanize it.