Month: July 2014

Dissent Of The Day

A reader takes a stand:

There are a lot of great things about The Dish, and I was happy to be part of the initial subscription wave. But you just reminded me again why I refuse to re-subscribe. It is your persistent, deplorable habit of using terms like “Baby Boomer”, “Gen X”, and “Millennials”.  These terms are utter nonsense. They are preposterous, deeply-misleading sweeping generalizations, grotesque caricatures of reality. There is no such thing as a so-called “generation” except in the strictest biological/anthropological sense, within kinship lines. The use of such terms as social descriptors has been a disaster for our discourse. (One need only look at the wave of idiotic “generation” articles pouring out of Salon for confirmation of this.)

You say every issue is discussed on The Dish? This one evidently can’t be. I have never seen any discussion challenging the ludicrous concept of “generational traits”. That seems to be strictly off-limits.

These so-called “generations” you assert the existence of cannot be defined coherently.

Each “generation” is wildly diverse and contains tens of millions of individuals, saints, sinners, and everyone in between. Yet certain people seem to think – wrongly – that they “know all about” others because they know what year these people were born in!Moreover, each “generation” contains tens of millions of individuals with unique biographies. (And yes I do need to emphasize that.) These individuals have interacted with a whole host of other humans, very many of them of other so-called “generations”, in deeply complex patterns of reciprocity. These individuals have been shaped by the whole of the human biological and cultural inheritance. They did not grow up in some sort of generational isolation box. Please stop slapping labels on them, as if they were figures in a bad editorial cartoon.

As a former history teacher and (minor) historian, it almost makes me grimace when I see such terms used to explain the nature of human society. Nothing could be more misleading. It’s as if we asked a 10 year-old how we can explain human history and society and he replied, “Well, it all depends on what year you were born in. That’s what makes you what you are. People born in 1944 are WAY different than people born in 1946. People born in 1957 are WAY different than people born in 1965.” We’d smile at such childishness – and then watch as a lot of adults make exactly the same childish arguments. It’s time to put away this childish nonsense.

I guess since I was born in 1952 and am routinely lumped together with 76 million other Americans as a so-called “Baby Boomer” that I am more sensitive to this phenomenon. In Esquire magazine, Paul Begala called people like me “locusts”. (I’d like to see Begala call my 59-year-old wife, a woman who has borne inconceivable burdens in her life and shown heroism on many occasions, a locust to my face. He would regret it.) The Atlantic said that people like me “ruined everything”, thus casually negating the lives and careers of millions of dedicated individuals. (Let’s Dick Cheney, born in 1941, off the hook, too.)  Imagine such descriptions being made about a group other than the so-called “Baby Boomers”. What kind of speech would they be considered? (BTW, I’m sick and tired of insults, not by you, directed toward the so-called “Millennials”. A lot of my 20-something former students are my friends.)

I want to be judged for my own successes and failures. Please stop assuming you know me, Andrew: you don’t. Please stop assuming that I’m just like everyone else in some mythical, arbitrarily-defined group that supposedly encompasses everyone born between 1946 and 1964. I’m not. OK? When you’re ready to do that, I’ll be ready to come back.

The South-Of-The-Border Crisis

In a must-read counterpoint to the media narrative that the Central American children pouring across our border are fleeing gang violence, Saul Elbein argues that the problems in Guatemala are far more extensive. He paints a picture of a failed state offering a veneer of legitimacy to a corrupt, feudal “deep state” that maintains itself through violence and exploitation:

The only model of power that exists in Guatemala is … terroristic, extra-legal, and dominated by violence. So is it any surprise that after the war, on the streets—where people grasped for the scraps that weft, where children grew up with no chance at wealth and less at respect—pirate organizations like the MS-13 grew? What we’re seeing in Guatemala is not quite, in other words, a crime wave. It’s simply the way things have been there for a long time, pushed to the next level. If you are a civilian there, beneath the labels—soldier; gangster; policeman; army; cartel—is but one underlying reality: men with guns who do what they want and take what they want. Your options are to buy your own security and gunmen; to join a gang yourself; or to leave.

And so many leave.

Meanwhile, Central American migrants are now being barred from Mexican cargo trains:

On Thursday, a freight train derailed in southern Mexico. It wasn’t just any train, though:

 It was La Bestia—”the Beast”—the infamous train many Central American immigrants ride through Mexico on their way to the United States. When the Beast went off the tracks this week, some 1,300 people who’d been riding on top were stranded in Oaxaca. After years of turning a blind eye to what’s happening on La Bestia, the Mexican government claims it now will try to keep migrants off the trains. On Friday, Mexican Interior Secretary Miguel Ángel Osorio Chong said in a radio interview that the time had come to bring order to the rails. “We can’t keep letting them put their lives in danger,” he said. “It’s our responsibility once in our territory. The Beast is for cargo, not passengers.”

In light of the situation, Keating advocates a major rethink of how we respond to chaos in Latin America, not to mention our own role in creating it:

I don’t claim to have an immediate fix for Central America’s ills, but surely there are more creative strategies out there than pouring money into a failing drug war and then walling ourselves off from the victims. Latin American issues tend to get shortchanged in the U.S. foreign policy conversation relative to more remote regions. I suspect this is part of the reason why Central America’s instability is only garnering attention now that the consequences of it have quite literally arrived at our doorstep.

On a broader level, the crisis should be a reminder that the U.S. is not immune from events to its immediate south. We’re an American country—in the regional sense of that word—and it’s time to start thinking like it.

(Photo: Central American migrants boarding the “La Bestia” train. By Pedro Ultreras.)

On Immigration Reform: Republicans vs Republicans

Noah Rothman flags a survey by a Republican polling outfit that finds large majorities of Republican voters in key states in favor of immigration reform:

86 percent of self-described Republicans and 79 percent of independents in those 26 states said that the immigration system is in need of fixing. Moreover, 79 percent of Republican respondents said that it was “important” for Congress to act on immigration reform this year. … In worse news for opponents of immigration reform, voters do not believe that the argument that President Barack Obama would not enforce border security provisions in an immigration bill is a valid reason for opposing reform. 72 percent of all respondents said did not believe that concerns over enforcement of border security was a good reason for rejecting immigration reform, including a majority of Republicans and 69 percent of independents. The Harper survey found that nearly two-thirds of all voters and 54 percent of self-identified Republicans support a pathway to legal status for illegal immigrants.

And yet Republicans in government remain committed to stonewalling. Vinik takes them to task:

If Republicans object to [Obama’s request for $3.7 billion in emergency funds], what exactly do they propose instead? How should we move through the huge backload of cases? Where should we hold the unaccompanied minors in the meantime? And how should we pay to transport them to their home countries?

Reforming the 2008 law, as Republicans want, could help relieve pressure on the immigration system, but it could cause children who qualify—or who should qualify—for asylum to be turned away. Even so, there are more than 50,000 unaccompanied minors in U.S. custody. Tweaking the law will not suddenly alleviate the problem.

But Tomasky knows exactly why they are doing this:

We’ve all seen this movie way too many times. I don’t know what the Republicans will end up doing here, but it will be dictated by the usual two factors. First, the outrage of the base. It’s cranking up already—oppose Obama here, or you will get a primary. That’s what drives nearly everything in the congressional GOP now. (By the way, what might Lindsey Graham be saying if his primary, rather than having turned out favorably for him already, were next week?) And my it’s heartening, isn’t it, to think that the House Republican caucus is going to follow the moral lead of the Texas delegation on this?

The second factor will be their internal polls. … If the polls now tell them very clearly that most voters—let’s refine that; most likely 2014 voters—are going to blame them for the irresolution of this problem, they’ll compromise. Otherwise, they will oppose. That’s the extent of it.

Previous Dish on the Republican response to the border crisis here and here.

A Bullet With A Mind Of Its Own

It exists:

[I]magine if you could transform a dumb bullet into a guided missile? That’s what the Pentagon did earlier this year, successfully firing .50-caliber bullets that steered themselves in mid-flight. It has just released a video [above] trumpeting the tip-top targeting of its Extreme Accuracy Tasked Ordnance (EXACTO) program.

The technology could make our sharpshooters that much more deadly:

Current sniper rifles can regularly hit trucks at 2,000 meters, but not bad guys. (The record kill is 2,430 meters, just over 1.5 miles. It was charted by Canadian army corporal Rob Furlong against a Taliban fighter in Afghanistan’s Shah-i-kot valley during Operation Anaconda in March 2002—but his first two shots missed.) “There’s no limit as far as I can see so long as the bullet’s stable—I think 2,000 or 2,500 meters is very attainable,” [Keith Bell, former commander of the Army sniper school at Fort Benning, Ga] said. “Right now, anything past around 800 meters is an extremely tough shot.”

Duncan Geere adds a few more details:

The bullets are the size of a large pen and can be used in both sniper rifles and machine guns. The full EXACTO system comprises of both bullets and a real-time guidance system that tracks and delivers the projectile to the target. They’re still some way from the battlefield, however. This live fire test is likely just the first of many.

American Teens And Common Cents, Ctd

The Economist examines the challenges facing efforts to improve high-school students’ financial literacy:

First, boosting financial literacy is hard. Jump$tart Coalition for Personal Financial Literacy, an American non-profit organization, has surveyed high-school seniors every other year since 2000. These surveys consistently show that students who have taken a full-semester course in personal finance do no better on a standard financial literacy test than those who have not taken such a course. Similarly, a study by Tzu-Chin Martina Peng and her co-authors found that having taken a personal finance course in school is unrelated to investment knowledge.

Second, and perhaps most important, courses in personal finance do not appear to have an impact on adult behavior.

As Buttonwood has pointed out, the knowledge that students acquire in school when they are in their teens does not necessary translate into action when they have to deal with mortgages and credit-card payments later in life. One study, for example, found that financial education has no impact on household saving behaviour. As a paper by Lewis Mandell and Linda Schmid Klein suggests, the long-term effectiveness of high-school classes in financial literacy is highly doubtful. It may simply be the case that the gap in time is too wide between when individuals acquire their financial knowledge, as high-school students, and when they’re in a position to apply what they have learned.

Kurdistan’s Moment? Ctd

Juan Cole’s list of recent “disturbing” news items from Iraq begins with some major developments regarding the Kurds:

1. Last Wednesday Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki angrily lashed out at the Kurds, accusing them of harboring the terrorists of the so-called ‘Islamic State.’ Since the Kurds have in fact fought the IS radicals, al-Maliki’s charge is hard to take seriously. Rather, it appears to be a sign of how angry he is that Kurdistan president Massoud Barzani is pressuring him to step down. I don’t think al-Maliki can get a third term without Kurdish support.

2. Barzani responded that al-Maliki is “hysterical.” The Kurds then withdrew from al-Maliki’s cabinet, in which they had been his coalition partners. The ministries will likely go on running all right, but the move is symbolic of the break between al-Maliki and his erstwhile backers. Foreign Minister Hoshyar Zebari, one of those who suspended participation, says it will be hard for the Kurds to work with al-Maliki unless he apologizes.

3. On Friday, the Kurds seized two important oil fields in the Kirkuk region. Since their willingness to supply Turkey with petroleum seems to be one of the reasons Ankara has increasingly made its peace with Iraqi Kurdistan becoming independent, the Kurds are now in a position to remunerate Turkey even more generously for acquiescing in their national aspirations.

By seizing these oil fields, Keith Johnson fears, the Kurds risk antagonizing the Iraqi government and further escalating tensions between Baghdad and Erbil:

The big questions now are:

How much more will the move strain the unity of an Iraqi government still struggling to push back against a spring offensive by Islamist insurgents? And how will the Kurds actually sell the additional oil they now control? As a solely regional government, the KRG has hit major obstacles in finding international buyers for its crude since it began trying to sell abroad earlier this year — largely because of Baghdad’s threats and diplomatic pressure.

The Kurdish seizure will aggravate U.S. goals of getting Iraq’s Sunni, Shiite, and Kurdish populations to work together to fight the Islamic State, formerly known as ISIS. Coupled with strident talk of an independent Kurdish state, it further complicates efforts to broker a truce between Baghdad and Erbil, especially regarding international oil sales. “

Luke Harding provides a glimpse of what life is like in Kirkuk these days:

Iraq’s disintegration has affected the city in multifarious ways. It has, for example, touched on the fortunes of Kirkuk’s football club. Nowzad Qader, the head of Kirkuk’s FA, said Iraq wasn’t able to complete its league this year, with players unable to travel to Baghdad. It was too dangerous, he said, since Isis controlled the road. “Isis doesn’t like humanity much, let alone football,” he observed. “If Iraq still exists next season we’ll resume.” Nearby, youths kicked a ball around in the early evening heat.

Qadar said the local FA reflected Kirkuk’s tradition of coexistence, at odds with the sectarian mayhem in the rest of the country. He was a Kurd, his deputy a Turkman and the secretary an Arab. “It’s like a microcosm of Iraq. We work together in brotherhood,” he declared. Maureen Nikola, a volleyball coach, said girls who played on her team came from all of Kirkuk’s ethnic groups. Some of her Christian players had emigrated with their families after 2003, she said. Nikola, a Christian herself, added: “If the peshmerga weren’t here, we would have had to flee, like Mosul.”

Previous Dish on the prospect of an independent Kurdistan here.

A Sunni Revolution In Iraq

That’s how Osama al-Nujaifi, the most recent speaker of Iraq’s parliament and one of the country’s leading Sunni lawmakers, understands the insurgency from which ISIS emerged as the lead actor:

Yes, it is a revolution. But at the same time, the terrorists are taking advantage of it. It’s a revolution that started a year and a half ago, as peaceful demonstrations. [The government] didn’t deal with it according to the constitution. Instead, they faced it with force. So it turned into a military movement. But it wasn’t as broad as we see now. The Islamic State in Iraq and Syria (ISIS) [which now calls itself the Islamic State] took advantage of the gap between the government and the people, and they invaded and occupied Iraqi cities.

ISIS controls important military areas, but the wider geographical area is in the hands of tribes and armed groups who are rebelling against the government, and who before that were fighting the Americans. We need to differentiate between these groups and the terrorists. We need to face ISIS militarily. But these other groups should be dealt with politically.

For this reason, Owen Bennett-Jones suggests that the Islamic State will eventually fall apart, but he argues it’s likely to take Iraq, and maybe even Syria, along with it:

The disintegration of Iraq fits into larger trends challenging the established order in the Middle East and it isn’t only jihadis who are driving the changes. In a development that would have been unimaginable a few years ago, Western companies are now buying oil from the Kurds despite the opposition of the central government in Baghdad. In Syria, Isis controls some oilfields but the output still gets to market. As for borders, it is no longer outlandish to consider the possibility of an Alawite redoubt in western Syria and of Kurdish self-rule: a de facto independence that would change not only Iraq but also Turkey, Syria and Iran.

Meanwhile, Patrick Cockburn considers the prospects for an ISIS assault on Baghdad:

Iraq’s acting national security adviser, Safa Hussein, told me that ‘many people think’ Isis will ‘synchronise attacks from inside and outside Baghdad’. He believed such an assault was possible though he thought it would lead to defeat for Isis and the Sunni rebels who joined them. The Sunni are in a minority but it wouldn’t take much for an attacking force coming from the Sunni heartlands in Anbar province to link up with districts in the city such as Amariya, Khadra and Dora. Much depends on how far Isis is overextended, surprised by its own victories and lacking the resources to strike at the capital. …

A rational calculation of the balance of forces in any prospective battle for Baghdad shows that Isis has shot its bolt for the moment and can’t advance out of Sunni-dominated provinces. But Baghdadis are wary of assuming that they’re safe because they know they have to take into account the gross incompetence of the ruling elite around Maliki, which clings to power as if it had not just lost half the country. Even the generals who openly abandoned their troops in Mosul, Ali Ghaidan Majid and Abboud Qanbar, still hold their old jobs, two of the three most important in the army. ‘I still see them turning up to military meetings in Baghdad and they often sit in the front row as if nothing had happened,’ a senior official said despairingly. ‘It is beyond a joke.’

Who Killed The RomCom? Ctd

Readers join the thread:

I am a former studio film executive. A romantic comedy is one of the most, if not the most, difficult script to write. When a good one comes along, and it happens very rarely, the studios go into a feeding frenzy. A good romantic comedy is cheap to make and its return on investment ratio is much higher than most genres. If you are a young screenwriter with no connections writing on spec, throw away your action script and write a good, original romantic comedy. You probably will not succeed at it – the premise is that they are really hard to write well – but if you do, you will have suitors.

Another sighs:

Your post on the supposedly insidious effect the growth of the Chinese film market has had on the American romantic comedy would be a great piece of alarmist culture-bait if only it had a shred of truth to it. The simple fact is that the Chinese market embraced an enormous romcom hit, Finding Mr. Right [trailer above], only two years ago. It was atop the box office for four weeks in China and made well over $80 million – a hit by anyone’s standards.

The film is no masterpiece, but then many of the romantic comedies so lamented by the writers you quote weren’t such great shakes either.

Ironically, the movie explicitly references Sleepless in Seattle as it dealt with birth tourism – the trend of wealthy Chinese women to have their children in the U.S. to secure a coveted American passport. It also touched on issues of materialism and corruption in Chinese in a lighthearted but pretty direct fashion.

Part of the problem with the explosion of online film blogging is that many of the people writing about movies don’t have much knowledge of actual industry practices, especially foreign-market practices. That leads to writing that basically relies on cultural stereotypes (“Oh, the Chinese, they don’t laugh at the same things we do – they’re foreign.”) or what the writers pick up on a jaunt or two to an international film festival. Nor do they really wish for the return of such middlebrow, middle-class genres like the romantic comedy (or the straight drama – which has almost entirely migrated to cable television), they’re much more compelled by art house fare and the chance to denounce tentpole pictures like the latest Transformers movie).

No, what’s really killed the romantic comedy is the death of general audience film critic in the mode of Roger Ebert or Pauline Kael (who was never a fan of the romcom form, but certainly of many of the performers in the films themselves), which is tied to the crisis in print publishing. There are no more tastemakers for those audiences, so they’ve scattered. What’s left is a critical wasteland where virtually anyone can assert anything without fear of being read critically. Want to prompt some mouse clicks? Here’s a piece on how those Chinese don’t like romance – or laughter.

Update from a reader:

Your reader’s response to O’Brien’s article misses the point of the argument. It is not that Chinese dislike romance or comedy, rather that there is a translation problem. The more reliant on word play and cultural specific jokes don’t play well. If a New York RomCom was to make an Eliot Spitzer joke, Americans, more or less, would understand the joke and Chinese would probably have problems with it. This of course works both ways; Americans could not understand a joke that used Xi Jinping from a Chinese movie (if that was aloud). O’Brien isn’t arguing that foreign people don’t laugh, rather that the nuance of language, its subtle gibes, its turn of the phrases, its reference points are hard to translate, while big thing goes boom is an easy translation. No one has ever gone to see a Michael Bay film because of the dialogue … in fact language that is lost in translation probably makes them better films.