Month: August 2014

Reclaiming ‘Jewish-Looking’

by Phoebe Maltz Bovy

One of the many tributes to the late, great Lauren Bacall can be found in The Jewish Week, whose angle is, understandably, a Jewish one. Gabriela Geselowitz provides an eight-item checklist of Bacall’s most Jewish details. What interests me most is the seventh item:

People would act surprised when they learned she was Jewish.  Tired of people telling her she didn’t “look” Jewish, she said, “And I’d think, what’s with this Jewish thing? Is it terrible to look it? Not to look it? Does it mean you have to look like Shylock?”

A mainstay of the Jewish press is and long has been the did-you-know-this-blonde-starlet-is-Jewish? story. Did you know that Bar Refaeli, Gwyneth Paltrow, and Scarlett Johansson are Jews? If you’re Jewish, you’ve probably heard this many times, and if you’re not, either you don’t care, or you run one of those other sorts of websites devoted to listing Jews.

I suppose this genre is meant to be of some kind of comfort to Jewish women and girls, who know all too well that we are not exactly stereotyped as ravishing. Pop culture is full of references to the unique appeal of non-Jewish women to Jewish men, but Jewish women… tend to get points only for not looking or seeming Jewish, whatever these mean. The American romantic comedy basically is a Jewish man (sometimes played by a non-Jewish actor – see Jason Biggs’s career) and a non-Jewish woman (who can, in turn, be played by a Jewish one – see Natalie Portman in “Garden State”). Or maybe the point is to reassure Jewish men that they need not marry out to find the conventionally beautiful wife of their dreams. (Obstacles to marrying a woman who looks like Bar Refaeli – let alone like Lauren Bacall – would seem to extend far beyond the possibility that such a woman wouldn’t share one’s religious persuasion.)

I mean, I get it. There are many fine reasons for avoiding the expression ‘looking Jewish.’

To begin with the obvious, anti-Semitic stereotypes often include visuals, and if the idea is that looking Jewish means having a hooked nose that reaches down to one’s navel, or some kind of grotesque hand grasping the entire globe, it’s understandable why few would want in. Like Bacall evidently said, who wants to look like Shylock?

Then, within the Jewish community, is the question of exclusion. Jews who don’t fit the more neutral stereotype (i.e. not horns or claws – just… a white person with dark hair, more or less) end up hearing from other Jews that they don’t count, which could, I’d imagine, get old, or get really annoying if you’re someone who doesn’t merely identify as Jewish, but wishes to be active in Jewish communal life. It’s not really a drawback in society at large, of course, to not look Jewish. Certainly not when it’s the sort of not-looking-Jewish that so fascinates the Jewish press, namely looking non-Jewish but white. Anyway, most American Jews, but not all, are of Ashkenazi (Eastern European) ancestry, and even among those of that background, we don’t – as the saying goes – all look alike.

And yet. For those of us who do look Jewish – ahem – how we’re received in the world is impacted by this perception. This is just… a fact of lived experience. It may not even be a thing – as in, I’m agnostic on whether there actually are more ‘Jewish-looking’ people among Jews than among the white population at large. That’s not the point. The point is that a stereotype exists, and those of us who are immediately understood as Jewish are those who happen to meet it. And it’s approximately as reassuring for me to hear that some Jews have hair much lighter and noses much smaller than my own as it must be for those in equivalent (if not exactly parallel) boats to learn that Alexa Chung’s career is doing well, or that Zoe Saldana – a woman of color, but… – was cast as Nina Simone.

What I’m asking for, then, is not some kind of outrage over the plight of the Jewish-looking Jews. It’s not really a plight at this point, just a life experience. All I’d like is to find some way to reclaim ‘Jewish-looking’ that isn’t too terribly insulting to Jews who do or don’t meet that description.

Objections? Agreement? Tangentially-related musings? Send them to dish@andrewsullivan.com.

Suicide Leaves Behind Nothing, Ctd

by Dish Staff

The thread on Robin Williams’ death morphs into our long-running thread on suicide:

Elizabeth Nolan Brown’s post reminded me of the thoughtful and informative comic on depression by Hyperbole and a Half. It’s in two parts – One and Two. I just re-read it all, and making it a little more heartbreaking this week is that the movie she is looking for in Part One stars Robin Williams …

Another reader opens up:

First, I want to make it clear I’m not writing this for sympathy or attention. A lot of people have been posting on social media this week about their own personal struggles with depression and suicide. I’m not ready to go public like that, but in the wake of Robin William’s suicide, I wanted to share something anonymously with your readers.

Yesterday I showed up at my therapist’s office with my “suicide kit”:

a bottle of 20 OxyContin, a bottle of 100 Tramadol, a bottle of aspirin (to thin the blood and facilitate drug absorption) and a half-dozen straight razor blades. I’ve had variations of this kit since a botched suicide attempt in my teens. If I had to give a reason why I’ve kept this thing around, the closest I could articulate it would be “escape hatch”. There’s a history of depression and manic-depression on both sides of my family tree, and I saw how it ground away at them, especially my mother. I did not want to die like that – alone, bitter, medicated, stripped of personality and hope.

So here I am at 50, no immediate family, just filed for divorce because my husband of 18 years found something perkier out yonder, and I’d be lying if I didn’t tell you I haven’t been eye-balling that kit every single day for the last three months because holy shit do I ever want to fucking escape.

And then Robin Williams hangs himself on a doorknob, evidently after hacking away at his wrists first, and suddenly it seems like half the people I know are confessing to suicidal thoughts or struggles with depression. Last week I was not so depressed that I could not hear it, could not absorb it, could not register the fact that I am not alone in feeling this way.

I’m not adequate enough of a writer to describe to you how important this is to someone like me, but know that it is important. Important enough to make me close and throw away an escape hatch I’ve held open for 33 years. And that’s why I’m writing. In case one of your readers out there also struggles with depression, also has their own “escape hatch”, can also hear, absorb and register that they are not alone in this. Because you’re not. I’m here. We’re here. Know this. And if you can, let others know it too.

Another reader:

Of course the ongoing Robin Williams discussion hits a cord with anyone who has felt what deep depression feels like. I feel blessed that I have had limited experience with it personally, except when I had my twins 10 year ago and suffered a despair – post partum – that I could not explain or get rid of without medication for a while. As those who have felt this inexplicable emptiness know, there is no amount of external stimulus, love, support or encouragement that can really heal this.

But that depression was NOTHING compared to what was a nearly suicidal reaction after being on Wellbutrin earlier this year. I was in a lethargic funk and feeling down about all sorts of things, and my doctor said if fatigue was a problem, perhaps bupropion could help. For about a month I thought it was helping, and then I woke up one morning and wanted to end it all. It was the scariest feeling I’ve ever had. The only thing I could muster was the will to look up my symptoms and it appeared I was having a paradoxical reaction to the medication that was supposed to help lift me out of the blues.

The idea of moving out of bed, of even getting to the toilet seemed beyond me. I cried, screamed and scared myself all day. Thankfully I felt sure it was a strange reaction to the medication and despite the pharmacist telling me I should taper, that was not going to happen. I stopped taking it immediately and about two days later I felt better.

But to think that feeling I had is something people with severe, suicidal depression grapple with every day, I can totally see why some battles end the way Robin’s did. I cannot even explain the feeling, other than to say I came close to calling 911 and checking myself into a mental hospital, and I do not have a history of major mental illness. I felt like a hopeless prisoner in my own mind, from which there was no escape, relief or balm but time.

Some people deal with that every day. We should have compassion and mercy and not question the “what ifs” – because unless you’ve felt that pit of despair, you just don’t know. So in the talk of seeking medication help as part of the fight against depression, that is well and good for many, but people should also be aware that the cure can make things even worse for some people. The brain’s chemistry remains such a frustrating mystery, so it’s impossible to tell for whom this will be the case. The warning labels say these things but I never thought that would be me.

Thanks for listening.

Do We Really Need A More Compliant Press?

by Dish Staff

That’s apparently Joe Scarborough’s position. Chris Caesar recaps the Morning Joe host’s back-and-forth with the WaPo’s Wesley Lowery, who (as you may recall) was recently arrested while reporting from Ferguson:

Scarborough sounded off on the Wednesday evening arrests of Lowery and Huffington Post reporter Ryan Reilly while the two worked in a McDonald’s near the scene of protests in Ferguson, Missouri. “If I saw that video and my son was the one that the police arrested after that episode, I’d say ‘Joey, here’s a clue: when the cops tell you – for like the 30th time – ‘let’s go,’ you know what that means son? It means, ‘let’s go.’ I’m sorry,’” Scarborough said. “I’ve been in places where police officers said, ‘Alright, you know what? This is cordoned off. You guys need to move along,’” Scarborough added. “And you know what I do? I go, ‘yes, sir,’ or ‘yes, ma’am’ – I don’t sit there and have a debate and film the police officer unless I want to get on TV and have people talk about me the next day.”

Because as Jon Chait puts it, “Nothing says ‘journalism’ like following orders from authorities, however questionable, self-interested, or illegal they may be.” Dylan Byers is left cold by the whole debate:

Lowery and Reilly deserve recognition for their reporting efforts, but getting arrested at a McDonald’s does not a great reporter make. Video of the arrest shows that Lowery didn’t exactly move with great haste when the officer told him to vacate (though that doesn’t make the officer’s actions forgivable). MSNBC’s Joe Scarborough criticized Lowery for that on Thursday morning, and Lowery responded by telling CNN that Scarborough should “come down to Ferguson and get out of 30 Rock where he’s sitting, sipping his Starbucks smugly.” Many sided with Lowery, a few may have sided with Scarborough. One hopes that the majority chafed at how a story about race and police brutality turned, for a moment too long, into a pissing match between two members of the media.

That analysis prompts a facepalm from P.M. Carpenter:

Byers says “Ferguson is not Fallujah” – a negative comparison that certainly holds true in many ways. But in our two Iraq wars, you may recall, the American press was “handled” and often sidelined by a Defense Department worried about bad press. As a result, the American public received an often skewed view of those wars. Are police departments to be allowed the same freedom of First Amendment-nullification at home? Whenever law enforcement bungles the job of crisis management, are reporters covering the bungle expected to cringe and bow and “move with great haste” in the face of incompetent authority? And are the likes of a law-and-order politicking Joe Scarborough to assume some sort of journalistic respectability? Byers is correct; this is “a story about race and police brutality” – and Lowery’s story is but an extension of the latter, with heavy First Amendment overtones.

Meanwhile, Ed Morrissey zooms out:

I’ve been puzzled about some reactions to the video of police arresting Wesley Lowery and Ryan Reilly at a McDonalds and the teargas attack on an Al Jazeera news crew for just standing on the sidewalk with their cameras. Some have suggested that these journalists didn’t respond to police orders to disperse, and were therefore subject to detention and counter-riot tactics. However, that’s only a legitimate argument when an emergency decree is in effect that explicitly authorizes police to act in such a manner. I’m unaware of any such declaration by Nixon, and if one does not exist, the police don’t have the authority to impose it themselves. Our whole system of civil rights is based on police being servants of the law, not on citizens being servants of the police based on their assessment of when we can and cannot exercise those rights. That includes pointing cameras at the police, and sitting in a public restaurant in a lawful manner.

More on Michael Brown and Ferguson here.

Don’t Forget About Sistani

by Dish Staff

Adam Taylor remarks on the role the preeminent Shiite cleric played in turning the tables against Maliki, leading to his resignation yesterday:

The Post’s Loveday Morris reports that a message from Grand Ayatollah Ali Sistani was key in convincing Iraq’s political elite that embattled Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki needed to go. The letter from Sistani, sent to leaders of Maliki’s Dawa party July 9, spoke of the “need to speed up the selection of a new prime minister who has wide national acceptance.” Not long after the letter was received, Haider al-Abadi, a deputy speaker for Iraq’s parliament and also a member of Dawa, was called upon to lead the country. On Thursday, Malliki finally admitted defeat.

It’s a bold move. While few people had doubts about Sistani’s theological power, he has rarely acted so directly to influence politics.

The 84-year-old Islamic cleric, infrequently seen in public and generally circumspect when making announcements, is a member of the “quietest” Shiite tradition that is suspicious of religion and politics mixing. However, Iraq’s crisis may now be so bad that Sistani is taking action – and we may just be seeing the start of it.

In a penetrating essay on Shiite Islam’s role in Iraqi politics, Mohamad Bazzi places Sistani in the context of a broader political-theological struggle within the faith:

Since the U.S. invasion in 2003, Sistani has competed with more radical clerics for leadership over the Shiite community in Iraq. This struggle reflects a parallel battle between Iranian and Iraqi clerics for dominance over the larger Shiite realm: … For Iran, the struggle over Iraq is not just a political or strategic one. It is also a theological battle over control of the Shiite narrative. At its heart, the argument is over competing visions of Shiism’s essence. Should the faith be defined by a diverse group of scholars living at seminaries and engaging in esoteric theological debates, while staying out of the political fray? Or should it follow the tradition of absolute political and religious leadership advocated by the leader of Iran’s Islamic Revolution, the late Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini?

Sistani represents the dominant theological school in Najaf, which rejects the Iranian model of rule by clergy. The Najafi clerics believe their role is to be spiritual leaders and not to participate directly in politics. Since the U.S. invasion, Sistani seized a more direct political role on several occasions, especially in 2004 when he lobbied for early elections and a constitutional referendum. But he never stepped into the political fray as forcefully as he has over the past two months, with his call to arms against ISIS and his leading role in Maliki’s ouster. Sistani’s actions could shift the historic debate regarding the position of clerics.

Where Do Republicans Stand On The Michael Brown Case?

by Dish Staff

Protest over the killing of unarmed teen in Ferguson

Notably, Rand Paul spoke out against police militarization with an op-ed in Time:

There is a systemic problem with today’s law enforcement. Not surprisingly, big government has been at the heart of the problem. Washington has incentivized the militarization of local police precincts by using federal dollars to help municipal governments build what are essentially small armies – where police departments compete to acquire military gear that goes far beyond what most of Americans think of as law enforcement.

Ilya Somin couldn’t be happier:

The op ed should help put to rest the notion – never very plausible to begin with – that libertarians are ignoring these issues. Paul has not gone as far in opposing the War on Drugs and police militarization as I and many other libertarians would like. I would prefer to abolish the War on Drugs completely, not just cut it back and reduce sentences, as Paul has advocated. But he has gone much farther on both than the vast majority of other mainstream politicians, including most Democrats.

Meanwhile, Benjamin Wallace-Wells sees a rare opportunity for bipartisan action:

[T]he conservative perspective on law and order has been subtly changing, most obviously in the strengthening conservative enthusiasm for reforming prison sentencing, a cause embraced not only by libertarians like Mike Lee and Rand Paul but also by more conventional Republicans like Marco Rubio and Paul Ryan. Even given this recent history, it was still striking today to see Rand Paul, in his statement, turn from more general concerns about the militarization of police to the specific topic of race: “Given the racial disparities in our criminal justice system, it is impossible for African-Americans not to feel like their government is particularly targeting them.” This is exactly the argument that liberals have been making for an awfully long time, but that conservatives have rarely joined. It seems hard to imagine, given how clearly the conversation has turned to militarization, that we won’t hear more of this.

But Dave Weigel identifies a split on the right:

The modern GOP, the one that elected Richard Nixon and built its base in the South and the suburbs, established early on that it was the “law and order” party. The crime waves of the 1960s and 1970s and the crack wars of the 1980s were crucial to Republican dominance, and led to tough-on-crime legislation that’s still on the books. Only recently, as violent crime rates have tumbled, has the libertarian tendency of the GOP reasserted itself. We’ve seen the “Right on Crime” Republican legislators pass prison reform bills; we’ve seen Rand Paul talk about restoring the voting rights of felons, and shrinking the number of crimes that can be classified as life-ruining felonies.

It’s an open question: Which of these tendencies will characterize the conservative response to Ferguson? The law-and-order tendency that assumes the cops pointing their guns at protesters are preventing the outside agitators from doing something wild? Or the libertarian tendency that asks if you really want a photo of the occupation of Crimea to be indistinguishable from a photo of the St. Louis metro area?

Ben Domenech argues, “If you want an indication about where someone sits on the dividing line between conservative and libertarian, sometimes it’s as simple as how they answer this question: how do you feel about cops?”

Do you naturally tend to trust them, viewing them as a necessary and needed hedge acting in defense of law and order? Or are you naturally suspicious of them, believing them to be little more than armed tax collectors and bureaucrats with a tendency to violence and falsehood in service of their whims? Are cops the brave individuals who stand between the law-abiding and those who would rob, rape, and kill, or are they the low-level tyrannical overpaid functionaries of the administrative state, more focused on tax collection in the form of citations, property grabs, and killing the occasional family dog?

This isn’t to say that only libertarians are suspicious of cops. There has always been a strain of conservatism very skeptical of government power, and as police forces have become more interested in seizing assets and ignoring complaint, many conservatives have become openly critical of their behavior. Indeed, Mary Katharine Ham has a great response to what we’re seeing in Ferguson, as does Kevin Williamson. But how you answer that initial question will tell you a lot about your political assumptions regarding authority.

Hans Fiene notes, “For many conservatives, especially those of us living in nice, comfy suburbs, it’s hard to apply the “power corrupts” doctrine to law enforcement because we’ve never seen corrupted enforcers of the law”:

We’ve never been wrongly arrested. We’ve never witnessed our children put in jail based on the false reports of police officers. We’ve never seen our neighbors beaten or tazed without cause. And in the extremely unlikely scenario that a police officer drove into our neighborhood and murdered our unarmed friend in cold blood, we cannot possibly fathom a scenario where the justice system wouldn’t be on our side and where that police officer wouldn’t spend the rest of his life in jail. Therefore Michael Brown must have been a violent thug, foolish enough to think he could swipe a cop’s weapon because, in our minds, there’s no conceivable way that a police officer would gun down an innocent man. But just because we don’t see the corruption of law enforcement in our own lives doesn’t mean that it doesn’t exist.

Meanwhile, Matt Steinglass wonders where the gun-rights crowd disappeared to:

Curiously, observes Francis Wilkinson in Bloomberg View, gun-rights advocates have not used the confrontation in Ferguson as an example of a situation where possession of a gun might have protected a citizen from the illegitimate use of force by a government agent. They have not argued that Michael Brown might be alive now if he had been able to shoot back at the police officer who killed him, or that the demonstrators who fired warning shots when police tried to shut down protests would have been justified in shooting officers to defend their right to freedom of association. No such arguments have been heard with regard to any of the unarmed black men killed by American police officers over the past few years. One wonders what might account for the fact that gun-rights advocates defend the right of a white Nevada rancher to shoot agents of the Bureau of Land Management, but not the right of young black men to shoot police officers.

More Dish on the events in Ferguson here.

(Photo: Demonstrators raise their hands during a rally to protest the shooting death of an unarmed teen by a police officer in Ferguson, Missouri, on August 14, 2014. By Bilgin S. Sasmaz/Anadolu Agency/Getty Images)

What Can Prevent Campus Rape?

by Elizabeth Nolan Brown

Judith Levine published a beautiful piece this week on how “to stop campus rape,” an issue that’s recently been getting attention from far outside its usual feminist bounds. In Congress, Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand (D-N.Y.) and a bipartisan team have been trying to pass a federal Campus Accountability and Safety Act (CASA) which would, among other things, create a public database of campus assaults and raise fines on colleges that report them inaccurately. A little over a year ago, the Campus Sexual Violence Elimination Act was campuspassed, mandating that schools create rape prevention and awareness programs if they want to keep participating in federal student loan programs.

It’s hard to see how most of these efforts will change anything. The difference between a rapist and a not-rapist isn’t having clicked through an online sexual-assault awareness module. And a public database of campus assaults may prove useful to those who choose educational institutions based on crime stats, but it would seem to do nothing to discourage rape on campus. The underlying issues — sexual assault is all too common, victims are often hushed or treated unfairly by college administrators, the accused can lack anything resembling due process — remain.

Increasing fines for colleges that fail to report sexual assaults, as the CASA would mandate, might force schools to take sex crime complaints more seriously. But even this proposal is riddled with problems. First, it would require a victim whose allegations have already been swept under the rug by her or his university to then take further action and file a complaint with the Department of Education. And as The New York Times noted recently, the Education Department’s Office for Civil Rights (OCR), which handles these claims, hardly has enough staff to evaluate student complaints, which could mean “many colleges that violate federal law will not be investigated or fined.”

Others, however, fret that the OCR could get a little too fine-happy under the new proposal. Hans Bader, an attorney with the Competitive Enterprise Institute, recently pointed out that the bill would let OCR keep any money it receives, rather than turning it over to the general treasury. Wendy McElroy worries:

This creates a huge incentive for OCR to be aggressively punitive or to accuse innocent universities of misrepresentation or substandard compliance. Even an inability to comply would not exempt institutions from fines. For example, they are required to enter into a “memorandum of understanding” with local law enforcement. If the latter refuses, then “[t]he Secretary of Education will then have the discretion to grant the waiver.” Not the obligation but the discretion.

For McElroy, the whole idea of colleges conducting sexual assault investigations is preposterous:

Rape is a criminal act. Why is it being vetted by campus administrators who would never conduct a murder investigation? Both are the job of police. Why should university staff be forensically trained? The police already are, and they usually have years of experience. Yet CASA provides that universities must enter into “a memorandum of understanding [every two years] with all applicable local law enforcement agencies to clearly delineate responsibilities and share information … about certain serious crimes that shall include, but not be limited to, sexual violence.” Not limited to? Perhaps administrators will be conducting murder investigations soon.

A simple solution exists to what critics call an hysterical and politically motivated campaign about sexual violence on campus. Sexual assault is a crime. Leave it to the police. Unless, of course, the campaign is hysterical and politically motivated. Then the pile-on of regulations and federal power makes sense.

I’m not inclined to agree with McElroy on much, but I think she is absolutely spot on here, both in asserting that cops should handle student rape cases and in assessing the motives of legislators. Students, feminists, and folks of all sorts have been very vocal lately about the problem of assault on college campuses. It’s an election year. Politicians want talismans to ward against war-on-women charges, or more street cred when they fire these charges at others. And unlike most “women’s issues,” this is an easy one, because nobody’s on the pro-rape side.

But let’s ignore these congressional theatrics for the moment. Back to Levine’s awesome essay. She traces the 1960s move away from in loco parentis policies on college campuses through a more permissive period to the trends we’ve been seeing recently (trends that correspond to a general societal panic about youth safety strangely at odds with the reality of crime and vice rates).

From abstinence education’s ascendancy to raising the drinking age, Levine suggests that more worry about young adults is actually making them less safe:

Today America has the highest drinking age in the world. Virtually every high school has a drug-and-alcohol-prevention program and a chapter of the aptly named SADD, or Students Against Drunk Driving. The ideal is abstinence until the magic age of 21.

The same goes for sex education. Its arguments against teen sex are similar to those against underage imbibing. Both lead to bad grades, low self-esteem, addiction, partner violence, unwanted babies, diseases and car crashes. Sex, drink and drugs add up to trouble and pain.

Pleasure is not mentioned. Pleasure is for adults.

But every kid knows that getting high is fun and sex feels good.

So young people arrive at college parched, horny and unskilled at social drinking or sexual relations, and go into hyper-party mode. Still too young to drink at a bar, they “pregame” — guzzle as much as they can as fast as they can — before going out. Ninety percent of alcohol consumed by Americans younger than 21 is in binge drinking. Eighty percent of campus rapes involve alcohol — lots of it.

The answer to alcohol-fueled rape isn’t micromanaging consent or intensifying efforts to banish college drinking — a proposition about as realistic as ending American’s love of cheeseburgers or stopping stopping the sex trade or conjuring unicorns. We need to teach young people to drink, love, and screw responsibility, and this involves a level of openness and honesty that seems to frighten a lot of people. But as Levine notes: teens know when we’re lying to them. Every opportunity we take to tell kids that premarital sex will ruin their lives and only deadbeats drink is a missed opportunity to arm them with the tools they’ll need when they inevitably encounter alcohol and lust.

Americans want to protect children by keeping them children. It doesn’t work. You can’t protect women by infantilizing them, either.

Which brings us to this long, mostly incoherent piece on masculinity from a young man named George Fields. In it, he asserts that “a girl simply grows into a woman, or so most believe, whereas a man is something that is made”:

He is made because his masculinity consists in the destruction of his own nature, not in the maturity of it. He is born subject to a slew of desires, some more despicable, such as an unbridled lust for sex and drink, and some more acceptable, such as a desire for fame and affirmation. Though some of these passions are perhaps less unbecoming than others, they all make the man a slave for as long as he is in thrall to them and acts according to them.

The act of being a man is realized when all such things are put under the rule of his will and are broken with a rod of iron; when he is no longer driven by his lusts as the Greeks would term it, or the flesh as it would be known among Christians, but rather commands them.

To Fields, the fairer sex has no interiority, simply passing from playing with dolls to pining for babies with nary an “unbecoming” urge or thought. Men, meanwhile, become adults by acknowledging that they are weak, narcissistic brutes and then battling this true nature. (And these are the type of folks who say feminists unfairly malign men!) The work of adulthood, for both men and women, is the work of denial.

It’s dangerous rhetoric. What happens when a man can’t deny his passion for “the flesh” any longer? And that blank female canvas he expects has her own ideas about having or not having sex?

Contrast his ideas about adulthood with Levine’s:

Violence will not end until men stop viewing women … as “objects for sex.” But neither will it end if we keep viewing women as “special objects” in need of special protection. … To be equal, women must recognize themselves as adults, neither allowing men to abuse them nor expecting men to protect them. For men to grow up, they must recognize women as equals, people like themselves. Equality, not protection, is the antidote to sexual violence.

Thoughts? Email dish@andrewsullivan.com.

(Photo by Ed Yourdon)

Did Russia Just Invade Ukraine For Real?

by Dish Staff

The Russian aid convoy Ukraine believes to be a Trojan horse might just be a decoy. Journalists who had a chance to look inside some of the trucks said they did contain humanitarian supplies like buckwheat and sleeping bags, but suspiciously, some of them were almost completely empty. Meanwhile, a column of Russian armored vehicles was spotted crossing into Ukraine yesterday:

The Guardian saw a column of 23 armoured personnel carriers, supported by fuel trucks and other logistics vehicles with official Russian military plates, travelling towards the border near the Russian town of Donetsk – about 200km away from Donetsk, Ukraine. After pausing by the side of the road until nightfall, the convoy crossed into Ukrainian territory, using a rough dirt track and clearly crossing through a gap in a barbed wire fence that demarcates the border. Armed men were visible in the gloom by the border fence as the column moved into Ukraine. Kiev has lost control of its side of the border in this area.

The trucks are unlikely to represent a full-scale official Russian invasion, and it was unclear how far they planned to travel inside Ukrainian territory and how long they would stay. But it was incontrovertible evidence of what Ukraine has long claimed – that Russian troops are active inside its borders.

What’s more, Ukraine claims to have attacked and destroyed most of the Russian APCs:

Ukraine said its artillery partly destroyed a Russian armoured column that entered its territory overnight and said its forces came under shellfire from Russia on Friday in what appeared to be a major military escalation between the ex-Soviet states. Russia’s government denied its forces had crossed into Ukraine and accused Kiev of trying to sabotage deliveries of aid. NATO said there had been a Russian incursion into Ukraine, while avoiding the term invasion, and European capitals accused the Kremlin of escalating the fighting.

Kiev and its Western allies have repeatedly accused Russia of arming pro-Moscow separatist rebels in eastern Ukraine, and of sending undercover military units onto Ukrainian soil. But evidence of Russian military vehicles captured or destroyed on Ukrainian territory would give extra force to Kiev’s allegations – and possibly spark a new round of sanctions against the Kremlin.

But Anna Nemtsova remains suspicious of the convoy itself:

Authorities in Kiev and the International Committee of the Red Cross demanded the Kremlin present a detailed inventory of what was inside the glistening convoy. And Aleksander Cherkasov, director of the human rights center “Memorial,” laid out several problematic questions in an interview with The Daily Beast: “We would like to know why the military trucks were loaded not by the ministry of emergency affairs but at the base of Tamanskaya Motor and Rifle Division in Moscow region,” said Cherkasov. “And also, for what reason about 30 military vehicles that accompany the convoy have no plates on them.” This is a problem, since no traffic police can identify any of the trucks if they start to disperse once they enter Ukraine.

“This time the Kremlin is openly supporting separatists in Ukraine by sending in military vehicles,” said Cherkasov. “If the trucks cross the border without official permission from Kiev, it would be considered a pure invasion.”

Maliki Bows Out

by Dish Staff

The Iraqi prime minister stepped down from his post yesterday, defusing a political crisis that just days ago looked like it would end in a coup:

On Thursday, the embattled Iraqi leader relinquished power and dropped the legal challenge to his successor, Haider al-Abadi, a member of his own Shiite Islamist Dawa Party. Abadi now has 30 days to form a new cabinet, and he will be under intense pressure from both Washington and Tehran — Iraq’s biggest patrons — to give powerful positions to members of the country’s embattled Sunni minority. The ministries of defense and the interior, which oversee Iraq’s security forces, have long been sought by Sunni leaders. Appearing on state television alongside his rival, Maliki pledged to support “brother” Abadi, citing the need for national unity.

Maliki’s change of heart came after his former backers in Washington and Tehran withdrew their support and urged him to step aside. He has also lost the support of much of his party and the Iraqi political class write large. Marc Ambinder observes that the US got what it wanted (and worked for):

Behind the scenes, the administration worked with Maliki’s party, the Iraqi National Group, offering assurances that the U.S. would stand fully behind its chosen candidate, so long as it wasn’t Maliki. The West encouraged Iraqi President Fouad Massoum to call for new elections within 30 days.

When people say that only a political solution will help Iraq, they mean two things. One: a strong leader who can unite the country without alienating a majority of a strong minority. Two: a political system that works, even minimally, and isn’t seen as unfair. Finding a strong charismatic leader is probably impossible, because Iraq has not lived peacefully without the strong arm of a dictator. It is a state that was drawn, not a state that drew itself. But the second is actually possible: Iraqis of all persuasions and demographic demarcations (Christians, Sunnis, Shiias, moderates, conservatives, agnostics, Baathists, and Kurds) need to have some confidence that they can participate in politics. Participating in politics creates a political culture, and a political culture forms bonds among even the most hated of rivals.

Juan Cole lists ten ways Maliki doomed himself. This was a big one:

In winter-spring 2013 when Arab Spring-type demonstrations were mounted by the Sunnis in places like Falluja and Hawija in the Sunni Arab west and north, al-Maliki declared them terrorists and sent in military troops and helicopter gunships to brutally suppress the protests. Sunni Arabs, having been informed that they would be a perpetual defeated minority in parliament were now given the idea that even peaceable assembly would be denied to them as a political tactic. Al-Maliki’s policies gave them no incentive to remain within the system. In the end they allied with the al-Qaeda offshoot, the so-called “Islamic State.” Al-Maliki didn’t so much lose the Sunni Arabs as drive them into the arms of IS with systematic policies of marginalization.

Al-Maliki’s successor needs to make the al-Da’wa Party a party of pan-Islam and try to attract Sunnis into it (this happened in the 1960s)– or better yet needs to found a Labor Party that could unite Iraqis across ethnicity and sect. This Shiite rule business can’t hope to put Iraq back together.

And Yochi Dreazen looks ahead to the challenges Abadi will face in forming a cabinet and uniting the country:

The Obama administration, which hailed Maliki’s decision to step down, has promised to increase its financial and military assistance to Iraq if Abadi’s new government has less of a sectarian bent than Maliki’s hard-line Shiite-dominated one.

Colin Kahl, who formerly served as the Pentagon’s top Mideast policy official, said Abadi will take office with widespread goodwill within the Sunni and Kurdish communities simply because he is not Maliki, who was reviled for instituting policies that discriminated against both groups. But Kahl said Sunni and Kurdish leaders will be looking to Abadi to quickly make substantive moves that show he is genuinely willing to share power. A key early test: whether Abadi puts Sunnis in control of the powerful ministries of defense and interior, which control the country’s military and police forces. Sunnis have wanted those posts for years to ensure that Iraqi security forces aren’t used against them the way they were under Maliki.

An American War Zone, Ctd

by Dish Staff

Outrage In Missouri Town After Police Shooting Of 18-Yr-Old Man

Glenn Greenwald argues that the police militarization on display – until recently – in Ferguson is “part of a broader and truly dangerous trend: the importation of War on Terror tactics from foreign war zones onto American soil”:

American surveillance drones went from Yemen, Pakistan and Somalia into American cities, and it’s impossible to imagine that they won’t be followed by weaponized ones. The inhumane and oppressive conditions that prevailed at Guantanamo are matched, or exceeded, by the super-max hellholes and “Communications Management Units” now in the American prison system. And the “collect-it-all” mentality that drives NSA domestic surveillance was pioneered by Gen. Keith Alexander in Baghdad and by other generals in Afghanistan, aimed at enemy war populations. Indeed, much of the war-like weaponry now seen in Ferguson comes from American laws, such as the so-called “Program 1033,” specifically designed to re-direct excessive Pentagon property – no longer needed as foreign wars wind down – into American cities.

Phillip Carter offers a brief history of police militarization in the US:

Things began to change during the 1980s, when the nation’s leadership declared a “war on drugs,” and began to militarize its approach accordingly.

Congress allowed the Pentagon to give warfighting gear to police departments, and also created a number of exceptions to the historical rule precluding military involvement in law enforcement. Police departments raced to apply for federal funding to harden their communities and police forces against an entire spectrum of threats not previously contemplated. Sophisticated command and control systems migrated from the military to law enforcement, alongside powerful surveillance and investigative tools first developed for the military and intelligence community. Police departments touted their use of military counterinsurgency techniques, learned from Army field manuals and returning veterans.

And, most recently, as the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan have wound down, the Defense Department has aggressively transferred combat gear to civilian law enforcement agencies at home – more than $400 million-worth in 2013 alone.  According to a USA Today report, “police forces in the same county as Ferguson received advanced rifle sights and night vision equipment between 2012 and 2014

As Kriston Capps observes, “One issue with the militarization of the police is that military gear doesn’t come with military training”:

The U.S. Army’s handbook on civil disturbances states in no uncertain terms that the way that the approach that authorities take to crowd control can worsen a crisis – a factor that the St. Louis County Police Department apparently did not take into consideration. “During planning, leaders must consider that the crowd may become more combative with the arrival of a response force,” the guidelines explain. So the first step in moving forward after Ferguson may be to complete the militarization of the police – that is, for state and local authorities to implement badly needed training to go with their advanced gear. At the very least, armored vehicles and riot gear should come with cameras.

Mary Katharine Ham suggests that a militarized police force is anathema to a free society:

Here’s the thing. We ask more of law enforcement in a free society and we should. We don’t accept that everyone in a community must be under the gun because some of them committed crimes. Or, that journalists should be arrested while trying to cover that community. We have a system that allows for going after the accused while respecting everyone’s rights, scribe or no. Stipulated that we ask cops to handle challenging, dangerous, delicate situations like riot and looting in Ferguson or manhunts in Boston. Because this is America, we ask them to do it while preserving the rights of innocent bystanders and even those who may be engaging in crime. … [W]hen an official response, even to a tough situation, looks like martial law with federally issued no-fly zones, the state isn’t honoring its part of agreement in a free society. We should be willing to demand that they do, even in the face of immense danger.

Meanwhile, Ed Krayewski notes that just months ago, the congressman who represents Ferguson voted against a measure that would limit the transfer of military surplus goods to local police:

In June, the House of Representatives voted on a series of amendments to H.R. 4435, the National Defense Authorization Act. Among the amendments was one by Rep. Alan Grayson (D-Fla.) which would’ve prohibited funds from being used to transfer certain kinds of military surplus to local police departments. The amendment failed by a wide margin, with only 62 votes for and 355 against. Among those voting against this bill, which would slow down the militarization of America’s police forces, was Rep. Lacy Clay (D-Mo.), whose district includes Ferguson, Missouri, where many Americans have gotten their first glimpse of America’s militarized police in action. House leadership on both sides also voted against it, including Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.), Steny Hoyer (D-Md.), Eric Cantor (R-Va.), and Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.)

It would be interesting to see what would happen if that vote were held again today. Congressman Hank Johnson (D-GA) has already proposed a demilitarization bill in light of the Ferguson:

Georgia Rep. Hank Johnson proposed legislation on Thursday aimed at demilitarizing domestic police forces, amid national criticism of heavily armed cops going after protesters in Ferguson, Mo. “Our main streets should be a place for business, families, and relaxation, not tanks and M16s,” the Democratic congressman wrote in a “Dear Colleague” letter to members of Congress. “Unfortunately … our local police are quickly beginning to resemble paramilitary forces.”

The Stop Militarizing Law Enforcement Act would prevent the transfer of certain military-grade equipment from the Department of Defense to local law enforcement agencies. That includes some automatic weapons, armored vehicles, armored drones, silencers and flash-bang or stun grenades. … Johnson will formally introduce the bill in September when Congress returns from summer recess, his office told TPM.

More Dish on the fallout in Ferguson here.

(Photo: A police officer watches over demonstrators protesting the shooting death of teenager Michael Brown on August 13, 2014 in Ferguson, Missouri. By Scott Olson/Getty Images)