“[Hamas] are monsters. But the population of Gaza are not monsters and the Palestinian people are not monsters; and I will confess that I have found myself unable to be satisfied, in the analysis of responsibility in this war, by the assertion, which is incontrovertible, that the killing of non-combatant Palestinians by Israel in Gaza is one of Hamas’s war aims, and so Israel is completely absolved if it obliges. A provocation does not relieve one of accountability for how one responds to it. For this reason, the war has filled me with disquiet, which my sympathetic understanding of Israel’s position has failed to stifle …
There is another reason for insisting on a more humane attitude toward the Palestinians, a political reason. It is that the Palestinians are not Hamas. One of Hamas’s objectives in this war has been to salvage its fortunes by creating the impression that it is representative of its people, and in this it has met with a measure of success. American diplomatic mistakes, along with the coarseness and the virulence of the opposition to Israel in Europe, have obscured an accurate understanding of the relation of Hamas to the Palestinians. Before the war Hamas was unpopular among Palestinians even, or especially, in Gaza: The miseries of Gaza can hardly be attributed only to Israeli policy. Now the Gazan tunnels and the Gazan arsenals have been gutted, but the old problem remains. Israel has a strategy for war, but it does not have a strategy for peace. In the aftermath of Operation Protective Edge, the notion, recently in fashion, that there is no need for a peace process is absurd. The destruction of Hamas is one of the interests that Israel and the Palestinians have in common, but the only way to destroy Hamas is to make peace with Abu Mazen,” – Leon Wieseltier.
“Every civilian casualty is a tragedy, a tragedy of Hamas’s own making,” – Benjamin Netanyahu, denying any responsibility for the deaths of civilians in Gaza.
(Photo: A relative mourns over the dead body of a child killed in an Israeli attack at Al-Shifa Hospital’s morgue in Gaza City, on July 20, 2014. By Mustafa Hassona/Anadolu Agency/Getty Images)
Arielle Duhaime-Ross observes that “condom use — even female condom use — requires a partner’s acceptance”:
That’s where Truvada comes in: the little blue pill is discreet enough to require no participation from sexual partners who might not be willing to help out. And it’s repeatedly shown to be extremely effective at preventing HIV infections when taken daily.
There’s no shortage of evidence linking intimate partner violence to inconsistent condom use. In a 2011 study of over 500 heterosexual men in New York City, researchers found that men who are physically violent with their partners are half as likely to report consistent condom use compared with men who aren’t. And another study, published in 2013, showed that women who were physically abused by their partners in the three months prior to answering the survey were more likely to have had sex without a condom than women who hadn’t experienced that type of violence. …
Thus, the threat of violence during condom negotiation is an important contributor to “risky sex” in abusive relationships — relationships that one in three women in the US will experience. And going through these experiences won’t just affect a woman once, as surviving intimate partner violence can significantly decrease a woman’s confidence when negotiating condom use with future sexual partners. “It’s not that women are stupid, or that they don’t know that they need to protect themselves from HIV,” [Anna] Forbes [of the US Women and PrEP Working Group] says. Rather, it’s that in some situations “the cost of insisting on condoms use is often greater and more immediate than the risk of HIV, either because of partner violence, stigmatization, the risk of the break up of a relationship, or community ostracism — it’s just really tough.”
Earlier Dish on the subject here. Our thread on PrEP is here.
In an interview about his food-based journeys in war-torn and unstable parts of the world, Anthony Bourdain shares what dining in a foreign land can reveal about people and places:
I came to realize that everything, particularly something as intimate as a meal, is a reflection of both a place’s history and its present political and military circumstances. In fact, the meal is where you can least escape the realities of a nation’s situation. People tend to be less guarded and more frank (particularly when alcohol is involved). What you are eating is always the end of a very long story–and often an ingenious but delicious answer to some very complicated problems…
When you travel with no agenda other than asking the simple questions, sharing a moment with people around the table, people tell you extraordinary things. You tend to notice things that can’t be avoided. The guy cooking dinner for me near The Plain of Jars in Laos was missing a few limbs. It was worth asking how that happened. The answer–though simple–tends, in such circumstances–to lead to very complicated back stories. In this case, a simple, question with a very long and frankly fascinating answer (our enormous secret war in Laos). …
We realized that when you ask people “What do you like to eat? What do you like to cook? What makes you happy?” and are willing to spend the time necessary to hear the answers, that you are often let “in” in ways that a hard news reporter working a story might not be. So I’ve been able to look at places like post Benghazi Libya, the DRC, Liberia, Haiti, Cuba, Gaza, the West Bank, Kurdistan and recently Iran from a very intimate angle. Those are all very long stories–and if you don’t take that time to listen, to take in the everyday things–the things that happened before the news story, there’s not much hope in understanding them.
I’m a marine fisheries biologist who just returned from a research trip on a commercial fishing vessel in the Gulf of Maine. I have tremendous respect for the intelligence of fish; they are smarter than most can think, and Culum Brown overlooks some research that shows fish can remember information for more than a year. I do have some doubts over whether they feel pain, but I am convinced they can suffer.
That said, if one chooses to eat animal protein, then fish may be the most moral choice.
Wild fish are born and live in their natural environment. They are unconfined, eat natural prey, and managed in most places so that they can reproduce at least once in their lifetimes. Depending on the fishing method, during capture they may experience fatigue, crowding and surprise, among other emotions. In my long experience, only in some trawl fisheries are they crushed. Most or many fish brought to the surface are still alive. Once on deck, most suffocate because they cannot acquire oxygen from the air, but the experience has been theorized by some to be like falling asleep would be for humans. Although I’m no expert on the slaughter of pigs, cattle, or chickens, I would assume that fish suffer less than domesticated animals, over the course of their lives.
Fish provide important sources of protein around the world. I presume eliminating or reducing consumption of fish in favor of a vegetarian diet may place more pressure on limited arable land, leading to clearing that would kill or eliminate habitat for terrestrial animals. All the choices are bad, but eating wild fish may be one of the least bad choices.
Another notes:
PETA has not overlooked fish. Watch its video starring Joaquin Phoenix here.
In the food industry, the killing of marine animals far outnumbers the killing of all other beings. One very conservative estimate is 90 billion (yes, with a “B”) individuals killed per year. Check out the kill counter here, and watch the comparative numbers grow before your eyes.
Some 40,000 Iraqi Yazidis, whose hometown of Sinjar was overwhelmed by ISIS militants on Saturday, are stranded on a mountain with little food or water after fleeing the city and being trapped there by the jihadists below, who consider them heretics:
UN groups say at least 40,000 members of the Yazidi sect, many of them women and children, have taken refuge in nine locations on Mount Sinjar, a craggy, mile-high ridge identified in local legend as the final resting place of Noah’s ark. At least 130,000 more people, many from the Yazidi stronghold of Sinjar, have fled to Dohuk, in the Kurdish north, or to Irbil, where regional authorities have been struggling since June to deal with one of the biggest and most rapid refugee movements in decades.
Sinjar itself has been all but emptied of its 300,000 residents since jihadists stormed the city late on Saturday, but an estimated 25,000 people remain. “We are being told to convert or to lose our heads,” said Khuldoon Atyas, who has stayed behind to guard his family’s crops. “There is no one coming to help.”
The Yazidis, Bobby Ghosh explains, are one of several Iraqi minority groups in danger of persecution and genocide by the murderous “caliphate”:
Many Shi’ites can flee—some already have—southward, and find refuge among family and those of their own sect; many of my Shi’ite friends in Baghdad are currently sheltering northerners sent to them by religious organizations. Kurds, likewise, have been streaming into the Kurdish-dominated areas to the north and west of ISIL-controlled territory. Yet another minority, the Assyrians, most whom are Christians, have also fled south, and now await succor from the West, especially from groups of well-established Iraqi Christians in the US, who themselves fled previous spasms of persecution. But other minorities, just as vulnerable to the wrath of ISIL, have neither international support nor nearby refuge. And ISIL seems to have identified them for special persecution.
ISIS has also captured the largest Christian town in Iraq. Razib Khan argues that these minorities’ days are numbered. To him, “the rise of the Islamic State, and the past 10 years of chaos and violence, suggest that this is the end of the persistence of ethno-religious sects such as the Yezidi across most of the Fertile Crescent”:
The Jacobites Christians, Assyrians, and Yezidi, lack powerful patrons and protectors. Though most Sunni and Shia would not countenance genocide, they are focused more on the exigencies of their own internecine conflicts. Many minorities already have large Diaspora populations Europe. Tens of thousands of Yezidi live in Germany, and tens of thousands of Assyrians live in Sweden. The most practical short term solution would be extend refugee status selectively to ethno-religious minorities to prevent them from being eliminated by genocide. …
Of course a final irony is that the migration of the ancient Middle Eastern minorities to the West will likely result in their diminishing over the generations. The corporatist straight-jacket of the Middle Eastern milieu was constricting, but it allowed for a communal identity to maintain itself. In the individualist West these small communities are unlikely to be able to self segregate in large enough ghettos where their cultural norms are dominant. This means that identity will become a choice, and over time intermarriage will likely result in a decrease in numbers. Though the Yezidi are rightly objects of sympathy, their cultural norms are quite retrograde in many ways. These folkways were adaptive in the circumstances of Kurdistan, a persecuted minority which had to maintain a high level of group cohesion. But in the West they are often impediments to full flourishing, and produce inter-generational conflicts.
Jacob Seigel notes that “Kurdish forces from Syria and Turkey have crossed the border, forming a rare alliance with the Peshmerga inside Iraq that has already begun clashing with ISIS to recapture the ground lost over the weekend”:
Tens of thousands of Iraqis now stranded in the mountains are awaiting the outcome of those battles. As for the United States, it is “working urgently and directly with officials in Baghdad and Erbil to coordinate Iraqi airdrops to people in need,” the Defense Department said. On Wednesday, it was 106 degrees in Mosul. There may be 25,000 children trapped in the mountains, according to the United Nations’ children’s relief agency. Forty of them have died already.
George Packer discusses what we might do to help the Yazidis:
Yesterday, a senior U.S. official told me that the Obama Administration is contemplating an airlift, coördinated with the United Nations, of humanitarian supplies by C-130 transport planes to the Yazidis hiding in the Sinjar mountains. There are at least twenty thousand and perhaps as many as a hundred thousand of them, including some peshmerga militiamen providing a thin cover of protection. The U.N. has reported that dozens of children have died of thirst in the heat. ISIS controls the entrance to the mountains. Iraqi helicopters have dropped some supplies, including food and water, but the refugees are hard to find and hard to reach.
It was encouraging to learn that humanitarian supplies might be on the way, but we always seem to be at least a step behind as ISIS rolls over local forces and consolidates power. ISIS is not Al Qaeda. It operates like an army, taking territory, creating a state. The aim of the Sinjar operation seems to be control of the Mosul Dam, the largest dam in Iraq, which provides electricity to Mosul, Baghdad, and much of the country. According to one expert, if ISIS takes the dam, which is located on the Tigris River, it would have the means to put Mosul under thirty metres of water, and Baghdad under five.
ISIS has purged Christians from their ancient communities in Mosul and the Nineveh province over the last several months. The war in Gaza has distracted the West for the last few weeks, but with that war now paused at the very least, perhaps it’s time to start shifting our gaze back to the much more dangerous situation in Iraq and Syria, where the death tolls already dwarf what has been seen in Gaza. We’ve spent a lot of time intervening in the Gaza war. What has the US done about ISIS, which poses much more of a threat to the US and the West, in a country where our presence might have made a difference?
Tomasky thinks we need to take a hard look at our own role in Central America’s descent into violence:
So in the three crisis countries, or at least in two of them (Guatemala and El Salvador), there’s a pattern. U.S.-sponsored civil wars tore the country apart in the 1980s. What happened next? As Ryan Grim and Roque Planas put it in a terrific Huffington Post piece tracing this history in greater depth, “With wars come refugees.” Terrified citizens of these nations started running to the United States by the tens of thousands.
When they got here, there was nothing for them. Depending on how old they were, they or their kids formed gangs in Los Angeles and elsewhere in the 1990s. We responded to that by “getting tough” on crime, throwing thousands of them in jail. Then when they got out of jail, we deported them back. We escalated the drug war—we had some success in Colombia, which merely pushed much of the cocaine trade into Central America. The ex-gang members we deported created extremely violent societies, societies where 10-year-old kids are recruited into new gangs and threatened with death if they don’t join, and it’s from those societies that today’s children are fleeing.
But Robert Brenneman stresses that the situation there is not as hopeless in as the prevailing narrative would have you believe:
While it is true that many of the children who reach the US border have grown up in difficult and even dangerous situations and ought to be granted a hearing to determine whether or not they should be granted asylum, I have Central American friends (including some from Honduras) who might bristle at the suggestion that every child migrating northward is escaping life in hell itself. The idea that all Central American minors ought to be pronounced refugees upon arrival at the border rests on the mistaken assumption that these nations are hopelessly mired in violence and chaos, and it encourages the US government to throw in the towel with regard to advocating for economic and political improvements in the region.
True, a great deal of violence and hopelessness persists in the marginal urban neighborhoods of San Salvador and Tegucigalpa, but these communities did not evolve by accident. They are the result of years of under-investment in social priorities such as public education and public security compounded by the entrance in the late 1990s of a furious scramble among the cartels to establish and maintain drug movement and distribution networks across the isthmus in order to meet unflagging US demand. At the same time as we work to ensure that all migrant minors are treated humanely and with due process, we ought to use this moment to take a hard look at US foreign policy both past and present in order to build a robust aid package aimed at strengthening institutions and promoting more progressive tax policy so that these nations can promote human development, not just economic growth. It is time we take the long view with regard to our neighbors to the south.
Previous Dish on our role in the Central American crisis here and here.
Annie Lowrey leafs through a new Brookings study on :
Robert A. Litan of the Brookings Institution and Ian Hathaway of Ennsyte Economics provide some scary data points in two research papers they have released in the last few months.
The share of all companies comprised by start-ups under a year old fell by half between 1978 and 2011
The proportion of private-sector workers employed at older firms has increased from 60 percent to 72 percent since 1992
The proportion of workers employed at young firms has declined over the same period
Companies under a year old are failing more often, with the “failure rate” for start-ups climbing to 27 percent from 16 percent in the early 1990s
The “failure rate” has increased for all but the longest-established businesses
Even the vaunted high-tech sector is seeing the same trends: The share of tech companies that are 16 years old or older has risen from roughly 15 percent to 25 percent since 1992, while the proportion of the industry that works in such firms has increased, too.
One possibility is that the link to population aging is quite literal. A study by Vivek Wadhwa, Raj Aggarwal, Krisztina Holly, and Alex Salkever that looked specifically at “high-growth” industries found that the typical successful founder is 40. Not someone who’s at the tail-end of his career, but not someone who’s fresh out of school either. That’s in part because “professional networks were important to the success of their current business for 73 percent of the entrepreneur,” and it takes time to achieve that success. Mark Zuckerberg founded a great company when he was in college, but that kind of super-young founder is the exception not the rule — most people need some practical experience and contacts to succeed.
And back in the early 1990s, there were a lot of people in their late-thirties and early forties: Nowadays that cohort of people’s prime founding years are behind them. There is another large cohort of people coming up, but right now they’re too young to be peak entrepreneurs.
Casselman, who provides the above chart, thinks it’s clear the decline in the start-up rate “began long before the boomers began to age out of their prime entrepreneurial years”:
There is other evidence that America’s aging population can’t explain its aging businesses. Self-employment rates, for example, have declined for all age groups (other than teenagers) over the past 20 years. And as Hathaway and Litan showed in an earlier paper, the decline in entrepreneurship is remarkably constant across regions and industries, hitting youth-heavy tech hubs and graying industrial cities alike. Demographics may be contributing to the problem, but they aren’t the primary cause.
The circumstances that once compelled Americans to develop familiar but less intimate relationships have faded. The time and attention we now spend online and with our closest friends is time not spent outside talking with neighbors, shooting the breeze at a bar, or grabbing a burger with a colleague from work. And while there’s nothing wrong with thatper se, we ought not to be so naïve as to think that that those new relationships don’t come at a cost.
I think the key here is in the wording: satisfaction is not synonymous with happiness. It stands to reason that New Yorkers, as a species, are more dissatisfied than residents of Nashville (the adjusted “most satisfied” city). I have spent quite a bit of time in Nashville – great place, nice people – but they are satisfied with one small art museum with an ok collection, satisfied to see “Paula Deen Live” or a touring production of “The Book of Mormon” at the Tennessee Performing Arts Center, satisfied with decent but ultimately uninspired and mediocre food, satisfied with a lovely – if underfunded – library, satisfied with pretty good colleges, satisfied with four blocks of walkable urbanism downtown, etc.
New Yorkers want (and expect) MORE. New Yorkers are unsurprised that they can see Vermeers at the Frick AND the Met. New Yorkers have seen great theater, which makes them want even better theater. It’s not uncommon for a New Yorker to eat great food one week, then compare it to a better meal they had last week . New Yorkers are currently arguing about how to make the Fifth Avenue main branch of the New York Public Library even better. New Yorkers greet Columbia and NYU with a shrug (not to mention the great CUNY system). And no place on earth (except perhaps Paris) is more focused on the quality and character of the urban environment than New Yorkers – and in every borough.
Perhaps Nashville delivers satisfaction. Nashville pleases. New York teaches New Yorkers the art of dissatisfaction. New Yorkers expect an awful lot from their city, and when it delivers, it surpasses all expectation. As you well know, it doesn’t give up those moments as often as we might like, but I for one, would rather a chance at the sublime than a guarantee of comfort…
Biased and balanced. Speaking of which, an update from another reader:
All I can say to your NYC reader who seems to think Nashvilleans (and presumably all other non-New Yorkers) are satisfied with their lives because they somehow don’t KNOW to expect better is … bless his or her heart. It’s so nice to see a New Yorker live up to the reputation of being a condescending prick.
Many of today’s posts were updated with your emails – read them all here. You can always leave your unfiltered comments at our Facebook page and @sullydish. 24 more readers became subscribers today – bringing us to 29,907. Help us get to 30,000 here – and get access to all the readons and Deep Dish – for a little as $1.99 month. Gift subscriptions are available here. Dish t-shirts and polos are for sale here. One subscriber writes:
I had the wonderful yet rainy weekend in Provincetown. We were able to also take in Miss Martina’s show. I thought I saw you outside the Wired Puppy coffee shop Saturday eve but did not want to interrupt your private time. It is through your stories of Ptown that made me want to visit. I have been a huge fan of your blog for the past 7 years. It has made a difference in my intellectual life. I know I can always read thoroughly about a topic. I became an obsessive reader during President Obama’s elections and the Arab Spring and most recently the Israel and Gaza conflict. I have also been reading How to Live, a great book club selection. I have been a subscriber for the last two years and will continue. I still sport your original t-shirt around Wilmington, DE.
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Auckland, New Zealand welcomes newborn lambs at Cornwall Park on August 6, 2014. The daffodils and lambs indicate that spring is making an early appearance in Auckland. By Jason Oxenham/Getty Images.
killing of non-combatant Palestinians by Israel in Gaza is one of Hamas’s war aims, and so Israel is completely absolved if it obliges. A provocation does not relieve one of accountability for how one responds to it. For this reason, the war has filled me with disquiet, which my sympathetic understanding of Israel’s position has failed to stifle …
The Dish 