Author: Andrew Sullivan

The Economist is pleasantly surprised about Mali’s election to restore democratic government in the wake of its civil war:

The election [on Sunday] was praised by observers for its high turnout and overall transparency. But coming just six months after a French-led force chased away Islamist militants who had seized control of the country’s vast north, and hastily arranged under intense international pressure, it was nonetheless riddled with flaws. Hundreds of thousands of voters were disenfranchised for lack of new biometric identification cards. Even some who made it to the polls, cards in hand, could not find their names on voter lists.

Still, it was not the debacle many outsiders had forecast. On an otherwise quiet day, voters crowded the streets leading to polling stations. Many marvelled that they had never seen such numbers at the ballot box. The 53.5% turnout shattered the previous record by 15 percentage points. Perhaps most important in a country still jittery after the jihadist occupation of the north, the day passed without violence.

Meanwhile, Michael Totten praises Morocco as a model of moderation in the Arab World:

Morocco has free and fair elections, but not for its head of state. That has to change sooner or later. The Moroccan monarchy will eventually have to sideline itself or face being sidelined by others. Smart Arab kings know this is true of the institution in general. As Jordan’s King Abdullah said to Jeffrey Goldberg of The Atlantic, “where are monarchies in 50 years?” In the meantime, Morocco provides a safe space for peaceable coexistence between liberals and Islamists, Muslims and Jews (including Israelis on holiday), Arabs and Berbers, modernists and traditionalists.

The Western press has wasted a lot of words lately describing the Muslim Brotherhood as moderate. But Muhammad VI is a real moderate. He’s a conservative in the sense that he belongs to a very old tradition and order, and he’s a liberal insofar as he advances women’s rights and has willingly abdicated some of his power. He’s a Muslim ruler who not only protects Jews, but declares Jewishness a part of Moroccan identity. He pushes for careful and deliberate change without overwhelming the country with too much at once, thus avoiding a hostile and potentially violent reaction from traditionalists.

Morocco is a little like Costa Rica during the Cold War—a calm, friendly, stable, sane, peaceable, and essentially civilized oasis in a region that has known precious little of those things.

Previous Dish on the recent upheavals in the Arab world here, here, and here.

Josh Clark and Chuck Bryant outline various ways to process human corpses. One option on the horizon:

Alkaline hydrolysis is an established technology that is already in use—albeit for the disposal of cattle infected with spongiform disease and cadavers that have outlived their usefulness at teaching and research institutions. Because of the utter lack of sentimentality attached to the process and the resulting goo it produces, alkaline hydrolysis has been largely left untouched for regular old funerals, even in places where it’s a legal means of disposing of corpses.

If the green lobby ever gets true power and starts wielding it against end-of-life norms, you will soon likely have no choice, however, so getting on board with the idea of having your body reduced to an oily, neutral substance sooner rather than later can help you to be a true early adopter in this area. Even more appealing, it uses about five to ten percent of the energy cremation does.

How it works:

In the process of alkaline hydrolysis, your corpse will be slid into a large stainless steel contraption that looks a bit like a freestanding pressure cooker, mainly because that’s what it is. An alkaline solution is introduced into the sealed chamber and heated to between 170 and 350 degrees Fahrenheit (depending on which method is used) and allowed to stew until your skin, organs, tissue and viscera have completely dissolved into the solution. A similar process also introduces pressure to the mix to speed up the process.

All that’s left over is a squishy version of your bones, which are then crushed and presented to your family. The rest of you is gone in virtually every sense of the word: The alkaline solution and heat completely destroy DNA; even a transhumanist would have a hard time conceiving of you being present in the solution at the end of the four hours.

Update from a reader:

As others will certainly point out, the technique described in your post was documented in the Mary Roach book, Stiff: The Curious Lives of Human Cadavers. Highly recommended.

Readers offer their own nominees of the best and worst book openers:

My wife consumes books like no person I have ever met.  At times she will share with me opening lines that she knows I may find interesting.  One such line is from a book by Toni Morrison, Paradise, and it has stuck with me for a long time:

“They shoot the white girl first.”

Six words – none longer than five letters – that set a scene loaded with tension.  The author has already brought us violence and racial issues and possibly gender- and/or sex-related plot lines. How could you not read on?

Another reader:

You mentioned the Bulwer-Lytton contest for bad first lines of novels, but you should also know about this spinoff contest, for bad first lines of novels, which tend to be much funnier. This year’s winner: “The men greeted each other, wearing various smiles on their faces.” My favorite from this year: “‘BOOM!’ said the bomb very loudly.” Another fave from an earlier contest: “In anticipation, John licked his own lips.”

A compilation of other candidates from readers:

“I am a sick man … I am a wicked man,”

– Notes From The Undergound, Dostoevsky.

The ellipsis alone offers so much insight into the character of the narrator: his self-consciousness as a writer, his awareness of the judgments of others (who will be quick to correct him if he does not correct himself), his insecurity, his brutal honesty.

“He was born with the gift of laughter, and a sense that the world was mad,” – Scaramouche, Rafael Sabatini.

“Mother died today. Or yesterday maybe, I don’t know,” – The Stranger, Camus.

“Call me Ishmael”- Moby Dick, Melville.

From that single, simple point of information a complex world of meaning and parable spreads open.

“A screaming comes across the sky,” – Gravity’s Rainbow, Pynchon.

You know that this is going to be a hairy ride.

“There was a boy called Eustace Clarence Scrubb, and he almost deserved it,” – The Voyage of the Dawn Treader.

The author of that sentence, one Clive Staples Lewis, must have enjoyed writing that.

Another reader:

You missed the best opportunity ever to loop a post full circle by neglecting one of the best opening lines of all time by the man himself:

“The man in black fled across the desert, and the gunslinger followed,” Dark Tower, Stephen King.

For a guy obsessed with an opening sentence, he laid down one helluva one. And he knows it (as obsessive Dark Tower readers will know).

One more completes the short thread:

For my money, the best first line of a story was for one never written. On an episode of “The Mary Tyler Moore Show”, Lou Grant is explaining to Mary how to write the lead in a good story, and he gives this as an example: “Bang! Bang! Bang! Bang! Four shots slammed into my gut, and I was off on the greatest adventure of my life.”

Readers are also offering suggestions over at our Facebook page.

Sara Gorman cautions against laws that would prevent mentally ill people from acquiring firearms:

There are two main reasons to approach these kinds of laws with a healthy dose of caution: one reason is that gun control efforts focusing on mental illness have the potential to exacerbate public stigma about the potential violence associated with mental disorders; the second reason is that gun laws that in particular involve collecting the names of people with mental illness in national databases have the potential to deter people from seeking the care they may desperately need.

Ample evidence has suggested that stigma and discrimination against people with mental illness is often correlated with perceptions that people with mental illness are inherently violent. People who believe that mental illness is associated with violence are more likely to condone forced legal action and coerced treatment of people with mental illness and may feel that victimizing and bullying people with mental illness is in some way justified.

The idea that mental illness and violence are closely related is quite common. A 2006 national survey found that 60% of Americans believed that people with schizophrenia were likely to act violently toward another individual. Even so, research has repeatedly established that psychiatric disorders do not make people more likely to act in a violent manner. Gun laws targeting people with mental illness are likely to worsen the perception that mental illness and violence go hand in hand, and, as a result, stigma and discrimination are likely to be exacerbated.

Marina Galperina flags the above video, shot today in Russia. It’s a scene reminiscent of fascist states in the early 1930s:

If anyone has any confusion about what Russia’s recently-adopted anti-gay laws do to its public, let me translate some of the audible dialogue in the video above[:] A young man [Gay rights activist Kirill Kalugin] decides to picket in Palace Square. He stands there alone with a rainbow flag, knowingly breaking this summer’s new anti-”gay propaganda” bill. Then, a large group of Airborne service members (striped-tank tops) circle around him and their leader starts the guerilla interrogation.

“What are you doing here on Airborne Army Day?”

“I am picketing,” he says, trying to keep on his feet while being manhandled by the group.

“Well, we do not agree with this and ask you to stop this sort of action and your one-man picket.” They begin to push him around. He falls.

“Oh, look he slipped and fell. Don’t do that,” the soldier says, performatively at the journalists trying to get closer. The man is visibly frightened as the soldiers form a chain around him and began to chant, smacking their fists into their palms.

“CALL THE POLICE ON HIM,” someone jeer. “STAND RIGHT THERE,” a few yell. The police arrive (blue shirts, police hats) and attempt to drag the man out of the circle, so the soldiers move closer, block their access and pushing the cops.

“What the fuck were you thinking, showing up at the Palace Square, faggot?” the leader yells.

“You guys are animals,” the protestor rasps, while another soldier chokes him and shakes him by his neck. As the cops try to remove the illegally protesting young man, the soldiers start shoving them and throwing punches. In the next shot, they encircle the police vehicle — “We’re not going to let them fucking move anywhere.” — after their leader tries to get into the cruiser and drag the protestor out, yelling, “Why are you defending him?!”

Is it me or don’t the steroidal paratroopers look like French circuit queens? The displaced homo-eroticism is almost comically obvious, while being equally disgusting.

Update from a reader:

How the hell did you guys miss the fact that the back of every police officer’s uniform says “OMOH” … “HOMO” spelled backwards.

This month Louisiana police illegally arrested more than a dozen men for “crimes against nature” (agreeing to have sex within private residences, with no money exchanged). It raises the question: How can 13 states still have such laws on the books? Because state-level Republicans love ’em:

Lawmakers in Texas have quietly killed every legislative effort to erase its anti-sodomy statute (the one that was actually stricken down by the Supreme Court), which makes sense when you consider Gov. Rick Perry is on the record defending it, and the state GOP recently made a sodomy ban part of its official platform. Kansas Gov. Sam Brownback left his state’s sodomy statute out of a 2012 push to purge outdated laws. The last serious repeal push in Louisiana came in 2003, shortly before the Supreme Court decision, with opponents warning that legalized sodomy would lead to disease and child abuse—two things that, thanks to the sodomy ban, Louisiana had been mercifully free of for the last 207 years.

Keeping anti-sodomy statutes on the books serves no real function, since the crimes are impossible to prosecute. Mostly, the laws’ supporters just don’t want their states to legally acknowledge that there’s something okay about homosexuality. So-called crimes against nature, like other 19th-century relics such as mutton chops, DIY canning, and income inequality, are kind of “in” right now. In July, Virginia attorney general Ken Cuccinelli, who is running for governor as a Republican, launched a new website to defend his state’s anti-sodomy law.

The Dish recently covered Cuccinelli’s bigotry here.