Author: Andrew Sullivan

Claire Evans welcomes a daily email from a stranger, brought to her inbox via a peculiar community:

The Listserve is a mailing list lottery. Sign up for the Listserve, and you’re joining a massive e-mail list. Every day, one person from the list is randomly selected to write one e-mail to everyone else. That’s it. As of this writing, the Listserve has 21,399 subscribers. There has been one email per day since April 16th, 2012. Run by a group of Masters Candidates in NYU’s Interactive Telecommunications Program (ITP), the Listserve emerged from a class exploring new ways of creating conversational spaces online. There were other ideas: chain letters, or a message board for only 100 people at a time. But eventually email’s directness and ease-of-use won out. An email flies straight, circumventing the myriad distractions of other online gatherings, where some voices pack disproportionate clout (or, er, Klout).

She goes on to differentiate the list from other forms of modern social media:

Where Facebook has devalued the word “friend” to the point of worthlessness, Listserve takes the opposite tack: it has imbued “stranger,” with its associations of danger and otherness, with an immediacy much more akin to real friendship. Listservers don’t spam you with vacation photos or cheap pleas for attention. Instead, they share long, personal stories of adversity and dole out big-picture life advice. “With the lottery mechanism slowing down interaction,” says [Listserve co-founder Greg] Dorsainville, “the emails have a pleasant tone: people talk about their own lives, and how they have battled against hardship or achieved success in their life. People share slices of their own identities and what have shaped them.”

Jenna Krajeski looks at how the Syrian conflict has bled into Turkey:

It has cost Turkey seven hundred and fifty million dollars to host the [Syrian] refugees, with about one hundred million more coming in from outside sources. Members of Syria’s opposition—both armed and not—consider Turkey their base, and the Turkish government’s support for them has made the country an opponent of the Assad regime in more than just words. The border is being knocked down piece by piece—whether by journalists and soldiers crossing back and forth or shells falling on Turkish towns. In a report issued this April called “Blurring the Borders: Syrian Spillover Risk for Turkey,” the International Crisis Group says that that Turkey “now has an uncontrollable, fractured, radicalized no-man’s-land on its doorstep.” The two car bombs that exploded in Reyhanli last Saturday were like two deadly exclamation points at the end of that sentence.

Julia Ioffe captures Russia’s perspective:

“Moscow understands that something has to be done because the war has been going on for two years and it has to stop,” [Maxim Yusin, the deputy foreign affairs editor of the Russian newspaper Kommersant] explains. “But if Assad’s opponents win, there will be a bloodbath. Shiites and Alawites will be slaughtered.” Moreover, he adds, echoing the official Russian position, that the successors to Assad will likely be the ones flying the black flag of jihad and sponsoring terrorism outside Syria’s borders. Lukyanov points out that Syria has long been home to those displaced by the upheavals in the Caucasus, which has become a hotbed of terrorism and Islamist insurrection. “Getting rid of a dictatorial but secular regime, and replacing it with an Islamist regime creates yet another support network for the terrorists in our backyard,” Lukyanov explains. Yusin makes a starker analogy. “Assad does not want to target America, but these guys do,” he says. “These are thousands of potential Tsarnaevs, and France and Britain want to arm them!”

Meanwhile, Nikolas Gvosdev tries to parse American views on Syria from both sides of the aisle:

It was often said that the first Gulf War in 1990-91 exorcised the ghost of Vietnam. Today, the ghost of Iraq is alive and well, prowling the halls and counsels of government. Some want that ghost to be heeded and for the United States to stay out of Syria. Others argue that decisive action is needed to banish that apparition once and for all. How this plays out in the coming weeks remains to be seen.

Daniel Larison takes a less charitable view of those calling for intervention:

While their goals of regime change and opposition victory may be very ambitious, Syria hawks seem to have little interest in the positive transformation of Syria. Their principal concern seems to be the destruction of the current regime, and just as in Iraq there is little or no attention paid to what would be done to reconstruct a working Syrian government once this is achieved. … For many Syria hawks, the reason to intervene in Syria is not to promote a more liberal or democratic political order. Indeed, some Syria hawks may understand that any post-Assad regime will be illiberal and majoritarian, but this doesn’t stop them from wanting to bring it to power.

No, the reason most Syria hawks want to overthrow Assad is to reduce Iranian influence, and there’s not much more to it than that.