Author: Andrew Sullivan

The Case For Microwave Dinners, Ctd

Joel Salatin balks at Marcotte’s feminist defense of microwaved meals:

[S]ince when are women the only ones who are supposed to shoulder the burden for integrity food? … Here’s the question I would like to ask these families: “Are you spending time or money on anything unnecessary?” Cigarettes, alcohol, coffee, soft drinks, lottery tickets, People Magazine, TV, cell phone, soccer games, potato chips . . . ?  Show me the household devoid of any of these luxuries, then let’s talk. Otherwise, you’re just unwilling to do what’s more important, which is provide for the health of your family and your environment. That’s a personal choice, and one that’s entirely within your control.

I’m amazed at the difficult situations I hear about in which people do indeed rise to the occasion. Whether it’s sprouting mung beans or alfalfa seeds in a quart jar on the windowsill or buying grain by the bushel, resourceful, can-do people committed to changing their situation figure out a way to do it. For Marcotte to accept irresponsibility this easily underscores a profound courage deficiency. Turn off the TV, get out of the car, get off the phone and get in the kitchen — men, women and children.

Mollie Hemingway also pushes back on Marcotte:

The big elephant in the room of the Slate piece is, of course, how family breakdown and the pressure to leave homemaking have put women in a serious bind. Women are having to work horrible hours to get by and raise their kids, frequently alone, and then come home and manage meal preparation with homework and all the other responsibilities of family life. It’s almost like the breakdown of the family has hurt poor women disproportionately.

And as for those blessed to have greater material wealth, many women were told that careers should never suffer because of the demands of family and so they have to work long hours and then rush home to get kids from the daycare and then figure out meals. It’s utterly exhausting. A feminism that didn’t advocate policies and practices that weaken families would seriously help out here. As would a feminism that didn’t make women feel so terrible for being home with their children.

We Are Already Sort Of Allied With Iran

Flagging the above tweet, Jacob Siegel points to Iran’s deepening involvement in the ISIS conflict:

The photo reportedly shows the Iranian general Qasem Soleimani, commander of the Qods force, Tehran’s chief military strategist, and the man many American officials consider to be America’s most dangerous foe on the planet. His visit to the site underscores the convergence of U.S. and Iranian interests in Iraq, and Iran’s desire to be seen as orchestrating the efforts. Amerli was clearly a defeat for ISIS and a relief for the townspeople who had held off the group for six weeks. But it’s less clear what the alliance between U.S. airpower and Iranian-backed militias says about the vision guiding the mission in Iraq. Even leaving aside questions of a grand regional strategy for the Middle East—and how our track record suggests that U.S. led wars in Iraq can benefit Iran—its not clear how the precedent set in Amerli will serve the President’s more immediate goals for resolving the war in Iraq.

Juan Cole suspects Washington and Tehran are already coordinating their efforts to some extent:

US air strikes on ISIL in Iraq have alternated with Iranian air strikes on ISIL positions. It seems likely to me that the two air forces are coordinating in at least a minimal way, otherwise there would be a danger of them hitting each other rather than ISIL. … Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, Iran’s supreme leader, is alleged to have just authorized Iranian forces to coordinate with American ones. The denials from other Iranian politicians are likely merely camouflage for a policy that would dismay Iran hardliners.

But Keating doubts anyone will acknowledge that partnership:

There are obviously key points of conflict between Iran and the United States, not least of which is the country’s controversial nuclear program. A new round of talks about that issue are set to begin in New York this month. Any open acknowledgment of cooperation between the countries with regards to ISIS would likely make the U.S. Congress, hardliners in Tehran, and the Israeli government go absolutely berserk. But if the two nations continue to escalate the fight against a common enemy, it’s going to require some level of coordination. I don’t see Iran being formally invited into Obama’s “coalition of the willing.”

Nor is Russia likely to be a formal partner. But it too may become a de facto ally in the fight against ISIS. Ishaan Tharoor highlights how ISIS, which is believed to include some 200 Chechen fighters, is now lobbing threats at Putin as well:

Here’s a slightly new geopolitical wrinkle. Earlier this week, the Islamic State issued a video challenging a powerful global leader. But this time, it was not President Obama or one of his counterparts in Europe. It was Russian President Vladimir Putin. In the video, fighters pose atop Russian military equipment, including a fighter jet, captured from the forces of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad. This is Agence France-Presse‘s transcription of what follows:

“This is a message to you, oh Vladimir Putin, these are the jets that you have sent to Bashar, we will send them to you, God willing, remember that,” said one fighter in Arabic, according to Russian-language captions provided in the video. “And we will liberate Chechnya and the entire Caucasus, God willing,” said the militant. “The Islamic State is and will be and it is expanding God willing.”

Itchy Taser Trigger Fingers

Dara Lind takes a broad look at how cops are trained to use force. A smart point about Tasers:

Thomas Nolan, a criminologist at Merrimack College of Massachusetts, was a police union official in the late 1990s and early 2000s, when Tasers and similar weapons were first being marketed to police officers. He remembers that they were initially sold as an alternative to lethal force — something that could be used in the same situations as lethal force would be, but with a better result. “What vendors were saying, and what policymakers accepted as truth, was ‘You’re going to avoid wrongful-death lawsuits because you don’t have to use deadly force anymore to incapacitate someone, you can use Tasers.'”

That’s not how Tasers are actually used by departments. They’re now, says Nolan, “the default option. Cops are not considering that this is an escalation of force. The Tasers are coming out pretty quickly. Instead of ratcheting down the instances of deadly force, they’re ratcheting up instances of nonlethal force.”

Why Are So Many Russians Dying?

Masha Gessen is perplexed why they are “dying in numbers, and at ages, and of causes never seen in any other country that is not, by any standard definition, at war”:

Sometime in 1993, after several trips to Russia, I noticed something bizarre and disturbing: people kept dying. I was used to losing friends to AIDS in the United States, but this was different. People in Russia were dying suddenly and violently, and their own friends and colleagues did not find these deaths shocking. Upon arriving in Moscow I called a friend with whom I had become close over the course of a year. “Vadim is no more,” said his father, who picked up the phone. “He drowned.” I showed up for a meeting with a newspaper reporter to have the receptionist say, “But he is dead, don’t you know?” I didn’t. I’d seen the man a week earlier; he was thirty and apparently healthy. The receptionist seemed to think I was being dense. “A helicopter accident,” she finally said, in a tone that seemed to indicate I had no business being surprised.

The deaths kept piling up. People—men and women—were falling, or perhaps jumping, off trains and out of windows; asphyxiating in country houses with faulty wood stoves or in apartments with jammed front-door locks; getting hit by cars that sped through quiet courtyards or plowed down groups of people on a sidewalk; drowning as a result of diving drunk into a lake or ignoring sea-storm warnings or for no apparent reason; poisoning themselves with too much alcohol, counterfeit alcohol, alcohol substitutes, or drugs; and, finally, dropping dead at absurdly early ages from heart attacks and strokes.

After running down a variety of possible explanations, she draws on the work of economist Nicholas Eberstadt to suggest the answer might be a lack of hope:

While he suggests that more research is needed to prove the link, he finds that “a relationship does exist” between the mortality mystery and the psychological well-being of Russians:

Suffice it to say we would never expect to find premature mortality on the Russian scale in a society with Russia’s present income and educational profiles and typically Western readings on trust, happiness, radius of voluntary association, and other factors adduced to represent social capital.

Another major clue to the psychological nature of the Russian disease is the fact that the two brief breaks in the downward spiral coincided not with periods of greater prosperity but with periods, for lack of a more data-driven description, of greater hope. The Khrushchev era, with its post-Stalin political liberalization and intensive housing construction, inspired Russians to go on living. The Gorbachev period of glasnost and revival inspired them to have babies as well. The hope might have persisted after the Soviet Union collapsed—for a brief moment it seemed that this was when the truly glorious future would materialize—but the upheaval of the 1990s dashed it so quickly and so decisively that death and birth statistics appear to reflect nothing but despair during that decade.

Update from a reader:

I wanted to point out that the Masha Gessen article you posted on Russia’s population is rife with errors. Please see this link that outlines many of them. Frankly, that article from Gessen should have been much better, as she is a very capable writer who has always written from unique viewpoints. That piece though was simply a bucket list of all the tired and false cliches that have consistently colored Western perceptions of recent Russian history. We cannot imagine that Russian’s have higher life expectancies than under that ardent democrat Yeltsin, because Putin is a bad bad man who is corrupt! But the reality is different.

The Lessons Of Ferguson

Joel Kotkin argues that despite what Ferguson has led many to believe, class matters more than race at this point in the US:

[R]ace will not define the 2014 election, or likely those that follow. Instead the real defining issue—class—does not fit so easily into the current political calculus. In terms of racial justice, we have made real progress since the ’60s, when even successful educated minorities were discriminated against and the brightest minority students were often discouraged from attending college. Today an African-American holds the highest office in the land, and African Americans also fill the offices of U.S. attorney general and national security advisor. This makes the notion that race thwarts success increasingly outdated.

But at the same time that formal racial barriers have been demolished, the class divide continues to grow steeper than in at any time in the nation’s recent history. Today America’s class structure is increasingly ossified, and this affects not only minorities, who are hit disproportionately, but also many whites, who constitute more than 40 percent of the nation’s poor. Upward mobility has stalled under both Bush and Obama, not only for minorities but for vast swaths of working class and middle class Americans. Increasingly, it’s not the color of one’s skin that determines one’s place in society, but access to education and capital, often the inherited variety.

In the wake of Ferguson, which the Dish covered extensively here, Jamelle Bouie takes stock of the myths to come out of the fetid corners of right-wing blogs and social media:

Did you know Michael Brown was a killer? Did you know he was a devoted gang member with an extensive juvenile record who routinely robbed convenience stores and committed acts of mayhem? And did you know that when Officer Darren Wilson shot Brown, he wasn’t using unjustified force, he was defending his life? The 6-foot-4, 300-pound 18-year-old fractured Wilson’s eye socket while reaching for his gun, and was killed while charging at Wilson to land another blow.

If this sounds suspect—if it sounds almost unbelievable—then your head is in the right place. Nothing in this narrative is true. Racist innuendo aside, there’s no evidence Brown was a violent gang member, nor is there evidence of any serious wrongdoing—as a juvenile, Brown was never convicted of a felony nor was he facing charges as an adult. And while Wilson was taken to the hospital after his encounter with Brown, he didn’t suffer serious injuries—the fractured eye socket is a myth.

But if you read websites like the Independent Journal Review, dive into far-right media, or explore the world of Darren Wilson support pages, you’ll find plenty of people who buy the fantasy. They reject the mainstream picture of Brown: A typical teenager, struggling to carve an identity and a life out of his beliefs, actions, and missteps. In their minds Brown was a budding criminal, and Wilson a hero. Or, as one Wilson supporter said during a demonstration for the officer, “We’ll all see this in the end that it was a good shooting. You know, it was a good kill.”

Al-Qaeda’s Newest Franchise, Ctd

Tunku Varadarajan underlines the link between ISIS and al-Qaeda’s new South Asian branch:

What should we make of this call by Zawahiri, of this loveless jihad? Why has he made this declaration, and why now? After all, al Qaeda has been in Afghanistan for years; and therefore in Pakistan; and therefore available, already, for anti-India jihad. Counterterrorism experts I spoke to were as one in pointing to the rise of ISIS in the Syria-Iraq theater as the main propulsion. ISIS has not merely stolen al Qaeda’s thunder; it is siphoning recruits away from the older organization, which has yet to recover from the catastrophic loss (in terms of charisma, and as a species of jihadi Lord Kitchener) of bin Laden. “Zawahiri wants you” doesn’t have quite the same impact on potential recruits as “Osama wants you.”

Gen. Ata Hasnain, a former Kashmir Corps commander in the Indian army, told me that before ISIS emerged as a jihadi force, al Qaeda “never felt the need to expand its ambit into South Asia. The anti-India terrorist groups in Pakistan were considered adequately motivated and organized, and al Qaeda preferred to remain only an inspiration for them, instead of overextending itself. Its prime battle was with Saudi Arabia and the U.S.” With the rise of ISIS, he said, al Qaeda has effectively been dwarfed. The avowal of jihad against India is its attempt to aggrandize itself anew.

The dwindling numbers of the Pakistani Taliban, partly thanks to the Syrian jihad drawing them away, could be another factor in the announcement of Al-Qaeda in the Indian Subcontinent:

Just a few years ago, the Taliban was one of the two prime Islamist militant groups—the other being Al Qaida-aligned insurgents in Iraq—for foreign fighters around the world to enlist with. But with the self-proclaimed Islamic State on the warpath and new conflicts in North Africa, the Taliban has become less attractive. Specifically, the Pakistani Taliban. That’s the subject of a new report in CTC Sentinel, West Point’s counter-terrorism newsletter. As of July 2008, the Pakistani Taliban included around 8,000 foreign fighters, notes Raza Khan, a political analyst who authored the report. These fighters came from western Europe, the Middle East, China, Russia, India, and central Asian countries, particularly Uzbekistan. But today, only a few hundred remain.

But Arif Rafiq counsels against overstating the connection between ISIS and AQIS:

For the past few years, Al Qaeda has stepped up its outreach to Pakistanis. Its Urdu-language service is among its most active. Al-Zawahiri has also made a handful of statements addressing the plight of Muslims in Burma and India, and Islamic activists targeted by the state in Bangladesh. It’s been laying the groundwork for AQIS for some time. Indeed, more than beating out competition from IS, Al Qaeda is trying to fill a void in the South Asian jihadist community—the absence of a grand patron. While Pakistan’s intelligence services continue to support militant groups in the region, such as Lashkar-e Taiba, its support for militants in Indian-controlled Kashmir has remained low for much of the past decade. That’s why Umar, the AQIS chief, in another video released this summer, asked Kashmiri Muslims to join Al Qaeda’s ranks and accused Pakistan of selling them out.

“The success or failure of Zawahiri’s new initiative,” Nisid Hajari writes, “may rest on one man: India’s Hindu nationalist Prime Minister Narendra Modi”:

The fastest way to increase Al Qaeda’s limited appeal in India would be for the authorities to overreact, as China has done with Uighurs in its restive Xinjiang province. This would not only alienate the best source of intelligence on homegrown radicals — the local Muslim community — it would rapidly burnish the appeal of radicals over more moderate voices. Any government scapegoating of Indian Muslims would be equally damaging. Modi’s association with the 2002 anti-Muslim riots in Gujarat and the Hindu nationalist Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh make him a lightning rod for many Muslims. He bears a special responsibility to endorse the loyalty of Indian Muslims and assure them they will not be targeted unfairly.

Probably the best way to ensure Zawahiri’s grand designs never come to fruition would be for Modi to push forward the stalled India-Pakistan peace process. As long as the wounds that divide the South Asian nations continue to fester, leaders on both sides will remain hostage to the actions of a few radicals: Any post-Mumbai terrorist plot in India that is traced back to Pakistan bears a high risk of setting off a wider conflagration.

It’s So Personal: Wendy Davis

A reader writes:

No doubt I’m not the first of your readers to bring your attention to this story, but just in case: Democratic candidate for Texas governor Wendy Davis has revealed that she had two abortions for medical reasons. I thought you all might be interested because of your previous coverage of late-term abortion.

Aman Batheja and Jay Root have details:

[Davis’s new book] reveals that Davis terminated a pregnancy in 1997 during the second trimester due to the fetus having an acute brain abnormality after Davis received multiple medical opinions suggesting that the baby would not survive. Davis describes in heart-wrenching detail how the experience crushed her. “I couldn’t breathe. I literally couldn’t catch my breath,” Davis wrote of her reaction when she first learned the diagnosis. “I don’t remember much else about that day other than calling [husband] Jeff, trying to contain my hysterical crying. The rest of it is a shocked, haze-filled blur.”

The doctor said that the baby wouldn’t survive to full term, and if she did, she would suffer and probably not survive delivery. “We had been told that even if she did survive, she would probably be deaf, blind, and in a permanent vegetative state,” Davis wrote.

Jessica Valenti praises Davis’s candor but defends women who stay quiet about abortions:

[W]omen’s abortions are none of your business – not even those of a public figure, not even one who became an international figure because of abortion rights. We shouldn’t have to explain ourselves or justify our life decisions: our abortions are ours alone.

Research shows that talking with people about issues like abortion helps to lessen stigma around terminating a pregnancy. But why must women splay their most intimate moments out into the world in order for people to understand how basic and necessary abortion rights really are?

And Sarah Kliff reminds us that Davis, while her situation was more extreme than most, is far from unusual for having terminated pregnancies:

Talking about abortion is rare — but the actual experience isn’t. More than one in every five pregnancies —  21 percent, excluding miscarriages —  are terminated, according to the Guttmacher Institute, a non-profit research organization that supports abortion rights. Each year, 1.7 percent of American women between 15 and 44 have an abortion.

Researchers at the Guttmacher Institute published separate research in the journal Obstetrics and Gynecology, estimating that if the abortion rate from 2008 held, 30 percent of American women would have obtained an abortion by time they turned 45. One in 12 women, at the 2008 rate, would have had an abortion by age 20, and a quarter of all women under 30 would have terminated a pregnancy.

Update from a reader:

Wendy Davis is disingenuous, or is it disingenuous liberal media? The two abortions Davis revealed that she had would NOT have been prohibited by the Texas abortion bill she filibustered. An ectopic pregnancy can be considered life threatening or at least a severe medical complication and, in any event, typically is discovered well before the 20 week limit of the bill.  Her second aborted pregnancy, “during the second trimester” anywhere from week 14 to week 26, (a) may not have been prohibited as prior to 20 weeks; and (b) as a severe and irremediable fetal defect would not have been prohibited by the bill.

Not to mention that, as a gubernatorial candidate, she went back on her opposition, claiming now to be for a ban on abortion after 20 weeks, subject to, provided that, blah, blah, blah … causing the left to explode.

Another:

Your update from a reader has a spurious line of reasoning. HB2 doesn’t just ban abortions after 20 weeks – that may be its least controversial aspect! It temporarily (and possibly permanently) closed more than half of the abortion clinics in the state because of restrictions meant to do just that. In its most restrictive interpretation it will leave 13 million Texas women with 7 clinics to serve their needs, down from 42 before it passed.

Sometimes I wonder if casual anti-choicers understand that you cannot get any kind of abortion in a regular OB/GYN practice, even if your abortion is perfectly legal and intended to save your life. Her opposition to the bill is because it restricts access to a basic medical procedure for all women who need it, no matter their reason. If Wendy Davis in 1997 was not able to physically get to a clinic for treatment, she would have had to continue with that pregnancy for who knows how long – one she knew to be doomed. Living every day in torture. This is what your reader wants? Her story and her opposition to the law strike at the heart of the It’s So Personal series.

We Tried To Save Them

Nicholas Schmidle gets the inside story on the June raid that failed to rescue James Foley and Steven Sotloff from ISIS:

Anticipating a possible rescue mission, a unit of Delta Force operators left from Fort Bragg, North Carolina, destined for a base in a country neighboring Syria. A geosynchronous satellite monitored the supposed safe house. On July 3rd, a little after 2 A.M. local time, several Black Hawk helicopters left the base, according to the special-operations officer, who asked to remain anonymous because he was not authorized to discuss the operation. Some of the Black Hawks carried Delta Force operators; others were Direct Action Penetrators, or DAPs, which do not carry personnel and are modified with rocket pods, 2.75-inch rockets, and chain guns. All of the aircraft crossed into Syrian airspace and headed toward the site outside of Raqqa.

As the helicopters approached the target, two armed Predator drones joined the operation, circling overhead.

(Warplanes were also in the vicinity, “on standby.”) With the DAPs providing cover, the manned helicopters landed and unloaded the team of Delta operators. A gunfight ensued, and two ISIS fighters were killed. The soldiers stormed the apparent safe house, but Foley and Sotloff were nowhere to be found. “It was a dry hole,” the special-operations officer said. The house matched, room for room, the sketches that the F.B.I. had. At one point, a bullet struck one of the helicopter pilots in the leg. The special-operations officer said that the Delta operators were confident that Foley and Sotloff had been there.

Meanwhile, speaking from her perspective as a former prisoner/hostage in Iran, Sarah Shourd urges the US to reconsider its policy of not paying ransoms:

The most frequently sited argument against paying ransom is that by doing so you fund terrorist organizations and create an incentive for groups like ISIS to capture more Americans. There is no doubt in my mind that this argument holds weight.

Still, there is more to consider. After over a year in isolated, incommunicado detention in Iran, during which I was never tried in court or allowed to meet with my lawyer, I was released to the Omani government in exchange for half a million dollars “bail”—in actuality a thinly veiled ransom. Regardless of who pays it, ransom is ransom. What’s the quantitative difference in paying ransom directly as opposed to through a third party when it comes to creating incentive and/or rewarding hostage taking?

The reality is that the U.S. government does negotiate for the release of U.S. hostages, and they clearly do this because they decide the benefits outweigh the risks.

Previous Dish on Foley’s “impossible ransom” here and here. My thoughts on the beheadings here.