Andrew Sullivan

Iran’s Crackdown On The Press

The WaPo’s reporter in Tehran, Jason Rezaian, and his wife Yeganeh Salehi, also a journalist, were arrested a couple weeks ago:

As one of few foreign correspondents in based in Iran, Rezaian’s reporting hardly breached the sensitivities that the Iranian ruling apparatus is known to crackdown upon. His last two articles for The Washington Post covered baseball in Iran (“In Iran, a spark of enthusiasm for America’s national pastime”) and coverage of the nuclear negotiations from Vienna (“World powers agree to extend talks with Iran”). He was arrested in his home, alongside his wife, upon his return from Vienna. …

It is unclear on what charges the Iranian-Americans are detained, as official state media have verified the arrests but not the reasons behind them. An unconfirmed report by Tasnim news website, associated with Revolutionary Guards, claimed the arrests were on suspicions of spying.

The Economist notes that “Iran has long been hostile to the media”:

Twenty-seven journalists are currently in jail in Iran, according to the International Federation of Journalists, a Brussels-based lobby. But in the wake of the election last year of Hassan Rohani as president pressure on the media eased. Several journalists were freed in the days after he took office.

That now appears to have changed. Mr Rezaian and his wife (pictured above) are part of a worrying new spate of arrests. On May 28th Saba Azarpeik, an Iranian writer, was detained after Etemad (“Trust” in Farsi), a reformist newspaper, published a testy exchange between her and Muhammad Sadegh Kooshky, a professor at Tehran University and a member of an anti-Rohani pressure group. Two months later Marzieh Rasouli, a writer on arts and culture, was sentenced to 50 lashes and two years in prison. Reporters Without Borders, a Paris-based organisation, says she and two other Iranian journalists, Parastoo Dokouhaki and Sahamoldin Borghani, were accused of collaborating with the BBC, which is seen as part of Britain’s spy network by some hardliners.

No one knows why Iran feels the need to crack down now.

Last week, Saeed Kamali Dehghan heard that six Iranian judges are leading the new crackdown on journalists and political activists:

In their testimonies, many prisoners have accused the six judges of acting on the instructions of top security officials and prison interrogators, and collaborating with the country’s intelligence ministry or the elite Revolutionary Guards. Several prisoners said the sort of sentences they were threatened with in interrogation sessions were later handed down in their trials, which they say points to close collaboration between judges and the intelligence apparatus.

Earlier this week, Haleh Esfandiari argued that Iran’s hard-liners are using the arrests “to undercut other countries’ confidence in [Rouhani’s] ability to deliver on promises Iran might make in a negotiated deal”:

The security agencies manage to discover spies and foreign plots whenever an Iranian government seeks a rapprochement with the West. In 1999, when the reformist Mohammad Khatami was president, 13 Iranian Jews from Shiraz and Isfahan, including a 16-year-old boy, were arrested on fabricated charges of spying for “the Zionist entity” and “world arrogance.” Ten were eventually sentenced to prison terms — a carefully calculated decision that defied the concerns of members of the European Union, and chilled Iran’s relations with them.

Mr. Khatami’s failure to take a stand against a trial that was widely regarded as farcical left him looking weak, as did his earlier failure to speak up when a political ally, Gholamhossein Karbaschi, the mayor of Tehran, was tried and sentenced on fabricated corruption charges. Those two events only encouraged his opponents to thwart the president in other ways, further weakening faith abroad that he had the clout within Iran’s political system — and most important, with its supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei — to withstand pressure from the hard-liners.

Growing Up Gazan, Ctd

In a brief post on Gaza’s demographics (43 percent of the population is under 15 years old), Yglesias makes a salient observation:

The election in which Gazans voted for Hamas … happened back in 2006 when most currently-alive residents of the Strip were too young to vote.

Andy Coghlan looks at why the Strip’s population is so young:

Demographers say it’s a combination of unusual factors.

One is that an unusually low proportion of Palestinian women hold jobs. “It’s the place in the world where the least women work outside the home,” says Jon Pedersen of the Fafo Institute, a centre for demographic and social research in Oslo, Norway. Latest figures from the Palestinian Central Bureau of Statistics show that 14.7 per cent of women are in the labour market.

“In most other countries, it’s much higher than that, between 70 and 80 per cent in Scandinavia, for example,” says Pedersen, who co-authored a comprehensive study a decade ago on the demography of Gaza. Even in other Middle Eastern countries with similar cultures to Gaza, the proportions working outside the home are significantly higher. In Jordan, for example, 16 per cent of women have jobs.

The data from Index Mundi show that the fertility rate in Gaza, 4.4 children per woman, is among the highest in the world. That has steadily fallen from a peak of 8.3 children per woman in 1991. This compares with a rate of 3 in Israel, although the overall rate there is elevated by higher rates of around 6 among the strictly orthodox Haredi Jews. In most European countries, it’s about 2.

Previous Dish on Gaza’s children here.

Teachers Should Spend Less Time Teaching

Elizabeth Green, author of Building A Better Teacher, makes a counterintuitive point:

We don’t give teachers the space to do anything but work, work, work. They have no space to learn. Whereas in Japan or Finland there are 600 hours per year of time spent teaching, in the US, it’s 1,000 hours or more. So teachers have no time to think, no time to learn, no time to study the kids, no time to study the curriculum. They have no way of seeing anything that’s happening outside their own classroom.

They have no time to see each other teach. Other countries show that time is some of the most valuable time. When you get to have a common classroom experience to look at, then you get things like figuring out that “13 minus 9” is the very best problem to teach subtraction with borrowing. That kind of learning doesn’t happen in the US.

White Picket Fence Poverty, Ctd

Kriston Capps flags an update to Brookings’ 2011 report on concentrated poverty, which reveals that suburban poverty in particular is growing in the wake of the Great Recession:

A rise in concentrated poverty is something we might expect to see after a prolonged recession. Still, a complete picture of the 2000s shows that the impact registered the hardest in largely rural areas surrounding geographically large metro areas. While concentrated poverty is still highest in cities—where 23 percent of poor residents live in distressed neighborhoods—the slide among poor residents into concentrated poverty was fastest in the suburbs. “Between 2000 and 2008–2012, the number of suburban poor living in distressed neighborhoods grew by 139 percent—almost three times the pace of growth in cities,” according to the report.

That poses a significant challenge to policymakers everywhere. If the best tools geared toward alleviating poverty are designed for urban centers, then they may be rendered increasingly ineffective by the new geography—with poverty spreading to areas with lower density, less transit, and fewer services. By 2008–2012, in fact, the suburbs were home to almost as many high-poverty neighborhoods as cities.

Previous Dish on suburban poverty here, here, and here.

Pregnant With Depression

Lia Grainger unravels the debate surrounding antidepressant use during pregnancy:

My family doctor assured me the drugs were safe and non-habit-forming, and that for a lot of people, they helped. I left with a prescription for Effexor, and have been taking the drug ever since. Now I’m 33, and life looks a lot different than when I gulped down the first of the roughly 2,800 peach colored pills I’ve since ingested. Something new is swirling inside my mind: the idea of a child. So it was with a special kind of horror that, during an afternoon of aimless internet meandering, I happened upon the world of “Effexor Babies.” Typing in this search term reveals link after link to news reports, blogs, and forum discussions detailing a range of negative outcomes in the pregnancies of women on Effexor. Many studies reveal an increase in the risk of a range of birth defects, some of them potentially deadly. I was terrified—and shocked that no one had warned me of these outcomes when I started the drug.

Going off the meds, however, poses another set of problems:

Why? Because there is plenty of evidence suggesting that untreated depression during pregnancy can also be harmful to the child. Most of this evidence suggests a secondary connection—it’s not the depression itself that will hurt the infant, but rather the fact that a depressed mom is less likely to stay healthy and take good care of herself during pregnancy and more likely to engage in negative behaviors like drinking and smoking.

How Drugs Got A Bad Rap

“Drug addict,” “drug control,” “drug culture” – it wasn’t until around 1900 that we used these terms the way we mean them today, explains Mike Jay:

Largely couched in medical terms as it was, the whole notion of ‘drugs’ carried moral and cultural implications from the start. Within the temperance debate, intoxication was an evil in itself and abstinence a corresponding virtue. Also, a good many of the substances that caused concern in the West were associated with immigrant communities: opium in the Chinese districts of San Francisco or London’s docklands, cocaine among the black communities of the southern US. In the racially charged debates of the day, these substances were presented as the ‘degenerate habits’ of ‘inferior races’, a ‘plague’ or ‘contagion’ that might infect the wider population. Such ideas might no longer be explicit, but the drug concept certainly carries a murky sense of the foreign and alien even now.

That’s why it rarely applies to the psychoactive substances that we see as part of normal life, whether caffeine in the west, coca in the Andes, or ayahuasca in the Amazon.

During the first years of the 20th century, opium, morphine and cocaine became less socially acceptable, rather as tobacco has in our era. Their use was now viewed through the prism of medical harm, and their users correspondingly started to seem feckless or morally weak. The drugs themselves became, in a sense, ‘legal highs’: not technically prohibited but retreating into the shadows, available only under the counter or from those in the know. And then, once their sale was formally banned in the years around the Great War, ‘drugs’ became a term with legal weight: a specified list of substances that were not merely medically dangerous or culturally foreign, but confined to the criminal classes.

Putin’s Strategery

Michael McFaul views the Russian president as a failed statesman:

Putin’s failed proxy war in eastern Ukraine also has produced a lot of collateral damage to his other foreign policy objectives. If the debate about NATO expansion had drifted to a second-order concern before Putin’s move into Ukraine, it is front and center again now. Likewise, the strengthening of NATO’s capacity to defend its Eastern European members has returned as a priority for the first time in many years. Russian leaders always feared U.S. soldiers stationed in Poland or Estonia, yet that might just happen now. In addition, Putin’s actions in Ukraine have ensured that missile defense in Europe will not only proceed but could expand. And after a decade of discussion without action, Putin has now shocked Europe into developing a serious energy policy to reduce dependence on Russian gas and oil supplies. As a result of Putin’s actions in Ukraine, the United States is now likely to become an energy exporter, competing with Russia for market share. Some call Putin’s policies pragmatic and smart. I disagree.

Approaching the Ukraine conflict from a strategic studies perspective, Joshua Rovner outlines what scholars in that field can learn from it:

Ukraine raises at least two issues that may inspire new thinking on strategic theory. One is the problem of recognizing success when it involves something less than victory.

Ukraine has been on the offensive against the separatist fighters, rapidly driving them back into a handful of strongholds. But it’s unlikely the government can destroy them, given pro-Russian sentiment in the east and the possible existence of a large sanctuary for committed separatists across the border. Moreover, any durable settlement will require making concessions to groups that are extremely hostile to Kiev, as well as tacit promises to the Russian regime.

This might be a reasonable outcome, especially if Russia is badly bruised and if Ukraine comes away with increased Western economic and political support. But some Ukrainian leaders will bridle at any settlement that leaves their perceived enemies in place, especially after having lost Crimea. Not everyone will learn to live with Russian President Vladimir Putin and his proxies, and their unease may cause them to underrate important strategic gains. Such a scenario should resonate with American observers.

Where Fur Babies Come From

Tim Kreider suspects that Americans’ high spending on their pets “may be symptomatic of the same chronic deprivation as are the billion-dollar industries in romance novels and porn”:

I’ve speculated that people have a certain reservoir of affection that they need to express, and in the absence of any more appropriate object– a child or a lover, a parent or a friend – they will lavish that same devotion on a pug or a Manx or a cockatiel, even on something neurologically incapable of reciprocating that emotion, like a monitor lizard or a day trader or an aloe plant. Konrad Lorenz confirms this suspicion in his book On Aggression, in which he describes how, in the absence of the appropriate triggering stimulus for an instinct, the threshold of stimulus for that instinct is gradually lowered; for instance, a male dove deprived of female doves will attempt to initiate mating with a stuffed pigeon, a rolled-up cloth or any vaguely bird-shaped object, and, eventually, with an empty corner of its cage.

(Photo by Nate Pesce)

Abducted By ISIS

A harrowing account from a 14-year-old Kurd in northern Syria:

They would be taken to the torture room downstairs, one by one. When it was Lawand’s turn, he was first put in a car tire and beaten. Then he was hung from the ceiling by his hands, and beaten again. He could take this punishment for only half an hour before admitting that the list of his YPG relatives was accurate. He was taken back to the cell upstairs, where his time in detention would span 20 days. The kids were allowed to spend an hour each day in the yard; older prisoners got only five minutes. …

When the Muslim holy month of Ramadan began, in late June, Lawand was allowed to leave the prison. He rejoined the other students at a nearby school. The kids were forced to observe the holiday’s daily fast in the July heat. When one was caught taking a sip of water, the militants tied him to the goalposts of a soccer field, making his body into a cross. Then they scalded him with hot water and beat him with sticks.

Some kids tried to escape. One was successful. When the rest were caught, they were put through mock executions, and more torture. Some had knives pressed against their throats for what seemed like an hour.

The Best Of The Dish Today

Sullybait: data from the CDC’s Behavioral Risk Factor Surveillance System now proves that New Yorkers are the unhappiest residents of a metro area in America. No: seriously. Huge numbers of people answer the CDC question, “In general, how satisfied are you with your life?” with four options: satisfied, very satisfied, unsatisfied, very unsatisfied. From the results of that, a new study controlled for things like wealth, age, race, education etc. and came to the staggering conclusion that the inhabitants of the Greatest City On The Planet are fucking miserable. Slate‘s Jordan Weissman was skeptical – I mean who wouldn’t be thrilled to live in that magnificent metropolis?

So I decided to check out the research team’s full data set, without all the fancy adjustments. Turns out, New York still takes the grand prize for big-city misery. Based on its raw happiness scores, the metro area was the third unhappiest overall, finishing just above Jersey City, New Jersey (which is basically an extension of Manhattan’s financial district), and ever-woeful Gary, Indiana. Among city regions with a population of at least 1 million, New York came in last. The same pattern held if you adjusted the data for demographic characteristics but not income. Any way you look at the numbers, the New York state of mind appears to be one of personal dissatisfaction.

NYC emerges at #56 in the happiness survey of cities. Washington DC? #5. Just sayin’.

Today, I detailed the rise and rise of eliminationist rhetoric in Israel. For a review of the definitional eliminationism of Hamas, go read Jeffrey Goldberg. Wars are like poultices: they bring all sorts of toxins to the surface.

I also worried about Obama’s possible executive action on illegal immigration; I noted that the GOP cannot muster enough votes for a resolution congratulating the Pope; Rich Juzwiak and I talked about sex without condoms, i.e. the activity formerly known as sex for almost all human history; readers came to the defense of Hillary Clinton’s vacuousness; and if you love beagles, you’ll love this video.

Speaking of beagles, it was a year ago today that we had to put Dusty down. She’s the model for the dog at the top of the page, and a constant presence in my life for fifteen and a half years. Her ashes still sit on the shelf here in Ptown, but the cottage is full of the energy and love of a puppy called Bowie. She shoves the pain instantly away. But every now and again I think of Dusty. And wonder where she is.

The most popular post of the day was The Last And First Temptation Of Israel; followed by Why Sam Harris Won’t Criticize Israel.

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. 21 more readers became subscribers today. You can join them 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 – and our premium tri-blend shirts are selling out soon, so don’t delay.

See you in the morning.

(Photo: Stone crosses marking the graves of German soldiers are overtaken by time and and the growing trunk of a tree in Hooglede German Military Cemetery on the centenary of the Great War on August 4, 2014 in Hooglede, Belgium. Yesterday marked the 100th anniversary of Great Britain declaring war on Germany. In 1914 British Prime Minister Herbert Asquith announced at 11 pm that Britain was to enter the war after Germany had violated Belgium neutrality. The First World War or the Great War lasted until 11 November 1918 and is recognised as one of the deadliest historical conflicts with millions of causalities. By Christopher Furlong/Getty Images)