Author: Andrew Sullivan

Tightening The Noose Around Russia’s Economy

Yesterday, Europe and the US announced new sanctions against Russia. Obama explains the gist:

The Cable summarizes the news:

The new European sanctions go further than ever before but still fall short of the type of “sectoral sanctions” that would block business with entire Russian industries. That reflects EU leaders’ concerns that hitting Russia too hard would also hurt their own companies and industries. The arms embargo, for instance, doesn’t apply to existing agreements. That means the $1.6 billion French deal to sell Mistral warships to Russia, which had come under fire from British officials last week, will be allowed to go forward, though France has said it will only deliver the first one while re-evaluating whether to also deliver the second.

That’s not the only sacred cow left untouched. While the new coordinated measures target future oil production, they don’t touch the natural gas business, a pillar of Russia’s export economy and a lifeline for Europeans. Both the United States and Europe took steps to restrict trade in key oil industry equipment needed for extracting oil from deep waters, in the Arctic, and from shale — all areas where Russia hopes to boost its oil output in years to come. The U.S. Commerce Department said it will limit the export of crucial oil technology to Russia, but it is not yet clear exactly what goods and services will be banned, how that will affect Russia’s current oil production, or even how much U.S. and European firms will be hit by export bans on certain oil projects.

Robert Kahn foresees “inexorable momentum for further sanctions”:

(1) Europe now is less of a constraint on further U.S. action; (2) Ukraine is achieving success on the battlefield, and without intensified Russian involvement would likely see further gains. If recent evidence of Russian shelling across the border is any indication, Russia has intensified its support in response to developments on the ground, which is justification for further sanctions; and (3) sanctions are likely to be extended over time in response to evasion. This last point is often unappreciated.

As with capital controls, prohibitions on financial transactions create incentives to innovate to evade the control. In some cases, that can be a helpful escape value, but in this case, where the West desires to impose a credible cost on Russia for its continued destabilization of Ukraine, controls need to be extended. If the restrictions on new debt, for example, are evaded in size by using non-sanctioned companies or alternative markets (such as foreign exchange swap markets), I’d expect the types of transactions and/or sanctioned institutions to be extended to close off those flows. This may be only the early innings of the sanctions game.

Yglesias unpacks the EU’s sanctions:

Russia’s export economy consists overwhelmingly of fossil fuels. This sector is Russia’s greatest point of vulnerability, but it is also the most costly sector for Europe to target since Europeans enjoy burning Russian oil and natural gas.

The EU is going to halt the export of certain categories of equipment and technology that are used in fossil fuel extraction. Europe will not target the natural gas sector, but is going to implement restrictions on the sale of equipment used in deep-sea drilling, arctic exploration, and shale oil extraction.

This won’t put much short-term pressure on the Russian economy. What it will do, however, is possibly divide the Russian elite. The long-term financial prospects of the Russian oil sector depend on its ability to continue pressing into new sources of oil. The imposition of this kind of sanctions could turn Russian oil barons into a constituency for a more restrained foreign policy. There is nothing concrete at stake in Ukraine that is nearly as valuable as tapping Russia’s own offshore and shale reserves.

But Julia Ioffe fears a cornered Putin is a dangerous Putin:

This is Putin today: a brash and unpredictable man backed into a corner with little, if any, way out. And it’s not a good Putin to be faced with.

His whole image mirrors that of the Russia he’s tried to create since he came to power in 2000: sovereign, strong, and unbowed by Western heckling. Putin, like the Russia he leads, likes to make decisions on his own terms. And he may very well lash out if the West demands he come out of that corner with his tail between his legs. This causes him to dig in his heels and resist at all costs, or to lash out. Because Putin, and Russia, do not follow commands, and they do not dance to the beat of Washington’s drum.

“Putin backed into a corner is not a great outcome for the West,” says Masha Lipman, a prominent Russian political analyst. She points out that boxing in the hard-to-predict leader of a massive military and nuclear power that has its fingers in various geopolitical pies that are of interest to the U.S. is quite risky. Will Russia retaliate by scuttling Iran talks? By forging a closer bond with China? And what will it make him do in Donetsk?

 

Butch And Proud

Vanessa Vitiello Urquhart explains why she identifies as a “butch lesbian”:

In part, it’s because the language of gender identity has always been a bit bewildering to me—I’ve felt hungry, happy, gassy, and anxious, but never male or female. Even so, it has been tempting to interpret my experience in ways that separated it from that of other women. This is especially true because cis-gendered women have a distinct tendency to define themselves in ways that don’t include me. I hear women throw out things like, “As women, we all know how important it is to feel pretty,” or “We, as women, are naturally more tender and nurturing,” statements that never seem to include women like me. Not only do I dislike feeling pretty and prefer arguing to nurturing, I don’t even particularly like eating chocolate. Popular culture, and women themselves, often imply that I lack many of the most essential qualities of womanhood. …

It’s wonderful that people who feel uncomfortable with the gender they were assigned at birth are gaining strength and visibility. But, it’s just as important that young people, girls and boys and genderqueers alike, can have as many examples as possible of men and women who don’t conform to gender stereotypes. I like to think I’m doing my part for that by living as an aggressive, competitive, logical, and strong butch woman.

Bad Science On The Big Screen

Jeffrey Kluger is frustrated by Lucy, a film premised on the widely believed misconception that we only use 10 percent of our brains:

The fact is, the brain is overworked as it is, 3 lbs. (1,400 gm) of tissue stuffed into a skull that can barely hold it all. There’s a reason the human brain is as wrinkled as it is and that’s because the more it grew as we developed, the more it bumped up against the limits of the cranium; the only way to increase the surface area of the neocortex sufficiently to handle the advanced data crunching we do was to add convolutions. Open up the cerebral cortex and smooth it out and it would measure 2.5 sq. ft. (2,500 sq cm). Wrinkles are a clumsy solution to a problem that never would have presented itself in the first place if 90% of our disk space were going to waste.

What’s more, our bodies simply couldn’t afford to maintain so much idle neuronal tissue since the brain is an exceedingly expensive organ to own and operate—at least in terms of energy needs…. “We were a nutritionally marginal species early on,” the late William Greenough, a psychologist and brain development expert at the University of Illinois, told me for my 2007 book Simplexity. “A synapse is a very costly thing to support.”

So why does the myth persist? A theory from neuroscientist David Eagleman:

I think it’s because it gives us a sense that there’s something there to be unlocked, that we could be so much better than we could. And really, this has the same appeal as any fairytale or superhero story. I mean, it’s the neural equivalent to Peter Parker becoming Spiderman.

Putting the scientific misinformation aside, Richard Brody feels the film doesn’t live up to its ambitions:

The grand-scale part comes when Lucy’s control of ambient energy taps into the mainframe of existence, the core of space and time. The trailer shows some wondrous stop-motion effects in Times Square and Lucy’s power to swipe action in and out, from high-speed to frozen and back, with her hand, as if swiping along a smartphone or tablet screen. [Writer/director Luc] Besson takes this idea audaciously, exhilaratingly far. I won’t spoil the contemplative delight, except to say that he comes amazingly close to territory covered in the more visionary moments of Malick’s “The Tree of Life.” Even now, I can hardly believe what I saw in “Lucy.”

Yet Malick’s movie—with its authentically profound considerations of the links between experience and transcendence, between ordinary life and intuitions of the absolute, between scientific knowledge and religious ecstasy—has an aesthetic, a style, a tone, a mood, which cohere with its grand ideas. His scenes of family drama in Texas, featuring such actors as Brad Pitt and Jessica Chastain, are filmed as distinctively and with as original and imaginative a vision as his synthetic images of the beyond, and the substance of that drama (down to the role of music in it, which meshes with the music heard on the soundtrack) is integral to his cinematic-philosophical creation.

Besson, by contrast, films the action with energy and flair but little originality. He realizes his characters with virtually no tendrils of identity to link up to his grander conceit.

Previous Dish on Tree of Life and Malick here. Update from a reader:

My guess is you will receive a version of this from others, but here’s mine:

You mean to tell me that light sabres aren’t real? Or that radioactive spiders can’t bite me and turn me into a superhero? Or that time travel may not actually exist?

It’s a movie, Poindexter. Shut up and let me watch the hot girl kick ass, OK?

Director’s Cuts For Novels

Andrew Ladd recommends that book publishers sell alternative drafts:

[W]hat’s wrong with a little naked commercial ambition in the publishing industry, given everything we’re always hearing about the death of the book? There’s clearly a demand for this sort of thing. The New Yorker, for instance, has previously published “early drafts” of well-known stories by famous authors, and there’s already a market for new translations of foreign language work – not to mention the perennial re-issuing of Shakespeare and other classics according to slightly different original texts. If we’re already doing all that, why not different drafts of contemporary books as well?

I suppose part of the objection might be that, by definition, an author’s last draft is supposedly the best. So when we have the definitive final text – unlike with Shakespeare et al – there’s no reason to publish a “worse” earlier one. Yet this is a silly argument, because any writer will tell you that, by the final stages of revision, most changes are a matter of minor rearrangement rather than major improvement. There are certainly plenty of things in my early drafts that I cut and now wistfully re-read.

Minimalist Or Just Dull?

Ian Svenonius calls out the new minimalist aesthetic of places like the Apple stores as a new form of snobbery:

The anti-stuff crowd invokes Buddhism and Communism-lite in their put-down of possessions and the people who “hoard” them. It’s supposed to be a sign of superstition, a hang-up, a social disease, greedy, sick. People who have things are derided as “fetishists.” Why would one have a record collection when all information is available online to be had by the technologically savvy? … Why should there be record stores, shopping areas, kiosks, video stores, movie houses, bookstores, libraries, schools, theaters, opera houses, parks, government buildings, meeting houses, et al? Public spaces, markets, and interacting with one’s surroundings are primeval, germy and dangerous. After all, it can all be done online.

Anna North expands upon this class analysis:

The idea of a vast anti-tchotchke conspiracy may strike some people as extreme. But others have begun to raise questions about minimalism’s class biases. At her blog Simply Fully, Taryn McCall notes that while she enjoys reading about minimalism online, “many of the most popular blogs that I read are written from the perspective of people who left high-powered, well-paid and benefited corporate careers for a simpler life and now have plenty of savings to show for it.” And, she writes:

“I am very aware that many people do without and receive stigma rather than praise. To them it is not called ‘minimalism.’ They live on very little, but it is not called anything because it is mostly unacknowledged, and when it does come up they are looked down upon as ‘lazy’ or ‘irresponsible’ (a feeling conveyed in even many minimalists’ posts). So I want to say what most minimalists are not saying: the benefits of minimalism depend in large part on where you start.”

Looking at what we wear, Lauren Sherman speculates that minimalist fashion has peaked:

Even a casual observer has surely noticed this shift toward the spare. “We are so overwhelmed with trends, bloggers and over-dressed looks that it’s refreshing to go back to basics,” says Melissa Moylan, women’s creative director at New York-based trend forecasting firm Fashion Snoops, explaining why we all want to look simple so badly.  Inspired by Céline’s Phoebe Philo, as well at Mary-Kate and Ashley Olsen at the Row, and Raf Simons when he was at Jil Sander, this flavor of minimalism is less severe than what we saw in the ’90s. (Yes, the clean lines are there, but it isn’t completely devoid of pattern or color either. In fact, Philo’s brushstroke-heavy spring 2014 collection inspired some to call it maximal minimalism.) This not-so-literal take on the concept gives the wearer some slack, which might be why it has become such a popular look. …

But how many perfect tees and pairs of pleated trousers can we pack into our wardrobes? While there’s always a market for basics — not to mention a contingency of diehard minimalists — not every label with a “pare it back” ethos will resonate as strongly as Mansur Gavriel or Protagonist. There’s a fine line between simple and boring.

A Well-Oiled Caliphate

In Charlie Cooper’s estimation, ISIS is handling governance surprisingly well. Part of that is down to its control of strategic resources:

Currently, it controls many of Iraq’s northern oilfields and is in a strong position to take its largest refinery at Baiji. On top of this, three weeks ago, IS took over Syria’s largest oilfield in al-Omar. Once a field is secured, IS has been quick to make a profit, reportedly earning millions of dollars selling oil to the Assad regime and, allegedly, to Iraqi businessmen.

In terms of water, IS has long controlled the Tabqa Dam and, hence, Lake Assad, in Syria, as well as the Fallujah and Mosul dams in Iraq. It thus falls to IS to provide drinking water and irrigation to massive areas of farmland. In a sense, IS has become a de facto state provider that enjoys a complex economic and infrastructural interdependence with the populations that live within its territories, something that further insulates it from outside attack.

But Keith Johnson finds reason to believe that the shady oil deals that fund the group’s activities aren’t sustainable:

With the Islamic State at the helm, that oil boom certainly won’t last forever.

The old oil fields in Syria and Iraq need lots of care, such as injections to keep the pressure up and output reliable; the lack of trained technicians and the frequent turnover have been a nightmare for proper reservoir management and will ultimately lower future output at those fields, [Chatham House oil expert Valérie] Marcel said. Still, all else being equal, that kind of control over oil fields, oil revenues, and petroleum products would be a financial shot in the arm for any terrorist outfit. Control of oil products, from gas canisters needed for cooking to fuel needed for transport, gives the group additional local leverage. And the revenue bolsters the Islamic State’s ability to recruit and pay fighters and to buy weapons.

However, that money is also desperately needed to cover the salaries of public workers in places the militants now occupy. Providing basic public services to show that they can do more than conquer and crucify, but can govern to a limited extent, also costs money. Serving as an unelected proxy for ousted or absent governments has long been a way for Islamist groups, from Hezbollah to Hamas, to broaden popular support.

The latest Dish on ISIS’s oil here, and on the water issue here.

Literature Is Not A Conflict-Free Zone

Death_of_Desdemona

Jonathan Gottschall, author of The Storytelling Animal: How Stories Make Us Human, examines why nearly all stories are problem stories:

[I]f you think about it, it’s not at all obvious that stories should be that way. You might really expect to find stories that really did function as portals into hedonistic paradise. Paradises where there were no problems and pleasure was infinite. But you never, ever find that.

Why are stories so trouble-focused? You have quite a bit of convergence among scholars and scientists who are looking at this from an evolutionary point of view, and what they’re saying is that stories may function as kind of virtual reality simulators, where you go and you simulate the big problems of human life, and you enjoy it, but you’re having a mental training session at the same time. There’s some kind of interesting evidence for this, that these simulations might help people perform better on certain tasks.

So in the same way that children’s make-believe helps them hone their social skills, it seems to be true of adult make-believe, too. If adult make believe is novels and films, it seems they’re entering into those fictional worlds and working through those fictional social dilemmas actually does, as hard as it may be to believe, enhance our social skills, our emotional intelligence, our empathy.

(Painting: The Death of Desdemona by Eugène Delacroix [1858], via Wikimedia Commons)

Fishing For Trouble

Michelle Nijhuis notes that that declining fish populations are associated with a variety of social ills:

[Professor Justin] Brashares detailed examples: declining fish populations off the coast of southern Thailand are forcing Thai fishing fleets to work harder for the same catch, and the resulting desperation for labor has triggered an epidemic of indentured servitude and child slavery.

(The United Nations estimates that ten to fifteen per cent of the global fisheries workforce now suffers some form of enslavement.) Over the past decade, more than a hundred “fishing militias” have formed in Thailand, and clashes over local fishing rights have killed an estimated three thousand nine hundred people. In surveys of Kenyan households conducted by Kathryn Fiorella, a graduate student who works with Brashares, a large proportion of women reported exchanging sex for fish because, they said, fish had become too scarce and expensive to secure otherwise. …

These linkages are rarely discussed in academic circles, or even in the popular press. Not long after Brashares published his work on fisheries and bushmeat trends in Ghana, Science published a high-profile article on the decline of global fisheries; the same week, the Times published a story on forced child labor in the fishing industry, drawing on research and analysis by UNICEF and the International Labor Organization. Science made no mention of forced labor, and the Times made no mention of fisheries’ declines. “The science side is very focused on natural-resource trends and not really thinking about social consequences, while the policy side is looking at Somali pirates or elephant ivory, and totally disconnected from the root causes,” Brashares said.

Trophy Children

swimming trophies

Teacher Molly Knefel defends giving every kid a trophy:

The disgust that so many adults feel at the idea of everyone getting a trophy has to do with creating incentives. If everyone gets a trophy then no one will try hard; if everyone gets basic food and housing to survive, then no one will work. Of course, this isn’t true. A soccer team full of 10-year-olds who all get participation trophies won’t all sit down and stop playing soccer– the kids who are good at scoring points will still want to do so. But the kid who never scored a point will, for a moment, be recognized: You played soccer too.

Instead, that kid is supposed to get the message: If you didn’t score a lot of points, no one gives a shit about you. And if that makes you sad, or if you feel that it’s not fair, get used to it. The world is a sad and unfair place. Score more goals next time. This message has always felt at odds, to me, with the equally ubiquitous platitude that children are the future. If children are the future, then why are we so gung ho about preparing them to be treated unfairly?

So they are better equipped to handle it.

(Photo by Flickr user terren in Virginia)