Author: Andrew Sullivan

Iraq: You Broke It, You Bought It?

Isaac Chotiner is willing to consider some sort of response:

[I]t’s not clear what America can or should do, which is why remarks like those from John McCain, who called this “an existential threat” and seems to want some sort of huge response, are alarming. But that doesn’t let the United States off the hook, and certainly not at the rhetorical level. Would Obama say that the Cambodian genocide was ultimately up to the Cambodians to solve, after America bombed and destabilized the country? Was the genocide in the former Yugoslavia a Bosnian problem, even though the West kept an arms embargo on the Bosnians, essentially preventing them from defending themselves?

Wieseltierism really has taken over that magazine, from top to bottom. I’d say eight years of blood and treasure and failure in Iraq is enough. Unless, like Wieseltier, you see the entire planet as a patient and America as the only nurse. Relatedly, Noah Millman declares that people “who think the world will swiftly get more peaceful if we mind our own business may well be just as wrong as the people who think that by sticking our nose into other people’s business we can force the world to be peaceful”:

[W]e are responsible for the situation in Iraq.

We are directly responsible in that we broke the existing arrangement of power and installed ourselves as the occupier. We are also indirectly responsible inasmuch as our overweening hegemonic influence in the region means that inaction is also a kind of action. So, because the Syrian civil war has not resolved, but expanded and become more violent and extreme, and because that civil war and Iraq’s are, with the rise of ISIS, effectively merging, to the extent that we may be “blamed” for not resolving that civil war, we may also be “blamed” indirectly for the deterioration in Iraq.

None of which means we should make feel obliged to do something stupid and counter-productive, but it provides and genuine moral explanation for why we might feel obliged to do something.

I love this formulation: hegemony means inaction is action, so there’s no difference between the two! So let me put this as kindly as I can. We lost 5,000 young Americans trying to keep this centrifugal country in one piece. After eight years, and huge expenses in training and equipping the Iraqi army, we bear no blame and never have for the pathological sectarianism of so many Arab countries, culturally or politically. And it’s time to have enough self-respect to say so. The sanest, wisest way to wriggle out of this trap is precisely to do nothing – again and again – until the pathology of dependence is finished.

If there is something we can do, it should be to ratchet up our ability to monitor these groups – sorry, NSA-haters, but spying is one of our strongest and least disruptive tools in preventing attacks on the homeland – and to provide as much diplomatic and political advice, if asked, as to how to render the situation less volatile. But even there, the limits of our behavior are so much more profound than the potential. If you think Maliki pursued text-book sectarianism out of a whim, or could have been effectively dissuaded by a few American military officials, you are only missing the entire modern history of Iraq. And in sectarian warfare, there is usually very little magnanimity. Just payback – again and again and again.

Leave it alone. And do what we can to protect ourselves. That doesn’t guarantee anything. But intervention guarantees far worse.

A Poem For Saturday

Dish poetry editor Alice Quinn writes:

A new volume of poetry by Kevin Simmonds, Bend to It, arrives with praise from the celebrated California poet D.A.Powell, winner of both the National Book Critics Circle Award and the Kingsley Tufts Award, who has said of Simmonds’ new poems, “Piercing the veil of a culture of silence, Kevin Simmonds brilliantly fuses quiet meditative traditions with a courageous impulse to dare beyond the boundaries of convention, to combine the bel canto of Italian art songs with the dynamic energy of James Brown; the tranquility of the zen masters with the fire and heat of the enraptured body.” We’ll post three of Kevin Simmonds’ poems this weekend.

“Lie” by Kevin Simmonds:

I’d write fewer poems
for my father to say
over the flat cell phone
he’s thinking of me
remembers some vital time
now history
when I was a small brown promise
with his wide nostrils     flat feet

just like his daddy
all the women would say & feel good
about saying it

I would give up all the mouths
I’ve fallen into
even the soft ambulance
of a man’s body

(From Bend to It © Kevin Simmonds, 2014. Reprinted with permission by Salmon Poetry)

Putting A Stop To Stop-Motion

Jurassic Park was released 21 years ago this week. Kottke recommends the above short documentary that reveals the technology behind the remarkably convincing special effects:

When Spielberg originally conceived the movie, he was going to use stop-motion dinosaurs. [Visual effects company Industrial Light & Magic] was tasked with providing motion blur to make them look more realistic. But in their spare time, a few engineers made a fully digital T. Rex skeleton and when the producers saw it, they flipped out and scrapped the stop-motion entirely. Fun story.

Elon Musk Has No Secrets Left

At least when it comes to Tesla:

Tesla Motors CEO Elon Musk has just opened up his company’s patents, saying that the company will not “initiate patent lawsuits against anyone who, in good faith, wants to use our technology.” In a conference call with reporters also on Thursday, Musk added that the company plans on aggressively filing electric car-related patents and opening them to the public as a pre-emptive measure to thwart other companies or potential patent trolls. This also applies retroactively to all currently held Tesla patents.

Will Oremus thinks the move makes perfect sense:

Musk isn’t naive, and Tesla isn’t a charity. Rather, he knows that Tesla’s real battle isn’t with other automakers for leadership of today’s niche market for electric cars. It’s the much greater struggle between electric cars and their gas-powered counterparts.

Viewed in that context, the obstacles to Tesla’s success aren’t the Nissan Leaf and the BMW i3—they’re the constraints of technology, cost, infrastructure, and customer expectations. The more money is put into electric batteries, the cheaper and more powerful they’ll become. The more electric cars there are on the road, the greater will be the demand for regional and national networks of electric charging stations. And guess what company will stand to benefit the most.

Jordan Golson nods:

Tesla needs widespread adoption of electric cars and the easiest way to do that is to get other automakers to sell them too. More electric cars in the world means Tesla’s cars aren’t so weird, and they become an easier sell to a skeptical public. … At the end of the day, the biggest risk for Musk isn’t that BMW or Toyota will steal his technology. It’s that the big automakers might not be interested in electric cars enough to bother building them at all.

Meanwhile, Timothy Lee suggests that electric cars aren’t such a unique case after all:

The standard economic argument for patents assumes that without them, new inventions will be quickly imitated by competitors, destroying the ability of the original inventor to turn a profit. But if you look at the history of actual inventions, this is often not how things work out.

In practice, the biggest challenge many inventors face isn’t fending off copycats, it’s developing a market for the product in the first place. For major inventions, the potential market is usually much larger than the first few firms can hope to serve. The challenge is converting all those potential customers into actual customers. In a new industry, competitors can actually help with this by helping spread news about the invention, pioneering better sales techniques, and developing improvements that make the product more attractive.

A Taxonomy Of Tints

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Daniel Lewis, author of a biography of the Smithsonian’s first curator of birds, considers the importance of color dictionaries in the history of science:

Shy, retiring, and nerdy in the extreme, [ornithologist Robert Ridgway] was an astonishingly talented identifier and user of colors. This gift was key in a field where distinguishing among subspecies of birds with slight color variations was essential to understanding the mechanisms of evolution, speciation, and other scientific aspects of the natural world.

Ridgway wrote a short color dictionary in 1886, just as he finished work on a groundbreaking set of rules and guidelines for naming birds. He worked quietly on his color project for decades, until 1912, when he self-published a work with 1,115 named colors: Color Standards and Color Nomenclature. The book is filled with color swatches with names like Dragon’s-blood Red, which makes me think of blood dripping from a sword; or Light Paris Green, which seems like a holiday. …

These color dictionaries have a deep, personal, and complicated history – even though they emerged from a strong desire to quantify the world, as taxonomic publications tried to do in the 19th and early 20th centuries. Colors are slippery, and they say something about the personal prejudices and interests of the namers, at least as much as they speak to the qualities of colors themselves. We don’t use them anymore because in book form they would be impossibly unwieldy: There are now more named colors than you can shake a dragon at – far more than would fit into a single volume. But Ridgway’s legacy lives on – his book evolved into the Pantone color chart relied upon by graphic designers, house paint creators, interior designers, fashion mavens, flag makers, and anyone looking to identify colors.

(Image: “Pantone Autumn” by Chris Glass)

Wilde For Women

As a journalist, Oscar Wilde took a special interest in women’s issues:

[I]t is revealing to see just how many of Wilde’s journalistic writings are for and about women. This activity peaks when Wilde takes over the editorship of the Lady’s World, an illustrated monthly that advertised itself as a “high-class magazine for ladies”. Famously, the first thing Wilde did when he took charge of the journal was to change its title: Lady’s World became Woman’s World – a shift that signals a different target audience and different political ambitions. The revamped journal was to provide high-quality journalism aimed at modern middle-class female readers who did not think of themselves as “ladies”. These women were keen to read about culture, education and employment, and Wilde catered for their advanced tastes. Wilde’s editorship of Woman’s World from 1887 to 1889 was a crucial step not only in his career as a journalist but in his development as a writer in a broader sense. It was the only period in his life in which Wilde received a regular salary. More importantly, though, he was now in charge of commissioning essays and reviews, which he did by recruiting an impressive array of women contributors ranging from successful novelists to graduates of the new women’s colleges in Cambridge and Oxford.

In a review of the volumes of The Complete Works of Oscar Wilde that cover the writer’s journalism, Stefano Evangelista observes that the genre proved a good training grounds for Wilde’s later literary experiments:

It is in the journalism that Wilde comes up for the first time with many of the ideas and phrases that he would reuse in critical essays such as “The Decay of Lying” or “The Critic as Artist”. The traffic between his journalism and criticism makes us realize that to draw a sharp divide between these two fields in the Victorian age is a rather arbitrary affair. It is also in the journalism that Wilde learns to play with the epigram – a literary device that he would perfect in his society comedies. He learns to cultivate an effortless style, which mixes critical acumen with silliness, balances learning with superficiality, and tempers natural donnishness by means of studied flippancy. He learns to master that characteristic blend of praise and ridicule. He learns, in other words, to establish that easy, direct contact with the audience that made him a successful dramatist in his own time and that still makes him, on the stage and in print, so appealing to many today.

Email Of The Day

[Re-posted from earlier today]

A reader writes:

I have been a subscriber since very early on. This winter I purchased a subscription for my father. He is an evangelical, as well as a thoughtful conservative. He and I have had our fair share of clashes over the years as I have moved more to the left, but we have always worked hard to hear, and be heard by each other.

dish-gift-sidebar-FDA couple months ago they moved across the country to the same area that my wife and I live. We have obviously spent a lot more time together since that move. I cannot tell you how many conversations we have that are based on something one or the other of us read on the Dish. Neither of us totally agree with you, but it gives us a good jumping off point to have healthy discussions, where both of us are fleshing out our ideas. I think over the last couple of years we are actually moving closer to the same way of thinking. I, through reading your blog, have become somewhat more conservative (small c) and I think he has moved away from the GOP and certainly from FOX news.

Anyways, thanks for thoughtful commentary and conversation starters.

To give the gift of Dish for your father or grandfather or stepfather or father-in-law or any other father on Father’s Day, click here. He, like all subscribers, will get full access to the Dish, including the thousands of words below all the readons each day, in addition to all the writings and podcasts in Deep Dish, including long conversations with Hitch, Dan Savage, and Iraq vet Mikey Piro.

A Poem For Friday

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Another selection from Patrizia Cavalli translated, from the Italian, by Gini Alhadeff:

I had cut my hair, darkened my eyebrows,
adjusted the right fold of my mouth, thinned
my body, raised my height. I had even lent
the shoulders a triumphant bent. A girl
boy
again, on the streets, a workman’s gait,
no superfluous embellishments. But I hadn’t forgotten
the languor of the chair, a clouded vision.
And I distributed caresses, not knowing I did. My secret
body untouchable. In the lower back
expectation condensed without satisfaction; in the gardens
long walks, advice repeated,
the sky sometimes blue
sometimes not.

(From My Poems Won’t Change the World: Selected Poems of Patrizia Cavalli, edited by Gina Alhadeff. Translation © 2013 by Gini Alhadeff. Reprinted by permission of Farrar, Straus & Giroux, LLC. All rights reserved. Photo by Lauren Finkel)

European Cabbies Are Uber-Angry

Traffic was worse than usual in Europe’s major cities on Wednesday, as tens of thousands of taxi and limo drivers in London, Paris, Madrid, and Berlin went on strike to protest the competition they are facing from ride-share services, particularly the astronomically valuated Uber, Alison Griswold outlines their beef:

Taxicab drivers throughout Europe are calling for their governments to crack down on Uber with tougher regulations. London has emerged as the epicenter of the demonstrations: Thousands of drivers are rankled that the city’s public transit authority, Transport for London, or TfL, has determined that the smartphone app used by Uber drivers cannot be classified as a meter because it is not installed in the vehicle. That technical distinction is everything because TfL rules state that only licensed taxis can use a meter—a privilege that comes with strict regulatory hurdles. Drivers feel that because Uber’s app determines fare based on time and distance (and the occasional price surge), it functions like a de facto meter and should be regulated accordingly.

But Richard Read argues that the protesters are missing the point, and that “the taxi industry is overdue for a shake-up” anyway:

Many cab companies still operate using a 20th century model: travelers call for service, step outside, and wait for the cab to arrive. That may be appealing to our parents and grandparents, but for folks under 40, it’s a different story. Like newspapers and record labels, the industry has resisted change for so long, it may be too late to fix it. We understand that there are millions of hard-working cab drivers around the world who find this news unsettling. But Uber isn’t booting them out of a job, it’s changing the way they work to be more in keeping with modern technology and lifestyles.

Ultimately, protests like the ones staged yesterday in Europe make for good news stories, but they do little if anything to reform the industry or boost customer satisfaction. As proof, consider this: Uber said that the protests in London alone resulted in an 850% growth in the company’s user base, as frustrated travelers tried to work around the traffic jams caused by cab drivers.

Likewise, Jim Epstein tells the cabbies they’re wasting their time – in more ways than one:

London mandates that its cabbies pass a 149-year-old exam called “The Knowledge” that requires them to master the city’s maze-like streets and know the precise location of museums, police stations, and theaters. As part of the test, they have to verbally recite detailed explanations of how best to travel from one location to another through the city’s roughly 25,000 arteries. Passing “The Knowledge” takes years of study, and most drivers fail at their first few tries. The test causes the gray matter in applicants’ brains to expand, according to one London researcher.

Perhaps the most compelling case for letting Uber thrive is that London’s brainy cabbies should devote their oversize hippocampi to contributing to fields like computer science and medical research. In an age of ubiquitous GPS devices, many of which also incorporate real-time traffic data, circling the city in a car is a profound waste of such exceptional minds. London may as well also require that cabbies master the art of saddling a horse and mending a harness.