The Dish

Jeremy Scahill’s film and book project Dirty Wars: The World is a Battlefield examines US military policy abroad, with special attention to covert operations.  Last month, Stephen Moss reviewed the film:

The extent of the US military’s covert operations and the amount of “collateral damage” are shocking; the film shows that even US citizens have been the victims of non-judicial executions; and the argument that the war on terror is ultimately unwinnable because indiscriminate killings radicalise whole populations is persuasive. “Somehow, in front of our eyes, undeclared wars have been launched in countries across the globe; foreigners and citizens alike assassinated by presidential decree; the war on terror transformed into a self-fulfilling prophecy,” Scahill laments at the end of the film. “How does a war like this ever end, and what happens to us when we realise what was hidden in plain sight?”

Tom Gallagher elaborates on the book’s contents:

A book called Dirty Wars will naturally have no shortage of nasty stories.

One of the worst occurred on February 12, 2010, when US forces arrived in the Afghan village of Gardez, shot up a party celebrating the naming of the newborn son of an Afghan police officer and killed the father and six others, including two pregnant women. After a failed cover-up — during which family members reported seeing “U.S. soldiers digging the bullets out of the women’s bodies” in order to support a fabricated story that the women had been found already bound, gagged and executed when the Americans arrived — the U.S. military staged a very public meeting in which JSOC [Joint Special Operations Command] Commander Admiral William McRaven personally apologized for the atrocity to Hajii Sharabuddin, the head of the household. The story disappeared from the headlines and the war went on. Several months later, however, Scahill met with Sharabuddin who told him that “now we think the Americans themselves are terrorists.” You didn’t see that part on the nightly news.

Reviewing the film in June, Steven Boone expressed desensitization to some of what the camera captured:

We’ve been here before. Popular documentaries like Michael Moore’s “Fahrenheit 9/11” did their best to demonstrate that foreign kids suffering or perishing because of disastrous U.S. policy are “just like our kids.” Given the incessant, almost automatic dismissal of such murders of children in this country—by pundits, Congress members, White House press secretaries, American generals, soldiers, and average Joes and Janes—it’s hard to see any meaningful difference between the folks who danced in the streets when the towers fell and Americans who find collateral damage offensive only when the collateral is American. Casual dehumanization of foreigners has become the norm everywhere. It’s as if 9/11 rolled back the world clock a century.

Scahill, Rowley and co-writer David Riker (creator of the classic neo-neorealist indie “La Ciudad”) do their part to attack this backwardness at the root. Clear and graphic images of the piles of dead children a U.S. drone strike left in a Yemeni field say so much more than (to cite a quietly outrageous moment early on) a general smugly, idiotically speculating that a pregnant Afghan woman our soldiers gunned down might have been a combatant. (“I’ve been shot at by women.”)

A recent interview with Scahill is here.

We recently aired concerns that Google is acquiring a monopoly on mapmaking. Adam Fisher evaluates the “Wikipedia of mapping,” OpenStreetMaps (O.S.M.), as a “potential challenger to Google’s cartographic hegemony”:

Today, Google’s map includes the streets of every nation on earth, and Street View has so far collected imagery in a quarter of those countries. The total number of regular users: A billion people, or about half of the Internet-connected population worldwide. Google Maps underlies a million different websites, making its map A.P.I. among the most-used such interfaces on the Internet. At this point Google Maps is essentially what [Silicon Valley visionary] Tim O’Reilly predicted the map would become: part of the information infrastructure, a resource more complete and in many respects more accurate than what governments have. It’s better than MapQuest’s map, better than Microsoft’s, better than Apple’s.

“You don’t see anybody competing with Google on the level or quantity of their mapping today,” says [OpenStreetMaps founder Steve] Coast, who now works as a geographic-information professional. But, he adds, “that’s because it’s not entirely rational to build a map like Google has.” Google does not say how much it spends on its satellite imagery, its planes, its camera-equipped cars, but clearly it’s an enormous sum. O.S.M., by contrast, runs on less than $100,000 a year. Google’s spending is “unsustainable,” Coast argues, “because in the long run, this stuff is all going to be free.”

The O.S.M. map data is free now — but using it comes with a catch. Any improvement, or any change at all, that a developer makes to O.S.M.’s map must be sent back to O.S.M. It’s a clever tactic, forcing competitors of Google Maps to choose between fighting Google alone or joining a coalition that, if it prevails, will ensure that no private company will ever be able to establish a mapping monopoly.

A reader disagrees with Kevin Mahnken:

With all due respect, our form of government is a “representative democracy,” meaning that those who run the government “represent” us.  I don’t believe you can represent the people if you do not know the people and you cannot know the people if you don’t live with those people. Our government was not set up to vote on various policies or ideologies, it was set up to “represent” the will of the people. There are too many people out there who just want to be professional politicians and don’t care about where they are, they just want the power of being elected.  This stinks and does a disservice to our form of government.

Another disagrees:

I was interested to read Mahnken’s belief that carpetbagging is a good thing.  The reality is, Clinton and now Scott Brown are examples of politicians moving into areas with similar character and make-up to a place they’re actually from.  In Hillary’s case, New York was a cosmopolitan place full of movers and shakers like DC had been for the previous 8 years, and Kennedy likewise was moving from one Eastern Seaboard state to another.  Brown seems to be going a little further, but he’s still in New England.  Not a radical departure.

Another:

I applaud Mahnken for defending, in principle, the idea of carpetbagging. I agree that sometimes the truly best person for the job may be the candidate who happens to be from somewhere else, geographically speaking. I think where the Scott Brown example is more problematic is that he isn’t just a candidate who happens to be from another place; he is a defeated candidate from another place. Many New Hampshire voters are probably more reluctant to vote for him because he was a failed candidate in Massachusetts, not simply because he’s from Massachusetts.

(Photo: Democratic candidate for U.S. Senate from Illinois Barack Obama and his Republican rival Alan Keyes prepare to debate on October 26, 2004. By Scott Olson/Getty Images. From Wikipedia: On August 8, 2004 – with 86 days to go before the general election – the Illinois Republican Party drafted Keyes to run against Obama for the U.S. Senate, after the Republican nominee, Jack Ryan, withdrew due to a sex scandal, and other potential draftees (most notably former Illinois governor Jim Edgar and former Chicago Bears coach Mike Ditka) declined to run. The Washington Post called Keyes a “carpetbagger”  since he “had never lived in Illinois.” When asked to answer charges of carpetbagging in the context of his earlier criticism of Hillary Clinton, he called her campaign “pure and planned selfish ambition”, but stated that in his case he felt a moral obligation to run after being asked to by the Illinois Republican Party. “You are doing what you believe to be required by your respect for God’s will, and I think that that’s what I’m doing in Illinois”.)

Steven Poole is skeptical about an ever-growing “cult of ‘productivity'”:

In the vanguard of “productivity” literature and apps was David Allen’s “Getting Things Done” (GTD) system, according to which you can become “a wizard of productivity” by organising your life into folders and to-do lists. The GTD movement quickly spread outside the confines of formal work and became a way to navigate the whole of existence: hence the popularity of websites such as Lifehacker that offer nerdy tips on rendering the messy business of everyday life more amenable to algorithmic improvement. If you can discover how best to organise the cables of your electronic equipment or “clean stubborn stains off your hands with shaving cream”, that, too, adds to your “productivity” – assuming that you will spend the time that is notionally saved on a sanctioned “task”, rather than flopping down exhausted on the sofa and waking groggily seven hours later from what you were sternly advised should have been a power nap of exactly 20 minutes. If you need such “downtime”, it must be rigorously scheduled.

The paradox of the autodidactic productivity industry of GTD, Lifehacker and the endless reviews of obscure mind-mapping or task-management apps is that it is all too easy to spend one’s time researching how to acquire the perfect set of productivity tools and strategies without ever actually settling down to do something. In this way, the obsessive dream of productivity becomes a perfectly effective defence against its own realisation. As Samuel Johnson once wrote: “Some are always in a state of preparation, occupied in previous measures, forming plans, accumulating materials and providing for the main affair. These are certainly under the secret power of idleness. Nothing is to be expected from the workman whose tools are for ever to be sought.”

Update from a few readers:

As someone who’s practiced GTD for about 15 years (and it is a practice that takes years to perfect), I can say that Steven Poole gets it wrong.

It’s not about doing more, scheduling every minute, calling everything “work.” It’s a pretty ingenious method of accounting for everything – stuff you’d normally put on a to-do list and stuff that you normally store somewhere in your brain – that you’ve committed yourself to so you can make wise decisions about what you value and how you want to spend your time. The result is often that you do get more done. But just as often you become free to not do anything because you can relax, knowing you haven’t spaced out on something important.

The big thing I’m wrestling with right now is looking at everything on my lists and making myself say “no” or “later” far more often. The system has really made it possible for me to take a good hard look at just how overcommitted I’ve let myself become.

Another:

You can’t post about productivity, GTD, etc without mentioning Merlin Mann.  He coined the popular term “inbox zero,” which the Dish has covered a bit, and wrote a very popular productivity blog, 43Folders, during the aughts, but has since stepped back from that venture to be highly critical of the “productivity porn” industry.  Merlin now does a popular weekly podcast at 5by5.tv/b2w, where he talks somewhat about GTD principles, but mainly focuses on how to help people actually do creative work, rather than talk about the tools for doing creative work, which can be a highly attractive sideshow.

Previous Dish on “inbox zero” here and here.

That’s what Heather Havrilesky dubs Nora Ephron after reading her anthology The MOST of Nora Ephron:

When everything fell to pieces for Didion—her husband of thirty-nine years died of a heart attack in 2003, and her daughter died of acute pancreatitis in 2005—her signature foreboding tone needed few adjustments. In The Year of Magical Thinking and Blue Nights, Didion describes these losses in the same melodramatic yet detached style that she once used to describe Los Angeles’ pristine blue skies as “the weather of catastrophe, of apocalypse,” or to capture the uneasy course of a family holiday in Hawaii, taken “in lieu of filing for divorce.” Didion’s unmatched dexterity as a writer hasn’t changed, but something feels wrong for the first time. Closing her last two books, it’s hard not to implore of the book-jacket photo, “But, Joan, how do you actually feel about all of this?”

Ephron, on the other hand, tells us exactly how she feels every step of the way—whether she’s clashing with her former boss, New York Post owner Dorothy Schiff, or reflecting on cheesecake and pot roast and the futility of making egg rolls that aren’t even as good as cheap Chinese takeout. Ephron does all this in the plainest language, with the least fanfare and the greatest amount of humor she can manage. Here is how she describes, to a reporter from the New Yorker, her mother’s death by cirrhosis, which was aided by an overdose of sleeping pills administered by her father:

“When that happened, I don’t know how to say this except . . . it was a moment of almost comic relief. It seemed entirely possible, in character, understandable, and I think we all filed it under Will I Ever Be Able to Use This in Anything.” Likewise, when Ephron discovered that her husband, Carl Bernstein, was cheating on her while she was pregnant with her second child, she translated that nightmare into the surprisingly giddy best-selling novel Heartburn, which subsequently became a film starring Meryl Streep and Jack Nicholson.

When life gave Ephron lemons, in other words, she made a giant vat of really good vodka-spiked lemonade and invited all of her friends and her friends’ friends over to share it, and gossip, and play charades. Whereas when life gave Joan Didion lemons, she stared at them for several months, and then crafted a haunting bit of prose about the lemon and orange groves that were razed and paved over to make Hollywood, in all of its sooty wretchedness—which is precisely what this mixed-up world does to everything that’s fresh and young and full of promise.

A reader responds to a recent post:

To me, the big difference between the experience of Joan Didion and that of the reader in your update, is the way their husbands died. One died of a sudden heart attack and the other from a terminal illness. It’s the sudden death that can totally upend you because it comes out of the blue, without any warning. With a terminal diagnosis, at least there’s some mental preparation for the worst even as you hold out hope – and pray – for your loved one’s recovery.

In an excerpt from his book Happy City: Transforming Our Lives Through Urban Design, Charles Montgomery examines how road design affects our waistlines:

Consider Atlanta. The average working adult in Atlanta’s suburbs now drives 44 miles a day. (That’s 72 minutes a day behind the wheel, just getting to work and back.) Ninety-four percent of Atlantans commute by car. They spend more on gas than anyone else in the country. In a study of more than 8,000 households, investigators from the Georgia Institute of Technology led by Lawrence Frank discovered that people’s environments were shaping their travel behavior and their bodies. They could actually predict how fat people were by where they lived in the city. Frank found that a white male living in Midtown, a lively district near Atlanta’s downtown, was likely to weigh 10 pounds less than his identical twin living out in a place like, say, Mableton, in the cul-de-sac archipelago that surrounds Atlanta, simply because the Midtowner would be twice as likely to get enough exercise every day.

Here’s how their neighborhoods engineer their travel behavior:

Midtown was laid out long before the dispersalists got their hands on the city. It exhibits the convenient geometry of the streetcar neighborhood even though its streetcars disappeared in 1949. Housing, offices, and retail space are all sprinkled relatively close together on a latticelike street grid. A quart of milk or a bar or a downtown-bound bus are never more than a few blocks away. It is easy for people to walk to shops, services, or MARTA, the city’s limited rapid transit system, so that’s what they do.

But in suburbs like Mableton, residential lots are huge, roads are wide and meandering, and stores are typically concentrated in faraway shopping plazas surrounded by parking lots. Six out of every 10 Atlantans told Frank’s team that they couldn’t walk to nearby shops and services or to a public bus stop. Road geometry was partly to blame. Frank and others have found that that iconic suburban innovation—the cul-de-sac—has become part of a backfiring behavioral system.

Update from a reader:

I think it’s a bit of a jump of logic for Charles Montgomery to suggest that longer commutes and suburban-style road design affect our waistlines.  Sure, the white male living in Midtown Atlanta is likely to be 10 pounds lighter than his counterpart in Mableton, but is that because of walking habits, or self-selection?  That white male living in Midtown (Atlanta’s gay neighborhood, mind you) is also more likely to go to the gym, eat kale salads from Whole Foods, bike around town, and take extra pains to care about his appearance.  The white male living in Midtown is, probably, single and urban-minded, while the white male living in suburbia is almost certainly married with kids.  I don’t know Montgomery’s methodology, but there are a whole host of factors here other than road design.  The kinds of white males who choose to live in a vibrant, diverse and hip urban neighborhood are the kinds of white males who – to paint with very broad strokes – take care of their bodies, for reasons of vanity or health.

In any event, I defy you to find a gay neighborhood in the USA that isn’t remarkably fit compared to its suburban counterparts – to the consternation, I expect, of any number of gays who don’t really want to go to the gym every day, but have to keep up with the Joneses.