Child Rape In Afghanistan

Robert Long highlights the endemic abuse:

The State Department has called bacha baazi a “widespread, culturally sanctioned form of male rape.” For instance, one military intelligence reservist related a story about an Afghan colonel who stood before a judge after he hurt a chai boy by violently raping him: “His defense was, ‘Honestly, who hasn’t raped a chai boy? Ha ha ha.’ The judge responds, ‘You’re right. Case dismissed.’”

Cracking down on this practice is nearly impossible, as the main culprits are often the very law enforcement and military personnel that the U.S. works alongside. In the documentary “The Dancing Boys of Afghanistan” (2010), police officials insist that sex traffickers of young boys will be arrested; later that day, two of the same officers are filmed at a bacha baazi party.

The words of a deputy police chief:

“If they don’t f–k the asses of those boys, what should they f–k?” he asks at one point. “The p—–s of their own grandmothers? Their asses were used before, and now they want to get what they are owed.”

Previous Dish on the subject here.

Egypt’s Gift To Erdogan

Claire Berlinski notices how the Egyptian coup has given Turkey’s prime minister another chance to steer the media away from protests in Istanbul, which have not subsided:

[T]he Gezi protests were so massive, and so widely publicized, even internationally, that none of us could figure out how he’d change the subject this time, even with the customary media lockdown. “Frankly,” I said to a friend, “the only way he could do it is by announcing that he’s always felt like a woman trapped in a man’s body and announcing that he’s scheduled himself for immediate gender reassignment surgery.”

I was wrong. God intervened. He handed Erdoğan a coup in Egypt, instead.

Now, to put this in context, the Turkish media barely noticed the coup in Mali, and I’d be astonished if more than 100 Turks were aware that in recent years there have also been coups in Honduras, Guinea-Bissau and Niger. But as of the Fourth of July, one would have thought, from reading the local press, that one was not in Turkey but in Egypt, which was more than passing strange. And while the world seems to believe the Egyptian coup was a “nightmare” for Erdoğan, putting an end to his ambitious foreign policy fantasies (and this is true), it it important to understand that it was simultaneously a dream come true, not only turning all foreign attention away from Turkey, but enabling him to turn all domestic attention away from Turkey, and lending credibility to his absurd claims that the Gezi Park protesters were in fact coup-plotters, despite extensive, serious research indicating that they were anything but.

Recent Dish on Turkey here, here and here.

Is Egypt Heading For A Civil War? Ctd

Michele Dunne isn’t ruling it out:

What could easily happen is a return to the sort of low-level insurgency and domestic terrorism that plagued Egypt during the 1980s and especially the 1990s. That period saw the 1981 assassination of President Anwar Sadat, a 1995 unsuccessful attempt on Mubarak’s life, a 1997 attack in which 58 tourists and four Egyptians were killed in Luxor, and many other incidents in which jihadi Islamists targeted Christians, liberals, foreigners, and government officials. Tens of thousands of Islamists were imprisoned, often for lengthy periods without charge. The Sinai will probably become much more dangerous than it already has, further setting back efforts to restart tourism and get the economy on track. Clashes between Islamist demonstrators and security forces are likely to continue, and those between armed Islamist and secular gangs might become common.

Will the post-Morsi violence become an actual civil war? Several more shoes would have to drop—a return to arms of the so-called repentant former jihadis, the drift toward extremism of more Brotherhood members, the formation of more and larger armed Islamist units in lightly governed areas of Egypt, such as Sinai and the Western Desert­—to bring about that unhappy prospect. But it can no longer be excluded altogether.

Earlier debate on the subject here.

Chicks With Boom Sticks

Documentarian Cathryne Czubek feels that female gun enthusiasts pose a challenge to the “weaker sex” stereotype:

You take these two potent symbols–woman and gun–and it electrifies this other issue of how we, and women specifically, negotiate power. You see this in the brief historical timeline in the film from Laura Browder, who says, “The history of armed women is the history of American women.” For instance, in the 1960s, some women were arming themselves in the Black Panthers and other radical movements while others were marching for peace. It opens up the issue about the instinctual nature of women that has always rattled feminism: are women different from men and more peaceful? Or are we just as fierce and warlike?

Ditto, by the way, the Pink Pistols.

Suicidal Bombers

Criminologist Adam Lankford argues that suicide bombers are driven by psychological reasons, not just ideological ones – that is, they “kill themselves to escape crises or unbearable pain”:

[When] I began watching martyrdom videos and reading case studies, letters and diary entries, what I discovered was a litany of fear, failure, guilt, shame and rage. … [F]ar from being normal, these self-destructive killers have often suffered from serious mental trauma and always demonstrate at least a few behaviors on the continuum of suicidality, such as suicide ideation, a suicide plan or previous suicide attempts.

Along similar lines, Lankford recently analyzed 185 American mass killings to learn when and why shooters die at the scene of their crimes. Joshua Keating lays out some of his findings:

Thirty-eight percent of perpetrators of mass shootings commit suicide by their own hand and 48 percent die in the attacks. (Some of those extra 10 percent could probably also be categorized as “suicide by cop.”) Lankford also found that for each additional victim killed in the attack, the shooters’ likelihood of dying was 1.2 times higher. Shooters are also far more likely to die when they bring multiple weapons to the scene and when attacking factories or warehouses rather than schools and office buildings.

Standing Up For Sitting Down

Ben Crair rails against the growing enthusiasm for standing during work, especially among writers:

Of course the long, stationary workdays of most Americans are unhealthy. The solution should not be to sit less, but to work less. If sitting is as bad as the doctors say—and I’m sure it is!—then why not prescribe longer lunch breaks, shorter hours, and more vacation? You can still be chained to a standing desk. Is it any surprise that its biggest fans are the paternalist creeps of Silicon Valley?

Along similar lines, Trent Wolbe, who suffered severe carpal tunnel syndrome, waged an “ergonomics war” that ended in epiphany:

On a hardware level, I had found nirvana: the Kinesis keyboard, Evoluent mouse (supplemented by an Innovera wrist gel-pad), and my main man FREDERIK are still with me today. But this was all very American-capitalist-consumerist of me: I was trying to buy a way around my problem as opposed to treating it at its source. Although they were drastically diminished, I was still experiencing pangs of discomfort every day. To get my computer habit to a truly sustainable place, I just had to stop being online so much! …

[E]very aspect of my life was mediated by a mouse and keyboard: the internet is a quick and easy medium for working most of the time and chatting with friends or watching YouTube the rest of the time. But my body was sending me an excruciatingly clear signal that being chained to a console wasn’t right for me.

And so I began the process of distancing myself from the console. I cut back drastically on Gchat, stopped casually spending time on Facebook, ceased infinitely scrolling through miles of Twitter trash. I actively avoid broadcasted content: news I’m not close to, products I don’t need to buy, LOLcats that have already harvested their fair share of LOLs. More than anything, just chilling out a little bit online has shown me the true way to ergonomic freedom. I do inefficient stuff like go for walks and call people instead of emailing them. I spend a lot more time with my cat, who is actually pretty LOL if you get to know her well enough.

Usually our health problems have simple answers: eat less, move more, relax. It’s a pervasive truth that I wish I had accepted before I spent all that time and money trying to figure out how to make it not feel like I had juvenile arthritis.

tl;dr: U got carpalz? Stand to type, get vertical mouse and keyboard, chill IRL instead of online.

The Other Blue Planet

But not inhabitable-blue, like earth. Au contraire:

For the first time, astronomers have detected the color of a planet beyond our solar system: It’s blue, but not because there’s water on its surface. It doesn’t even have a “surface.” Instead, the color is thought to come from glassy grains of silicate in its choking atmosphere. The planet, known as HD 189733b, is a blazing hot gas giant circling a star 63 light-years from Earth in the northern constellation Vulpecula.

“He’s Not A President, He’s A Ruler.”

No, we’re not talking about Egypt. We’re talking about America – and a duly re-elected president who, unlike his predecessor, has not seized total executive branch powers to himself. Alec MacGillis discovers the truly unhinged Ailes-fed paranoia that’s now common on the right:

[I]t’s taken no time for declamations against the administration’s regulatory freelancing on Obamacare to turn into general paranoia about what the administration might conspire to do with an immigration law. Steve Benen noted that this started with a Washington Examiner column by Conn Carroll. Next thing you knew the paranoia was being voiced on the House floor by Louisiana Rep. John Fleming (whom you may recall as the fellow who complained that high taxes left him with only $600,000 each year to feed his family). “One of the biggest fears we have about the Senate amnesty bill … is we can’t trust the president,” Fleming said.

“We can’t trust him…Whatever we pass into law, we know he’s going to cherry-pick. How do we know that? … ObamaCare; he’s picking and choosing the parts of the law that he wants to implement. This president is doing something I have never seen a president do before: in a tripartite government with its checks and balances, we have lost the balances. We have a president that picks and chooses the laws the he wants to obey and enforce. That makes him a ruler. He’s not a president, he’s a ruler.”

So there you have it: by attempting to sabotage a law of the land they reject, Republicans have made it increasingly easy for their more outspoken members to argue against legislation many of their leaders support.

But Alex Altman and Zeke Miller report that the failure of immigration reform could prompt the type of executive actions Republicans fear:

If reform fails, Administration officials are plotting how to keep Obama on the right side of public opinion. They won’t rule out the possibility of further executive actions to circumvent Congress in the event the House fails to act. Congressional gridlock has driven Obama down this path before. He issued a series of executive orders on gun control, and toughened emissions standards on vehicles and power plants when climate legislation faltered. He also used executive authority to halt deportations of so-called DREAMers at the height of last year’s presidential campaign.

But Representative Albio Sires, a New Jersey Democrat, told reporters after a meeting with Obama that the President was wary of taking executive action to further curb deportations now. “He’s afraid that it’s going to harm the overall process of trying to get immigration done,” Sires said, according to Politico.