The Dish

Simon Critchley considers the US and UK policy of refusing to pay ransom to terrorists, noting that “governments like the Spanish, the French, and the Italian … have simply found other, more clandestine and covert ways of making such payments.” He notes that “the next move these [latter] governments make is simply to deny that such payments have been made”:

All of this suggests a moral dilemma: Is it better to (a) remain morally consistent, refuse negotiation and ransom payment to an allegedly evil organization, but watch your citizens get beheaded? Or (b) sign up to a principled agreement not to negotiate with “terrorists,” but then negotiate nonetheless, pay a large amount of money to release the citizens of your country, and simply deny the fact publicly?

In this case, I would argue that (b) is the best and wisest course of action. Consider the following scenario. Imagine that when the Spanish, French, and other governments began to negotiate with ISIS, the responsible parties in the UK and US did so as well. Based on what we know of the European negotiations, it seems likely that the lives of Foley, Sotloff, Haines, and Henning could have been spared. Also, Peter Kassig could be back in US and not threatened with a very likely beheading, and the voluble John Cantlie could hopefully return quietly to life in the UK. This would have required paying some money, probably quite a lot of money. Some reports indicated that ISIS had asked for 100 million euros for James Foley, but wasn’t he worth that much? European soccer players are traded for such sums. In October, the Pentagon reported that it had spent $1.1 billion on military operations since the offensive against ISIS began last summer.

In this way, the horrific spectacle of videoed beheadings of Western captives could have been avoided—executions that led to principled proclamations of the “pure evil” of ISIS on the part of David Cameron and Barack Obama and contributed in significant part to the subsequent, wildly expensive, and very probably ineffective policy of air strikes on ISIS in Syria. Absent these beheadings, the strikes in Syria might have been averted or at least conducted in a more covert, less febrile, and hysterical atmosphere.

Gwynn Guilford provides an overview of recent research into why “jellyfish blooms appear to be getting bigger, more frequent, and more destructive”:

Perhaps the most disquieting observation about the rise of jellyfish … has to do with new polyp habitats. A few centuries ago, when a jellyfish larva—i.e. a fertilized egg—looked for a surface to start cloning on, it had to make do mostly with the odd seabed rock or oyster shell. If a larva couldn’t find such a surface, it would be eaten or die out.

The odds of finding a place to settle used to be pretty long. But humans are bettering those larvae’s chances of survival.

Bridges, ports, drilling platforms, ship hulls—these are just a few examples of miles upon miles of smooth surfaces that polyps are colonizing. Research published last year reported polyps of numerous species taking over everything from buoys to floating plastic cigarette packaging (paywall).

A study on moon jellyfish published in October offers a more direct link between booming coastal development and jellyfish blooms. The research team, which included the prolific Shin-ichi Uye and three other marine biologists, counted the number of baby moon jellyfish in a bay before and after a new floating pier was installed. The jellyfish polyps rapidly colonized the new pier’s underside, resulting in a four-fold surge in their numbers after the dock’s arrival.

Guilford goes on to clarify, “Though this latest research is building a strong case that man-made disturbances to the ocean are amplifying blooms, the lack of historical data on jellyfish means these links still aren’t certain.”

Previous Dish on the jellyfish menace here.

(Photo by Flickr user franzi ヅ)

Helen Rittelmeyer looks back to the origins of lowbrow conservatism, surveying the “pamphleteers, satirists, and hacks” who took up Edmund Burke’s critique of the French Revolution and its defenders, like Thomas Paine, in the 1790s:

[A]nother lawyer thought that it would be better to answer Paine than to muzzle him. This was John Reeves, an ultra-monarchist barrister andjournalist who in 1792 founded the Association for Preserving Liberty and Property Against Republicans and Levellers. (If only the modern Tea Party had resurrected that name.) Later, when Reeves was charged with seditious libel for having written a pamphlet so fulsomely pro-monarchy that it appeared to reduce parliament to a mere appendage, Burke wrote eloquently in his defense, claiming that while the pamphlet had probably gone beyond what was strictly orthodox, its author was guilty of nothing more than a few ill-chosen metaphors.

Within a year of the Association’s first meeting—in a tavern, the Crown and Anchor—there were more than 1,000 clubs spread throughout the kingdom, their mission to halt the spread of Jacobinical ideas among the British public. Modern historians have focused on the Association’s more rambunctious pastimes, like burning Tom Paine in effigy and throwing the occasional radical in the local river, but far more of their effort was spent distributing loyalist literature. Reeves loved the excitement of publishing more than the practice of law, and he took great relish in reprinting suitable tracts—such as the Rev. William Paley’s unselfconsciously titled Reasons for Contentment, Addressed to the Labouring Part of the British Public—and, later, in accepting unsolicited submissions from amateur scribblers eager to help the cause. Prices were kept low partly to entice poorer buyers and partly to allow rich sympathizers to buy literature in bulk and hand it out for free. One pamphlet was listed at “Price only ONE HALFPENNY, or 3s. per Hundred to such as give them away.”

(Image of John Reeves by Thomas Hardy, 1792, via Wikimedia Commons)

Michael Tesler tries to measure how “TV helped change attitudes about marijuana”:

The large increase in support for legalization over the past decade was concentrated among Americans who watch a lot of TV. After accounting for other variables, support for marijuana legalization has increased by almost 20 percentage points among individuals who watch at least four hours of TV a day (nearly one-third of the population). Meanwhile, opinions remained relatively static among Americans who do not watch much television.

One his commenters contends that the Internet played a bigger role:

On any 30 minute discussion show, there are at least five minutes of commercials, five minutes of introduction, and five minutes of the host asking questions. That leaves 15 minutes divided by 2. If you speak at 100 WPM, that gives you 750 words to tell all there is to know about the subject. Don’t refer to any books because saying the titles will only waste precious air time, and no one will remember them, anyway. If you don’t win by knockout, you lose.

On the other hand, on the internet, each point can be explained in detail, authoritative references are a click away, and anyone from anywhere can participate for free. Idiots can run their mouths with stupid prohibitionist stuff on TV and get away with it simply because there isn’t time to go through all the stupidity. On the internet, they get handed their heads.