The Dish

by Katie Zavadski

Laila Alawa is tired of talking about it:

Ultimately, the issue at hand is not the discussion of being Muslim in America. The problem is the thought surrounding the discussion, an idea that it is not possible to consolidate the two identities – Muslim and American – in our community today. Although it might have been integral to confront in the community initially, it has reached a point where we are continuing still to overemphasize the topic, a decision that overshadows the real issues our community faces, point blank. The overshadowing serves, then, to validate the premise of mutual exclusivity between the two identities, throwing the Muslim American identity of many today into paralysis and confusion, as they suddenly are faced with the need for reconciliation between the two. We push ourselves two steps back by throwing identity into the way of oncoming traffic, and it only serves to harm rather than help us as a community.

Iram Ali disagrees, arguing that the issue is more complicated:

The notion of being Muslim in America is … inherently different from being a Muslim American, not because they identify two different groups of Muslims but because they are simply two different linguistic formations of a similar idea.

Sidelining “Muslim in America” as being problematic only decreases the lexicon for developing our Muslim American narrative. I am a Muslim American, but I can also face issues of being a Muslim in America, which is distinct from a Muslim anywhere else in the world. Acknowledging that Muslims in America have different circumstances from Muslims in other regions will also pave the necessary groundwork for us in other important matters that Alawa mentions, such as mental health or arts development. Muslims in America do not need one cultural identity or a single-mindedness about where to settle down in this globalized world in order for us to be a collective community. Our identity issues, accumulating in this melting pot of different cultures and ideas, are an integral dimension of our Americanness.

(Photo: Muslim-American men greet each other at the annual Eid al-Adha prayer held at the Teaneck Armory in Teaneck, New Jersey. Eid al-Adha, also known as the Feast of the Sacrifice, commemorates Abraham’s willingness to sacrifice his son as an act of obedience to God, who in accordance with tradition then provided a lamb in the boy’s place. By Robert Nickelsberg/Getty Images)

by Jonah Shepp

Mike Konczal tears down the right-wing trope that private charity can be an adequate substitute for government social insurance, looking at the historical role of the state in building and maintaining America’s safety net:

One problem with the conservative vision of charity is that it assumes the government hasn’t been playing a role in the management of risk and social insurance from the beginning. It imagines that there is some golden period to return to, free from any and all government interference. As Senator Lee has said, “From our very Founding, we not only fought a war on poverty—we were winning.” How did we do it? According to Lee, it was with our “voluntary civil society.” We started losing only when the government got involved.

This was never the case, and a significant amount of research has been done over the past several decades to overturn the myth of a stateless nineteenth century and to rediscover the lost role of the state in the pre-New Deal world.

The government’s footprint has always grown alongside the rest of society. The public post office helped unite the national civil society Alexis de Tocqueville found and celebrated in his travels throughout the United States. From tariff walls to the continental railroad system to the educated workforce coming out of land-grant schools, the budding industrial power of the United States was always joined with the growth of the government. The government played a major role throughout the nineteenth century in providing disaster relief in the aftermath of fires, floods, storms, droughts, famine, and more.

James Kwak backs him up:

This shouldn’t come as a surprise. There are basic economic reasons why public social insurance is superior to voluntary charity. The goal here is to protect people against risk: of unemployment, of health emergency, of outliving one’s savings, and so on. For a risk-mitigation scheme to work, there are a few things that are necessary. One is that people actually be covered. This is something you can never have with a private system (unless it’s regulated to the point of being essentially public), since charities get to pick and choose whom they want to help. …

Another thing you want is the assurance that the system has the financial capacity to actually protect you in the event of a crisis. That’s why you don’t depend on your neighbors to rebuild your house if it burns down. Besides the fact that they may not like you, they probably don’t have enough money—especially if you lose your house in a fire that burns down the entire neighborhood. As I’ve said many times before, there is no other entity in the country—and not really one in the world—with the financial capacity of the federal government. Even state governments scramble to cut benefits when push comes to shove, which is one reason why some states provide Medicaid coverage to almost no one.

by Patrick Appel

McKay Coppins heralds the decline of conservative publishing:

Borders bookstores, whose widespread placement in exurban malls and rural communities made them magnets for right-leaning customers, shut down in 2011. And the web has decimated the subscription-based “book clubs” that launched a slew of conservative best-sellers in the ’90s and early 2000s.

Meanwhile, the proliferation of conservative publishers has made the economics of their genre much tougher, with an ever-increasing number of books competing for an audience that hasn’t grown much since the ’90s. One agent compared conservative literature to Young Adult fiction, an unsexy niche genre that quietly pulled in respectable profits for years until the big houses took notice, and began entering into bidding wars for promising authors, and flooding the market in a frenzied attempt to find the next Twilight.

While best-sellers by famous pundits like Bill O’Reilly’s Killing Jesus, and Charles Krauthammer’s Things That Matter continue to give conservative publishing a veneer of wild success, publishers say the ruthless competition on the right has made it increasingly difficult to turn a profit on midlist books.

Waldman thinks this “is mostly a reflection of the problems in the publishing industry as a whole”:

But one sub-niche that is definitely suffering is the pre-presidential-campaign book. Bizarrely, publishers still compete fervently to sign every last senator running a quixotic presidential campaign, on the off-chance that he might become president and then his book would sell spectacularly. But all but one of the candidates fails, and then the publishers have wasted their money. Just look at the pathetic sales some of these guys have generated [see chart above]

Drum blames Obama Derangement Syndrome:

Obama drove conservatives into such frenzies of hysteria that their books lost the potential to appeal to anyone except the most hardcore dittoheads. I mean, Ann Coulter built a whole career on writing ever more outrageous things in order to get a rise out of liberals, but what can you do when you’re competing with, say, Jerome R. Corsi, PhD? It’s hopeless. He makes Coulter look positively sedate.

When everyone turns the dial to 11, you aren’t a niche anymore. You’re just a crackpot fringe.

by Katie Zavadski

On Monday, in order to reduce smog, Paris tried ban half of its cars from driving that day. Emily Badger warns that these types of bans can backfire:

From an environmental standpoint, there are at least two ways to try to rein in pollution from vehicles: We can either improve the technology itself (getting cleaner, more efficient cars on the road), or we can try to reduce how much people use it. Unfortunately, evidence suggests that attempts at the second strategy often undercut the first one.

Research out of Beijing has found that the ongoing one-day-a-week ban has reduced particulate matter there by about nine percent. But a study out of Mexico City found no positive environmental benefits from the regular ban there, for a fascinating reason.

People really like to drive, and they’ll come up with some seriously inventive ways around restrictions. In Mexico City, it appears that many people bought cheap, used second cars (you’ve got your odd car and your even car) to get around the license plate rule. In effect, it appears as if the ban caused an increase in the total number of cars on Mexico City’s roads, tilting the makeup of the entire fleet toward less fuel-efficient vehicles.

Zachary Shan considers what Paris did wrong and right:

The positive move taken in Paris, in my opinion, is that the ban excluded electric cars, hybrids, and people who carpooled (3 or more people to a car). So, rather than being encouraged to buy more cars of lower quality, such a policy would encourage people to buy electric cars and hybrids. But the concern mentioned above still seems valid. So far, studies on such bans have reportedly come to mixed conclusions.

Is there a better solution? It seems there are a couple of solutions that have been shown to work better: low emission zones (LEZs) and congestion charges. They go about the matter in different ways, so can actually offer better results when combined.

by Patrick Appel

Rogin and Lake see it as a possibility:

Nobody knows if and how Russia will follow through on its threats to sacrifice the Iran talks to try rob Obama of the main diplomatic accomplishment of his second term as president. Russia could pull out of the so-called “P5+1” group—the world powers currently negotiating with Iran. Or Moscow could stop cooperating on international sanctions on Iran, easing pressure on Tehran and helping Russian businesses.

Roger Cohen casts doubt on the idea that Russia would cease working on the Iranian nuclear deal, noting that “Russia has its own interest in stopping nuclear proliferation, and even the Cold War did not preclude cooperation in some areas.” Larison isn’t so sure:

Moscow has been much less alarmed by Iran’s nuclear program than Western governments are. Russia may not want Iran to have nuclear weapons, but it seems much less worried that Iran is likely to acquire them. The other argument is that Russia doesn’t want to sabotage diplomacy with Iran because that would make U.S. military action more likely, but it’s not so obvious that it would greatly harm Russian interests if the U.S. and Iran couldn’t resolve the nuclear issue peacefully. Russia benefits in some ways from ongoing U.S.-Iranian hostility, and it is not harmed if the U.S. ends up waging yet another war in the Near East.

Walter Russell Mead makes related points:

[I]f Russia did manage to stop the talks dead, the result wouldn’t automatically be an Iranian bomb. The first result would be to put Obama into the horrible, no-win situation he has spent his whole presidency working hard to avoid: where his only two choices are military action against Iran and accepting an Iranian nuclear weapon. If (as the White House has continually insisted that he would) he goes for force, the United States gets involved in another Middle Eastern war, and Russia enjoys a huge financial windfall as oil prices skyrocket and a propaganda windfall as the United States (without a UN mandate, which Russia would take care to block) takes on yet another preventative war in a Middle Eastern country.

Or, alternatively, the United States endures its most humiliating and devastating foreign policy defeat in decades, leaving its prestige in tatters and its global alliance system fundamentally weakened as yet another of President Obama’s red lines, this one much brighter and deeper than the one in Syria, gets crossed—with impunity.