Tag: Premium

Should We Know Where Our Food Comes From?

by Phoebe Maltz Bovy

As someone who’s long been skeptical on that front, I got a kick out of James Ramsden’s response to the food-knowledge pseudo-crisis in Britain:

[A] new survey by BBC Good Food Magazine has found our knowledge of the seasons to be pitiful. Of the 2,000 people polled, only 5% could say when blackberries were plump and juicy. And 4% guessed accurately at when plums were at their best. One in 10 could pinpoint the season for gooseberries. All of this is despite 86% professing to believe in the importance of seasonality, and 78% claiming to shop seasonally.

In the great scheme of our foodish shortcomings – the obesity, the steady rise of ready meals, our unwillingness to cook – does it really matter if people don’t know when a broad bean is in season?

“Know where your food comes from,” though, is the standby answer of what would make us improve our diets. But is that the case? Should individual consumers of food (that is, all of us) become experts in food production? Is that even possible? And what if a little – but insufficient – knowledge leads us to the wrong choices, “wrong” defined as the opposite of what we think we’re accomplishing when (ugh) voting with our dollars? Farmer Bren Smith recently cast doubt on consumers’ abilities in this area (NYT):

Especially in urban areas, supporting your local farmer may actually mean buying produce from former hedge fund managers or tax lawyers who have quit the rat race to get some dirt under their fingernails.

We call it hobby farming, where recreational “farms” are allowed to sell their products at the same farmers’ markets as commercial farms. It’s all about property taxes, not food production. As Forbes magazine suggested to its readers in its 2012 Investment Guide, now is the time to “farm like a billionaire,” because even a small amount of retail sales — as low as $500 a year in New Jersey — allows landowners to harvest more tax breaks than tomatoes.

Knowing where your food comes from may seem like a harmless-enough activity, at least if the worst that comes of it is, you’ve accidentally bought a tomato from a retired 35-year-old financier. And there’s something to be said for knowing that your food isn’t tainted, that neither workers nor animals were abused, although ideally (IMHO, as they say), this is something the state would take care of, not individual consumers conducting individual research projects.

The problem comes when it shifts from hobby to moral necessity, and when – as Emily Matchar has convincingly argued – the burden of dietary expertise ends up falling on women. The food-movement refrain – that we don’t think enough about what goes into our digestive tracts – also ignores that many women already think about this plenty, a point made most eloquently in a newspaper comment from a while back. Commenter Anath White wrote:

I adore Mark Bittman (and even received his boxed cookbooks last Christmas) but surely he must mean MEN when he writes “a time when few of us thought about what we ate?” A bit younger than he is, I’ve been aware of what I eat since my teens – in other words, most of my life. And I’d wager most of the women he knows would say the same thing.

Indeed.

Does “Stupid” Have A Place In Political Discourse?

by Dish Staff

About two weeks ago, Paul Krugman caused a tiff by obliquely calling Paul Ryan “stupid,” leading Laurence Kotlikoff to respond, “No one, and I mean no one, deserves to be called stupid.” (Krugman later clarified that he believes Ryan isn’t stupid, but rather a “con man.”) In a post relevant to all in the blogosphere, Noah Smith mulls over the power of the s-word:

Now, calling people “stupid” is certainly not polite. But I never cease to be amazed at how effective it is in terms of making people choke on their own rage. People really do not like being called stupid. … In the end, I think people overreact to the “stupid” insult because, as a society, we use arguments the wrong way. We tend to treat arguments like debate competitions– two people argue in front of a crowd, and whoever wins gets the love and adoration of the crowd, and whoever loses goes home defeated and shamed. I guess that’s better than seeing arguments as threats of physical violence, but I still prefer the idea of arguing as a way to learn, to bounce ideas off of other people. Proving you’re smart is a pointless endeavor (unless you’re looking for a job), and is an example of what Stanford University psychologist Carol Dweck calls a “fixed mindset.” As the band Sparks once sang, “Everybody’s stupid – that’s for sure.” What matters is going in the right direction – becoming less stupid, little by little.

Megan McArdle similarly sees “stupid” as a rhetorical crutch:

Ultimately, calling people stupid is simply a performance for the fellow travelers in your audience. It’s a way that we can all come together and agree that we don’t have to engage with some argument, because the person making it is a bovine lackwit without the basic intellectual equipment to come in out of the rain. So the first message it sends – “don’t listen to opposing arguments” – is a stupid message that is hardly going to make anyone smarter. The second message it sends is even worse: “If he’s stupid, then we, who disagree with him, are the opposite of stupid, and can rest steady in the assurance of our cognitive superiority.” Feeding your own arrogance is an expansive, satisfying feeling. It is also the feeling of you getting stupider.

Update from a reader:

When Krugman suggested that Paul Ryan was a “stupid person’s idea of what a thoughtful person sounds like,” he was not calling Paul Ryan stupid. He was, quite plainly, suggesting that those who thought that Ryan was thoughtful were the stupid ones.

Another elaborates:

I read both Krugman’s original article and his supposed clarification and I did not at all get the impression that he was calling Paul Ryan stupid. He begins with a quote by Ezra Klein, in which he describes Dick Armey as “A stupid person’s idea of what a thoughtful person sounds like”. Krugman goes on:

It’s a funny line, which applies to quite a few public figures. Representative Paul Ryan, the chairman of the House Budget Committee, is a prime current example. But maybe the joke’s on us. After all, such people often dominate policy discourse. And what policy makers don’t know, or worse, what they think they know that isn’t so, can definitely hurt you.

This is Krugman’s only reference to Ryan in the entire column, so this has got to be where his critics are accusing him of, at the very least, implying that Ryan is stupid. However, the plain reading of the passage does not bear this interpretation out. This is, after all, English grammar. Words have consequences.

Obviously, Paul Ryan is a public figure who, in Krugman’s estimation (and to follow his implied comparison), would be a substitute for Dick Armey in Klein’s quote. Krugman is in no way saying that Ryan is stupid, but rather that he is “A stupid person’s idea of what a _______ person sounds like”. In this blank you could insert the word “smart”, “serious” or any one of a number of descriptions, but I think it is quite clear that Ryan is NOT being singled out as being stupid. At least, not by Krugman is this particular column he isn’t.

With that said, Krugman DOES seem to be obliquely accusing anyone who believes that austerity cures recessions and that stimulus spending makes them worse of being wrong and, perhaps even wrong-headed. In fact, you might even take that a step further and accuse Krugman of calling pretty much anybody who believes these things stupid, but those who interpret him as specifically calling Paul Ryan “stupid” here are, I hate to say it, kind of stupid.

Kimono Cardigans

by Phoebe Maltz Bovy

A Tokyo style blogger recently took issue with a mislabeled kimono:

While it seems like the accompanying photo of a sundress was unintentional and due to the awkwardness of Twitter image selection (the linked Telegraph article includes story-appropriate images), this tweet started a conversation about the various non-kimono items currently going by “kimono”:

Indeed, there’s “kimono” everything, even, from Kate Spade of all places, a kimono-themed iPad cover.

Graham Ruddick explains the pseudo-kimono trend in Britain:

The kimono is a traditional Japanese garment that has been historically known as a thin full-length robe influenced by the east Asian culture However, it has been reimagined for western shoppers in a similar form to a casual cardigan and is flying off the shelves of fashion retailers. New Look is selling a kimono every five seconds, the equivalent of 1,440 a day, and claims to have been the first major fashion chain to sell them in the UK.

Things did not go so well the last time a traditional garment was “reimagined for western shoppers in a similar form to a casual cardigan.” Remember Navajo-chic-gate of 2011-2012?

What often happens, in such conversations, is a descent into utter confusion. It’s not clear where the line falls between the cultures one can and cannot dress as. A generic “British” is presumably fine – by all means, take Hyacinth Bucket as your style inspiration. (Some of those floral dressed weren’t bad, in a kind of Elaine Benes way…) But how about the traditional dress of Estonia? Is the line whiteness-or-not, the wealth of the country, or both? It seems not all that exploitative – if still Orientalist – to go out and buy all Korean skincare products after reading a blog post about how Korean women get “poreless skin.” (Yes, I do believe that positive stereotypes about East Asian women’s skin were Edward Said’s main concern.)

Now for some first-person-as-second-person:

If you happen to be a bit of a Francophile and a Japanophile, is one of these acceptable but not the other? Is a Breton-inspired shirt from Muji or Uniqlo (says someone who owns both) different than a kimono-inspired cardigan from a Western European company? If you yourself are of an ethnicity (Eastern European Jewish) that was, until relatively recently, thought to be in disguise if in Western attire, aren’t you sort of always culturally appropriating (unless in Hasidic garb), or is this just like everything else to do with white privilege – all that matters is the time you live in? My ancestors would have been defined as ‘Oriental,’ but I am not.

Discussions of cultural appropriation, at least in the first person, tend to inspire such sinkholes. Consider the following, from Jarune Uwujaren’s 2013 post:

Is the Asian fusion takeout I order every week culturally appropriative? Even though I’m Black, is wearing dreadlocks appropriating forms of religious expression that really don’t belong to me? Is meditating cultural appropriation? Is Western yoga appropriation? Is eating a burrito, cosplaying, being truly fascinated by another culture, decorating with Shoji screens, or wearing a headscarf cultural appropriation?

Each, then, to her own, culturally-specific sinkhole.

The best I can conclude is as follows: If people of the group in question are offended, then you have to at least consider that you’ve crossed a line. I mean, you don’t have to. I suppose one could take the approach that the offended are in the wrong, but in such cases, why? There are times when violating rules of PC is courageous, but wearing a headdress to a music festival after learning that this offends many American Indians isn’t one of them. As for the kimono cardigans, it seems as if the offensiveness comes not from Westerners wearing traditional Japanese dress because they find it attractive, but rather from things that are not kimonos being labeled as such. And – speaking still more generally – if the culture you’re appropriating from looks down its nose at you, someone from what they view as an inferior culture, trying to imitate theirs (hi, France!), you’re in the clear.

The Knots Of Depression

by Dish Staff

Like Elizabeth, Rod Dreher uses the death of Robin Williams to discuss his own experiences with depression:

It seems so elemental — of course your mental state affects your perception of reality, duh! — but unless you’ve lived through it, it’s hard to understand how profound it can be. I walked around the house as if I were wearing a heavy wool blanket soaked in cold water almost all the time. Reason is largely powerless in the face of it. You can’t just snap out of it. You can’t make an argument for why you shouldn’t be depressed, and why things are really not as bad as you think they are. I mean, you can try this, and maybe it will help a bit, but it’s like being tied up and thrown off a pier, and being told by well-meaning people standing on the pier how you can save yourself by swimming to safety.

Some people — like Robin Williams — are not going to be able to save themselves, or be saved, for the same reason that some people who are thrown into the water bound by knots they did not tie will drown. I could be wrong about this, but I trust in the mercy of God in the case of poor souls who suffer so much that they cannot see any other way to relieve their pain.

The death prompted Ty Foster to come out as bipolar:

I can’t speak for anywhere else, and I can’t really speak for any other disabilities, but I know that in my home country [the US], we are still quite a long way from eliminating the stigma that surrounds mental illness. When I’m depressed, it’s hard enough to get myself to the bathroom and back, let alone getting myself to a freaking doctor. Recovery is made all the more difficult by the fact that the world around me, in many insidious ways, causes me to feel even more alone, weird, creepy, scrutinized, awkward, unworthy than I already would. So the hell with that world.

Relatedly, Jason Millman flags research finding that “improvements in understanding mental illness … didn’t help reduce the social stigma”:

People were more likely to say they didn’t want an alcoholic to marry into the family (up from 70 percent to 79 percent) or have someone with schizophrenia as a neighbor (up from 34 percent to 45 percent). Most in 2006 also said they were unwilling to work closely with someone who had schizophrenia (62 percent) or alcohol dependence (74 percent), and most thought people with either illness would likely be violent.

“There was no support that greater scientific understanding translated into reduced prejudice in the United States or elsewhere,” Pescosolido wrote in a more recent March 2013 review of research into the social stigma around mental illness. Reducing the stigma, she points out, will depend on a better understanding of the social and cultural factors shaping it.

Vladimir Putin, Locavore, Ctd

by Dish Staff

annual-change-in-euro-zone-consumer-price-indexes-all-items-fruit-vegetables_chartbuilder

Jason Karaian looks at how Putin’s counter-sanctions on EU produce imports stand to affect European farmers and consumers:

While it’s never a good time for farmers to lose a big market like Russia, now is particularly inopportune. Bumper crops have pushed down prices in recent months, which is bad for producers as well as policymakers—the euro zone has been flirting with deflation this year, and a glut of produce once destined for Russia but dumped closer to home could push prices down even further[.]

“We can only hope that European consumers eat more pears,” a Belgian fruit farmer told the Wall Street Journal (paywall). … To add insult to injury, the upcoming apple harvest in Europe will be one for the record books, according to an industry forecast published yesterday. “The same day it’s announced we have a big crop our largest customer, Russia, stops buying, so it’s like a Black Thursday,” the commercial manager of a French apple concern told FreshPlaza. “The producers will be hit,” an Athens fruit seller told Euronews.

And Alec Luhn measures the impact, as well as the politics, of the ban in Russia:

State-controlled television has been downplaying any effects of the ban. “Consumers will barely be able to notice any price increase…. Even if people have to travel abroad for some dishes, it will lead to greater profits for Russian tourist firms,” reporters on Rossiya 24 exclaimed during a newscast on Friday, Aug. 8. But analysts predict an overall rise in food prices that will further exacerbate inflation, which has already risen beyond the Central Bank’s predictions to 7.5 percent.

The import ban doesn’t only affect luxury goods. Almost one-third of Russian families don’t obtain the minimum amount of calories and nutrients designated by the Health Ministry, according to the Russian Presidential Academy of National Economy and Public Administration, and they will likely have even more difficulty as cheap products from Ukraine are taken off the shelves.

Bershidsky highlights the ban’s potential impact on Putin’s shaky Eurasian Economic Union project, which the Russian president still wants as part of his legacy:

Putin has not given up. Rebuilding at least a smaller, narrower version of the Soviet Union remains at the center of his agenda. He wants it to be part of his legacy. Armenia — dissuaded by Moscow from EU association — and Kyrgyzstan are on track to join the EEU this year. As of 2015, the member states will harmonize their tax systems.

The other members of Putin’s union, however, don’t have the same interest in imposing or enforcing a ban on imported food. Belarus and Kazakhstan have nothing to retaliate against: Only Russia faces Western sanctions. “This is our domestic matter,” Belarussian President Alexander Lukashenko said yesterday. “If we need Polish apples, we buy them, but for our domestic market, not for Russia.” Kazakhstan President Nursultan Nazarbayev’s press service clarified after he talked to Putin on the phone that the food embargo was “Russia’s unilateral measure that doesn’t involve” other EEU members.

In Anne Applebaum’s view, the trade angle of this conflict puts to rest the “McDonald’s theory of international relations”:

This week, as Russia, a country with 433 McDonald’s, ramps up its attack on Ukraine, a country with 77 McDonald’s, I think we can finally now declare the McPeace theory officially null and void. Indeed, the future of McDonald’s in Russia, which once seemed so bright—remember the long lines in Moscow for Big Macs?—has itself grown dim. In July, the Russian consumer protection agency sued McDonald’s for supposedly violating health regulations. This same consumer protection agency also banned Georgian wine and mineral water “for sanitary reasons” at the time of the 2008 Russian-Georgian war, and it periodically lashes out at Lithuanian cheese, Polish meat, and other politically unacceptable products as well. …

This week—as Russia bans most American, European, Canadian, Australian, and Japanese agricultural goods—globalization suddenly began to unravel a lot faster than anybody imagined. Vladimir Putin knew sanctions were coming and openly declared that he didn’t care. He also knows that a trade war will hurt a wide range of his countrymen, but he didn’t mind that either.

A Breakdown In Kabul?

by Dish Staff

The agreement John Kerry brokered to resolve the Afghan presidential election crisis is looking shaky today after Ashraf Ghani announced that he would not necessarily agree to share power with his rival Abdullah Abdullah if an ongoing audit of the vote showed that Ghani had won:

Ghani said the winner will appoint the loser “by decree” as a chief executive to serve “at the discretion of the president.” Abdullah has demanded more authority if he loses. Ghani also said Tuesday that although he “hoped” the audit of 8.1 million votes could be done in time to have the new president attend a NATO summit in early September, no inauguration date has been set because of “technical uncertainties” with the slow-going ballot review. He said both he and Abdullah will attend the summit, considered key to winning new foreign aid for the ailing Afghan economy. …

Ghani was careful Tuesday not to claim victory. But he spoke in a distinctly presidential tone as he laid out a wide-ranging policy agenda for the next government, including banking and anti-corruption initiatives as well as the rights of women and Taliban prisoners.

Representatives of the Ghani and Abdullah camps were scheduled to start a round of meetings today to hash out the technical details of the agreement. Omar Samad examines the potential pitfalls and what it will take to overcome them:

The contentious issues that are outstanding and still need to be ironed out are: 1. Planning for the upcoming transfer of power and identifying the new government’s priority challenges and collaborative frameworks. 2. Agreeing on a national governance agenda, drawing from the two sides’ respective electoral platforms and programs in sectors such as security, economy, foreign affairs, and social services. Figuring out unresolved issues should be left to professional advisory groups that could also involve non-partisan figures.

3. Defining the parameters of power sharing as part of a unity government structure. The two sides will need to step away from a zero-sum option, show flexibility and use creative methods to clearly define the authority of the president and the newly proposed post of chief executive. Models from other countries can used if applicable to the Afghan context.

But Jim White rolls his eyes:

With 15 negotiators on each side, I would expect that the first week or two of the negotiations will resolve such crucial issues as the shape of the table and the length of the breaks between sessions. They might also want to make a “no punching” rule, as there appears to have been another fight today while ballots were being reviewed.  It’s hard to see how Kerry could make a third trip to put the power sharing back on course since the first two have been such spectacular failures.

Thomas Scherer isn’t optimistic that the two men, each of whom believes himself to be the elected president of Afghanistan, will work things out in the end:

Why have the candidates continued to fight? There was almost certainly fraud on both sides as supporters took advantage of Afghanistan’s insecurity and institutional deficits and found varying ways to “rock the vote.” However, the mere presence of fraud rarely matters; the fraud must be great enough to change the results. The preliminary results of the June 14 run-off show Ghani ahead with 4.5 million votes to Abdullah’s 3.5 million, about 56 percent to 44 percent. Does Abdullah really believe that he can overcome a million-vote difference?

I argue, with a couple assumptions, that Abdullah can reasonably believe that he can still win. As such, the parties will continue to fight over every vote and escalate when necessary, further threatening the stability of Afghanistan. This high-stakes game of electoral chicken will likely continue until the two sides collide or until the United States, desperate for some semblance of stability, can persuade a candidate to accept defeat.

A Cure For Ebola? Ctd

by Dish Staff

Yesterday the World Health Organization determined that it is “ethically sound” to administer promising but unproven Ebola treatments on a wide scale, countering earlier criticism that one such treatment, the experimental antibody therapy ZMapp, had been made available exclusively to Westerners. The Liberian government has announced that it will be administering the drug to two afflicted doctors in the country, but as Josh Lowensohn notes, it remains unclear just how much medicine will ultimately make it to West Africa:

Supplies of the drug have also dwindled due to difficulties producing it, though Canada today said it would donate 800 to 1,000 doses of the drug to be used in aid efforts. A separate drug called TKM-Ebola, which is also developed in Canada, could end up being used as well after getting a nod from the US Food and Drug Administration last week to restart human testing of the drug on those who are already infected.

Peter Loftus notes ominously, “The maker of the experimental Ebola drug that was given to two infected Americans said Monday that its supply has been exhausted after the company provided doses to a West African nation [presumably Liberia]”:

Mapp Biopharmaceutical Inc. said in a brief online statement it had complied with every request for the drug that had the necessary legal and regulatory authorization. The company said it provided the drug, called ZMapp, at no cost in all cases. San Diego-based Mapp didn’t name any countries that requested the drug and didn’t release additional details.

Alexandra Sifferlin considers how health officials will make the tough decisions about administering the drugs:

[N]ow the question is: With not enough to go around, who gets them? That’s ultimately at the discretion of the countries themselves, and before that happens, there’s a waiting period as the WHO formulates another panel of technical experts to create guidelines for the best use of these drugs. Some of the questions they will try to answer are: At what stage of the disease are the drugs or vaccines effective? Are they effective at the beginning of the disease or at the later stages? What are the safety issues related to the drugs? What’s the efficacy of the drug—do 30 percent of people respond or 50 percent?

“It think [who gets the drugs] is one of the most difficult questions to answer,” says Dr. Abha Saxena, the coordinator for the global ethics team at WHO. “There is a limited supply and there is a lot of demand. But who gets it is contextual, it will depend upon on the country, the situation, and they type of drug that will eventually go forward into either trial or compassionate use.” The panel will meet by the end of this month.

Meanwhile, Amanda Taub suggests that “most of the people Ebola kills may never actually contract it”:

New, worrying information from Sierra Leone suggests that damage from the disease may go far beyond deaths from the Ebola virus itself. Rather, Ebola is claiming more victims by damaging already-weak local health systems and their ability to respond to other medical problems, from malaria to emergency c-sections. The ebola-driven rise in deaths from those other maladies may outpace the deaths from ebola itself.

The effect of the loss of services may be severe. Even before the Ebola outbreak, Sierra Leone was ranked the seventh-worst country in the world for maternal and child mortality. In 2012, the aid group Save the Children reported that 18 percent of children in Sierra Leone did not survive to age 5, and one in 25 women died of childbirth or pregnancy-related causes. If these fears prove correct, those numbers may be about to get much worse.

Egypt Is Led By A Mass Murderer

by Dish Staff

That’s the conclusion of a Human Rights Watch investigation into the killings of at least 817 and probably over 1,000 Egyptians during the dispersal of pro-Morsi demonstrators from Rabaa al-Adawiya Square a year ago tomorrow. The massacre, HRW contends, was deliberate, premeditated, and readily qualifies as a crime against humanity:

The 195-page investigation based on interviews with 122 survivors and witnesses has found Egypt‘s police and army “systematically and deliberately killed largely unarmed protesters on political grounds” in actions that “likely amounted to crimes against humanity”. The report recommends that several senior individuals within Egypt’s security apparatus be investigated and, where appropriate, held to account for their role in the planning of both the Rabaa massacre and others that occurred last summer – including Abdel Fatah al-Sisi, Egypt’s then defence minister and new president. As head of the army at the time, Sisi had overall responsibility for the army’s role at Rabaa, and has publicly acknowledged spending “very many long days to discuss all the details”.

HRW’s executive director Kenneth Roth, who was refused entry into Egypt for “security” reasons when he arrived in Cairo on Sunday to present the report’s findings, further details the role of Sisi:

There is every reason to believe that this was a planned operation implicating officials at the very top of the Egyptian government. Interior Minister Mohamed Ibrahim was the lead architect of the dispersal plan. His immediate supervisor, in charge of all security operations, was Abdel Fattah al-Sisi, who was then defense minister and deputy prime minister for security affairs and is now Egypt’s president. In discussions prior to the dispersal, senior Interior Ministry officials spoke of anticipating thousands of deaths. The day after the slaughter, Ibrahim said it had all gone exactly according to plan, and later gave bonuses to participants.

The Rabaa dispersal was part of a pattern of cases across Egypt in which security forces used excessive force, including killing 61 participants at a sit-in protest outside the Republican Guard headquarters on July 8, and another 95 protesters near the Manassa Memorial in eastern Cairo on July 27.

But don’t hold your breath waiting for Sisi to be referred to the International Criminal Court. Owen Jones is outraged that the brutality of the Egyptian regime gets little press in the West, even as the US and UK funnel vast amounts of money, weapons, and other support to Sisi:

Too little has been said about Egypt’s human rights crisis. More than 40,000 people were detained or indicted in the first 10 months after the coup and, according to Amnesty International, the regime is usingmethods of torture from “the darkest days of the Hosni Mubarak era”. With “rampant torture, arbitrary arrests and detentions”, there has been a “catastrophic decline in human rights”. There have been claims of rape against male political dissidents; the use of electrocution, including on prisoners’ testicles; and in one case, a hot steel rod was inserted in the anus of a dissident who later died. …

Egypt is in the grip of a violent tyranny that brooks little dissent. And just as the west is complicit in Israel’s attack on Gaza, it equally shares some responsibility for the actions of Egypt’s regime. The question is surely, how many more corpses until we start holding those responsible to account?

Read the Dish’s extensive coverage of last summer’s bloodshed in Cairo here.

Did Snowden Tip Off Al-Qaeda’s Cryptographers? Ctd

by Jonah Shepp

Not by a long shot, Glenn Greenwald and Andrew Fishman answer, hitting back forcefully at the report claiming that al-Qaeda overhauled its cryptography in response to the Snowden leaks. To begin with, they point out that Recorded Future, the intelligence firm that issued the report, has deep and longstanding financial ties to the US intelligence community and as such cannot be considered an independent referee. Furthermore, another Snowden document reveals that al-Qaeda already knew about Western intelligence agencies’ surveillance technologies and how to get around them, long before Snowden came into the picture:

The Recorded Future “report”—which was actually nothing more than a short blog post—is designed to bolster the year-long fear-mongering campaign of U.S. and British officials arguing that terrorists would realize the need to hide their communications and develop effective means of doing so by virtue of the Snowden reporting. … But actual terrorists—long before the Snowden reporting—have been fixated on developing encryption methods and other techniques to protect their communications from electronic surveillance. And they have succeeded in a quite sophisticated manner.

One document found in the GCHQ archive provided by Snowden is a 45-page, single-spaced manual that the British spy agency calls a “Jihadist Handbook.” Though undated, the content suggests it was originally written in 2002 or 2003: more than 10 years before the Snowden reporting began. It appears to have been last updated shortly after September 2003, and translated into English by GCHQ sometime in 2005 or 2006. … So sophisticated is the 10-year-old “Jihadist Manual” that, in many sections, it is virtually identical to the GCHQ’s own manual, developed years later (in 2010), for instructing its operatives how to keep their communications secure[.]

Greenwald and Fishman also stress that the report offers no evidence to support a causal link between the Snowden leaks and al-Qaeda’s recent crypto upgrades:

Critically, even if one wanted to accept Recorded Future’s timeline as true, there are all sorts of plausible reasons other than Snowden revelations why these groups would have been motivated to develop new encryption protections. One obvious impetus is the August 2013 government boasting to McClatchy (and The Daily Beast) that the State Department ordered the closing of 21 embassies because of what it learned from an intercepted “conference call” among Al Qaeda leaders

This speaks to an infraction we in the media are frequently guilty of: lending greater weight to new information when it feeds into a pre-existing narrative, regardless of whether that new information is credible on its own merits. Officials in the government and the intelligence community have spent the past year crying to the press that Snowden’s revelations have weakened America’s defenses against terrorism by revealing our tradecraft to our enemies. Spooks are not wont to provide proof for such claims, because the evidence always seems to be classified, but “if only we knew what they knew”, we’d see that they were right. And it requires no great leaps of logic to intuit that al-Qaeda and its allies, who clearly know a thing or two about the Internet, might have come across the Snowden leaks and used them to their advantage.

So that narrative, underpinned by intuition but not hard evidence, became conventional, at least on one side of the surveillance debate. There was a demand for proof of that received wisdom, and when something purporting to be that proof came to light, the product was delivered to the market with all due speed. And giving people tools to support the opinions they already hold, rather than distinguishing truth from propaganda, is the core business of much of today’s clickbaity media. That’s a serious problem.

On the other hand, the full impact of these leaks won’t be clear for some time, and the question of whether and to what extent they exposed us to new threats is not conclusively settled, so Snowden and Greenwald can’t claim vindication any more surely than their critics can call them traitors and terrorists. But the broader point, that Snowden shouldn’t be convicted of treason in the court of public opinion solely based on accusations and innuendo, stands strong. We’d do well to remember that the next time we come across “evidence” like this.

Just Another Ceasefire, Or Something More? Ctd

by Dish Staff

J.J. Goldberg passes along news from the Israeli press that Israeli and Palestinian negotiators have come close to reaching an agreement on a long-term Gaza ceasefire during Egyptian-brokered talks in Cairo. He relays the reported terms of the agreement: on the Israeli side, these include a halt to hostilities, Israeli control over border crossings between Gaza and Israel, and PA control over payments to public workers in Gaza. The Palestinian delegation is demanding an expansion of the coastal waters open to Gaza fishermen, the opening of the Rafah crossing into Egypt, and an expansion of amount and variety of goods Israel transports into Gaza. Other demands appear to have been set aside for the time being:

The Palestinians have agreed to drop for now their demands for a Gaza seaport and reopening of the Dahaniya airport in Gaza. Israel and Egypt had opposed the opening of a Gaza seaport out of fear that Hamas would use it to import weapons. Israel’s position is that it will not agree to opening a Gaza seaport until agreement has been reached on a verifiable, enforceable disarmament of Hamas and demilitarization of Gaza.

For the present, Israel is said to have dropped its demand for demilitarization of Gaza. There was never any chance that Hamas would agree to it, and as such it would require a complete reconquest of Gaza and defeat of Hamas. That, as the heads of the Israel Defense Forces warned the cabinet last week, would require a massive operation that would devastate Gaza and lead to Israel’s complete isolation internationally.

Yishai Schwartz expects these negotiations to come to nothing and the war to end in a stalemate, as neither party is willing to compromise much:

Given the incompatibility of the sides’ respective goals, it’s clear that negotiations are a bit of a farce. In the short term, Hamas seeks an arrangement that expands its legitimacy at the expense of the Palestinian Authority; Israel seeks to weaken Hamas and enhance the authority of the Palestinian Authority. Hamas seeks rearmament; Israel seeks demilitarization. In the long term, Hamas seeks Israel’s dissolution and replacement with an Islamist state. Israel seeks a reliable normalcy for its citizens, and is currently deeply divided over whether it wants, needs, or can even afford the creation of a Palestinian State. These objectives are simply not reconcilable. …

Instead, both sides will likely resign themselves to some sort of renewed modus vivendi that is only slightly less terrible than the status quo. Israel and Hamas will agree to a partial weakening of the blockade in exchange for a nominal effort at demilitarization.

In the meantime, activists are organizing another flotilla of boats to run the Gaza blockade. Dish alum Katie Zavadski can guess how that will turn out:

Like the one in 2010, this flotilla will come from the IHH Humanitarian Relief Foundation, a Turkish NGO, complete with very concerned activists from 12 countries. The group, part of the Freedom Flotilla Coalition (which describes itself as “a grassroots people-to-people solidarity movement composed of campaigns and initiatives from all over the world working together to end the siege of Gaza”), told Reuters that this is being organized “in the shadow of the latest Israeli aggression on Gaza.”

Of course, since the seven-plus-year blockade of Gaza is a handy bargaining chip for Israel, we can already tell you how this will likely go: Tensions will flare as the ship(s) near Gaza, refusing to be inspected by Israeli forces. Eventually, the IDF will raid them. There may be casualties. And inevitably, the “humanitarian mission” will set back peace talks even further because this will be touted as another show of Israeli aggression.