Tag: Premium

Trend Anticipation

by Phoebe Maltz Bovy

Rachel Hodin at Into The Gloss declares delicate jewelry so last season:

As someone who’s skilled in the art of falling (and then breaking those falls with her hands), a change from the popular dainty ring scenario feels in order. However, it wasn’t until I stumbled on Erin Wasson’s Instagram (“stumbled” being an exalted term for my stalking habits these days) that I could finally visualize it: thick gold rings. Paired with nothing more than plain pants and a basic white tee, Erin’s ring game looks fresh in comparison to ‘gram upon ‘gram of dainty finger stacks (though it’s probably mostly vintage).

This is a real shame, because the dainty rings Hodin finds insufficiently “fresh” are much prettier than the clunky ones that barely manage to work on Erin Wasson, the model-about-town wearing them. While I’m not super into rings myself, and only wear the ones that may cause others to question my feminist principles, for other jewelry, or jewelry on other people, I suppose I’m Team Dainty. But that is not our principle concern.

So, back to Hodin: The ‘grams in question refer not (just) to the weight of a really tiny ring, but to Instagram. As every last Dish reader surely knows, for some time now, all the fashion-blogger-types were posting pictures of themselves with dainty rings, sometimes stacked, often worn in addition to wedding and engagement rings. Sometimes worn, bafflingly, at the knuckle. (How do those stay on? Answer, from the infinitely stylish Garance Doré: They don’t.) This was the look of 2013, which explains why, in 2014, the NYT style pages have announced that dainty is so very now. As has Forbes.

A cynic would consider the possibility that someone trying to sell clunky rings has PR’d said jewelry onto Wasson, hoping that enough shots of this edgy-gorgeous woman glaring, smoking, and giving the finger in a certain sort of ring would convince us plebs to go out and buy the same kind of ring. (Learned the hard way: Just because a look works on Alexa Chung, it may not work on you. Presumably this principle carries over to models and it-girls more generally.) But of course something along those lines must have been what brought us delicate rings as a thing. Still, that something is being marketed to us doesn’t mean it’s not appealing in its own right.

What was so brilliant about this ITG post was its timing. “Delicate” has been the thing for quite some time, which explains why the notoriously late-to-the-game NYT style pates only just now took notice. The NYT pieces suggest a knuckle-ringed finger to the pulse, but for whatever reason (a stodgy editorial process?), they’ve arrived once the moment’s over. That, or their arrival means that the moment’s over.

All of which gets us to the secret formula of trend anticipation. It involves identifying current trends once they’ve reached their peak and declaring the opposite look the hot new thing. Has the NYT discovered skinny jeans? Mom jeans are the thing. They just feel fresh.

While trend anticipation skills probably do have some financial use I have yet to harness, they don’t by any means need to determine our own sartorial choices. I will leave mom jeans and enormous gold rings to those at the cutting edge, and will stick with daintier denim and accessory options for my own trips to such glamorous places as the Wegmans parking lot.

It’s OK Not To Feel Anything When A Celebrity Dies, Ctd

by Dish Staff

A reader writes:

Thanks to Elizabeth Nolan Brown for her eloquent essay on Robin Williams.  This reminds me of when Princess Diana died. I found out when I walked to the corner store to buy the newspaper. I read the headline and thought “Shit, that’s too bad” and didn’t give it another thought. Then the worldwide hysteria erupted and it was all Diana, all the time.  I just didn’t understand what the big deal was.  My wife, friends and family thought I was incredibly callous to have almost no reaction to Diana’s death.

Same thing with Robin Williams. I liked him and more than once busted a gut listening to him, but he was an entertainer with no connection to me.  Why should I grieve? It sucks that his demons took him down and I understand why some people are sad, but I just can’t muster it.

A like-minded reader adds:

It is as if Facebook and Twitter reactions to celebrity deaths and tragedies have supplanted going to church as the cultural litmus test for letting the greater community know you are a good person and people are compelled against all reason to participate.

But another relates to Robin:

“If you’re that depressed, reach out to someone. And remember: Suicide is a permanent solution to temporary problems,” – Robin Williams, World’s Greatest Dad (2009)

I was diagnosed with postpartum depression not that long ago.

I reached out, got help, and feel a million time better already. But it took along time. Depression makes you believe that you can’t dig yourself out of the hole you find yourself in. It makes it feel like if you reach out and talk to you someone, they’ll think you’re crazy. One of the main reasons I didn’t talk about my PPD was because I thought my doctor or husband would try to take away my son for fear that I’d hurt him. And that’s where depression twists the knife that is guilt. I felt guilty because I’m a mother! I should love this period of my life! I should be thrilled to have this amazing, perfect, healthy human being that looks at me with such love. But it’s a chemical imbalance. It’s not something I could control.

Mr Williams suicide is the second I’ve heard of in less then two weeks, the first being a former acquittance. We really do need to work on having a more open and honest dialogue about depression in this country.

Another gets honest:

If someone were to die at the age of 63 after a lifelong battle with MS or Sickle Cell, we’d all say they were a “fighter” or an “inspiration.” But when someone dies after a lifelong battle with severe mental illness and drug addiction, we say it was a tragedy and tell everyone “don’t be like him, please seek help.” That’s bullshit. Robin Williams sought help his entire life. He saw a psychiatrist. He quit drinking. He went to rehab. He did this for decades. That’s HOW he made it to 63. For some people, 63 is a fucking miracle. I know several people who didn’t make it past 23 and I’d do anything to have 40 more years with them.

Another gets open:

With regards to the death by apparent suicide of Robin Williams, I want to draw a clear line between Feeling and Mourning in this particular situation. I agree completely with the sort of Yeah, No Duh thesis of your post, and I found myself in the Facebook poster’s camp when, say, that guy from The Fast and the Furious movies died in a fiery car crash. It was tragic and ironic and awful, and I “felt” for his fans and family, I suppose; but I didn’t mourn.

I am deeply mourning the loss of Robin Williams.

I was born in 1969, so I grew up with Mr. Williams on my teevee machine. I obsessed over Dead Poets Society in my early 20s, around the time I realized I would suffer the rest of my life with depression. Aladdin and Mrs. Doubtfire helped me through the miserably dark early ’90s, when my diagnosis shifted to Bipolar Disorder, and I laughed and cried at the tail end of that rotten decade with Good Will Hunting and The Birdcage, both of which I sat up all night last night watching.

And somewhere in there, between Williams as a fat blue cartoon genie and a gay Miami nightclub owner, I laid down in my grungy apartment’s bathtub and made a pitiful, half-assed and obviously unsuccessful attempt at opening my wrists. I didn’t want it enough, so I failed. I still bear the small, pale scars of that day as reminders of what the end might look like. But I made it over. That time.

I am deeply mourning the loss of Robin Williams, because he felt like a friend and fellow-sufferer. He was the classic Crying-on-the-Inside Clown; a man who had everything and an almost universal acclimation as one of the greatest living comics. And yet he didn’t make it over. With all his fame and celebrity and the deep respect of his peers and fans, Robin Williams couldn’t make it over. I mourn for him; I mourn for that inescapable pain that not even his wife and children could help him overcome. I was inconsolable last night not because I’d never see another Robin Williams stand-up act or another in a long line of his mediocre late-career comedies, but because if he couldn’t make it over, what chance do I have?

Yes, it’s fine to feel nothing about this. Be my guest; the last thing the world needs is more faux-sentimentality and rootless hero-worship Because Celebrity. But when you’ve loved a performer since you were 9 years old, and suffered with him and laughed with him and watched him grow and rise and fall and fail and get back up and start all over again, all the while laughing most loudly at himself, you owe yourself a moment of true mourning.

Go here for all our coverage of Robin Williams’ death.

When Bellow Went Green

by Dish Staff

dish_melvilleberkshires

Saul Bellow’s classic novel, Herzog, turns fifty this year. Revisiting the book, Andrew Furman notices an aspect of the plot that had escaped him before – Bellow’s “sensitive evocations of place, particularly green places both within and without the city,” an unexpected turn for a Jewish writer associated with the urban landscapes of Chicago:

The novel opens with Herzog at his dilapidated Berkshires property at the peak of summer, contemplating all that has recently befallen him, primarily the collapse of his second marriage and his academic career. Bellow takes pains during this opening section, and throughout, to dramatize Herzog’s receptivity to the natural world. He sleeps outside many nights, surrounded by “tall bearded grass and locust and maple seedlings.” And “when he opened his eyes in the night, the stars were near like spiritual bodies. Fires, of course; gases—minerals, heat, atoms, but eloquent at five in the morning to a man lying in a hammock, wrapped in his overcoat.”

Critics have generally paid short shrift to such moments of heightened perception, moments that don’t directly involve the people in Herzog’s life, or his big ideas.

But now it seems wrong to separate Herzog’s receptivity to the external world from his insights about his impoverished upbringing, his failures as a father, husband, and son, and his scholarly views. It seems worthwhile, instead, to examine whether he finds, through nature, the exalted state of human perception envisioned by another Massachusetts resident, Ralph Waldo Emerson.

Bellow at least holds out the possibility that Herzog, like Emerson’s scholar or poet, might tap into his highest intuitive powers and realize true insight through his close observations of the animals, plants, and nighttime sky in the New England countryside. “Nature (itself) and I are alone together, in the Berkshires,” Herzog muses late in the novel, “and this is my chance to understand.”

(Photo of Herman Melville’s studio in the Berkshires, where he wrote Moby Dick, via Pablo Sanchez)

Why Intervene In Iraq And Not Syria? Ctd

by Dish Staff

Frederic Hof slams Obama for not arming the Syrian rebels back in 2012:

No doubt the president is sensitive to the charge that his rejection of the 2012 recommendation by his national security team to arm and equip nationalist Syrian rebels robustly has contributed significantly, if inadvertently, to ISIL’s growth in both Syria and Iraq. His comments to Friedman implicitly dismiss the 2012 recommendation itself as a fantasy, but as Secretary Clinton’s Syria adviser I was a member of the administration at that time. The recommendation, in one form or another, was offered not only by Clinton, but by Secretary of Defense Leon Panetta, CIA Director David Petraeus and Chairman of the Joint Chiefs Gen. Martin Dempsey. Yet the president, ignoring decades of universal conscription and mandatory military service in Syria, persists in characterizing the Assad regime’s armed opponents as a hopeless collection of former butchers, bakers and candlestick makers.

What is truly curious, however, is the request to Congress for $500 million to finance what the president deems a fantasy. Indeed, if press reports are true that the United States is already involved in some low-level arming, equipping and training of Syrian rebels, one wonders how many taxpayer dollars have already been spent on something the commander-in-chief deems illusory.

In a post we noted earlier, Marc Lynch explains why arming was a dodgy idea, and remains so today. Larison piles on, starting with a reminder that the exact same outcome that anti-interventionists feared in Syria (jihadists taking control of American weapons intended for “moderate” allies) has come to pass in Iraq. And another thing:

It should also be obvious that groups such as ISIS benefit from collapsing state authority, so it is not clear why an even more activist Syria policy aimed at collapsing the Syrian government would have been bad for that group or one like it.

The bigger problem with the hawkish revisionism on this question points to the inherent absurdity of what they were demanding from the U.S. (and what the administration has more recently agreed to do). Syria hawks wanted the U.S. to arm anti-regime forces for the purpose of overthrowing the government, but they emphasized their desire to arm only the “right” kind of insurgents to distract from the small problem that their overall goal of regime change would inevitably empower jihadist groups. Syria hawks wanted to arm the opposition in the hopes that it would start a process that would bring the Syrian government down, and if that had happened that would have created an even worse chaotic landscape in which jihadist groups would have thrived even more than they already do. Instead of jihadists controlling just part of Syria, it is entirely possible that even more of Syria would have ended up under their control had the administration done exactly what Syria hawks wanted and if things had worked according to plan.

Max Fisher and Amanda Taub list some other reasons why Obama’s choice not to intervene in Syria doesn’t contradict his choice to intervene (reluctantly) in Iraq. Among these reasons is that there’s a difference between intervening to preserve the status quo and intervening to change it:

Obama ordered air strikes against ISIS in Iraq focused on the narrow goal of defending Iraq’s semi-autonomous Kurdish region. Kurdistan had been mostly secure until ISIS began pushing into the territory about a week ago; it’s got a stable, pro-American, oil-producing government. Obama’s strikes are meant to help Kurdistan defend itself, and to preserve the status quo of a secure Kurdistan. The strikes are very clearly not about trying to change the larger ISIS war in Iraq, or to help Iraq retake the vast ISIS-held swathes of territory. In Syria, there is no “good” status quo to defend. Any strikes against ISIS there would be about pushing the group back from Syrian territory it already controls, so that more moderate Syrian rebels could seize it. In other words, the air strikes would be about changing the facts on the ground in Syria, rather than preserving them.

Obama seems willing to use force when he can protect something good — a stable, secure Iraqi Kurdistan — but not to try to fix something bad. He doesn’t want to “own” the outcome, get dragged into a potentially long engagement that could easily escalate, or risk sending the conflict spinning in an unpredictable new direction. So the US approach to Syria and Iraq is consistent in this respect.

Even Allahpundit sees how these criticisms of Obama’s reticence to intervene ignore reality:

It’s easy to say in hindsight “we should have hit ISIS harder before they had time to establish themselves”; in reality, had Obama made that case at the time, he would have been scoffed at by war-weary lefties and righties. And with good reason: There’s simply never been compelling evidence, the way there is with an America-friendly battle-tested force like the peshmerga in Kurdistan, that an FSA armed by Uncle Sam would have been equal to the task of stopping the jihadis, let alone Assad.

Previous Dish on intervention in Iraq vs. Syria here and here.

Trolling And The Confessional Essay

by Phoebe Maltz Bovy

Alyssa Rosenberg looks at the implications of Jezebel’s troll crisis:

The Jezebel staffers’ complaint [that their parent company isn’t blocking porn-bearing trolls] raises a broader issue. As publications have struggled to figure out what will reliably draw in both readers and advertisers on the Internet, feminist posts have emerged as a clear success story, one that provokes a unique response, both positive and negative. Feminist political commentary, feminist cultural criticism and women’s first-person narratives and personal essays have all done well in this challenging new ecosystem, even as they have inspired a particularly ferocious backlash. Many online publications have been willing to profit from these positive responses, but they have been slow to protect the writers and editors who must deal with ugly responses.

Rosenberg expands on the economics of women-oriented journalism:

One of the attractions of feminist writing is that it can be inexpensive to produce. XOJane, a women’s site that specializes in personal essays and first-person narratives pays $50 for such pieces. Bustle, a women’s site from Bleacher Report founder Bryan Goldberg, garnered derision last year when, on its launch, it advertised a part-time job that would pay the person who landed it $100 a day, at least three days a week, to produce between four and six posts each day.

I’d expand this further still, moving away from the persistent but seemingly blanket spamming Jezebel is evidently facing, and focusing instead on the sort Jessica Valenti and other female writers contend with: Personal insults, often of a deeply personal nature.

It’s not just that, as the Jezebel case indicates, female women’s-topics-type writers aren’t receiving proper support when it comes to the responses their work ends up eliciting. We also need to consider the sort of pieces women are encouraged to write in the first place: The more personal, the better. It’s not simply, here is woman journalist, here is woman’s issue – which is its own concern, but a separate one. The post or article often has to be about the woman. It needs to be about her contraceptive choices, her feelings about her cellulite and oh, perhaps a visual of that cellulite to go with?

Rosenberg’s article hints at the relationship between mandatory overshare and the industry but assumes that the writers who share are doing so readily:

Unfortunately, it sometimes seems like burnout is part of the business model. If one staffer is exhausted by a tidal wave of sexist e-mail and comments, another one will be eager to take her place, confident in her own imperviousness. If a writer becomes uncomfortable with using her own life for material – or, like Hannah Horvath on “Girls,” runs out of life experiences to turn into stories – there will be someone else out there who is invigorated by the possibilities of the personal essay.

We shouldn’t look at this as women simply liking to overshare. This is what gets page-views, and what’s the easiest for the most writers to produce. The desire here is about getting published, not (in most cases) about sharing something personal with the world. Personal sells, but it’s also what attracts the most painful sort of trolling.

The thing is, it’s not so difficult to accept divergent viewpoints from readers, even if the occasional UR WRONG can sting. But a contrarian take on, say, your IUD, your self-image in that bathing suit, is different from the same on birth control or body-image generally.

It’s not any more acceptable for a personal-essay writer to be subject to abuse than for any other sort of writer. The point here isn’t to blame the victim, but rather to question how we’ve even arrived at this hyperpersonal form of women-oriented journalism. It’s been sold to female writers as a sort of liberation. Speak your truth! And it can be just that, but only if the writer is sophisticated enough to handle whichever backlash, and established enough to be adding the personal details intentionally (as I’d assume was the case when Valenti shared the story of her first period), and not trying to trade the story for a professional contact or $50.

How Sexually Fluid Are Women Really? Ctd

by Phoebe Maltz Bovy

More readers have reacted to my post on the great, cascading river that female sexuality is, or isn’t, as the case may be. One makes the fine point that, even if bachelorhood goes unremarked in some locales, that’s not always the case:

I have to dissent. Since the stigma against being gay is more intense for men, I suspect there are still more gay men who are covering it up by getting into relationships with women. Especially in small towns across America.

This same reader goes on to agree with Savage that the problem is monogamy:

I don’t dispute your point about women having far more pressure to project desirability and to pair up; but as for the woman in Dan’s podcast, isn’t it just as likely that she’s simply bored of monogamous straight sex with this particular guy? Maybe she’s thinking of women 90 percent of the time because every instance of bland sex with her boyfriend reminds her that there’s another kind of experience she’s depriving herself of.

I can’t listen to the podcast, since I’m at work, but I’m assuming the boyfriend knew she was bi when they started dating? If so, then the boyfriend knows there’s a dimension of her sexual appetite he is utterly powerless to satisfy. I’d be curious to know how bisexuals get around this issue. Because while the boyfriend sounds selfish, he has reason to fear that his girlfriend’s sex with another woman will develop into much more than that. On the other hand, if he gives the affair his blessing, then would it be fair for him to expect to indulge based on his attraction to a physical trait he desires but his girlfriend lacks?

Of course, these are the absurdities that come with our society’s imposing sexual monogamy on creatures who don’t really want it. As more of us straights talk candidly with gay men who are in open relationships that last, you’ll see polygamy go mainstream. In 50 years, there will be a Mad Men-type show set in the early aughts, and the next generation will mock us for being Puritans. (Also, for being fat and haphazardly destroying the planet, but that’s an email for another day.)

Another reader thinks that not just bisexual women but straight ones, too, feel the occasional or more-than-occasional tingle for a woman:

You wrote, “Savage, in his response, likens her persistent desire to be with women to kinks and fetishes people try to repress over the years (he mentions foot fetishes), and it’s like, gah, this woman is a lesbian!”

Nope. She’s not.

I came out as bisexual in my late teens because hey, most of the time (maybe not 90%, but definitely more than 50%) I fantasized about women. But then, at university, I tried dating some girls, and the reality was way different from the fantasy. Not my thing at all. This wasn’t a fear of the social consequences of not being straight; I had already come out to all my friends. This was me being faced with the reality that vaginas, in person, are not my thing. I’ve been married to a guy for a few years now, and my fantasies haven’t changed, but my in-person sexual preference is definitely for penises. I bet this is not uncommon among straight women.

I’m still waiting to feel something other than envy when I see pictures of Natalia Vodianova, but who knows, that day may come! And I’ll leave it to the trans activists (not the bisexual activists this time) to offer up the obvious suggestion for where someone might turn if they’re into women but not vaginas. Or, I’ll save them the trouble: Not all women have vaginas.

Yet another reader dissents, and might have something to contribute to a certain hit TV show:

I’m following your thread on female sexual fluidity with interest for I was a Federal female inmate for over 11 years and believe me, it is real.

In my experience, well over half of the general prison population and probably more than 75% of long-timers, paired off – got girl friends. (Sex outside of a relationship happened but wasn’t the norm.) These pairings were not merely high school-type, best-friend stuff. A few, due to religious scruple or fear of breaking rules were chaste, albeit with lot of smooching. Most were sexual … or as sexual as was possible in an overcrowded institution where caught-in-the-act meant weeks in the hole.

From what I could gather, most of the women did not think of themselves as lesbian or even particularly bisexual. Many were not sufficiently sophisticated to know what they were but if they’d had to select, most would have probably chosen “straight.” Often they maintained relationships with lovers or husbands on the streets and I would watch at mail call as an ardently committed couple swooned over pics of each other’s boyfriends. Now that’s pretty fluid. So I’m here to profess that, lock us up at least, and we’re a sexually fluid gender.Behind the walls we even gave it a name. We called it being “gay for the stay.”

The real question is, what does Natasha Lyonne think about all this? But the relevant question here, which is probably answerable, is how this compares with what goes on in men’s prisons. A lack of opposite-sex options has been known to cause a kind of fluidity in both sexes, but I’m not sure what that says about life in the coed world at large.

And then there’s a reader who agrees with me, and who shares the following anecdote:

I have a female friend who was with her boyfriend exclusively since high school.  She thought sex with her boyfriend was OK.  No complaints.  Then one night when she was in her late 20s, she had an extremely vivid sexual dream involving a female celebrity and everything changed.  Up to that point, she had never even considered sex with a woman, now she had become obsessed with it. Luckily, her boyfriend was very supportive and helped her explore these thoughts (and not in a creepy way) by renting lesbian movies, reading books about lesbian sexuality, going to group discussions at the local LGBT Center about questioning your sexuality, etc…

It took over a year, but she was eventually sure that she was a lesbian even though she hadn’t actually been with a woman sexually (or even kissed a woman) up to that point.  So she and her boyfriend officially split (they remained very close friends) and she started going on dates with women she met online or through events at the LGBT Center.  She eventually met a woman through some mutual friends, fell in love, and went to Vermont to get a civil union. They’re still happily together today.  They went back to Vermont on their 10-year anniversary and got married.

I’ve talked with her at length about the whole crazy roller coaster ride.  She says that she never even considered that being gay was an option when she was growing up. Never crossed her mind.  You don’t really know what other people are feeling or what’s normal.  It’s kind of like being a kid who is nearsighted and not knowing that you need glasses.  You just assume that things are blurry because they’re far away and that everyone else is seeing the same thing.

So, in at least once case, a woman who identified as straight stopped over at bi before arriving at lesbian. Doesn’t mean all bisexual women will do so.

And finally, a reader gets at the essential:

I think that the “female fluidity” thing is a male fantasy superimposed on flimsy evidence just because, as I said earlier, men think they know it all. They know how to be men and they know how to be women too. And yeah, Dan is gay but that doesn’t make him immune to the socialization and stereotypes. Males are taught to believe a lot of nonsense about women. Just as we are taught to believe nonsense about them.

Ultimately, I’m not particularly concerned with how sexually fluid the typical woman turns out to be, and am far more interested in the reasons we keep hearing the ‘women are sexually fluid’ refrain. It is, as this reader notes, partly about how neatly this matches up with something many straight men have long hoped to hear: A threesome’s in the cards, not for me, oh, no, she’s the one who wants it! Not, of course, that that’s what it actually means for a woman to be bisexual, or sexually fluid, but it does help explain why there’s such a receptive audience for every scrap of evidence that this is just how women are wired.

But the bigger issue, for me, is that ‘women are sexually fluid’ is used as a way to affirm what many already believe about female sexuality of all stripes: That it’s basically nonexistent. That women care about relationships, but don’t experience intense physical desire. The way it’s often framed, this allegedly fluid female sexuality isn’t so much about lusting after men and women at various points in one’s life or one’s afternoon, but rather, about women never lusting after anyone, and thus being equally content with a male or female best friend.

Is Russia About To Invade Ukraine? Ctd

by Dish Staff

As Ukrainian forces surround Donetsk and prepare for what they say is a final advance on the separatist stronghold, NATO has reiterated its warning that a Russian invasion is likely:

NATO Secretary-General Anders Fogh Rasmussen said there was no sign Russia had withdrawn the troops it had massed at the Ukrainian frontier. Asked in a Reuters interview how he rated the chances of Russian military intervention, Rasmussen said: “There is a high probability.”

“We see the Russians developing the narrative and the pretext for such an operation under the guise of a humanitarian operation, and we see a military build-up that could be used to conduct such illegal military operations in Ukraine,” he said.

Jeremy Bender observes that if Russia decides to invade, it is prepared to do so on multiple fronts:

According to The Interpreter, there has been a sharp increase in Russian troop movements in Belarus. Belarus borders Ukraine to the north, and the border crossing between the two countries is located less than 150 miles from Kiev. Belarus and Russia share close relations. Russia maintains military bases in the country, and Russia recently announced plans to build an airbase in the west of Belarus.  A YouTube video, thought to have been taken today in the Belarusian city of Vitebsky, shows a large number of Russian troops and equipment. The city is located approximately eight hours due north of Ukraine.

A second YouTube video, shot on August 10, depicts another large armored convoy in Novoshakhtinsk, by the Rostov region of Russia. This convoy is less than 20 miles from the Ukrainian border, and it is less than 150 miles to either of the separatist-held cities of Luhansk or Donetsk. Simultaneously, a Russian aid convoy is set to enter Ukraine in the north east through the city of Kharkhiv, according to a document translated by The Interpreter. The convoy is said to contain humanitarian cargo for the east of Ukraine and it will fly under the signal of the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) once it passes into Ukrainian territory.

But Ukrainian authorities now say they won’t let the aid convoy cross the border:

Russian news agencies reported that hundreds of white trucks were being packed with supplies and sent to the eastern Ukraine border, but a spokesman for Ukraine’s National Security and Defense Council, Andriy Lysenko, said Ukraine would not allow the trucks to cross into the country because the aid was not certified by the Red Cross. “This convoy is not a certified convoy. It is not certified by the International Committee of the Red Cross,” Lysenko said, according to the Associated Press. Another Ukraine presidential aide, Valery Chaly, told reporters that the supplies would be loaded onto other transport vehicles before they crossed into Ukraine territory held by separatists, Reuters reported.

Ed Morrissey worries that things are on the verge of getting out of control:

The convoy doesn’t even have to include military supplies to produce the kind of provocation Putin has clearly desired for months. They can set themselves up as “observers” once inside Ukraine and block Kyiv from further military action against the rebels. If the Ukrainian military does proceed, then Putin can send in his troops in order to protect his “humanitarian” mission. Whatever happens, it’s going to happen quickly. The West had better be prepared to shut Russia down economically when it does — and it would be best to “telegraph” that intention to Putin now, as the WaPo’s editors advise, in order to avoid the situation altogether. If Putin wants to donate aid, let him work through the Red Cross. Anything else is a thinly-veiled provocation for a European war that only the Russian media would miss.

Paul Huard flagged another troubling sign late last week:

“The probability of invasion is much, much higher than it has ever been,” James Miller, managing editor of The Interpreter, told War is Boring in an e-mail. The Interpreter translates media from the Russian press and blogosphere into English for use by analysts and policymakers. The Russians reportedly have moved military vehicles with “peacekeeping” insignia to the border—a first since the crisis in the Ukraine began. Earlier this month, NATO warned that the Russians could mount an incursion into Ukrainian territory under the guise of a peacekeeping mission. The Interpreter reports that it has found several pictures and a video showing Russian armored vehicles bearing the insignia “MC,” an abbreviation of the Russian words mirotvorcheskiye sily or “peacekeeping force.”

Meanwhile, Josh Kovensky highlights Putin’s ever loopier propaganda, featuring Mickey Rourke and Steven Seagal:

Russians saw a familiar face on television last night, when Seagal appeared at a show in honor of the “reunification of Crimea with Russia.” Seagal did not appear alone; a Russian-nationalist motorcycle gang called the Night Wolves accompanied him. At the show, the bikers reenacted Russia’s version of the past eight months of Ukrainian history. An idyllic Slavic scene is interrupted by marching Ukrainian Nazis, whose swastika formation bizarrely matches that of “Springtime for Hitler.” The swastika-shaped Ukrainian Nazi junta is controlled by a pair of massive hands emblazoned with symbols of the U.S., holding huge cigars.

The Nazi-Ukrainians go on a reign of terror until a bunch of Russians with AK-47s show up, duking it out with the Kievan Fourth Reich until the Donetsk and Luhansk People’s Republics solidify, with many evil Ukrainian-Nazi-Fascist-Junta members set on fire in the process. At the end of the show, a massive Mother Russia statue appears along with the Soviet national anthem, heralding the reunification of Crimea with Russia.

The Mom Behind National Sex Offender Registries Wants To Scale Them Back

by Elizabeth Nolan Brown

Slate is running a series of articles this week on why and how U.S. sex offender registries have become the beast that they have. Writers Matt Mellema, Chanakya Sethi, and Jane Shim – all students at Yale Law School – kicked things off Monday by talking to Patty Wetterling, the woman largely responsible for the sex-offender registry’s national creep.

In 1989, Wetterling’s 11-year-old son Jacob was kidnapped on his way home from a convenience store with his brother and friend; he was never found, and his abductor’s identity remains unknown. At the time his kidnapping, only a few states had sex-offender registries, and Wetterling came to see this as a big problem. She pushed for her home state of Minnesota and all states to adopt them. And voila: the Jacob Wetterling Crimes Against Children and Sexually Violent Offender Registration Act of 1994.

“But the world has changed since then,” Wetterling told Slate:

What’s changed, Wetterling says, is what science can tell us about the nature of sex offenders.

The logic behind the past push for registries rested on what seem like common sense assumptions. Among the most prominent were, first, sex offenders were believed to be at a high risk for reoffending—once a sex offender, always a sex offender. Second, it was thought that sex offenses against children were commonly committed by strangers. Taken together, the point was that if the police had a list, and the public could access it, children would be safer.

The problem, however, is that a mass of empirical research conducted since the passage of Jacob’s Law has cast increasing doubt on all of those premises.

Sex offense recidivism rates have actually been shown to be lower than for most other crimes. And in 93 percent of cases with child victims, the offender was not some untraceable stranger but someone known to the victim.

Some states are starting to come around. In California, one of the first states to enact a sex offender registry (in 1947!), the board that manages it is calling for reforms. In a 2014 report, the California Sex Offender Management Board (CSOMB) argues that not only does it unduly burden registrants in its current, expansive state, it is also less effective than a much less robust registry would be:

California’s system of lifetime registration for all convicted sex offenders has created a registry that is very large and that includes many individuals who do not necessarily pose a risk to the community. The consequences of these realities are that the registry has, in some ways, become counterproductive to improving public safety. When everyone is viewed as posing a significant risk, the ability for law enforcement and the community to differentiate between who is truly high risk and more likely to reoffend becomes impossible.

The board also notes the extraordinary cost of running the current registry. Far from taking money away from fighting sex crimes, reigning in the registry a bit would allow more resources for tracking high-risk offenders and developing other ways of protecting communities, it says. CSOMB concludes with advice that would be wise to heed way beyond California:

If the current registration system was effective in the ways intended, these might be considered part of the price to pay for the greater good. But, since the current registry does not attain its intended purposes, many of these unintended consequences are without justification.

Today at Slate, Sethi maps out which states force people to register as sex offenders for things like public urination, consensual teen sex, and prostitution. Free Range Kids blogger Lenore Skenazy recently highlighted how “any registering snafu” once you’re on the list – including notifying the state of an address change a week after the move instead of the week before – can result in an extended registry period or renewed time in jail. In Texas, the administrative error comes with a mandatory minimum of two to five years.

Obama’s Imperial Presidency? Ctd

by Dish Staff

Last week, Douthat provoked a conversation about Obama potentially legalizing millions of undocumented immigrants with an executive order. Chait is uncomfortable with Obama’s plan:

I fully support Obama’s immigration policy goals. But the defenses of Obama’s methods seem weak and short-sighted. To imagine how this method might be dangerous, you have to abstract it away from the specific end it advances and consider another administration using similar methods for policies liberals might not like. What if a Republican president announced that he would stop enforcing the payment of estate taxes? Or suspend enforcement of regulations on industrial pollution? Or laws on workplace discrimination against gays and lesbians? …

The Linzian nightmare that seized many liberals last year is a vision of a political system in which neither the president nor the Congress can share power, and neither recognizes the other’s legitimacy. The extremism of the Republican Party may have precipitated Obama’s confidence in unilateralism. To think that the cycle will end here, and that a future president won’t claim more expansive and disturbing powers to selectively enforce the law, requires an optimism not borne out by history. In the short run, we will rejoice in the sudden deliverance of massive humanitarian relief to people who have done nothing more than try to create a better life for their families. In the long run, we may look back on it with regret.

But Jonathan Cohn doesn’t worry much about Obama’s potential executive actions because a Republican president could reverse them:

I totally get the underlying concern here. The limits of presidential power matter and smart, reasonable people can disagree about what they should be. But here’s one fact to remember: Any action Obama takes will, by definition, lack the permanence of legislation. President Ted Cruz could undo it on January 20, 2017. He might not want to do that, for all sorts of political and practical reasons. But he or any other Obama successor would have the same kind of unilateral authority to act that Obama does. And reversing an executive order is a heck of a lot easier than trying to undo legislation—which, after all, requires new legislation, which in turn means pushing a new bill through both houses of Congress and getting a presidential signature.

On the legal merits, Eric Posner continues to insist that Obama can act to halt deportations:

When government agencies decide which types of corporate or tax fraud to investigate, and which types to ignore, they exercise executive discretion, as they do when they decide whether to shut down an undercapitalized bank or a restaurant that has served food that gives someone a stomachache. This is why a crusading prosecutor, like New York’s Eliot Spitzer in his time, can decide to crack down on a type of conduct—insider trading, accounting fraud, whatever—that had previously been winked at. We live surrounded by “domestic Caesars.”

All of this goes double for immigration law. The president’s authority over this arena is even greater than his authority over other areas of the law. For decades, presidents of both parties have deferred legal action against millions of people who entered the country unlawfully. As the immigration law experts Adam Cox of New York University School of Law and Cristina Rodriguez of Yale Law School have described in a paper, this has been going on at least since the 1940s.

Steinglass sees the “threat to the rule of law here comes mainly from America’s unrealistic immigration policies”:

The country is a very rich, well-governed country that shares a 3,000-kilometre-long border with a much poorer, badly governed one, which in turn borders countries that are poorer still. Until Central America becomes stable and prosperous, it will continue to send millions of emigrants to the US. Current immigration quotas, which date from 1990, limit each country to no more than 7% of the total of 700,000 legal immigrant visas each year; in principle, Mexico is treated the same as Switzerland. Enforcing this skewed system requires America to constantly raise the already large sums it spends on patrolling the Mexican border; in 2012 America spent $11.7 billion on border security. Fully sealing the border could cost $28 billion per year. The American public (let alone the Republican party) has shown no willingness to appropriate that much money. Deportations rose from 70,000 in 1996 to 419,000 in 2012, with the Obama administration deporting as many people in its first five years as the Bush administration did in eight. Yet this has made no dent in the total population of undocumented immigrants. And the current level of deportation seems to be politically unsustainable. Latino constituents are increasingly fed up.

He goes on to argue that “Republican inability to articulate any coherent immigration policy other than “deport them all” amounts to a preference for fantasy over reality, rather than engaging in the messy job of making policy for the real world.” But Reihan thinks Congressional gridlock is good, in that it serves as a check on government actions that lack public support:

The House of Representatives was designed to be the part of Congress that is most responsive to popular opinion. It’s not at all obvious that members of the House are failing in their constitutional obligations when they are resisting a legislative proposal—even one backed by every significant business lobby under the sun, Michael Bloomberg, Mark Zuckerberg, and other enlightened billionaires—that increases immigration levels when doing so is extremely unpopular.

However, Yglesias points out that by obstructing action on this and other issues, the House GOP ends up with less favorable outcomes:

Regardless of your views on what should happen with the unauthorized population, a compromise is strictly preferable to letting immigration authorities flail away at the situation just as a compromise was strictly preferable to letting the EPA handle climate change without congressional input.

Yet at this point, blindly choosing the worse outcome over the better one has become such an ingrained habit for the ideological right that it barely seems to have been considered. Instead, immigration restrictionists waged a vigorous intra-party war against the supporters of comprehensive immigration reform. They sought to prevent a sell-out, and did so utterly without regard to whether blocking comprehensive reform would actually lead to an outcome they prefer.

Kurdistan’s Sticky Situation

by Jonah Shepp

iraq_oil_map

Oil may not be the be-all, end-all of the Iraq conflict, but it does play its part. Brad Plumer examines the oil politics of Iraqi Kurdistan and what’s at stake in the fight against ISIS:

By June of this year, Iraqi Kurdistan was producing 360,000 barrels per day — about 10 percent of Iraq’s production (and about 0.5 percent of the world’s supply). And much more was expected. In a 2009 State Department cable leaked by Wikileaks, one foreign firm said Kurdistan “has the potential to be a world-class hydrocarbon region.” Yet ISIS posed a (partial) threat to that boom when they showed up on the outskirts of Erbil, a city of 1.5 million that is hosting many of the oil and gas firms in the Kurdish region. On August 8, Reuters reported that some 5,000 barrels per day had gone offline in Kurdistan as a result of the fighting. Various oil firms, including Chevron, said they would withdraw some non-essential personnel from the region.

So far, the disruptions have been relatively minor, particularly since the US has launched airstrikes against ISIS that allowed the Kurdish military to retake a number of towns. The Kurdish regional government now insists that “oil production in the region remains unaffected.” ISIS, for its part, clearly has an interest in seizing oil fields. The group reportedly controls seven oil fields and two refineries in northern Iraq, as well as a portion of a pipeline running from Kirkuk to the port city of Ceyhan in Turkey. Reports have suggested that ISIS is now selling some 10,000 barrels of oil per day to fund its activities.

So it would make sense that, in an effort to help the Kurds defend themselves, the US might have some concern for an industry that serves as a major driver of development in Kurdistan. But Steve LeVine pushes back against those who believe the American intervention is primarily about protecting that industry. He sees two problems with their argument:

The first is that the Obama administration has steadfastly discouraged ExxonMobil, Chevron and the other companies from working in Kurdistan.

Until recently, it sought to sabotage the region’s efforts to export its oil. The White House’s rationale has been that, to the degree Kurdistan gains de facto financial independence from Baghdad, the less likely that Iraq will hold together as a country. On Twitter, Middle East energy expert Robin Mills has been among those pushing against the it’s-about-oil theory. A second problem is Obama himself—he is fixated on renewable energy and opposed to oil. When he has embraced oil, such as shale, Obama has done so reluctantly and often in order to placate the fossil fuels industry and its advocates. There may be rational speculation surrounding the role of oil in former George W. Bush’s original assault on Iraq, but there is little likelihood that it featured on Obama’s list of reasons to bomb ISIL.

Yishai Schwartz agrees that the all-about-oil argument, though “seductive”, is also reductive:

It seems likely that the decades of U.S. involvement and the vast web of American relationships in the region—both of which have a great deal to do with oil—play a role in making Americans more viscerally concerned with the region and its people. In that sense, our humanitarian impulse in this conflict is quite likely connected to oil, albeit in a distant and complex way. But that is a long chain and a nuanced argument, to which the “Obama is worried about the world’s oil supply” thesis bears very little resemblance. So where does this conviction come from? Perhaps it’s cynicism borne of past experience: Oil has played a major role in Western interventions in the Middle East, often with disastrous results. But we shouldn’t assume that every statesman is Henry Kissinger or every action is a new Suez operation. The colonialist paradigm is a useful lens for historians, but when it becomes an ideological commitment for the political commenter, it’s simply another set of blinders.

Schwartz gets it exactly right here. Nobody doubts that petroleum, its ubiquity in the modern economy, and our dependence on it factor heavily into American foreign policy; it is, after all, the only reason we’ve been allied for 70 years with the Saudis, a regime whose values, interests, and activities contradict our own at every turn. It’s right and necessary to acknowledge how damaging petro-politics can be and to worry about our government being beholden to the whims of despotic rentier states. I’m not a huge Thomas Friedman fan, but he’s right to harp on this point as he has done periodically for years.

But the presence of oil interests in Iraq does not ipso facto preclude the possibility that American policy there might also be guided by something else. I used to buy into the theory that the 2003 Iraq invasion was about oil, and as LeVine mentions, it was likely part of the equation, but then so were the domestic politics of the War on Terror and a settling of scores between the Bush family and Saddam Hussein. A conspiracy-minded focus on any of these drivers obscures the key fact that the war was driven by an ideology – the neoconservative theory that democracy can be exported by force – that is dangerous in and of itself and whose promulgators have yet to exit the public sphere despite having been pretty conclusively proven wrong. So by all means, let’s talk about the oil, but let’s not mislead ourselves that it’s all about oil.

Water, on the other hand, might really be what it’s all about:

Mosul is not the only dam for which IS has fought. After taking large parts of Iraq in a campaign that started in Mosul, the country’s second largest city, in June, on August 1st IS battled to take control of Haditha dam on the Euphrates in the eastern province of al-Anbar. The fighters were repelled by Iraqi troops and Sunni tribes, but reports suggest the offensive continues.

IS may want to control these resources in order to bolster its claim to run a state. But it may have additional motives. Baghdad and southern Iraq rely on water being released from these dams. So IS could cut off the water, limiting flows to Baghdad and the south or, conversely, release large amounts that could cause floods (although this would also flood areas controlled by IS, including Mosul city, south of the dam). Any change in water flows would also affect the availability of food, because Iraq is heavily dependent on irrigation to grow wheat, barley, rice, corn and fruit and vegetables.

I’m at a loss for why people aren’t freaking out about this a whole lot more.