Tag: Premium

Will Europe Pass Serious Sanctions? Ctd

The answer – finally –  appears to be yes:

Although the European Union agreed last week to consider sanctions against Russia’s energy, defense, and financial industries, it was unclear how far they would go. It’s still uncertain how broad the sanctions will be, but the call on Monday indicated a change of tone from last week, when EU politicians were trading barbs over whether Britain or France was more reliant on Moscow’s money.

The EU will likely restrict each industry slightly, rather than imposing a full ban — such as an arms embargo. That approach would help address the fundamental problem of different EU countries relying more on Russian business in different industries.

Yglesias is excited:

After a five-way conference call between the leaders of Germany, France, the United Kingdom, and Italy the European Union seems ready to outline tough new sanctions on Russia. Not just the shooting down of MH 17, but Russia’s total lack of remorse or post-shootdown restrain appears to have been a game-changer in terms of German politics and that’s been enough to swing the situation around. The sanctions package is looking very similar to ideas outlined last week in a memo obtained by the Financial Times. The new package belies the notion of a “weak” Europe that is refusing to counter Russian aggression.

But Cassidy doesn’t expect the sanctions to amount to much:

We already know that Russia’s energy sector—which supplies power to many European countries, not just Germany—is likely to escape most of the new restrictions. The exact terms of the arms embargo have yet to be decided, but it isn’t expected to have any effect on existing contracts, such as France’s delivery, later this year, of a Mistral warship. That leaves the new financial sanctions, and I’d be willing to wager that they won’t be as draconian as they might appear, either.

Last week, Anne Applebaum analyzed Putin’s grip on Europe:

Which is worse? France sending Russia a ship that could be used against NATO allies in the Baltic or the Black Sea? Or Britain’s insistence on its right to launder Russian money through London’s financial markets? It was an amusing spat, not least because it plays into the stereotypes: Britain versus France, crooked bankers versus cynical politicians. The dispute dominated headlines as Europeans debated the right response to Russian aggression in eastern Ukraine.

But in some sense, it also disguises the real nature of Russian influence in Europe. For Russia’s strongest political influence is not in relatively large countries such as Britain or France, where at least these things are openly discussed, but rather in weaker countries that barely have a foreign policy debate at all.

Yesterday, Ioffe took a closer look at the EU industries that would be impacted by Russian sanctions

For example, German car manufacturers. Russia is their second-biggest market. If sanctions get in the way of that, German autoworkers are out of some jobs. Or if E.U. sanctions affect defense contracts, French workers building Mistral warships (for which Russia has already paid $1.1 billion) will also find themselves out of a job, and possibly striking. If Russia cuts off titanium exports—it is the world’s largest producer and the best at machining the parts—Airbus and Boeing have to stop building Dreamliners and double-deckers.

Countries like Bulgaria and Italy who are reluctant to hit Russia harder are involved in building the South Stream gas pipeline and also see a lot of revenues from Russian tourists. Bulgaria is especially vulnerable: 70 percent of its tourists are Russian. The U.K. financial industry launders a lot of Russian cash, so they are understandably reluctant to voluntarily plug up that flow. Cyprus is in a similar situation, both with Russian tourists and Russian offshores.

“A lot of jobs would be affected, but the macroeconomic effect is less than is often claimed,” says Cliff Kupchan, head of the Russia practice at the Eurasia Group.

Daniel Gross isn’t holding his breath for a bold EU response:

If the EU were suddenly to shut down all the gas pipelines and order Russian oil tankers to turn around, it would certainly inflict some short-term damage on Russia. But there are plenty of other customers out there for Russia’s oil, which is pretty fungible. As for natural gas, the huge new supply deal Putin inked with China means that a large customer will be emerging in Russia’s east. And while European countries could make a point of purchasing oil from non-Russian sources, they don’t have a ready replacement for Russia’s natural gas.

Taking serious steps to reduce purchases of Russian energy would require European leaders to show both moral courage and an overt willingness to inflict financial pain on large and well-connected companies. But both of these things are in short supply—just like natural gas and oil.

Earlier Dish on EU sanctions here.

Eating Man’s Best Friend

John D. Sutter doesn’t understand why we don’t eat dogs:

The United States euthanizes 1.2 million dogs per year, according to the ASPCA. Would 6741960599_a1e9c58d64_zeating them be so different? It actually could be seen as helpful.

“[U]nlike all farmed meat, which requires the creation and maintenance of animals, dogs are practically begging to be eaten,” Jonathan Safran Foer, a vegetarian and novelist, writes in the book “Eating Animals.” Euthanizing pets, he says, “amounts to millions of pounds of meat now being thrown away every year. The simple disposal of these euthanized dogs is an enormous ecological and economic problem. It would be demented to yank pets from homes. But eating those strays, those runaways, those not-quite-cute-enough-to-take and not-quite-well-behaved-enough-to-keep dogs would be killing a flock of birds with one stone and eating it, too.”

Michael Brendan Dougherty objects to this line of reasoning:

[T]he reason we shouldn’t eat dogs is related to the same reason it is more heinous and hateful to burn a synagogue than a community center, or that it is more of a violation to burn down a man’s home than the two rental properties he owns of an equivalent dollar value. The spaces, objects, and even animals we sanctify with our respect, friendship, and time really do enter into different moral categories. It is not inherently evil to smash a picture, but it is a gesture of hatred to tear a beloved family photo.

Societies like Korea, where dogs have been eaten and kept as pets, even come up with different categories of dogs to separate the ones that are sanctified by human friendship, and those that are not and therefore can be eaten. As Americans, with our own history and sense of ethics, we would probably never develop this distinction, and that’s okay. We’re fine with diversity when it comes to other cultural manifestations, like manners, another dimension of human behavior with moral implications. It is a human wrong to be inhospitable, but hospitality may have completely different expressions and taboos from one culture to the next. So, too, with our taboos on eating and animals.

The Dish has covered this subject repeatedly over the years. Update from a reader:

Before moving to eating dogs, why can’t we at least start with eating the pigeons? City pigeons are extremely well fed, many are gourmet fed and plump as hell. They should taste great. And it’s gotta taste like chicken, right?

Maybe from a pigeon farm. But you really want to taste a pigeon that feeds on New York Shitty trash?

(Photo by Nina Matthews)

Does The Safety Net Need Fixing?

Jordan Weissmann argues that Paul Ryan’s anti-poverty plan is a solution in search of a problem, and that the safety net as it is has been successful at keeping most Americans out of long-term poverty:

In 2011, according to the Survey of Income and Program Participation, the annual U.S. poverty rate was 14 percent. But only 3.5 percent of Americans were chronically poor, meaning they had been impoverished for three straight years. … One take-away from these numbers is that, yes, chronic poverty is real, and we need to work toward fixing it. But another is that, by and large, most people don’t need a life contract to escape poverty; the existing safety net catches them and helps them back onto their feet.

To his credit, Ryan makes some of these distinctions. The animating idea of his plan is that our approach to poverty should be customized person by person. His plan even distinguishes between the sort of approach the government could take to help a woman facing “situational poverty” versus someone stuck in “generational poverty.” He clearly sees the poor as individuals, which is far better than many politicians. But in order to make custom poverty prevention a reality, he wants to tear down a system that already works fairly well for the majority and has without question diminished material deprivation in this country.

Bouie turns to similar statistics to fire back at Reihan’s defense of the Ryan plan’s inherent paternalism:

At some point in their lives, millions of Americans will experience a short spell of poverty. Not because they don’t have a plan to fix their lives or lack the skills to move forward, but because our economy isn’t run to create demand for labor, isn’t equipped to deliver stable work to everyone who wants it, and wasn’t built to address the distributive needs of everyone who works. The best way to confront this problem for most people is to just address those needs.

Yes, on the margins, there will be Americans who need an intensive approach, and I endorse government support for voluntary life coaching. (For example, look at the Center for Urban Families in Baltimore.) But by and large, the easiest solution is to mail larger checks to more people. In other words, we need more solutions like Ryan’s expansion of the Earned Income Tax Credit—the best part of his plan—and fewer life coaches for the poor.

Reihan goes another round, now arguing that caseworkers would make up for the failures of poor communities to provide “mutual self-help” to their members:

Mutual self-help still exists, yet its institutional manifestations seem to have decayed as U.S. culture has grown more individualistic and as the state has grown more inclusive. Civil society cannot, in my view, replace a robust safety net. There are some things, however, that mutual self-help networks can do better than the state, e.g., impart implicit learning or facilitate the transmission of beneficial social practices that must first be validated by in-group members, etc. And so the fact that mutual self-help networks, including invisible mutual self-help networks, are stronger among the nonpoor than the poor is a serious problem, albeit one that is hard to capture through anything other than ethnography.

What does any of this have to do with casework? Essentially, I see casework as a substitute, albeit a decidedly inadequate one, for mutual self-help networks. In an ideal world, casework might even contribute to their revival. For now, at least, casework strikes me as the best tool we have to see to it that the right help goes to the right people at the right time.

Earlier Dish on Ryan’s plan here.

Tunnel Vision

Ben Caspit attributes the Israeli public’s willingness to stomach a ground invasion of Gaza to the discovery of Hamas’ network of tunnels leading into southern Israel:

It should be remembered that had Hamas not rejected the Egyptian cease-fire initiative, Israel would not have discovered the scope of this threat, and Hamas would have continued digging and expanding its tunnel network, right until the moment it was deployed.

One senior Cabinet member I spoke with this week described that possibility to me: “Imagine,” he said, “that we are in the middle of a conflict with Hezbollah up north. Our top-notch infantry brigades are up there, in the north, when suddenly Hamas deploys its network of dozens of tunnels all at once. Some 2,000 Hamas commandos suddenly burst out of them and embark on a killing spree, slaughtering thousands of people in the cities and towns across Israel’s south, from Sderot through Ashkelon, Netivot and Ofakim, maybe even all the way to Beersheba.

Who would stop them? The police? The air force? It would take weeks to clean up the mess, and at the end of the entire process, we would find death and destruction across southern Israel. I know,” the minister continued, “that it sounds like a figment of the imagination, but based on what we are discovering these days, the scenario is far more realistic than it is imaginary. In this region, the reality easily exceeds anything we can imagine.”

But in a translation provided by J.J. Goldberg, Nahum Barnea debunks the Israeli government’s claim that the tunnels came as a surprise to them:

When the Cabinet agreed to the Egyptian cease-fire proposal in the middle of last week, was it aware that Gaza was teeming with tunnels, dozens of which reached into Israeli territory? The answer is, Yes. In an extended effort, over a period of years, Military Intelligence mapped out the underground world of Gaza. Not all the tunnels were identified, not all the openings and routes were located, but the magnitude of the threat was known. It was found not only in the secret material that reaches the prime minister’s desk, but even on YouTube: Military Intelligence chief Aviv Kochavi included the story of the tunnels in a lecture he gave at the Institute for Strategic Studies in Tel Aviv. …

Netanyahu was not the first to war against the tunnels. He takes the name of the tunnels in vain. As prime minister he hadn’t seen the tunnels as a threat that justified a military operation — before and during Pillar of Defense in 2012, before and during Protective Edge in 2014. He chose to take a risk. When he said, in reply to a question from Udi Segal of Channel 2, that he hoped the problem of the tunnels would be solved through diplomatic means, he knew the sentence had no grounding in reality.

The Next Phase Of The Ukrainian Conflict

Serhiy Kudelia expects that, if Ukrainian “insurgents are pushed out of big cities, the ongoing asymmetric warfare in Donbas that will be fought largely by conventional means is likely to take the form of an underground guerrilla movement”:

Similar to the PKK in Turkey, ETA in Spain or the IRA in the Northern Ireland, it will rely on sporadic attacks on government and military installations to exhaust the incumbent and damage its governing capacity rather than establish control over a territory. And like Hezbollah in Lebanon or FARC in Colombia, it will rely on outside powers for provision of arms, funds and training. In its new form, guerrilla attacks will likely spill over to other Ukrainian regions, particularly Western Ukraine. According to the latest poll, most Donbas residents (39%) blame radical nationalist organizations for the ongoing conflict, with Western intelligence services being close second (34%).

The path to solving the current conflict in Donbas goes not only through Brussels or Washington, but also through Moscow.

While Russia has become an active participant in the conflict, it is also the only actor with real leverage over the insurgents. By denying them sanctuaries on its territory and ending arms supplies, it will effectively cut their main lifeline. However, the Kremlin will not acquiesce to an outcome that ignores what it views as its legitimate interests in the region with a large ethnic Russian presence. While Russia’s immediate commitment to peace is doubtful, the prospect of a protracted conflict on its border, growing international isolation and risks of regional war is also hardly appealing for Putin. All the sides – Ukraine, Russia and the West – should in principle be interested in finding a sustainable resolution to the conflict. One thing that prevents them from negotiating in earnest now is the belief that their interests will be better served by continued fighting. However, as the recent study of war duration shows, irregular wars last much longer than conventional or symmetric non-conventional wars (113.32 months on average). So if guerrilla war begins there may not be an end to violence in sight.

 

Book Club: To Philosophize Is To Learn How To Die

A reader adds to the other near-death experiences sparked by Sarah Bakewell’s How To Live:

I am 65 years old. In 1958, when I was 9, I suffered a ruptured appendix that was misdiagnosed as flu, so I lay in my bed for a week getting sicker and sicker until I was taken to Lankenau Hospital outside Philadelphia. They treated me with drugs for three days and then operated.
bookclub-beagle-tr

I have a number of memories from the three weeks I spent in the hospital but my near-death experience is still very close to me 55 years later. I, too, have a vivid memory of looking down on myself from up high, the minister at my right hand, and my already grieving parents on my left. I remember seeing a bright light and feeling a great sensation of peace and comfort surrounding me. Then my father kept shaking me. He kept saying “Wake up! Don’t go to sleep!” He pulled me back from that gate or passage I was about to enter.

I also have another vivid memory which I have kept from that time. While I was passing in and out of consciousness I had a dream that has stuck with me.

My heritage is Latvian, and my Latvian forebears are Nordic looking. In my dream I was wrapped in a blanket in the back seat of a big, black limousine like a Packard. I was taken to the ferryboat landing at the foot of Flower St. in Chester PA where we used to cross the Delaware to New Jersey on the way to the shore, before the bridges were built. It was night and cold (I got sick in January.) Very blond men wearing cashmere coats and black Homburg hats took me out of the car and onto the ferryboat. They laid me on one of the wooden benches polished from decades of use. The engines started and the ship began to vibrate. I felt cold and was shivering. Then, one of the men came back for me and picked me up in my blanket. He took me back to the Packard. He said “it’s not time yet. We made a mistake.”

Now I have bladder cancer and have been in the OR 12 times in the past four years. I am able to control my fear and make the most of it now largely on the basis of my early brush with death. To tell you the truth, in the grand scheme of things it doesn’t amount to a hill of beans. I don’t want to die just yet but, you know, it really isn’t that big a deal.

Montaigne would be chuffed. Another reader:

One thing I took away from this excellent biography is something you touched on a bit in your very good kickoff to the discussion. Montaigne‘s essays are the antidote to today’s happiness-obsessed culture. Parents raise their children instilling happiness as the most important, above even having good morals. Our social climate today believes that if you’re not happy all the time, there’s something wrong with you.

It hasn’t always been that way. When my father told his father he was divorcing my mother because they were no longer happy, my grandfather, dismayed, replied, “Who told you you were supposed to be happy?” But now, if you live in NYC or Los Angeles, it’s unusual to not have a therapist. Campus counseling services cannot keep up with influx of demand. So the title of this book is sublime irony.

Hope this is valuable. So glad you’ve started these monthly discussions. I have read all three books so far.

Read the whole Book Club conversation here. Send your own thoughts to bookclub@andrewsullivan.com.

The Lady Cops Of The Islamic State

As ISIS commands all women in its domains to veil their faces or face unspecified punishment, Kathy Gilsinan explores the role Iraqi Syrian women themselves are playing in enforcing the group’s fanatical dictates:

The al-Khansaa Brigade is ISIS’s all-female moral police, established in Raqqa soon after ISIS took over the city a few months ago. “We have established the brigade to raise awareness of our religion among women, and to punish women who do not abide by the law,” Abu Ahmad, an ISIS official in Raqqa, told Syria Deeply’s Ahmad al-Bahri. Ahmad emphasized that the brigade has its own facilities to avoid mingling among men and women. “Jihad,” he told al-Bahri, “is not a man-only duty. Women must do their part as well.”

The institution of female enforcers for female morality makes a certain kind of sense if you take the prohibition against sexes mingling to its logical extreme. Still, ISIS in Raqqa may be the only jihadi group employing this kind of logic. In other jihadi groups, “it is men who enforce modesty in public,” explains Thomas Hegghammer, an expert on Islamist militancy affiliated with the Norwegian Defence Research Establishment, via email. Nor has the practice spread elsewhere in the Islamic State’s self-declared caliphate. The al-Khansaa Brigade may be what Hegghammer calls a “short-lived stunt in a single city.”

Indeed, regional news sources suggest the brigade was designed to solve a specific problem: male anti-ISIS fighters disguising themselves in all-concealing feminine garb to pass through checkpoints. With male ISIS members reluctant to inspect under garments to verify the womanhood of the wearers, they got some women to do it.

Haute But Reheated, Ctd

The new French law demanding transparency on whether restaurant dishes are homemade continues to cause controversy. Marc Naimark points out that the law assumes ready-made as the default:

If you’re the kind of consumer who likes to know where your food comes from, this might sound like a pretty good idea, but au contraire: This law is as flawed as they come.

The logo itself comprises one problem with the law: It requires that all homemade dishes be identified, under penalty of a fine of up to 300,000 euros and two years in jail. That’s right: If you dare make real food without labeling it as such, you can go to jail. The fact that identifying homemade food as such is not an option but an obligation strikes everyone I’ve spoken to here in Paris as nonsensical. How fair is it that the burden of compliance lies on those offering real food—the people this law is supposed to protect—rather than the purveyors of factory-made food? (It’s worth noting that those hefty fines are in fact not likely to be applied: The country’s consumer protection inspectors are already overworked, and past menu labeling efforts have gone mostly unenforced.)

Naimark adds this “shocking” tidbit:

Chefs need not make their own stocks and basic sauces. French cooking is founded on its sauces: How can a cook unwilling or unable to prepare his own sauces claim to be making quality food?

Those still reeling from the news that French food isn’t all lovingly crafted from scratch – and, consequently, that those amazing Parisian meals may just have been a welcome respite from a day of touring the city – may take some comfort in the following WSJ story about the state of Gallic school cuisine. Christina Passariello and Marion Halftermeyer report from Paris:

Baptiste gingerly tasted a puff pastry with the tip of his tongue before squishing up his face in disgust. The 2½ year-old gastronome doesn’t like cream.

“I don’t want to try the berry,” added Emy, crossing her toddler arms across her chest.

In France, a country obsessed with good eating, even food for junior must be gourmet. [Jamila] Aissaoui was one of 14 day-care cooks participating in a recent bake-off in Paris. The best recipes will be published in a cookbook and could enter the repertoire of four-course meals that are served to more than 33,000 children under the age of three at the city’s day-care centers. …

Public schools and day-care centers see it as part of their educational mission to teach children—with the help of chefs like Ms. Aissaoui—to eat a diet as broad as it is balanced. Crèches, as French day-care centers are known, serve children as young as 1 year-old sophisticated ingredients such as leeks, Roquefort cheese and dark chocolate, to encourage adventurous palates.

Small Arms, Big Problem

Apparently, we’re missing a lot of guns in Afghanistan and have no idea where they are:

“We’re not talking just handguns and M-16s and AK-47s,” [John Sopko, the special inspector general for Afghanistan reconstruction] told TIME correspondents over lunch on Friday. “We’re talking some high-powered stuff — grenade launchers, RPGs, machine guns — anything that one person could use.” His new report says the U.S. recorded improperly, or simply failed to record, the serial numbers of 43% of the nearly half-million small arms the U.S. has supplied Afghanistan over the past decade. Sloppy U.S. record keeping is compounded by Afghanistan’s indifference to the congressionally mandated U.S. oversight of the weapons’ whereabouts.

Dana Liebelson has more on the inspector general’s report:

According to SIGAR, the US is also supplying Afghanistan with too many weapons.

It estimates that the Afghan security forces have a surplus of over 80,000 AK-47s, 5,800 grenade launchers, and 2,500 Russian PKM machine guns. Defense Department officials told investigators they do not currently have the authority to repossess excess weapons, but they said that “DOD will remain engaged in addressing these critical weapons accountability issues.” The Pentagon did not respond to comment for Mother Jones.

SIGAR concludes that, without confidence in the Afghan government’s ability to account for weapons, “there is a real potential for these weapons to fall into the hands of insurgents, which will pose additional risks to U.S. personnel, the ANSF, and Afghan civilians.” It’s certainly happened before—in 2009, the New York Times reported that “of 30 rifle magazines recently taken from insurgents’ corpses, at least 17 contained cartridges, or rounds, identical to ammunition the United States had provided to Afghan government forces.”

Anti-Zionism And Anti-Semitism, Ctd

While not all Jews support Israel’s actions in Gaza, some people – as previously discussed here – are holding all Jews responsible. Eli Lake spells out where he believes the line falls between criticism of Israel and anti-Semitism:

The atmosphere in Europe since the beginning of the war has been so toxic that the foreign ministers of France, Italy, and Pro Palestinian Demonstrations Are Held Throughout EuropeGermany on Tuesday issued a rare joint statement condemning anti-Semitism at pro-Palestinian demonstrations.

All of this presents a troubling paradox for Zionism. The state of Israel was founded in 1948 as a haven for Jews. But in 2014 Europe’s anti-Semites have attacked Jews for the deeds of the Jewish state. It is a classic anti-Semitic canard to punish any Jew for the perceived crimes of all of them. There is no evidence also to suggest that if Israel did not respond to rockets fired from Hamas, the Jews of Europe would be any safer or the continent’s anti-Semites would be any more tolerant. After all, some of the worst attacks on Jews in France occurred at a time of relative quiet in Israel.

It’s disgusting and wrong. It’s worth noting, however, that Netanyahu’s blanket condemnation of all of Hamas for one lone, renegade cell – and the brutal collective punishment of Gazans – including ten dead children today –  doesn’t help matters. Lake quotes a former IDF intelligence official as saying that rising anti-Semitism in Europe ends up fueling emigration and thus aiding Israel. Elliott Abrams believes this is happening in France:

In my travels to Israel over the years I have noticed what so many others have as well: the growing French presence. One hears French spoken in hotel lobbies and restaurants, and sees real estate ads more often in French than English. It was estimated a month ago that one percent of the French Jewish community, or 5,000 people, would emigrate to Israel this year. That figure will surely grow now, this year and in the coming years. French Jews simply do not feel safe, despite general denunciations of anti-Semitism from government officials. To walk in many parts of Paris wearing a kipah is to risk serious bodily harm.

Last week, Jordan Chandler Hirsch put forth a similar argument:

The case for Israel is now unfolding in the heart of Berlin. This past Friday, an imam was filmed delivering a Friday sermon beseeching Allah to destroy the Zionist Jews. “Count them and kill them to the very last one,” he prayed. A day before, an angry mob gathered to demand the same thing. “Jude, Jude feiges Schwein! Komm heraus und kampf allein!” it bellowed in unison—“Jew, Jew, cowardly swine, come out and fight on your own!”

Or they can come, of course, come to America, where Jews are celebrated, integrated and free from rockets.

(Photo: A Pro-Palestinian demonstrator holds a placard with the symbols ‘Swastika equal to Star of David’ during a demonstration on July 17, 2014 in Madrid, Spain. By Pablo Blazquez Dominguez/Getty Images)