Faiza Patel checks in on efforts to destroy Assad’s chemical weapons:
Finding a country willing to take the toxic chemicals turned out to be impossible; early candidates Norway and Albania backed out. The U.S. came forward with an innovative solution: priority chemicals would be destroyed at sea aboard an American vessel, the specially-outfitted Cape May, using mobile units developed by the American military. Although there remain concerns about whether the units will work consistently on a ship at sea, the idea is not as outlandish as it might sound. The offshore approach has been taken before, albeit on a smaller scale: in the mid-2000s, Japan destroyed World War II-era bombs found at sea off the port of Kanda.
Here’s where the project has hit a snag.
In order to get the priority chemicals onto the Cape May, the Syrians first have to transport them to the northern port of Latakia. The December 31, 2013 deadline for doing so has passed. Two batches of priority chemicals have been moved offshore. These reportedly comprise about 4% of Syria’s total 1300 ton stockpile. However, since we don’t know how much of the stockpile is priority chemicals, we cannot evaluate progress in moving the most toxic chemicals out of the country. The OPCW has attributed the delays to security concerns, as well as logistical issues (although the recent remarks by the U.S. seem to point the finger at Syria). Meanwhile, the clock is ticking. According to the plan approved by the OPCW, priority chemicals must be destroyed—not just spirited out of Syria, but destroyed—by March 31, 2014. And planners estimate that it will take approximately 45 to 60 days to complete the operation at sea.
The final deadline for destruction of all Syrian chemical weapons is June 30th. Hayes Brown looks ahead to it:
Should the delays continue past the June deadline … the OPCW will have a decision to make, one that may bring force back onto the table. Under the terms of the United Nations Security Council resolution that demanded Syria hand over its stockpile, Ban and the OPCW Executive Director are required to jointly report Syrian non-compliance to the Council. Should that occur, the resolution promises that the Council will “impose measures under Chapter VII of the United Nations Charter.” This can range from the imposition of economic sanctions to the use of military force, neither of which permanent members China and Russia are in favor of. Given the wording of the resolution, though, should Syria be found in non-compliance, they may not have much of a choice.
Philip Klein is aghast at the House speaker’s decision to pursue immigration reform in the lead-up to midterm elections:
If immigration reform passes, it will boost Democrats’ prospects in 2014 by demoralizing the GOP base and elevating President Obama, who just delivered a State of the Union Address that tacitly acknowledged he could no longer achieve anything major. If it fails again due to a conservative backlash, then it will trigger another wave of Democratic attacks on Republicans for being anti-Hispanic.
Per the chart above, Republicans favor neither legal status nor citizenship for illegal immigrants:
28% of Republicans oppose [temporary legal status] ‘strongly’. Around third also strongly oppose permanent residency (34%) and citizenship (36%) for illegal immigrants.
Overall, around half of the country (49%) favor a conditional ‘pathway to citizenship’ for illegal immigrants living in the U.S. that have passed background checks, paid fines and have jobs. 41% are opposed. This is about the level of support seen in YouGov polling over the last seven months. Granting temporary legal status is favored by 55%-36% opposed and permanent residency by 52%-39%. All three ideas are favored by the majority of Democrats.
Reihan thinks the GOP should focus on jobs instead:
If Republicans want to build trust with voters — foreign-born and otherwise — they ought to instead pass a serious jobs bill. In his State of the Union address, President Obama made it clear that he will use raising the federal minimum wage as a wedge issue to put GOP lawmakers on the back foot, and there is at least some reason to believe that he will succeed. A Gallup survey from late last year found that 58 percent of Republicans favored a substantial minimum wage hike, a fact that has greatly complicated conservative efforts to beat back a policy they fear will dampen future job growth. The perfect populist issue has fallen into the president’s lap, and a GOP immigration reform push will do nothing to dull its effectiveness.
But Ambers says now may be the “least worst” time for the Republicans to act. He lists reasons why this reckoning is inevitable:
(1) At some point, Republicans will no longer be able to build national political coalitions without reliably attracting more than 40 percent of the Latino vote. This is demographic destiny. The date of this eschaton can be delayed but not put off.
(2) Republicans will endure short term pain. (They’ll have given amnesty to people who don’t deserve it. They’ll be laying the groundwork for a cohort of Democratic voters. They’ll be ratifying ObamaCare.)
(3) Every cycle that passes by without immigration reform is a cycle that is one more removed from the day when Republicans will begin to rebuild a new political coalition that includes more Latinos.
John Avlon credits Boehner for taking on reform despite the political toxicity:
The good news is that Speaker John Boehner has finally decided to do what’s in the long-term best interest of his party and his country, betting big on what could be his most lasting positive legacy. “This problem’s been around for at least the last 15 years. It’s been turned into a political football. I think it’s unfair,” said the consummate dealmaker Boehner. “I think it’s time to deal with it. But how we deal with it is going to be critically important.”
The bad news is that the Tea Party and associated right-wing activist groups have already declared immigration reform a betrayal of conservative virtue, shots fired in the GOP civil war. A “Death Warrant for Conservatism,” declared the Powerline blog, while Heritage Action’s Dan Holler told The Daily Beast’s Patricia Murphy the proposal amounted to “a full-throated embrace of amnesty.”
Looking at the districts where the Latino vote is decisive, Cillizza concludes that immigration reform won’t help any Republicans get elected to the House this year:
Of the 24 districts with a Hispanic population of 25 percent or higher, half are places where the Hispanic vote amounts to something close to the only Democratic vote in heavily Republican seats. Only four of the 24 districts were won by President Obama in 2012, and only five others — California’s 25th, Florida’s 25th, California’s 39th, California’s 49th and New Mexico’s 2nd — can be considered even potentially competitive between the two sides. Those nine districts represent roughly four percent of the 232 seats the Republican majority currently controls in the House.
Passing immigration reform is, without question, the right move for a Republican party with an eye on winning back the White House in 2016 and staying competitive in the presidential race for decades to come. But, viewed from the how-does-this-affect-me-and-my-political-career perspective that most rank and file House Republicans see the world, passing immigration reform is a far more mixed bag politically speaking.
Sargent sees it differently, noting how the politics could actually be worse next year than right now:
Here’s an alternate reading: If the party tackles reform in 2015, it could get tied up in GOP presidential primary politics, pulling the GOP field to the right and leaving the eventual nominee saddled with extreme party rhetoric and positions on the issue, further alienating Latinos in the general election — exactly as happened in 2012. So while it might be difficult for Republicans to get reform done this year, braving it might be better than waiting.
Sean Trende wonders whether the push is happening now because Boehner fears a big win this fall:
First, a landslide would present as much of a problem as it does an opportunity for those who might want to revisit the issue in 2015, especially if the GOP establishment (or its donors) believes this is a must-do before the 2016 elections. The base would be even more agitated after a big victory, and appalled at any compromise on this issue if the GOP picks it up in 2015. In addition, absent a majority, Democrats wouldn’t have the same incentive to support a bill that contained further compromises, especially since they already view the bill as a compromise in the first place. They’d be better off watching Republicans flail and fail to pass a bill as their own base abandons them; this is roughly what happened in the mid-2000s. …
This isn’t to suggest that the GOP leadership is affirmatively doing this to minimize Republican gains. What I am saying is that they are closer to neutral about big gains than we might think, given the problems that the surge in base enthusiasm caused for them after the 2010 elections. So if they check agenda items like this off the list now and still get a landslide, great. But if they end up cooling off the base’s enthusiasm and get a narrow, establishment-based Senate majority and keep the House, well, that’s not the end of the world either. In fact, it would mean a more docile caucus in both Houses, which is good for those who run those Houses.
Benjamin Wallace profiles Ezra Klein and describes his vision:
Klein’s theory of the news grew out of his frustration with the industry’s relentless presentism, with the fact that, because media organizations prioritize what’s new (that’s why it’s called news), an article about the latest development in Syria’s civil war would likely not mention the single most important fact necessary to understand what is happening: the historical enmity between Alawites and Sunnis …
The answer, as Klein sees it, lies in the handling of what he calls “persistent content,” the more static information that makes the new stuff make sense. And here, he believes, the Internet has untapped potential. Traditional media organizations have taken advantage of the Internet’s speed but not its longevity. “People set newspapers on fire, they use them for wrapping fish,” Yglesias says. “The Internet does not have that property. What I don’t think we’ve gotten is that you can make things last longer than in print.” People who think about digital journalism distinguish between what they call unchanging “stock content” and ephemeral “flow content.” Klein believes that distinction is unhelpfully stark. “We’re interested in ending the ‘versus’ there,” he says. “We believe there are rivers and lakes of content that work together.”
Working on the web has two essential qualities: the pond-skater and the plumb line.
The pond-skater can flit with astonishing speed on the surface of everything, on “news”, and on the very latest twists and turns of various discussions. The plumb line allows the pond-skater at any point to stop and drop anchor, plumbing essentially infinite depths of detail, context, information and history. Combining the two remains digital journalism’s great and unique possibility.
We do it every day, of course, on the Dish with every continuing thread and with every contextualizing hyper-link. We combine seventeenth century poetry, revisionist history, classic tomes and novels, scholarly studies, authors long since forgotten, and video from the past to create a constantly changing but, we hope, open-ended and deep inquiry into any number of subjects. The point is to make the new more comprehensible by understanding the old, and to make the old instantly new again by adding context and wisdom and perspective to the new.
There must be many ways to unlock this potential. Here’s hoping Ezra innovates another one.
The former Port Authority official who personally oversaw the lane closings at the George Washington Bridge, central to the scandal now swirling around Gov. Chris Christie of New Jersey, said on Friday that “evidence exists” that the governor knew about the closings when they were happening. A lawyer for the former official, David Wildstein, wrote a letter describing the move to shut the lanes as “the Christie administration’s order” …
The screenshot above is part of the response from Christie’s office. No, it’s not from a high school president trashing his old schoolyard friend. It just reads like that. Josh Marshall is gobsmacked:
It’s genuinely shocking that a sitting governor and presidential aspirant finds himself or his key defenders writing a sentence like this: “He was publicly accused by his high school social studies teacher of deceptive behavior.” I mean, is that a joke?
It’s as petty as the alleged crime – and thereby makes it seem more plausible. Josh thinks Christie is toast:
Put it all together: the horrible press, the dipping polls, the political sword of damocles people have to sign on hoping won’t fall and the inherent difficulties of getting a tonally northeastern, relative moderate through the GOP primary process, it’s just too heavy a lift. It won’t happen. And that’s all assuming he’s either innocent or that smoking gun evidence never comes out.
Everything here is circumstantial. Christie definitely comes off as the kind of politician who would order a stunt like this. Possibly he didn’t do it. Possibly he did, but it will never be proven. His best-case scenario now appears to be an absence of a smoking gun, and convincing voters not to believe the subordinate pointing a finger at him. It doesn’t look good.
Even if he says something gassy like, “I have no hard evidence but, knowing how the governor’s office operated and knowing the governor personally for many years, I’m sure he knew,” that’ll be enough for Christie’s enemies. There are so many people, left and right, who want him out of the 2016 field that the accusation alone from someone at the heart of the scandal is seriously damaging. If Bridget Kelly comes out and agrees with Wildstein, I don’t know what happens to the rest of Christie’s term.
[A]bove all, there is this: we now know that the man at the center of this whole operation has decided to flip against Christie instead of taking the fall. This should not be surprising – Wildstein signaled his willingness to cause trouble when he responded to a legislative subpoena by providing so many damning e-mails and text messages (including one that referred tantalizingly to a meeting between Christie and Port Authority Chairman David Samson just before the “time for some traffic problems” order was issued); and he got a lawyer without ties to Christie, unlike Bridget Anne Kelly, the deputy chief of staff who sent the “traffic problems” order and has secured as her lawyer Michael Critchley, a top attorney with longstanding links to Christie. Wildstein is, quite simply, the ultimate wildcard – someone who seemingly left politics after a brief stint as mayor of his hometown but kept his hand in the game for years as an anonymous and exceedingly well-sourced political blogger, “Wally Edge.”
Assuming that this former official can back up his claims, Christie is not only finished as a national candidate, but he will probably be forced from office early, and he should be. It is somehow fitting that he should be undone by such petty punitive tactics when he owed his reputation as a national political figure in no small measure to his willingness to browbeat and harangue. Even if Christie hangs on in office for the rest of his term, he will make no headway in getting anything through the legislature, and his second term is effectively over. The main question that will remain at that point is whether any laws were broken and to what extent Christie may be culpable.
Last month, when the scandal took off, I said Christie was one story away from oblivion. At least for now, and despite its deadly timing, I’m not convinced the Wildstein letter is that story. With Wisniewski, I am reserving judgement until we hear from Kelly, Christie’s former deputy chief of staff. She’s the potential John Dean of this story. She has the power to destroy her former boss, but also to exculpate him, at least partly. Until we know what she’s got to say, Christie will remain in limbo. He’s not quite dead yet.
Christie, and only Christie, is even attempting to defend Christie at this point. Not his allies in South Jersey, including Democrats with whom he cut deals to become Governor in the first place; nor any national Republicans, all of whom have added ‘if’ clauses to every statement of support since the beginning of his crash; and certainly not the hard-right, left muttering sour nothings about liberal media conspiracies and Benghazi.
We’ll have to see the evidence to know if or how Christie lied. But expecting the truth because it would so clearly be foolish for Christie to lie, or for any politician to, is a misguided notion. There have been too many times that it just hasn’t worked out that way. The dumb, disprovable lies often have to do with sex. But there are other disorienting impulses, too, like pride and money and Republican primaries.
Update from a reader:
Let’s say Christie is correct and there is no evidence linking him to the bridge scandal. But look at the petty things he said about Wildstein, who worked for Christie and whom Christie appointed to the Port Authority. Doesn’t it say something about Christie as a manager, that he would hire someone he thought so little of, who has been involved in shady (according to Christie’s point of view) things for so many years?
That’s what Derek Thompson calls Philip Seymour Hoffman:
It’s not clear that there were roles Philip Seymour Hoffman could not do. He had so many lives within him—and more, undiscovered and unseen. Those are the lives, aside from his own, we’ve now lost. “For me, acting is torturous,” Hoffman told the New York Times in 2008, “and it’s torturous because you know it’s a beautiful thing. I was young once, and I said, That’s beautiful and I want that. Wanting it is easy, but trying to be great—well, that’s absolutely torturous.”
Christopher Orr notes how Hoffman “took on roles large and small, in films high-, middle-, and low-brow, and he excelled regardless of the occasion”:
Writing my end-of-the-year prizes a month and a half ago, I included among them “The ‘Philip Seymour Hoffman Makes Any Movie Better’ Award,” for The Hunger Games: Catching Fire. It was jokey commendation, of course, but not really a joke. Of the nearly three dozen performances of Hoffman’s that I have witnessed onscreen, I can’t think of a single one that failed to elevate the film in question.
Dana Stevens contemplates the roles Hoffman might have played:
Accomplished as he already was, Hoffman’s career nonetheless had a distinct feeling of being nearer its beginning than its end—he was the opposite of an artist in decline. It’s easy to imagine him performing into his 80s, challenging himself and surprising us in ever-different ways as he grew older, playing Winston Churchill or Falstaff or Captain Ahab or King Lear, directing and producing both for the stage and the screen, mentoring younger actors. That we’ll never get a chance to watch that lifelong creative flowering makes me want to destroy a roomful of furniture with the cold, methodical rage Hoffman’s betrayed jewel thief displayed in Sidney Lumet’s final film, Before the Devil Knows You’re Dead. It’s a bravura moment that seems to cite the famous room-destruction scene in Citizen Kane, but with a performance that, in some ways, surpasses Welles’. For years to come—as long as I’m still around to watch movies, which right now feels like a very lucky position to be in—I’ll see other actors playing roles that should have belonged to Hoffman, and feel his loss anew.
“A lot of deaths feel sad. Philip Seymour Hoffman’s feels like a robbery,” my friend, Time’s television critic James Poniewozik wrote this afternoon on hearing the terrible news that the actor was dead at 46, leaving three young children. His death was reportedly due to a heroin overdose. Hoffman had sought treatment for addiction in 2013 in response to his relapse after more than two decades clean.
It’s a sadly perfect sentiment. Some artists’ deaths, like that of Heath Ledger’s, seem preposterously tragic because of the extreme youth of the people in question. Their passings force us to make accountings of what might have been possible. But like Roger Ebert, who died last spring, Philip Seymour Hoffman was an established part of the movies for as long as I’ve been watching them in any sort of serious way. We didn’t have to wonder what might have been, when the ways in which Hoffman acted as a blessing to every movie he was a part of is so abundantly obvious. The idea of a year at the theater without seeing Hoffman show up as a shaman of a music journalist, an irascible CIA agent, the founder of a new religion is almost incomprehensible.
There is a particularly chilling aspect to Hoffman’s death that only another recovering addict can feel. He had 23 years clean, and then went back out. Just two weeks ago, I celebrated ten years off my own crippling drug habit. Sometimes I feel convinced that I’ll never relapse and experience that kind of pain and insanity again. Recovery programs warn that this kind of thinking can be dangerous. The addicting substance is characterized as “cunning, baffling and powerful.” It sounds like a cliché until someone with more than two decades clean, with a beautiful family and a career that is the envy of the world trades it in for a glassine envelope of dope and a set of works.
A collection of 14 clips from PSH’s films are here.
I have read you pretty religiously since the 2008 campaign. I actually first checked out your blog back in 2004, but as a teenager in Darwin, Australia it didn’t make much sense. But by now I’ve basically stopped reading anything else and rely on the Dish and NYT headlines. I was a founding subscriber last year and just re-upped for $25 (I’m a grad student, so I might pay more when it’s not going straight on my student loan.)
This Christmas I also bought a gift subscription for each of my little brothers. I’ve taken their education seriously and have previously done things like get the Guardian Weekly delivered to us in Oz, or sign them up for Foreign Affairs and The New Yorker. This year we are all going to be on different continents outside Oz for the first time. I wanted them to have something that was relevant to their lives as global citizens and would give us common reading experiences to discuss. I’m hoping the Dish will be more than just a news source, but help bring us closer together while we are apart.
Australia is just one of the top 30 countries seen in the above screenshot of the Dish’s back-end, displaying the number of page-views we have accrued in the past 30 days. That list continues far down the page and ends up encompassing nearly every nation on earth, down to Rwanda (37 page-views), Nepal (30), Paraguay (25), Mongolia (13), and Uzbekistan (1). A Kiwi writes:
It’s summer down here in New Zealand, and I’m just back from some serious doing nothing on a beach. And the first bit of actual something I’ve done (okay, except for putting the laundry on), is to renew my subscription. Because I like what you’re doing for journalism. And I get that this intimate media model means that I’m allowed to make suggestions for improving things. So here it is in two words: MORE RUGBY.
(Did I mention that I’m from New Zealand, home of all the rugby world titles? Except, to our shame, one: the Bingham Cup. See here for a story on the New Zealand Falcons who are going to Sydney this year to rectify that gap.)
Keep up the good work – and more rugby, please.
My dad has a big wide grin as he reads this. Update from a reader who tries to widen it with this video:
Reading your Kiwi’s email, I cheered in front of my computer screen! Yes, yes, yes, more rugby!
Of course, as a French reader and fan of “Les Bleus” since I was a kid, reading the rest, i.e. “Did I mention that I’m from New Zealand, home of all the rugby world titles?” perversely made me think of that try [seen in the video]. It is known here as “l’essai du bout du monde” (the ends of the earth try) and I thought that this thread, if it starts, would do with some “French flair” …
Sure, sure, it’s been long since les Bleus have shown that much brilliance and one can only hope Philippe Saint-André (at the origin of this famous try in 1994 and present coach of the French team) could breathe some of that “flair” into his players. But hope springs eternal. Far from me the idea to twist the knife in a very fresh wound, but young Gaël Fickou seemed to have found a tiny scrap of it at last in the last two minutes of the France-England match of last Saturday (6 Nations). Okay, I’ve fought hard (well, maybe not that hard..) but I just can’t resist this video.
All of the above in good fun of course! To me, that’s the true magic of rugby: to have so many dedicated fans, cheering their team from the bottom of their hearts, but always with respect for the other side and ready to share a beer with the other team’s fans the minute the match is over, united in their love of “le beau jeu”.
Another reader, from Woodside, Victoria:
It’s warm today, as the thermometer in the picture says, with the smell of smoke in the air. Nothing to worry about yet.
Incidentally I renewed at $10 per month. Considering that I also subscribe to New York magazine, in which most of what I do is fumble at the crossword and giggle at the Approval Matrix, anything less doesn’t seem right.
And another Aussie:
I just subscribed for $50. I’ve been reading the Dish for almost two years now, avidly, but have (shamefully) been putting off subscribing.
I like paying for journalism, and I’ve done so for a while – I subscribed to Crikey, an Australian online news site, for three years at $200 p.a., and to The Sydney Morning Herald and The Australian, both Australian newspapers, for the past two at $100 p.a. – so it was never having to pay that put me off subscribing to you (although, being a grad student, dollars are a little precious).
No: it was the awareness that in paying for journalism I was, to some extent, going to be locking myself into a certain view and style of news – like the viewer who only watches Fox because that’s what they pay for. I didn’t want that. Both Crikey and The Sydney Morning Herald are left-of-centre publications; The Australian, a News Ltd paper, was my attempt to get some dissent and difference to my news consumption. But one of the things I’ve enjoyed most about the Dish is that content and viewpoints are both wide and constantly aired. I might disagree with what I read, but I love being able to read it.
So, when it came time for subscription renewal, I cancelled one to come to you.
Another paid in pounds:
Just wanted to say I’ve resubscribed at an annualised rate of a £1 a week, which works out (I think) at round about $85. Frankly, it’s a bargain. As Henry Root might say, here’s £50. Keep up the good work.
Cheers. We’re chuffed. Update from a dissenting reader up north:
Noting that pageviews from Canada are not even a twentieth of your domestic following, I find my own choice not to subscribe is sustained. It’s a very Yank phenomenon, your blog.
In the 1930s, a Canadian public-policy guru, Graham Spry, said of broadcasting (he meant radio, but it applied to television, and more widely too): “It’s the state – or the United States.” Either Canada built up public broadcasting or there would be nothing but American broadcasters sending us American news, culture, personalities. So Canada built a public broadcasting network – and regulated private broadcasters as well.
There’s no sign of publicly funded blogging on our horizon. But no Canadian blog with ambitions anything like yours could survive on subscriptions. And if we subscribe to The Dish, we reinforce the American blogging hegemony. You run a great blog, but despite the Kiwi dreamer who sent you his money and hoped for more rugby posts, it’s gotta be pretty much all America all the time.
Now if your 170,000 Canadian pageviews could translated into $20 apiece for a Canadian blogging consortium…? Hmmm. (But since 170 of them are probably me alone, there’s only a thousand or so of us looking in, anyway!)
I understand your perspective on Dylan Farrow and respect what you have written. I, too, am deeply sympathetic to her and refuse to dismiss what she has said. Nonetheless, the account published by The Daily Beast offers a clear and cogent defense of Woody Allen, and I would urge you to consider it. I do not know what to think, but I am starting to wonder if the issue at stake is not whether we allow a man’s morality to overshadow the quality of his work, but rather whether we truly have enough evidence to discount the morality of the man.
I’m glad to link, and eager to air that side of the issue. But I remain, as I have to, agnostic about the actual accusations – but not the evident pain and anger in the letter – which remains compatible with what Dylan says happened to her. But my point was not about who may or may not be right. I cannot know with any certainty, although I tend to sympathize with most victims in cases like these. My point was simply about how the moral compromises involved in grappling with flawed artists are basically unavoidable. Another adds:
Allegations such as these are so perverse, nobody ever wants to believe someone would be willing to simply make them up. But as the Duke lacrosse team case taught us, the accusations aren’t always true.
Another dissents:
I’m struggling with why you weren’t this measured and circumspect when you responded to abuse within the church and by Sandusky at Penn State. You’re not exactly known for your friendliness to child molesters. Jefferson, Eliot, and Larkin all thought and did things that were morally repugnant, sure, but none of them directly involved the sexual abuse of a small child. Wasn’t Maciel just as accomplished an auteur (within his chosen sphere) as Allen? Should we sit here and marvel at the brilliant talent and the subtle artistry with which he manipulated his audience?
If Ms. Farrow’s allegations are as true as you and I seem to believe they are, your comparison to concussions in the NFL is inapt. For all the evil of the concussion crisis, those grown men agreed to that environment in a way that Ms. Farrow did and could not. A more general comparison to football, however, may be on point in that apparently all fans are incredibly willing to overlook or at least contextualize the sins of their preferred entertainment.
So, why the restrained invective when it comes to Woody Allen?
Because I do not know for sure. And an individual possible case like this one is not the same as institutionalized child abuse whose impact can be so much greater and where institutional and social power can enforce silence in ways not imposed on Dylan Farrow. Another reader draws from experience:
Rage expressed towards a parent by an adult kid may be due to real abuse, but it is not proof of abuse. I participate in support groups of estranged parents, principally mothers, who have been estranged by their adult children.
It is common in these groups for these mothers to share their grief, heartbreak, confusion and their own anger over their kids’ rewriting of history and allegations of things that did not happen. There is also something called Parental Alienation Syndrome, which is said to occur in situations of a bitter divorce where one parent – generally the parent who is living with the child at the time of the divorce – is so bitter that their feelings and their behavior towards the other parent influence their children to react to the formerly loved other parent as though they are of no worth, resulting in complete rejection of the other parent. The rejection can be so complete that nothing that the alienated parent can do will convince the child of their worth.
It is hard to imagine that anyone could have been angrier at Woody Allen than Mia Farrow at the time of their breakup. I can imagine that it was tough to have been a child living in her household then. It isn’t hard for me to believe that in her own rage at Allen that Mia would have gone to the extent of using her children as weapons against Allen. A child of 7 is no match for a mother in a rage.
I don’t know what really happened, but for me the proof of what happened does not lie in Dylan’s rage. I have seen adult kids grow up believing that good parents were bad parents. It is a tragedy for everyone.
One more reader:
We know nothing about Dylan. Nothing about her mental health. Nothing about how her mental health was assessed as a seven year old (or as a three year old, for that matter). She cannot be questioned or cross examined. The report stemming from the six or seven month investigation of her allegations has never been made public, but what little we know of it suggests every reason to doubt Dylan and Farrow. And according to the Daily Beast, her brother Moses – also adopted by Allen – has now decided that living with Farrow involved “brainwashing.”
I do not believe Dylan, not her particulars at least (which are, in fact, not very particular). Which is not to say that I find Allen blameless. Adoptive children are often very fragile. I have two. Even children adopted as infants experience tragedy very early in life and tragedy damages children. To jointly adopt two fragile children with a woman to whom you have not made a lifetime commitment, a woman who is most assuredly a few sandwiches short of a picnic, and then to cheat on that woman with her own adoptive daughter is to invite bedlam. Allen may not have foreseen the details of that bedlam, but when we do bad things we don’t get to dictate the parameters of the suffering that ensues.
Mia Farrow’s brother, by the way, is currently jailed for child abuse, and the vast majority of abusers started out abused. I wouldn’t be surprised if both brother and sister were victims. Moreover, I suspect Dylan, out of empathy for her mother’s very vocal rage, truly did not want to see Allen after their separation, and that when she did not want to see him, Farrow, based on her own experience, suspected and then suggested the possibility of sexual abuse. And after days and months of questioning and prodding, I suspect that Dylan came to believe that she had been abused.
If we care about facts, and want to hash them out in the media, the report should be released as well as transcripts of all interviews – including with Dylan. But we are not concerned about facts. We are concerned with vengeance and anger.
Ioffe profiles Russian activists. What to worry about:
The increasingly real threat of economic turmoil is already chipping away at Putin’s power with more effectiveness than any protest movement. There is bound to be a vacuum when the forces of economics prevail. But a movement that is pulled in myriad different directions, that cannot decide on an identity, and yet lacks variety in its leaders cannot fill the void. By crushing the opposition, Putin has all but ensured that, once again, Russia’s history will repeat itself, and only the wrong people will be there to step in—the ultra-nationalists, childlike faddists, and dangerous purists. And Putin’s own story may not end as happily as he imagined.
On this most recent trip to Moscow, I asked one government official what the culmination of Putin’s reign would look like. “We don’t have this tradition of, OK, you served two terms and you leave,” he said. “We have no other tradition but to hold out to the end and leave feet first.” He meant in a coffin.
The Economistbreaks down the problems with the Russian economy:
In today’s Russia, oil and gas account for 75% of all exports, compared with 67% in 1980. Although Russia no longer buys grain from America, as it did in the 1980s, 45% of what Russians buy today is imported. Walk around a department store in central Moscow, and it is hard to find anything that is produced locally. The state remains the single largest employer, while its corporations—controlling natural resources, infrastructure, banking and media—dominate the economy.
As Clifford Gaddy and Barry Ickes, two American economists, have argued, the highly inefficient industrial structure of the old Soviet economy, based on misallocation of both resources and people, remains intact. The oil rent reinforced and perpetuated it: it has bought political stability and the loyalty of the population, but has slowed down modernisation. Inevitably, the result is stagnation.
Insisting that “elections are flawed,” Alexander Guerrero proposes an alternative method of selecting representatives that he calls “lottocracy”:
First, rather than having a single, generalist legislature such as the United States Congress, the legislative function would be fulfilled by many different single-issue legislatures (each one focusing on, for example, just agriculture or health care). … These single-issue legislatures would be chosen by lottery from the political jurisdiction, with each single-issue legislature consisting of 300 people. Each person chosen would serve for a three-year term. Terms would be staggered so that each year 100 new people begin, and 100 people finish. All adult citizens in the political jurisdiction would be eligible to be selected. People would not be required to serve if selected, but the financial incentive would be significant, efforts would be made to accommodate family and work schedules, and the civic culture might need to be developed so that serving is seen as a significant civic duty and honour. In a normal year-long legislative session, the 300 people would develop an agenda of the legislative issue or two they would work on for that session, they’d hear from experts and stakeholders with respect to those issues, there would be opportunities for gathering community input and feedback, and they would eventually vote to enact legislation or alter existing legislation.
The advantages he sees:
Single-issue focus is essential to allow greater learning and engagement with the particular problems, especially given the range of backgrounds that members would bring to the institutions, and the fact that these individuals would be amateurs at the particular task of creating legislation. Lottery-chosen representatives would have more time to learn about the problems they’re legislating than today’s typical representatives, who have to spend their time learning about every topic under the sun, while also constantly travelling, claiming credit, and raising funds to get re-elected. In the lottocratic system representatives will be — at least over a long enough run — descriptively and proportionately representative of the political community, simply because they have been chosen at random. But they will not have in mind the idea that they are to represent some particular constituency. Instead, they will be like better-informed versions of ourselves, coming from backgrounds like ours, but with the opportunity to learn and deliberate about the specific topic at hand.
He argues that the way we taste has a lot to do with other factors. He cites [gastronome Jean Anthelme] Brillat-Savarin’s observation that the pleasures of the table are not the pleasures of eating. We are less likely to enjoy our Nespresso, he suggests, if we know how it was prepared. This leads us to another level of taste: the sort we use when we express distaste at another’s ethics. He doesn’t use the word in that way, preferring to talk about “judgment” when urging us to make our own decisions about what to cook. As a philosopher, he feels the need to give us some criteria with which to make these assessments, and urges a balance between mind and body, arguing that food tastes better when we’ve thought about it.
Alex Renton describes a chapter on food and routine:
Routine, says Baggini, can be thought a virtue – Aristotle’s hexis, or habit, is an active condition, not a passive one. Routine and repetition are the key to kitchens great and small – whether it’s Baggini’s Italian grandmother preparing her fabulous ravioli at Easter, or a sushi shokunin practising his precise art. Some 30% of us, he quotes a recent survey, always have the same thing for lunch – is that a bad thing?
“There is nothing more tedious than culinary innovation for the sake of it,” Baggini concludes the chapter. “Every restaurant trend of recent decades, for example, has ended in a giant yawn… The knack is not simply to fall into routines and be limited by them, but to choose them well and hence be enriched and liberated by them.” This is interesting, arguable stuff and shows Baggini at his best, drawing from a glorious range of sources (I’m desperately trying to avoid a cooking metaphor here) to produce engaging thought.
Erica Wagner appreciates that Baggini considers the morality of eating meat:
[O]n our behalf he heads to an abattoir and describes in clear but not gruesome detail just what happens when a pig goes to slaughter. The conclusions he draws are rather more forgiving than those of Jonathan Safran Foer in his largely excoriating Eating Animals – but Baggini is not talking about factory farming here, rather about animals that have been raised humanely. But then, what does “humanely” mean, when it comes to animals? How much consciousness or awareness do they have? It’s a question Baggini considers too – though admitting that it’s impossible to know the answer. He decides, however, “that treating animals with respect is not incompatible with eating them”.
Meanwhile, John Crace provides a “digested read” for the book. Previous Dish on the philosophy of food here and here.
the fact that, because media organizations prioritize what’s new (that’s why it’s called news), an article about the latest development in Syria’s civil war would likely not mention the single most important fact necessary to understand what is happening: the historical enmity between Alawites and Sunnis …
The Dish 