Tag: Premium

Making Up For Lost Time

Nina MacLaughlin explains what happened when, as an adult, she started wearing makeup:

I was experimenting at age 30 the way I never had as a kid. In middle school, all my pals had bright, colored Caboodles full of makeup, like tackle boxes for black-cherry lip gloss, cotton balls, and squares of eye shadow in various shades of blue. I was never into it — not disdainful, just unmoved, the lot of it lost against more pressing concerns: crushes on boys, playing soccer. Plus, I had no one to model the behavior after. My mother wore no makeup. There were no lipsticks to smear, age 6, standing on a stool in the bathroom mirror. No eye shadow to smudge above the lids. My mother looked forward to going gray; to dye your hair, she believed, signaled a lack of confidence, a cowardly rejection of nature. … The message she conveyed to me from an early age was that beauty needed no adornment. I absorbed it, deeply, without knowing I had.

In some ways it’s a positive message to send to a girl: You don’t need this stuff to be attractive. And I’m relieved not to suffer the stress and time-consumption of having to manage my face with products every time I walk out the door. But a subtle strain of judgment exists at its base: If you need to use makeup, then you are not naturally beautiful. Red lips, blushed cheeks, lined eyes — they run the risk of making a woman look clownish, whorish, or — worst of all — like she was trying too hard.

Stacia L. Brown, seen above, recalls undergoing a similar change of heart around the same age:

New motherhood was exhausting, but I didn’t expect it to age me. I come from deep brown women, a grandmother routinely mistaken for 10 or more years younger than her age and a mother more often assumed to be my sister than my parent.

They each gave birth to one girl, but they were much younger than I was when they did so. At 17 and 19, respectively, their sexiest years were ahead of them. Even now, in their seventies and fifties, they shore up the veracity of the saying, “Black don’t crack.” Not only did I inherit too little of their melanin, I also got pregnant a few weeks before turning 30. I had no precedent for the hastened aging to come. …

Mothering alone has been a double-edge sword, sloughing off my vanity, but also wounding my sense of my own beauty. Often, I can’t really care too much how I look; there’s no time, everything else is more pressing, and most of it falls to me. For a while, this felt transcendent, like a flouting of beauty conventions, empowering and deeply feminist — even if it wasn’t quite intentional. But as soon as I was able to come up for air, I noticed the pitying glances at the dried milk and drool on the maternity shirts. Acquaintances leaned in with concern, their palms firmly planted on the back of my hand, and said, “But how are you?”

And Jessica Grose recently shared her own makeup trajectory:

“They didn’t teach me how to do hair at Harvard,” my doctor mom would sniff. She had a stylish pixie (Madonna, circa the “Rain” video) that she methodically maintained with visits to the hairdresser once every four weeks. She cared about her clothes, but she always used a minimal amount of makeup and had no skill with a curling iron. And while she would take me shopping when I was a kid, she never taught me how to do anything beauty-wise. When I asked her recently why she never imparted any of these skills, first she said, “It never occurred to me,” and then she added, “At least I taught you to shave your legs.”

My mother also always said that you don’t need makeup when you’re young: In your 20s, you have the best skin and hair you’ll ever have, so why gussy that up? In my experience, that was true. I never had acne until my late 20s, which is also when I started getting wrinkles (this seems like a cosmic joke). My hair got weird and stringy when I was pregnant with my daughter at 30. I came to a point where if I didn’t start learning how to do basic hair and makeup, like my friends had learned when we were teenagers, I was at risk of going out in public looking like a bridge troll.

Beard Of The Week

A reader writes:

The recent discussions on The Dish on Gamergate, Dr. Matt Taylor’s shirt, and the the vaguely generalized anxiety over the decline of male culture, has been exhilarating, exasperating, unnamed (19)and maddening!  I can honestly say it’s the single issue where I feel a viscerally negative reaction to parts of your stated opinion.  But, as a bright blue dot in the midst of the deep red state of Texas, I’ve long ago had to learn to look past a few points of disagreement for the sake of a friendship.  And we are still friends, aren’t we?  I hope so.

This debate, along with your long-standing interest in the beard as a quintessential symbol of masculinity and your commitment to highlighting contemporary portrait photography, has actually had a significant impact on my work as a visual artist.  I’m a photographer who works using the technologically obsolete, hand-made process known as Wet Collodion, or Tintype, first invented in 1851.  This is the process that was used by the British photographer Roger Fenton, whose work during the Crimean War was likely influential in the popularization of the long beard for British men in the mid-19th century, as you mention in this post.

My colleague Bryan Wing and I are the team Project Barbatype.

We photograph the men (and women) who compete in Beard and Moustache competitions, mostly in our Texas region, with plans to attend the World Championships in Austria next year.  There is actually an international governing body for this, the World Beard and Moustache Association.

These competitions are usually held in bars and are often fundraisers for various charities, and are, as you may imagine, raucous affairs fueled by much drinking of beer and shouting of obscenities.  They are a total blast!  Coming from the very staid and stuffy art world (which likes to pretend it’s far more subversive than it actually is), it’s refreshing to make work in an environment where crowds gather to greet an image as it magically emerges in the chemical bath with high-fives and cheers of “THAT’S TOTALLY BADASS!!”

The whole phenomenon of the Beard Competition is, as you say and as I hope our Tintype project seeks to emphasize, “a little cultural balancing of the high-tech 21st Century by the mores of the low-tech 19th.”  Many of the competitors dress the part for their turn on the stage, sometimes in very impressive hand-tailored period clothes, others in ironically inspired blue-collar work outfits.  All of them take great pride in the care, maintenance, and presentation of their facial hair.  One of our guiding principles of the project is to produce photographs that reflect that level of handiwork and committed craft.

I have heard criticism from some Art-world colleagues who think our Project, and the whole phenomenon of the contemporary Beardsmen, is simple and frivolous fluff, best dismissed as a backlash against feminism.  But as I see it, there is a very supple and subversive message at work here about the nature of post-feminist masculinity, both hetero- and homo-.  By taking a traditional and easily recognizable symbol of manliness and exaggerating it to the point of absurdity, these folks are simultaneously satirizing and celebrating the arbitrariness of all markers of gender identity. “We men are creatures of pompous posturing,” they seem to say.  “It’s stupid and we know it.  But what the fuck, it’s fun! Look at me! Look at my beard!!”  What could be more male than that?

The competitions have all the hallmarks of an eye-roll-inducing “boys will be boys” permissiveness, but divorced from any malicious intent. Which is not to say that there are no rude comments or drunken exaltations flying around the bar – far from it.  These are guys out drinking after all, and I certainly am not going to start spouting off about “post-feminist masculinity” while at one of the events, for fear of being (appropriately as I see it) run out as a killjoy.

But these competitions are essentially men in drag, as MEN – MANLY MASCULINE HAIRY MEN’S MEN.  As an artsy-fartsy academe who has always felt queasy with unrepentant expressions of male vigor, this is a flavor of masculine identity that I can celebrate without guilt.  And I have to admit, that feels nice.

I have attached a few examples of the tintypes from Project Barbatype to this email, but there are more in the Facebook group, and at my personal website.  We have signed model releases for each of them, and should you care to publish any, we would certainly welcome the publicity!

An Object Lesson In Knowing Your Audience

Speaking at an international women’s justice summit on Monday, Turkey’s president violated a cardinal rule of public speaking, telling a room full of women’s rights activists that gender equality is unnatural:

Certain work, Erdogan said, goes against women’s “delicate nature,” and “their characters, habits, and physiques are different” from men’s. “Our religion [Islam] has defined a position for women: motherhood,” he said. He then went on to blast feminists, accusing them of not understanding their role in society. “Some people can understand this, while others can’t,” he said. “You cannot explain this to feminists because they don’t accept the concept of motherhood.”

Erdogan tried using the Quran to advance his point, saying, “Paradise lies at the feet of mothers,” which ended up just turning into an awkward reflection on the role of his mother in his own family. “I would kiss my mother’s feet because they smelled of paradise,” he said. “She would glance coyly and cry sometimes.”

Alev Scott puts her finger on why this speech was so frightening:

Erdoğan is neither a lone madman in a padded cell, nor a Victorian uncle caught in a time warp.

He’s the president of a country of 75 million people where only 28% of women are in legal employment, an estimated 40% of women suffer domestic violence at least once in their lives, and where millions of girls are forced into under-age marriage every year (incidentally, Erdoğan’s predecessor, Abdullah Gül, married his wife when she was 15). Exact figures on domestic abuse and rape are hard to come by because it is socially frowned upon to complain about husbands, and police often tell women and girls who have been threatened with murder by their partners to go home and “talk it over”.

During his speech this week, Erdoğan implied such widespread abuse is the work of the unhinged: “How could a believer – I’m not talking about perverts – how could someone who understands our religion commit violence against a woman? How could he kill her?”

Elahe Izadi notes that Erdogan doesn’t have a great track record when it comes to women’s issues:

In 2012, Erdogan, who was prime minister at the time, called abortion murder and came out against birth by Caesarean section. He’s also called for women to have at least three children and pushed for laws that encourage people to marry young. In 2013, Erdogan’s government lifted a head-scarf ban for women working in government offices. Turkey ranked 120 out of 136 on the World Economic Forum’s 2013 gender gap index, which includes economic, political and educational measures. …

In a report in September, Human Rights Watch said that “perpetrators of violence against women, most commonly male partners, ex-partners, and family members, often enjoy impunity” in Turkey and that authorities have failed to implement a 2012 law to protect women from violence.

The Democrats’ Infighting Over Obamacare

https://twitter.com/jonfavs/status/537372051195977728

Chuck Schumer is second-guessing the Dems’ decision to prioritize the ACA:

In his harshest assessment of the Obama presidency to date, Schumer argued that the White House and congressional Democrats erred by focusing on the Affordable Care Act throughout most of 2009 and early 2010 rather than following the passage of the economic stimulus with other targeted economic legislation that would directly help more people. He said voters had given the party a mandate in 2008 to stop the financial crisis and reverse the economic damage done to the middle class, and while he supported the substance of Obamacare, it was a political loser because it offered its most tangible benefit—access to coverage for the uninsured—to just 5 percent of the voting public.

Beutler disputes Schumer’s version of history:

The health care reform process didn’t begin in earnest until after the Recovery Act had already passed, at which point Congress’ willingness and ability to pass another big deficit-financed stimulus bill had been maxed out. Maybe Schumer has other ideas in mind—labor rights? Housing policy? A different entitlement?—but he’s never laid out what the achievable alternative was, and how the middle-class and Democratic Party would’ve been better off as a result.

That’s because there never really was an alternative. Not that Democrats couldn’t have done a better job helping the economy recover—I believe they could have—but that the One Big Thing they cashed their capital in on wasn’t really up to them. Health care reform was basically pre-packaged, and ready to go because that’s where the consensus was. If after such a decisive victory and once-in-a-generation majorities, Obama announced he would go small on health care reform, or put it off for another time (like he did with immigration reform) the backlash would’ve been severe. It would’ve been his first major elective move as president, and it would’ve splintered his coalition very badly.

Weigel argues along the same lines:

There’s an alternative history of the Obama years in which the administration, like some time traveller sent back to fight Skynet, prevented the Tea Party from ever being born. It governed from the populist left; it owned the fight against “Wall Street” and denied the right the ability to side with the proles by opposing TARP. It’s a widely held belief on the left that this really could have been done, with smarter hires and less concern for the financial world that was going to turn against Obama anyway. Obama could have, like FDR, “welcomed their hatred.”

The small problem with this argument is that it’s bonkers. The Republican opposition to the new Obama presidency did not begin with the ACA. It began with the economic stimulus bill, which Democrats had hoped to get as many as 80 Senate votes for, and ended up scraping through with only three Republican votes in the Senate and none in the House.

Steve M. disagrees:

But Obama, even after the stimulus fight and the rise of the tea party, had enough juice to get the health care bill passed, because that’s what he’d saved the rest of his political capital for. That was the make-or-break agenda item for him.  And of course he was going to prioritize that rather than a larger stimulus — he was an ambitious president with an eye to the history books. A bigger stimulus wasn’t going to be the accomplishment that made his name as a president — for that he needed a big piece of legislation.

Except that what Obama is going to be known for is failing to help the middle class enough in the wake of the crash. I favor the health care law, but it’s porous — it doesn’t help enough people, and there are many people it doesn’t help at all.  What if stimulus and debt relief had gotten the make-or-break treatment from the White House?

Waldman is unimpressed by such arguments:

[T]o say that Democrats shouldn’t have bothered on the off chance that they could have passed some more stimulus and maybe minimized their losses in 2010 makes one wonder what the point of electing Democrats is.

Schumer would reply, “To help the middle class!” But when he got to the point in his speech where he was ready to offer all his terrific ideas for doing so, he punted, saying, “I’d like to outline not WHAT policies Democrats will propose but rather HOW we should build our party’s platform to appeal directly to the middle-class and convince them that government is on their side.” What followed was some mundane PR advice.

That’s something there’s no shortage of, and, to put it in Schumer’s terms, the voters didn’t hire him to dispense messaging tips. If he really wants to help his party, he ought to get moving on those middle-class proposals he keeps talking about. When do we get to see them?

Being A Cop Has Never Been Safer

Shackford reflects on the revelation that last year was an all-time low for killings of police and a 20-year high for killings by police:

It’s an important reminder when Cleveland police kill a 12-year-old boy carrying a toy gun. It’s an important reminder when we see stories that police have killed more people in Utah over the past five years than any other form of violence outside of domestic conflict. Police have killed more people in Utah since 2010 than gangs or drug dealers. Obviously, it’s a positive that fewer officers are being killed in the line of duty, just as it’s a positive that crime trends are heading down. We should be worried, though, if police internalize the idea that this increase in their own shootings is what is keeping them safe in the field and not the general drop in crime.

Nick Wing adds that “Bureau of Labor Statistics list of the 10 most-dangerous professions doesn’t include law enforcement officer”:

The BLS said law enforcement accounted for 2 percent of total U.S. fatal on-the-job injuries in 2013, with 31 percent of those injuries caused by homicide. Other studies on the deaths of officers in the line of duty also showed police were far less likely to be killed in 2013 than they had been in decades. According to a count by the Officer Down Memorial Page, which collects data on line-of-duty incidents, there were far fewer deaths last year than in more than 40 years.

A 2013 tally by the National Law Enforcement Memorial Fund showed 100 officers died in the line of duty last year, the fewest since 1944. Traffic-related fatalities were the leading cause of officer deaths in 2013. The report found that “firearms-related fatalities reached a 126-year low … with 31 officers shot and killed, the lowest since 1887 when 27 officers were shot and killed.”

Ingraham points out that the true number of individuals killed by police is unknown:

It’s particularly worth noting that the FBI data on justifiable homicides is widely understood to be substantially undercounted — some states don’t participate in the FBI’s data-gathering programs at all, and others don’t tally justifiable homicides separately. So while the figures above are useful for generating a trend, the actual national numbers are considerably higher.

Ellen Nakashima provides more details on the subject:

Federal officials allow the nation’s more than 17,000 law enforcement agencies to self-report officer shootings. That figure, [Wes] Lowery reported, hovers around 400 “justifiable homicides” by law enforcement each year. Several independent trackers, primarily journalists and academics who study criminal justice, insist the accurate number of people shot and killed by police officers each year is consistently upwards of 1,000 each year, Lowery reported.

Update from a reader:

Please stop writing, or allowing people to write, that the gun the boy in Cleveland was carrying was a “toy” gun or a “fake” gun. It was a BB gun that looked very much like a semiautomatic pistol.  Maybe you can post this picture and let readers decide:

cleveland-gun

The Racial Divide Over Ferguson

YouGov measured it recently:

Racial Divide Ferguson

Russell Moore observes that “the Ferguson situation is one of several in just the past couple of years where white and black Americans have viewed a situation in starkly different terms”:

White Americans tend, in public polling, to view the presenting situations as though they exist in isolation, dealing only with the known facts of the case at hand, of whether there is evidence of murder. Black Americans, polls show, tend to view these crises through a wider lens, the question of whether African-American youth are too often profiled and killed in America. Whatever the particulars of this case, this divergence ought to show us that we have a ways to go toward racial reconciliation.

Jelani Cobb remarks that, in Ferguson, “the great difficulty has been discerning whether the authorities are driven by malevolence or incompetence”: 

Last night, McCulloch made the inscrutable choice to announce the grand jury’s decision after darkness had fallen and the crowds had amassed in the streets, factors that many felt could only increase the risk of violence. Despite the sizable police presence, few officers were positioned on the stretch of West Florissant Avenue where Brown was killed. The result was that damage to the area around the police station was sporadic and short-lived, but Brown’s neighborhood burned. This was either bad strategy or further confirmation of the unimportance of that community in the eyes of Ferguson’s authorities.

McArdle is more sympathetic to the prosecutor:

To judge by last night’s events, this attempt to split the baby between declining prosecution and putting on a full trial failed. On the other hand, to judge by the Los Angeles riots after the Rodney King verdict, putting on a full trial sometimes fails, too. If a conviction was extremely unlikely — and that seems to be the consensus of most of the experts I’ve seen — then I’m not sure there were any good options here. I’m not even sure the prosecutor chose the worst one.

Dreher asks, “What would you have done had you been the cop in that situation?”:

If you don’t want to be shot by police, don’t stick your hand into the window of an officer’s car and try to grab his weapon. Can we at least concede that this was an extraordinarily stupid thing for Michael Brown to have done? That does not mean that what followed on the street was justified (nor does it follow that it was not justified). But it does mean that both the physical evidence and eyewitness statements support the contention that the initial shot that hit Michael Brown was justified.

However, Ezra has a hard time believing Wilson’s story:

Why did Michael Brown, an 18-year-old kid headed to college, refuse to move from the middle of the street to the sidewalk? Why would he curse out a police officer? Why would he attack a police officer? Why would he dare a police officer to shoot him? Why would he charge a police officer holding a gun? Why would he put his hand in his waistband while charging, even though he was unarmed?

None of this fits with what we know of Michael Brown. … Which doesn’t mean Wilson is a liar. Unbelievable things happen every day. The fact that his story raises more questions than it answers doesn’t mean it isn’t true.

But the point of a trial would have been to try to answer these questions. We would have either found out if everything we thought we knew about Brown was wrong, or if Wilson’s story was flawed in important ways. But now we’re not going to get that chance. We’re just left with Wilson’s unbelievable story.

Hating On Click-Bait

Room for Debate covers the insidious practice. Jazmine Hughes feels condescended to:

[T]he majority of backlash against click bait headlines is a response to the forced push of emotion that click bait content foists onto a consumer. The promise that “you won’t believe what comes next” or “you’ll never feel the same” deprives readers of their analytic agency and imposes an uncontextualized reaction on them. It’s aggressive, empty and intellectually reductive — or, simply, super annoying. There’s nothing wrong with an enticing headline, but pique my interest, don’t belittle my intelligence.

And Baratunde Thurston comments on its cry-wolf quality:

The occasional employment of a listicle or withheld information or you’ll-never-believe-this is fine. However, it’s not being used occasionally. It’s infecting all online information with a one-trick pony that is used over and over again until all we have are tricks. It’s the overuse that bugs me because — to overuse the metaphor — it misses the point of ponies! Ponies are supposed to help you get from point A to point B (often with your heavy burdens) — not just stand on their hind legs or chase their tails all day! The tricks are cute for a while, but ultimately we want to go somewhere.

On the positive side, this absurdity has inspired a new arena for humor. Over a year ago, my company hosted a “Comedy Hack Day” built around humor, and one team created a satirical site called Clickstrbait to lampoon this silly practice.

The Prosecution’s Weak Case Against The Media

Last night prosecutor Robert McCulloch complained that “the most significant challenge encountered in this investigation has been the 24 hour news cycle and its insatiable appetite for something, for anything, to talk about, following closely behind with the nonstop rumors on social media.” Poniewozik protests:

I suspect part of what’s behind the frustration of people like McCulloch is that social media makes everyone a critic. Thousands and thousands of people are watching over your shoulder to see if you slip up, checking what you missed, judging whether you were thorough enough, questioning your agenda. Good. Having everyone watch you do your job, or not do it, may be a pain, it may be stressful, but in an imperfect justice system, it’s not exactly a bad thing.

Tim Mak Arthur Chu agrees:

“Blaming the media” for always distorting the story, for making a big deal out of minor misunderstandings, for drawing attention to things that “aren’t any of their business”—it’s the favorite rhetorical trick of powerful people who want to be left to continue doing what they were doing. Sure, the media frequently make terrible mistakes. But a kneejerk rejection of “the media” and a demand for those of us in the audience to “mind our own business” is an implicit statement that the people the media make miserable—business owners, politicians, police chiefs, celebrities—don’t make mistakes. It’s an implicit call to trust them to do the right thing without fear of external scrutiny.

Obama Bites His Tongue On Ferguson

https://twitter.com/jdisis/status/537332458543665153

Last night, Beutler called on the president to give a big speech on Ferguson:

This is Obama’s first opportunity (for lack of a better word) to use the bully pulpit to steer the national agenda in a positive direction since the slaughter at Newtown, Connecticut, and it’s the first time since he became a national figure that he’ll be able to address a racially charged issue without an election in his future to deter him.

But the statement Obama delivered last night, as Cillizza remarks, “was almost doomed from the start”:

The combination of Obama’s status as the nation’s first black president and the powerful visuals coming out of Ferguson, which are catnip for cable TV, made it a) absolutely necessary that he speak about Ferguson on Monday night and b) absolutely inevitable that whatever he said would be criticized by almost everyone emotionally invested in the story — and outrun by events on the ground that were being broadcast simultaneously with his remarks.

That sort of lose-lose proposition is increasingly becoming a hallmark of the modern presidency.

How Ezra understands Obama’s dilemma:

Obama’s language didn’t soar tonight, just as it didn’t soar in his first set of remarks on Ferguson. And that’s because Obama can manage polarization on immigration in a way he can’t manage polarization on race.

President Obama might still decide to give a major speech about events in Ferguson. But it probably won’t be the speech many of his supporters want.When Obama gave the first Race Speech he was a unifying figure trying to win the Democratic nomination. Today he’s a divisive figure who needs to govern the whole country. For Obama, the cost of becoming president was sacrificing the unique gift that made him president.

Jesse Walker questions whether such speeches matter:

I watched an Obama speech tonight. The cable channels aired it in a split screen with footage from Ferguson, so as the president urged calm I could see a live feed of the country ignoring him. His comments were predictable and bland, but even if he’d given us the most stirring rhetoric of his career I can’t imagine that it would have made much difference. This is the news, not The West Wing. Words are cheap.

Julia Azari considers the purpose of presidential speeches:

There are a number of perspectives on crisis rhetoric and on the purposes of presidential speech, but one idea that drives at many of the key points is communication scholar David Zarefsky’s argument that presidential rhetoric has the power to “define political reality.” To quickly synthesize Zarefsky’s point with other work on presidential communication (including my own), this kind of communication has a few main purposes. These include putting a political situation in the context of the past, particularly our Constitutional heritage, and applying a useful and resonant metaphor to the situation that allows us to understand what caused the problem and what kinds of solutions are available. In other words, presidential speech can provide a common text for all citizens to understand a situation, and provide a sense of what the policy alternatives are, even if agreement among them remains elusive.

This is a tremendously difficult task. When non-white human beings have been historically denied full citizenship, how does anyone begin to forge a common understanding of an event that rings true across racial and ethnic lines? How can anyone transcend the polarized state of American politics?

Iran Talks Get An Extension, Ctd

Aaron David Miller and Jason Brodsky are skeptical that the negotiations over Iran’s nuclear program, which were just extended, will ever bear fruit, given the toxic domestic politics in both Tehran and Washington. “But,” they add, “there may well be something even more fundamental at work: a strategic disconnect”:

We can’t end Iran’s nuclear capacity, so we are working to constrain it through buying time. Iran is trying to preserve as much of that capacity as possible while easing and eliminating economic pressure. And Iran is also playing with and for time. There’s really no end state, either on the nuclear issue or sanctions relief. And thus any comprehensive agreement is, by definition, interim at best. That just doesn’t add up in today’s highly charged and suspicion-laden political environment, no matter how moderate and well-intentioned the negotiators themselves may be.

The fact is that Iran knows what it wants: to preserve as much of its nuclear weapons capacity as possible and free itself from as much of the sanctions regime as it can. The mullahs see Iran’s status as a nuclear weapons state as a hedge against regime change and as consistent with its regional status as a great power. That is what it still wants. And that’s why it isn’t prepared — yet — to settle just for what it needs to do a deal. Ditto for America. And it’s hard to believe that another six months is going to somehow fix that problem.

With Republicans champing at the bit to push through more sanctions, Jeffrey Lewis figures any future talks are doomed:

The wave of Republicans who swept into office during the midterm was always going to be a problem, but coming home with yet another extension makes this problem much, much worse. Remember, the argument for imposing congressionally administered poison-pill requirements in the middle of a negotiation was that the threat of new sanctions would “strengthen” the president’s hand in dealing with those shifty Iranians. Had the White House come back with at least a “framework” agreement, the president might have been able to make the argument that Congress was about to piss away a once-in-a-generation chance at constraining Iran’s nuclear program. Instead, another extension plays right into the argument that the president needs Congress to help strengthen his hand by being maximally insane.

To Larison’s mind, that kind of pessimism is just what opponents of a comprehensive deal were looking for:

There is a reason why Netanyahu was pleased by news of the extension, and it isn’t because he has suddenly become a supporter of diplomacy with Iran. He guesses that the longer the negotiations wear on, the more pressure opponents of any deal can bring to bear on the administration. The more time that it takes to reach a deal, the more likely it is that opponents can spoil the negotiations by pushing for new punitive measures against Iran. Unfortunately, he’s probably not wrong. While it is better to have extended the talks and kept the possibility of a deal alive, the fact that the talks had to be extended gives opponents of any deal an opening to reject further diplomacy as a waste of time. They are wrong about this, but the longer that the negotiations take without conclusion the harder it becomes to argue that the talks are still worth pursuing.

But Ali Vaez, senior Iran analyst at the International Crisis Group, sounds a hopeful note to Laura Rozen, “comparing this week’s Iran nuclear talks in Vienna with the 1986 Reykjavik summit between Ronald Reagan and Mikhail Gorbachev that led to the first US Soviet arms control treaty a year later”:

“In 1986, Gorbachev and Reagan had an arms control negotiation in Iceland which had the exact same parameters,” as the Iran talks in Vienna this week, Vaez said. “They were very close, they could see the light at the end of the tunnel, but the talks failed. However, because at that point [the two sides’] positions became 100% clear and they knew the advantages and disadvantages of not reaching an agreement, they went back a year later, and got the first arms control between the United States and the Soviet Union.”

Similarly, the United States and Iran, in these negotiations in Vienna, over the past year have persistently seen an agreement as in their respective countries’ national interests, despite the enormous difficulties and complexities of the negotiations as well as the fact that the two countries have not had formal diplomatic relations for 35 years. “For the first time, [each side’s] real positions are 100% clear to the other side,” Vaez said. “There is a limited window of time … If they want to make progress, the chance is the best it has ever been.”

Walter Russell Mead, on the other hand, attributes the lack of a deal “the failure of American policy across the region and the splintering of U.S. alliances which the outreach to Iran has caused”, which in his view “now makes a deal with Iran much harder to reach and much more expensive to pursue”:

The Iranian nuclear issue has become hopelessly entangled in the vicious politics of the Sunni-Shi’a war now engulfing Lebanon, Yemen and Iraq. Iran has effectively held out the prospect of a nuclear deal to get the U.S. to step back from the regional competition, making it look to many Sunnis that the U.S. has tilted toward the Shi’a and dreams of a New Middle Eastern Order based on a U.S.-Iranian alliance that marginalizes the Sunni Arabs, the Turks, and the Israelis. Keeping the U.S. focused on the (unlikely) prospect of a nuclear deal while undermining U.S. alliances across the region as Iran and its proxies tighten their grip is exactly what Iran wants. The Obama Administration, despite occasional signs that it recognizes the trap, so far seems to lack the vision and decisiveness needed to break out of the current destructive impasse.

Roger Cohen underscores why calls for total dismantlement of Iran’s nuclear infrastructure, such as those emanating from Jerusalem, remain misguided:

Because it is not achievable in the real world; the perfect cannot be the enemy of the good. Diplomacy is about tough compromise, not ideal outcomes. The nuclear know-how attained by Iran cannot be undone. The aim must be to ring fence for at least a decade a strictly monitored program, compatible only with peaceful use of nuclear power, where enrichment is kept below 5 percent. Iran, a signatory of the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, will not renounce the right set out in that treaty to “nuclear energy for peaceful purposes” at the behest of a nuclear-armed nonsignatory of that treaty, Israel. This is reality; deal with it. Iran’s nuclear program has the emotional resonance the nationalization of its oil had in the 1950s. That nationalization prompted a never-forgotten Anglo-American coup. Calls for dismantlement are seen in Iran through this prism. As Kerry’s negotiating partner, Iranian Foreign Minister Mohammad Javad Zarif, said, “You are doomed to failure” if you seek “a zero-sum game.” Setting impossible targets is code for favoring war.