Sophianotloren

The public debate is framing the Iran nuclear deal exactly backwards.

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As Congress prepares to vote on the recent agreement with Iran, the deal’s Republican opponents have been competing to see who can describe it in the most horrifying terms. Mike Huckabee claimed President Obama would “take the Israelis and march them to the door of the oven”. Senator Ted Cruz said “it will make the Obama administration the world’s leading financier of radical Islamic terrorism.” In a committee hearing, Senator Lindsey Graham scolded the Secretaries of State, Defense, and Energy, implying that the administration had been too eager to avoid war.

Could we win a war with Iran? Who wins the war between us and Iran? Who wins? Do you have any doubt who wins? … We win!

In a speech whose video has been watched more than half a million times on YouTube, former congressman Alan West denounced the “weakling in the White House” saying:

How dare Barack Obama, how dare John Kerry, how dare Valerie Jarrett, or any of these other charlatans that occupy Washington D.C., surrender this great constitutional republic to the Republic of Iran!

Senator Marco Rubio also sees “weakness”:

President Obama has consistently negotiated from a position of weakness, giving concession after concession to a regime that has American blood on its hands, holds Americans hostage, and has consistently violated every agreement it ever signed.

Chris Christie said that President Obama was “giving Iran a nuclear weapon”. And he implied that they will bully more “gifts” out of us, now that the realize how weak our president is:

You give them your belt, they’ll want your pants next. That’s the way it goes

Defenses of the deal, by contrast, have been measured. The New Yorker‘s Steven Coll‘s positive analysis, for example, concludes:

The deal is imperfect but good enough, and it offers a tentative promise of a less dangerous Middle East.

Or, as the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs, General Martin Dempsey, put it:

Relieving the risk of a nuclear conflict with Iran diplomatically is superior than trying to do that militarily.

Listening to this discussion, particularly the portion that penetrates the conservative bubble and bounces around its echo chamber, you might reasonably imagine that whatever small concessions we got from Iran, we gave up far too much in return. Those hard-headed and hard-fisted mullahs bullied that hapless jellyfish that we call a president, who was so eager to get any kind of deal that he gave away the store.

If that’s what you believe, you have the story exactly backwards: There is a bully in the story, but it’s the United States. We got Iran’s lunch money, and we gave up nothing.

How can that be? And if it is that way, why doesn’t President Obama beat his chest and say so?

Who? Us? The central myth of the era of American dominance (i.e., since World War II) is that our power is benign. No matter how many countries we invade or bomb, or how many governments we overthrow (as we overthrew Iran’s fledgling democracy in 1953 and reinstalled the brutal Shah), we always act on the side of right and justice. Sure, we police the world, but we’re Officer Friendly. We’re never the kind of cops who throw their weight around.

In acceptable American political debate, neither Republican nor Democratic leaders are allowed to challenge that myth. And that puts the Obama administration at a significant disadvantage as it tries to claim credit for its diplomatic victory over Iran. Because this time we did throw our weight around, and we got something.

Retelling the story. So let’s put aside the myth of benign American power and retell the story of the current agreement, beginning with the basic issue: Will Iran construct a nuclear weapon? In other words, will Iran do something that we did 70 years ago, that Israel did 50 years ago, and that Pakistan (Iran’s rival in the looming Sunni/Shia conflict) did almost 20 years ago?

I grant that in many parts of the Middle East, Iran funds and supplies groups that fight against our allies (though we find ourselves on the same side against ISIS). I grant that we (and Israel and Saudi Arabia) have good reasons to want to keep Iran from building a bomb. But let’s not pretend that Iran was doing something monstrous and unheard of when they built a secret complex capable of producing (eventually) a weaponizable quantity of fissionable material.

Iran is a moderately large country (with a population larger than traditional nuclear powers like United Kingdom or France) with oil wealth and a heritage of civilization going back to Cyrus the Great (who freed the Jews from the Babylonian Captivity). It sees a club of great nations (plus a few lesser nations) and believes it deserves to join. The fact that we have reasons to want to keep them out does not imply that their desire to join is illegitimate.

Threats of war. OK, so what have we done to stop them? During the Bush years, we negotiated a few sanctions, but mainly we rattled our sabers. (The Bush U.N. ambassador, John Bolton, is still rattling. And Republican presidential candidate Scott Walker has said “the next president could be called to take aggressive actions, including military action, on the first day in office”.) Every few months, the press would publish rumors that we (or Israel with or without our approval) were planning an attack on Iran’s nuclear laboratories and reactors, as Israel attacked Iraq’s Osirak reactor in 1981.  Presumably, at least some of that buzz came from intentional leaks meant to intimidate the Iranians. When the Obama administration came in, it continued to insist that “all options are on the table“. In other words, if we don’t get what we want, we might launch an attack.

If you look for any corresponding Iranian saber-rattling at us, what you mainly find are threats to counter-attack if we attack them. (These threats usually get covered in the American press as if hitting back were barbarous.)

So if there’s a Munich analogy here — I wouldn’t go there, but Jeb Bush, Ted Cruz, John Bolton, and many other Obama critics did (including The Drudge Report photoshopping Obama’s face onto Neville Chamberlain in the photo above)  — the only way it can make any sense is if we are in the Hitler role. We’re the ones who have been threatening war unless another nation agrees to our demands.

Economic warfare. But the saber-rattling wasn’t working, so the Obama administration opened a second front: Through diplomacy, it got the UN Security Council to impose far harsher sanctions on Iran than the Bush administration had managed. We had to convince Russia and China to go along with us on that, which wasn’t easy. (Russia’s desire to oppose the West in Iran goes back the Great Game between the Czars and the British Empire.) But President Obama and Secretary Clinton got it done.

The sanctions took a serious bite out of the Iranian economy, which pushed them to the negotiating table. In the negotiations that just concluded, they agreed to restrictions on their nuclear program that should prevent them from having nuclear weapons for the near-to-medium term. (Whoever is president when the agreement expires will still have all of his or her options on the table.)

Who’s the bully? In exchange for those very real concessions, we agreed to a gradual relaxing of the sanctions that we created. What we’re “giving” the Iranians are their own frozen assets. And we’re going to allow them to participate in the world economy, like any other country would.

In what sense is any of that a “concession” on our part? Imagine you’re in school, and you get a smaller kid in a headlock. He gives you his lunch money and you let him go. Have you “conceded” anything to him, really?

Your fellow bullies might claim that you let him off too easy, that if you’d squeezed a little harder he might have given you his sneakers too. And maybe they’re right: By walking away unscathed, the kid gained much more than you did, compared to the scenario where you beat the crap out of him and took his lunch money anyway. (As Senator Graham says, if it comes to war, “We win!”)

But in a larger sense, all you’ve done is let him out of a situation that you created. You have his lunch money and he has nothing of yours.

That’s the Iran deal: We have an agreement to keep them from building a bomb any time soon, and an inspection regime to make sure they keep that agreement. They got nothing from us.

I have a piece up about two excellent recent articles about the Republican war on voting rights:

Essentially, the Republican Party worked a clever bait-and-switch. Legislators would nominally support the Voting Rights Act, while Republican executive officials, judges, and statehouses worked full-time to undermine its effectiveness at every turn. This incremental war against the Voting Rights Act has the benefit of advancing Republican policy views and interests without attracting the public attention that would come from outright refusing to re-enact the Voting Rights Act.

But let’s be clear: The Supreme Court reflects the views of today’s Republican Party much more than the 2006 vote does. (Note that Congress has not acted to revise the Voting Rights Act, although the Supreme Court nominally left the door open for a different pre-clearance formula.)

And this war against the Voting Rights Act is connected to a broader movement against voting rights. Higher voter turnout generally benefits the Democratic Party. Not coincidentally, various rules that make it harder to vote have been enacted by Republican-controlled states. Such vote suppression is generally defended on the grounds that it’s intended to thwart voter fraud, but these arguments are pathetically feeble.

In another essential article, Ari Berman of The Nation describes this campaign of disenfranchisement. Berman links the beginning of this campaign to the crucial 2000 election, which among other consequences led to a long-time enemy of voting rights being nominated chief justice of the Supreme Court. George W. Bush’s razor-thin plurality in Florida was the product of vote suppression on both ends. Before the fact, the Florida government (governor: Jeb Bush) engaged in a purge of the voter rolls that included many eligible voters. After the fact, both Bushes worked tirelessly to prevent a fair recount. This all culminated in Shelby County‘s only competition for the worst Supreme Court decision of the last 20 years: Bush v. Gore.

The Rutenberg and Berman pieces linked within are very much worth reading.

deng-dong:

effyeahnerdfighters:

(via mylonelysoul)

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tastefullyoffensive:

[@politicalmath]

via http://www.tumblr.com/likes

via http://silkyblackgold.tumblr.com/post/64522287821

via http://reform.lt/

via http://blog.yimmyayo.com/page/3

controlledeuphoria:

the60sbazaar:

Claudia Cardinale 

Bond girl

the-marriage-of-heaven-and-hell:

Happy Birthday Myrna Loy (August 2, 1905 – December 14, 1993)

“Life, is not a having and a getting, but a being and a becoming.”  - Myrna Loy

Joan Crawford once confessed in an interview that she envied Myrna Loy “like mad because she latched on to the secret of growing old gracefully—and usefully” x

fartooyoungandclever:

Ah, the English countryside…

lava-schism:

fairymascot:

(x)

now can we stop arguing over which pair of characters has the ‘best’ or ‘strongest’ relationship based on the number of body parts their fusion has??

PREACH

sailorjnpr:

officialcrow:

Philly fucking up

The Gang Destroys the Canadian Ambassador

i know philly must be mad about drake but come on

A magical diagram for the binding of enemies and thieves, XVII century.

As usual, this post is inspired by a discussion I found on Fetlife. The gist of the question, for those who don’t do Fetlife, was whether or not other female doms are actually paragons of efficiency and virtue or whether perhaps the questioner’s former s-type might possibly have had unreasonable expectations, and whether other female doms somehow made themselves perfect before they felt ready to dominate someone.

First off, while there are no shortage of shitty doms out there, if you bash your dom/former dom for not being perfect every second of every day, go fuck yourself. Doms are human beings, just like you. We have faults and bad days and make mistakes just like you. If you need your dom to be perfect you don’t actually want a relationship, you want someone to act out a fantasy for you.

On the late and lamented The Black Leather Belt blog, Lily Lloyd said something very smart about how needing your dom to be perfect is about fear of surrender and wanting submission to be easy and risk free and not wanting to face the fact that your dom is human and will make mistakes sometimes. That, uh, sounded a lot smarter when she originally said it. I think her point about wanting submission to be risk free, even as clumsily as I’ve restated it here, is really important though. I get that it’s scary to make yourself that vulnerable to someone. I certainly couldn’t do it. But you can’t blame other people for your fear of taking that risk, and you can’t make it their job to somehow magically make submission risk free. That’s simply impossible, so suck it up or admit you’d rather stick to fantasizing.

Back at the topic of when you’re ready to dominate someone, you’re never going to feel perfectly ready. As a bunch of commenters in the Fetlife thread already said, there’s always going to be something you could be better at. None of us are ever going to be perfect, and if we wait until we are we’ll never get to have any fun.

That’s not to say that there’s no bar to clear whatsoever, though. While I very strongly believe that people are allowed to identify however they want, once you get involved with another person you have a responsibility to at least try to do right by them. Shit happens to everyone but you have to try. Like in any relationship you need to have something to give (that is, not be in a constant state of crisis where you only barely have enough energy to keep your own life going), half-decent communication skills, and reasonable expectations, and particular to d/s relationships you need to be willing to take responsibility for getting your partner back on an even keel if a scene goes wrong.

Some people will say it’s not fair to blame only the dom when a scene goes wrong and that the s-type is just as much at fault if they failed to communicate (because that’s always effortless and not terrifying when you’re in a bad headspace), but a) that’s blatant douchebaggery and b) I’m not even talking about blame. Taking responsibility for helping your partner is something you do because they need it, not because you screwed up. Honestly, what kind of person would only help their s-type if they were certain it was their fault things went wrong? If your s-type really does have shitty communication skills it’s probably wise to step back from pursuing a d/s relationship with them, but dammit you help people who need it even if there was no way you could have kept things from going wrong.

Note that none of that involves being debt free and having your dream job and an awesome house with a fully stocked playroom and a signed note from a therapist saying you’re officially ready to ride this ride. You’ve just got to be a grownup and willing to try, which, coincidentally, is exactly the same thing I’d expect from an s-type. Like I keep yelling, doms are not that special.

As long as you’ve got a handle on the first two levels of Maslow’s hierarchy of needs, you officially have my blessing to look for a d/s relationship. You know, if for some reason you care what some asshole on the internet thinks  But in general, no one’s going to hunt you down and give you permission to call yourself a dom and find a d/s relationship. You’re never going to get a certificate in the mail saying you’re ready. You’ve just got to give it a shot and try to learn from your mistakes, just like everyone else.

I can’t say “memoir by Mark Sanford’s former speechwriter” would rank very high on books I would consider reading, but damned if this doesn’t make a decent case. One thing that makes clear is that Sanford really is a remarkable number of types of asshole. For example, the grammar troll who believes that good writing consists of adhering to arbitrary rules they vaguely remember from grammar school that virtually every good writer ignores:

“He knew bad writing when he saw it, except when he was the author,” Mr. Swaim says. Once, the governor storms into the office, fulminating about Mr. Swaim’s decision to write “towns of Lee County” instead of “towns in Lee County.” He tends to combine absolute certainty with a complete misunderstanding of what he is talking about. “There’s a rule against beginning a sentence with a preposition — conjunctions, whatever — and you can’t break rules,” Mr. Sanford declares.

And we also have more examples* of Sanford being one of the world’s biggest rich skinflints:

Mr. Sanford’s former wife, Jenny, has already provided evidence of his legendary parsimony in her memoir, “Staying True” (in his earlier stint in Congress, she notes, Mr. Sanford brought his laundry home on weekends to avoid paying to have it done in Washington). Mr. Swaim adds more examples: how, at receptions, the governor stuffs boiled shrimp and deviled eggs into his pockets to eat for dinner; how he refuses to send his clothes to the dry cleaners and once wore the same shirt for almost two weeks straight; how he gave an employee a Christmas ornament saying “Merry Christmas! Love, the Peterkins.”

Look, I spent 8 years total in grad school. And since that grad school was in political science my disposable income remains modest to this day. In other words, I like free food and drink at conferences and the like as much as the next guy. Nonetheless, I can confidently say that I have never stuffed shellfish that’s likely to be pretty dodgy in the first place and appetizers involving hard-boiled eggs into my pockets for later consumption. And, unlike Sanford, I actually wash my clothes.

It probably goes without saying that he’s a “capricious, bad-tempered boss” too. I’m sure he has plenty of company in this on both sides of the aisle, but it’s everything else that makes him special.

*my favorite previous ones:

Item 3: Mark and Jenny are newlyweds, and it is Jenny’s birthday. He gives her a hand-drawn card — with a picture of half a bicycle. For Christmas, another card — with a picture of the other half. “Months later, he delivered the gift to me, a used purple bike he had purchased for $25!” Jenny’s initial response, the right one, is “disbelief. . . . In time, however, I came to know this was just part of who he was.”

By the time Mark is in Congress, Jenny is reduced to instructing the scheduler to remind him of her birthday. And there is the touching moment when Mark has a friend pick out a diamond necklace for Jenny, has a staffer hide the present in her closet and faxes notes to Jenny and the boys cluing them in on where to search. A few weeks later, when Mark sees the necklace, he exclaims, “That is what I spent all that money on?! I hope you kept the box!’ ” Mark “returned the necklace the next day, thinking it was not worth the money he had spent,” she writes. “I wouldn’t have felt comfortable wearing it in his presence, so what was the point?”

There’s a line between “being frugal” and “being a dick,” and Sanford passed it about 10 miles ago.

discardingimages:

expressive Virgin Mary

‘The Abingdon Apocalypse’, England 13th century

British Library, Add 42555, fol. 15r

It is our imperfections that make us beautiful.  I firmly believe that, and I say it to those I care about as often as I can.

It is also our imperfections that make us human. I’m quite certain that this is a large part of why I find imperfections beautiful — because they show me the humanity in a person, they reveal someone real and vulnerable and relatable.

The scars and wrinkles and “blemishes” that all-too-often get airbrushed out of images of supposedly beautiful women — the images plastered across magazine covers and advertisements everywhere — taking those away leaves something that feels plastic, unreal, not human.  Skin in so many shades and tones, white-washed and bleached and faded in order to look “pretty” — and all I see is “pretty boring.”  Bodies in so many sizes, so many shapes, so many types and amounts and conditions of ability — many of them simply not displayed, and those that are get changed to appear taller, thinner, less waist, more hip, never a wrinkle or touch of acne or visible body or facial hair.  The result is a nearly uniform display of the same woman, over and over, minor variations on the rubber-stamp design.  I hate it.

I remember when I first figured out what “cellulite” is.  Wasn’t very long ago, actually — less than 6 months — and suddenly it made so much sense; commercials selling ways to get rid of cellulite-and-wrinkles, almost as if it were a single word, were offering a way to match the impossible plastic look of the “ideal.”  My first thought was, “Oh, that! Never knew there was a name for it… I always thought it was beautiful.”

Or the perennial question about pubic hair — almost always phrased as “what’s the best on other people: shaved neatly or completely untouched?” Actually, I don’t have a preference about what other people do with their own bodies.  I try to stay out of deciding what anyone else can/can’t, should/shouldn’t, will/won’t do with their bodies — there’s no way I can yell “MY BODY, MY CHOICE!” and mean it if I’m not willing to shout with equal strength, ‘YOUR BODY, YOUR CHOICE!” and act on both with the determination I feel about them.  I really don’t care how you keep your hair, pubic or otherwise; all I know is what I like for my own body.

I am not perfect.  None of you are perfect.  This “perfect” thing is nonsense, anyway — because perfection is so subjective, anyway.

What I am is beautiful.  You are all beautiful.  We are beautiful, and we are human.  And that is a much more important thing to be!

Filed under: General

Michael Hiltzik strongly suggests yes.

Alice Tornquist, a Washington lobbyist for the high-tech firm Qualcomm, took the stage at a recent Qualcomm-underwritten conference to remind her audience that companies like hers face a dire shortage of university graduates in engineering. The urgent remedy she advocated was to raise the cap on visas for foreign-born engineers.

“Although our industry and other high-tech industries have grown exponentially,” Tornquist said, “our immigration system has failed to keep pace.” The nation’s outdated limits and “convoluted green-card process,” she said, had left firms like hers “hampered in hiring the talent that they need.”

What Tornquist didn’t mention was that Qualcomm may then have had more engineers than it needed: Only a few weeks after her June 2 talk, the San Diego company announced that it would cut its workforce, of whom two-thirds are engineers, by 15%, or nearly 5,000 people.

The mismatch between Qualcomm’s plea to import more high-tech workers and its efforts to downsize its existing payroll hints at the phoniness of the high-tech sector’s persistent claim of a “shortage” of U.S. graduates in the “STEM” disciplines — science, technology, engineering and mathematics.

As millions of students prepare this summer to begin their university studies, they’re being pressed to choose STEM fields, if only to keep America in the lead among its global rivals. “In the race for the future, America is in danger of falling behind,” President Obama stated in 2010. He labeled the crisis “our generation’s Sputnik moment.”

The high-tech industry contends that U.S. universities simply aren’t producing enough graduates to meet demand, leading to a “skills gap” that must be filled from overseas if the U.S. is to maintain its global dominance. Low unemployment rates among computer workers imply that “demand has outpaced supply,” Jonathan Rothwell of the Brookings Institution told me by email. “Companies struggle to fill job vacancies for skilled programmers and other STEM fields.”

Yet many studies suggest that the STEM shortage is a myth. In computer science and engineering, says Hal Salzman, an expert on technology education at Rutgers, “the supply of graduates is substantially larger than the demand for them in industry.” Qualcomm is not the only high-tech company to be aggressively downsizing. The computer industry, led by Hewlett-Packard and Microsoft, cut nearly 60,000 jobs last year, according to the outplacement firm Challenger, Gray & Christmas. The electronics industry pared an additional 20,000 positions.

The high-tech industry then lobbies for more H-1B visas, allowing for immigration of high tech workers from nations like India. Is the reason a shortage? No, it’s to flood the market and lower wages for all. And it’s a great strategy–wrap your labor strategy up in a nice passage of national security and Sinophobia, convince Congress, the president, and the entire world of higher education that universities are not serving the needs of important American industries, and *presto*, you can start driving down wages for highly skilled labor by flooding market at both ends, creating a massive oversupply of labor.

As a historian in one of the disdained departments by university administration, watching the chickens come home to roost on this when all the STEM graduates can’t get good jobs is going to be interesting.

James Loewen calls out the eminent historian of the Civil War, James McPherson, on the middle school U.S. history textbook emblazoned with his name for its coverage of Southern secession. McPherson’s own great Battle Cry of Freedom makes it perfectly clear that the South seceded for slavery. But the middle school textbook does not and rather pushes myths about “civil liberties” and other canards to explain secession. Immediately I thought, I’ll bet McPherson outsourced the writing of the textbook. Loewen suspected this himself and McPherson basically confirmed it, saying he had little to do with the book “for at least the last ten years.” And while I get that if I was a super famous historian, it would be pretty easy to cash a large check for doing nothing, there’s also something about quality control around my own name brand. That’s an embarrassing find. Purging sub-college textbooks of faulty and racist historical interpretation must happen. Loewen does yeomen’s work for this purpose. At the very least, professional historians need to take ownership and responsibility over what is published under their names.