Zephyr Dear

Found at Nerdy Jokes.

Lisa Wade is a professor of sociology at Occidental College and the co-author of Gender: Ideas, Interactions, Institutions. You can follow her on Twitter and Facebook.

(View original at http://thesocietypages.org/socimages)

Discussing her new novel, A Tale for the Time Being, Ruth Ozeki connects her Buddhism to her writing, noting in particular the way her “sense of self is a more shifting (shifty?) and pluralistic entity” than is typical:

A Tale for the Time Being plays very overtly with this notion of self or selves, which in Buddhism is called no-self, or anatman. Buddhism teaches that because everything is impermanent, there is no fixed self that remains unchanged in time. And Buddhism also teaches that there is not an independent self, that can exist separate from others. Thich Nhat Hanh calls this interbeing. So what we experience as the self is more like a collection of fluid, interpenetrating, interdependencies that change and flow through time. The title, time being, refers to just this, and the novel, with its two narrators Ruth and Nao, is a kind of overt performance of these Buddhist propositions of interbeing and time being.

I think in my previous work, too, the choice of narrative voice, or voices, is related to my pluralistic sense of self. This was true even before I knew much about Buddhism. I’ve never been able to write from a single point of view, or even stick to a single grammatical person. All my novels contain multiple narrators, some of whom speak directly, using the first-person pronoun “I,” and others less directly, using third- and sometimes even second-person pronouns. The use of these pronominal shifts and multiple POVs destabilizes the sense of there being a singular “author” running the show, in charge of the fictional world, and I like that ambiguity. In the past, I’ve tried to write in an omniscient voice, but the characters refuse to cooperate.

New research suggests there are real benefits to vegging out – so long as you don’t guilt yourself out of them:

Participants were recruited via a gaming website and through psychology and communication classes. Specifically, the participants answered questions about the previous day, including how much work or study they’d done (answers ranged from half an hour to 16 hours), how depleted they felt after work or college, how much TV they’d watched or video-gaming they’d played (this averaged around two hours), whether they viewed it as procrastination, whether they felt guilty, and how recharged they felt afterwards.

The key finding is that the more depleted people felt after work (agreeing with statements like “I felt like my willpower was gone”), the more they tended to view their TV or gaming as procrastination, the more guilt they felt, and the less likely they were to say they felt restored afterwards. The same findings applied for TV or video games.

“Rather than diminishing the beneficial potential of entertaining media,” the researchers said, “we believe that the results of this study may ultimately help to optimise the well-being outcomes of entertaining media use by extending our knowledge of … media-induced recovery and general well-being.” If the researchers are correct, then if you cut yourself some slack when you watch TV after a hard day, you’re more likely feel rejuvenated afterwards.

#PeoplesClimate mural in #Bushwick (corner of Flushing & Bogart) by @gilfnyc. Get ready, NYC. #climate pic.twitter.com/kVq80pkjOb

— Collin Rees (@collinrees) September 14, 2014

Elizabeth Kolbert previews NYC’s climate march this Sunday:

For next year’s meeting in Paris to produce an agreement that’s meaningful, that agreement is going to have to somehow yield truly significant emissions reductions, and do so quickly. After twenty-two years of failed attempts, it’s hard to be optimistic about this prospect.

But for this very reason, you’ve got to give those who are planning to march on Sunday that much more credit for trying. (It seems that the Secretary-General himself will also attend the march.) There’s a lot of inertia in the climate system, and whatever we do to it now, our descendants are going to have to live with the results for a long, long time. Already, the effects of climate change are painfully apparent—in the shrinking Arctic ice cap, in the death of millions of acres of forest in the Western U.S., in more severe downpours and flooding in the Northeast, and, quite possibly, in the current California drought. As Governor Jay Inslee, of Washington, recently summed up the situation, “We are the first generation to feel the sting of climate change, and we are the last generation that can do something about it.”

Bill McKibben defended the march against naysayers during his guest-blogging stint:

I’ve come to believe a few basic things.

One, we have long known much that we need to do to start addressing the issue (job one is to put a serious price on carbon, and stop letting Exxon use the atmosphere as a free sewer). Two, we won’t do these things as long as the power of the fossil fuel companies remains so powerful – we will continue to move in the direction of renewable energy because it makes sense, but we will do so too slowly to make a dent in climate change. Three, the power of the fossil fuel companies is a function of their money, which buys more influence than their arguments deserve; in fact, scientists long ago won the argument on climate change, they’ve just lost the fight. Four, the only thing that can match the power of that money is the power of movements. They’re hard and slow work to build, but when they reach a certain point they can change the zeitgeist, and suddenly segregation is obviously disgusting, gay marriage is obviously common sense, and so on.

I’m not certain we’ll get to that point – movements don’t always work. But I am certainthat we won’t get there without one. And I’m certain too that even if we knew the odds were low we should march. Part of it is simply to bear witness, to say: when scientists issued their warnings, some portion of our species paid attention.

Robert Draper looks into revisionist accounts that suggest history hasn’t been entirely fair to the Roman emperor:

The dead do not write their own history. Nero’s first two biographers, Suetonius and Tacitus, had ties to the elite Senate and would memorialize his reign with lavish contempt. The notion of Nero’s return took on malevolent overtones in Christian literature, with Isaiah’s warning of the coming Antichrist: “He will descend from his firmament in the form of a man, a king of iniquity, a murderer of his mother.” Later would come the melodramatic condemnations: the comic Ettore Petrolini’s Nero as babbling lunatic, Peter Ustinov’s Nero as the cowardly murderer, and the garishly enduring tableau of Nero fiddling while Rome burns. What occurred over time was hardly erasure but instead demonization. A ruler of baffling complexity was now simply a beast.

“Today we condemn his behavior,” says archaeological journalist Marisa Ranieri Panetta. “But look at the great Christian emperor Constantine. He had his first son, his second wife, and his father-in-law all murdered. One can’t be a saint and the other a devil. Look at Augustus, who destroyed a ruling class with his blacklists. Rome ran in rivers of blood, but Augustus was able to launch effective propaganda for everything he did. He understood the media. And so Augustus was great, they say. Not to suggest that Nero was himself a great emperor—but that he was better than they said he was, and no worse than those who came before and after him.”

(Image: Graffiti portrait of Nero, c. 1st century, via Wikimedia Commons)

McDonalds used to include this perfectly utilitarian spoon with coffee--perhaps the company's only genuine claim to a design classic. Because it could be used to measure out drugs, though, it was removed from the market at the demand of lobbyists seeking a symbolic victory over drug "paraphernalia."

The head of the NSA’s Signals Intelligence Directorate may be involved in a serious conflict of interest with a major defense contractor.

DRS Signal Solutions, a contractor offering signals intelligence (SIGINT) services to the defense industry, appears to be providing or seeking to provide services to the NSA even as it employs a vice president married to Teresa H. Shea, the head of the NSA’s Signals Intelligence Directorate. Buzzfeed’s Aram Roston, who broke the story , writes:

“Teresa H. Shea is director of the Signals Intelligence Directorate, which means she oversees electronic eavesdropping for intelligence purposes….As for Shea’s husband, James, he is currently a vice president at DRS Signal Solution…. According to its own website, DRS is seeking 15 workers for a potential SIGINT-related contract at Fort Meade, Maryland, which is the headquarters of the NSA.”

Neither the NSA nor any of the individuals involved in this story would provide a direct response to inquiries by Buzzfeed. In turning down a public records request from the publication for Shea’s financial disclosure forms, the NSA cited the 1959 National Security Agency Act, which shields the NSA from being forced to disclose its activities or “the names, titles, salaries, or number of the persons employed by such agency,” among other things.

In other words, even when it comes to some of the most basic questions of ethics and integrity in federal service, the NSA invokes its right to stay in the shadows. The agency’s refusal to answer questions about the apparent conflict or provide any other information simply contributes to the perception of a dubious business relationship. That perception, in turn, undermines Shea’s own court declarations that the program of mass data collection on American citizens revealed by NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden was subject to the strictest possible oversight. How can the American people be expected to simply trust that the NSA will protect their civil rights within such surveillance programs if it turns out NSA officials engage in dubious ethical practices generally?

(Photo: NSA/Getty Images)

The post Powerful NSA Official Potentially Self-Dealing With Defense Contractor appeared first on The Intercept.

Some smartasses made and are trying to sell an “Apple Watch” to capitalize on the actual Apple Watch being released next year. But, hey, if you fall for it, at least you’re only out a few bucks.

So: the referendum is over and the count is underway. I'm about to go to bed; when I wake up there should be a result. The final YouGov opinion poll today (not an exit poll) gave No a 54/46 lead, but earlier polls suggest the outcome is within the margin of error; I'd be very surprised if that final poll reflects the final count. In Edinburgh, the turnout was around 89.7% of the electorate, with voter registration running at 97% overall and more than 95% of postal ballots returned.

One thing is sure: even a "no" victory won't kill the core issue of the delegitimization of the political elite. (It has become not simply a referendum on independence, but a vote of confidence on the way the UK is governed; anything short of a huge "no" victory amounts to a stinging rebuke to the ruling parties of the beige dictatorship.) With that level of voter engagement we're seeing, and turn-out—probably setting a new record for the highest turnout in a British election—the number of "yes" votes is likely to exceed the number that would normally secure a landslide victory for the winning party in a general election: this will have serious repercussions in the long term. In event of a "yes" vote, negotiations will open over the terms of separation, and in event of a "no" vote, well ... promises were made by the "no" campaign in the last week that amounted to a major concession on Devo Max: will the Westminster parties keep those promises in the wake of a "no" vote on independence?

Anyway: I'm not staying up for the count. (I'm tired, boringly middle-aged, and the count will happen whether or not I'm glued to the internet feeds into the early hours.) Instead, I'll update this blog entry when there's a result tomorrow ... and in the meantime, open the discussion comments for a single question:

What comes next?

UPDATE: Final results: Yes, 44.7%, No, 55.3%, Turnout: 84.5% (setting an all-time record for a UK election—voting is not compulsory, and at the last UK general election, in 2010, the turnout was 65.1%).

UPDATE 2: First Minister Alex Salmond has resigned. (NB: it'll be utterly astonishing if his successor is anyone other than Nicola Sturgeon.)

Olga Khazan explains:

Though Americans across the economic spectrum are sleeping less these days, people in the lowest income quintile, and people who never finished high school, are far more likely to get less than seven hours of shut-eye per night. About half of people in households making less than $30,000 sleep six or fewer hours per night, while only a third of those making $75,000 or more do.

Unsurprisingly, shift workers face the greatest risk of sleep deprivation; they get two to four hours less sleep than average. The consequences can be dire:

Exposure to bright light when it’s time to sleep makes it harder for the body to produce melatonin, a sleep hormone. Over time, this sleep deprivation translates to an increased risk for heart disease, gastrointestinal problems, and reproductive issues. … For some, a sleep shortfall can lead to narcolepsy-like symptoms. One study found that 53 percent of night-shift workers report falling asleep accidentally on the job.

Tim Cook:

A few years ago, users of Internet services began to realize that when an online service is free, you’re not the customer. You’re the product. But at Apple, we believe a great customer experience shouldn’t come at the expense of your privacy.

Our business model is very straightforward: We sell great products. We don’t build a profile based on your email content or web browsing habits to sell to advertisers. We don’t “monetize” the information you store on your iPhone or in iCloud. And we don’t read your email or your messages to get information to market to you. Our software and services are designed to make our devices better. Plain and simple. […]

Finally, I want to be absolutely clear that we have never worked with any government agency from any country to create a backdoor in any of our products or services. We have also never allowed access to our servers. And we never will.

That Tim Cook and Steve Jobs are very different people has been a common refrain for three years, and it came up again this week in his interview with Charlie Rose. But one trait they share is the ability to write in simple, straightforward words. I say clear writing is a sign of clear thinking. Tim Cook and the rest of Apple’s leadership are serious about this — both as a moral issue and as a competitive advantage to tout over Google. They should have called this “Thoughts on Privacy”, because it reads an awful lot like Jobs’s “Thoughts on Music” and “Thoughts on Flash”.

There’s really nothing to say about Ronan the Accuser. He was the most underused villain since…ever, in the MCU. Which is a shame, because as an overzealous law enforcement official, he could have been a really fun counterpoint to the band of criminals that make up the movie’s heroes. Kind of a Space Javert character, albeit more extreme.

Remember that schism between al Qaeda and ISIS? Well, there’s nothing like a new war with the Great Satan to help patch that up. Adam Taylor passes along some salient news and poses a troubling question:

In a two-page message posted to Twitter accounts that represent both groups, al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula (AQAP) and al-Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb (AQIM) asked their “brothers” in Iraq and Syria to “stop killing each other and unite against the American campaign and its evil coalition that threatens us all.” It’s an unusual move. The two groups are perhaps the most notorious of the al-Qaeda-linked groups: AQAP operates in Yemen and Saudi Arabia, and it has been described as the “most lethal Qaeda franchise” by the Council on Foreign Relations, while AQIM operates in Northern Africa, in particular Algeria, Mali and Libya. Analysts say a joint statement from the two is unprecedented. …

[T]he statement calls on all jihadist groups to unite against a common enemy: “crusader America” and the alliance of states backing the U.S. plan to strike the Islamic State. This language echoes the Islamic State’s own language and presents a bigger concern: Might U.S. strikes against the Islamic State cause it to reunite with al-Qaeda and other extremist groups it opposes?

Aymenn al-Tamimi translates and analyzes the statement. In his view, the answer to that question is “not necessarily”:

This statement does not mean AQAP and AQIM are getting closer to IS or warming to the idea of pledging allegiance to IS. Indeed, they have firmly rejected IS’ Caliphate declaration, and have maintained their loyalty to al-Qa’ida Central (AQC). For comparison, note that members and supporters of Jamaat Ansar al-Islam- an Iraqi jihadi group (with a Syrian branch) which like al-Qa’ida does not accept IS’ claim to be a state or caliphate- have also denounced the U.S. airstrikes etc. targeting IS as constituting war against Islam, and like al-Qa’ida would want an ideal situation where all jihadis having the end-goal of a Caliphate unite against a common enemy, while rejecting IS’ assumption of supreme authority.

Meanwhile, much though Obama takes pains to deny that there is anything religious or civilizational about this war, that’s not how ISIS sees it:

[N]o matter how delicately the White House wants to frame renewed military operations in the region, it’s serving up rich propaganda fodder for the militant group in Washington’s crosshairs. As Morning Mix’s Terrence McCoy notes, the Islamic State is all too happy to paint the coming battle as a civilizational conflict. In its own glossy publication, Dabiq, the terror organization hails its plans to fight the “crusaders in Washington” and sees its rise amid the chaos of the Middle East as an evocation of history. …

In any event, it’s all dubious propaganda for the Islamic State, which as Obama noted, spends most of its time killing fellow Muslims and faces a constellation of largely Muslim factions — Kurdish militias, Syria’s Assad regime, the Iraqi government, Iran, and the Sunni Gulf states — arrayed against it. And, given Obama’s caution, the Islamic State can’t count on the same slip of the tongue of the president’s predecessor. Just days after the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, President George W. Bush warned that “this crusade, this war on terrorism, is going to take a while.”

In a really terrific post during my vacation, Freddie DeBoer nailed something to the cross:

It seems to me now that the public face of social liberalism has ceased to seem positive, joyful, human, and freeing. I now mostly associate that public face with danger, with an endless list of things that you can’t do or say or think, and with the constant threat of being called an existentially bad person if you say the wrong thing, or if someone decides to misrepresent what you said as saying the wrong thing. There are so many ways to step on a landmine now, so many terms that have become forbidden, so many attitudes that will get you cast out if you even appear to hold them.

Freddie’s concern was with online hazing of the politically incorrect. Writers are not just condemned any more for being wrong or dumb or rigid. They are condemned as sexist, racist, homophobic, anti-Semitic, blah blah blah – almost as a reflex in trying to discredit their work. That’s particularly true when it comes to fascinating issues like race or gender or sexual orientation, where liberalism today seems to insist that there are absolutely no aggregate differences between genders, races, ethnicities, or sexual orientations, except those created by oppression and discrimination and bigotry. Anyone even daring to bring up these topics is subjected to intense pressure, profound disapproval and ostracism. This illiberal liberalism is not new, of course. But it’s still depressingly common.

Sam Harris is one of its latest victims. There sure is plenty to disagree with Sam about – and we have had several such arguments and debates. But the idea that he is a sexist – and now forced to defend himself at length from the charge after a book-signing discussion – is really pathetic. His account of the episode is well worth-reading for the insight it gives into the Puritanical wing of the left. Michelle Boornstein decided to play the sexist card after a contentious interview, and then tweet it out thus:

“Something about that critical posture is..intrinsically male.” @samharris on why chicks don’t dig atheism http://t.co/NDf5T0dJYr

— Michelle Boorstein (@mboorstein) September 12, 2014

Here’s what she was referring to (in her words):

I also asked Harris at the event why the vast majority of atheists—and many of those who buy his books—are male, a topic which has prompted some to raise questions of sexism in the atheist community. Harris’ answer was both silly and then provocative. It can only be attributed to my “overwhelming lack of sex appeal,” he said to huge laughter.

“I think it may have to do with my person[al] slant as an author, being very critical of bad ideas. This can sound very angry to people… People just don’t like to have their ideas criticized. There’s something about that critical posture that is to some degree intrinsically male and more attractive to guys than to women,” he said. “The atheist variable just has this—it doesn’t obviously have this nurturing, coherence-building extra estrogen vibe that you would want by default if you wanted to attract as many women as men.”

This is impermissibly sexist because it assumes that there are some essential biological and psychological differences between men and women, and for a certain kind of leftist, this is an intolerable heresy. If that truth cannot be suppressed or rebutted in a free society, its adherents must be stigmatized as bigots. It’s a lazy form of non-argument – and may have been payback from Boorstein after Harris and she differed quite strongly on the power of fundamentalism in American culture.

But Boorstein’s premise – that because many more men than women seem to buy and read his books, there must be some sexism at work – is preposterous.

Anyone can buy a book on Amazon. There are no gender barriers whatever. The free flow of ideas will often lead to different audiences for different authors. That some books by white Americans are read disproportionately by whites doesn’t mean they’re racist. And, yes, style of writing – especially the combative, testosteroned debates that occur online or typify the slash-and-burn atheist conversation – can lead to a disproportionately male-skewed audience for that kind of thing. But all that is a function of free choice in a free market of ideas – not some kind of institutional sexism – let alone personal sexism. Why we cannot revel in these differences and embrace them as part of what makes being human so fascinating and variable is beyond me. But clearly it threatens people. Reality can.

Then Sam was subjected to a public dressing down by a person in the book-signing line:

She: What you said about women in the atheist community was totally denigrating to women and irresponsible. Women can think just as critically as men. And men can be just as nurturing as women.

Me: Of course they can! But if you think there are no differences, in the aggregate, between people who have Y chromosomes and people who don’t; if you think testosterone has no psychological effects on human minds in general; if you think we can’t say anything about the differences between two bell curves that describe whole populations of men and women, whether these differences come from biology or from culture, we’re not going to get very far in this conversation.

But the conversation is not the point. Even an individual writer’s personality and style is not the point. The point is the enforcement of an ideology by the weapon of stigma and social ostracism. Some favorite lines from the p.c. war:

You should just know that what you said was incredibly sexist and very damaging, and you should apologize … You’re just totally unaware of how sexist you are.

It’s that last line that really gives the game away. It means essentially that a writer cannot win. Or rather: that a writer somehow has to represent all of humanity or risk being regarded and demonized as hostile to whole sections of it. This should be called out for what it is: a full-scale assault on the integrity and freedom of writers in the name of social liberalism. Writers need to stand up to this cant – and not capitulate to it.

For more on the subject of women and atheism, check out the Dish discussion thread, “Where Are All The Female Atheists?” One of those readers brought to our attention the work of the brilliant female atheist Jennifer Michael Hecht, whom we subsequently invited to join our Ask Anything feature to discuss the subject of suicide, explored in her book Stay: A History of Suicide and the Philosophies Against It.

Elias Groll and Simon Engler round up some of the worst offenders, like Oklahoma Senator James Inhofe:

“ISIS, they are really bad terrorists, they’re so bad even al Qaeda is afraid of them,” Inhofe told a local Fox station last month. “They’re crazy out there and they’re rapidly developing a method of blowing up a major U.S. city and people just can’t believe that’s happening.”

Perhaps Inhofe is right, [counterterrorism chief Matthew] Olsen is wrong, and Islamic State militants are indeed plotting an attack right now inside America’s borders. American intelligence officials have certainly been wrong before about the threat posed by terror groups, and the Islamic State has alarmingly large numbers of fighters with American passports who could return to the U.S. to carry out strikes here at home. But the phrase “rapidly developing a method of blowing up a major U.S. city” goes far beyond what experts inside and outside of government say about the group’s capabilities. There is no substance here, only speculation likely designed to inspire fear and drum up support for military action.

Weigel examines the partisan implications of threat inflation:

Here’s the current paradox. The Obama administration—most reliably Chuck Hagel and John Kerry—is describing ISIS in apocalyptic terms. According to Kerry, ISIS is “an ambitious, avowed genocidal, territorial-grabbing, Caliphate-desiring quasi-state.” Their goal is not really to downplay what ISIS can actually achieve, or to reflect the intelligence analysis that ISIS poses little threat to (ugh, this term) “the homeland.” It’s to avoid a Syria-style rebellion in Congress and assemble a coalition of Arab partners in the Levant.

But Democrats do not benefit, domestically, from the hype. Just today, New Hampshire U.S. Senate candidate Scott Brown challenged Democratic Sen. Jeanne Shaheen to secure the border and sign on to legislation that would revoke the citizenship of American ISIS fighters. “If anyone (including ISIS) can cross our borders at any time, with anything in their possession, then Washington has no control over our nation’s security from terrorist attack,” said Brown. That statement sounds like incoherent heebie-jeebie-ism if you listen to intelligence assessments. Current estimates peg the total number of Americans who might have gone to Iraq and Syria for ISIS at fewer than 100. The threat of such an American, if he returned, is not that he’d cross an unprotected border with a knife between his teeth and jihadism on his mind. It’s that he’d use his American passport at a normal TSA checkpoint.

jpegheaven:

Allan Wexler.

Coffee Seeks Its Own Level. 1990. If one person alone lifts his cup, coffee overflows the other three cups. All four people need to coordinate their actions and lift simultaneously. Inspired by the principle “water seeks its own level”. I had been working on a series of projects using basic scientific principles learned in high school as a means to explore architectural issues.    

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September 15th, 2014: Let's say Jay and Kay are... cross-temporal siblings? Yeah, that actually sounds really great! – Ryan

Benedict Evans:

When you buy Amazon stock (the main currency with which Amazon employees are paid, incidentally), you are buying a bet that he can convert a huge portion of all commerce to flow through the Amazon machine. The question to ask isn’t whether Amazon is some profitless ponzi scheme, but whether you believe Bezos can capture the future. That, and how long are you willing to wait?

Henry Farrell flags a paper (pdf) on sites that “allow users to ‘upvote,’ or ‘downvote’ posts and comments”:

[The researchers] use some complicated statistical and experimental techniques to reach two key findings:

(1) People who write low-quality posts are more likely to write again when they get negative attention. Furthermore, the quality of their posts deteriorates. This goes beyond the simple adage that you shouldn’t feed the trolls by giving them attention. The evidence suggests that negative feedback can perhaps actually create trolls. It also suggests that people getting negative feedback are more likely to give others negative feedback, too, spreading the infection.

(2) People who write high-quality posts are encouraged by positive attention to write more. However, they aren’t as encouraged by positive attention as bad posters are by negative attention. Furthermore, the quality of their posts does not go up. Broadly speaking, encouragement doesn’t seem particularly effective.

I spent the last three days in Portland, Oregon, the kind of city I could easily live in: manageable, green, easy-going, mellow, polite. And I spent it with a few hundred entrepreneurs and activists, preparing and debating and sharing experiences about the burgeoning cannabis industry. It felt a lot like a gathering more than ten years’ ago of activists and ordinary gay folks, anticipating the possibility of civil marriage rights. It had the same energy, the same nervousness, and the same excitement. And, for me, the big reveal was the staggering level of innovation, imagination and technology that will transform the cannabis market as only American capitalism can.

And the people there defied every stereotype people want to apply to those of us who want to end the destructive, self-defeating Prohibition of a plant that is much less harmful than alcohol or tobacco. We’re long since past the age of Cheech and Chong; past the dumb giggles and condescending jokes, and mercifully beyond the boomer divide that still somehow sees this is as some kind of culture war issue, rather than a sane, pragmatic, gradual reform that will end persecution of so many, and improve the lives of countless more. So, yes, it did remind me of marriage equality – not least because the logic behind it is just as powerful and the opposition just as intellectually weak. If, like me, you’ve had the wind knocked out of you by Obama’s capitulation to neoconservatism, there are still some areas where the last six years can yield some durable domestic progress – and this is one of them. Unless, that is, Obama’s panicked blunder so emboldens the forces of reaction that it puts more of what we have achieved since the Bush-Cheney nightmare in jeopardy.

This weekend, we took our minds off the new Americanized war in the Middle East, and feasted on the poetry of Jericho Brown. I was gut-punched by this poem in particular. A secular meditation on prayer – from the Village Voice advice columnist! – is well worth re-visiting; I’ve rarely heard a homily that revealed and explained so much.

We aired the key to happiness; the cheeky face of a giant fruit-bat; the freedom from body dissatisfaction that veiled Muslim women enjoy; and a view of conservatism very close to my own – by Roger Scruton. Plus: the novel WWII soldiers couldn’t put down.

The most popular post of the weekend was Why Obama Launched Another War; and The View From Your Window Contest – a toughie.

See you in the morning.

“

My Least Favorite Trope (and this post will include spoilers for The Lego Movie, Guardians of the Galaxy, The Matrix, Western Civilization, and—cod help me—Bulletproof Monk*.) is the thing where there’s an awesome, smart, wonderful, powerful female character who by all rights ought to be the Chosen One and the hero of the movie, who is tasked with taking care of some generally ineffectual male character who is, for reasons of wish fulfillment, actually the person the film focuses on. She mentors him, she teaches him, and she inevitably becomes his girlfriend… and he gets the job she wanted: he gets to be the Chosen One even though she’s obviously far more qualified. And all he has to do to get it and deserve it is Man Up and Take Responsibility.

And that’s it. Every god-damned time. The mere fact of naming the films above and naming the trope gives away the entire plot and character arc of every single movie.

”

- Elizabeth Bear - My Least Favorite Trope (via feministquotes)

Jacob Siegel worries about what happens to the footage:

Think of it like this: The police will have moved their evidence into a private warehouse staffed by private security guards and administrators. These private guards can see the boxes the evidence is stored in, how many and when they come in, but they’re not supposed to look inside. And instead of only keeping evidence related to criminal matters, this private warehouse is storing a bottomless pit of routine interactions between cops and citizens. Going 50 in a 35? Got stopped because you fit the description, but quickly released once the cops realized you weren’t the person they were looking for? There’s going to be a video of you in a private corporation’s digital records.

This isn’t abstract.

In Michael Brown’s case, outrage that the teenager’s fatal shooting wasn’t recorded was paired with a video released by Ferguson Police Chief Thomas Jackson, showing the teen appear to push a clerk and leave a store with a box of unpaid-for cigars. It shortly emerged that the officer who shot him had no knowledge of that earlier crime, and many accused the police chief of releasing the video to smear a dead man. The same massive evidence trove body cameras create can, if used selectively, humiliate and indict average citizens.

Also, Matt Taylor points out, cameras don’t always prevent police abuse:

Presumably, your average beat cop is less likely to go on a power trip and beat a vulnerable person senseless if he thinks he might have to explain the video to a grand jury afterward. But slapping cameras on police officers’ lapels is no panacea, and presents all sorts of tricky questions about privacy in this era of unchecked state surveillance. Besides, we know that, by way of example, cops in Albequerque, New Mexico, went ahead and killed a mentally ill homeless man on tape last year despite the officers’ cameras. Remember, Rodney King was beaten on tape (and so was Garner, for that matter)—for all the good it did him.

Previous Dish on cop cameras here.

(Photo: New York City Public Advocate Letitia James displays a video camera that police officers could wear on patrol during a press conference on August 21, 2014 in New York City. By Andrew Burton/Getty Images)

gay-bondage69:

transschmuck:

cutevictim:

Jesus was a homeless Palestinian anarchist who held protests at oppressive churches, advocated for universal health care and redistribution of wealth, before being arrested for terrorism, tortured and executed for crimes against the state, now go ahead and explain to me why he’d vote conservative. I’ll wait.

i’m sorry that’s just the best sentence i’ve ever read

Canon Jesus is so much cooler than American Jesus.

How do many migrant women prepare for the likelihood of being raped? They take birth control as their journey begins. Read the rest

We've known since the start that Yahoo fought the NSA's Prism surveillance program tooth-and-nail; but as unsealed court docs show, the Feds made the process into a harrowing ordeal, and sweet-talked gullible judges into dropping the hammer on Y. Read the rest

bleedingshoulder:

kuinexs:

Sasha Vinci sculptures

because everyone has always wondered what michelangelo would have made if he saw some Giger and Beksinski work.

President Obama’s plan to “degrade and destroy” the Islamic State counts on pretty much everything going right in a region of the world where pretty much anything the U.S. does always goes wrong.

Our newspapers of record today finally remembered it’s their job to point stuff like that out.

The New York Times, in particular, calls bullshit this morning — albeit without breaking from the classic detached Timesian tonelessness.

Mark Mazzetti, Eric Schmitt and Mark Landler (with contributions from Matt Apuzzo and James Risen) start by pointing out the essential but often overlooked fact that “American intelligence agencies have concluded that [the Islamic State] poses no immediate threat to the United States.”

And then, with the cover of “some officials and terrorism experts,” they share a devastating analysis of all the coverage that has come before:

Some officials and terrorism experts believe that the actual danger posed by ISIS has been distorted in hours of television punditry and alarmist statements by politicians, and that there has been little substantive public debate about the unintended consequences of expanding American military action in the Middle East.

You’ve got to love these quotes:

Daniel Benjamin, who served as the State Department’s top counterterrorism adviser during Mr. Obama’s first term, said the public discussion about the ISIS threat has been a “farce,” with “members of the cabinet and top military officers all over the place describing the threat in lurid terms that are not justified.”

“It’s hard to imagine a better indication of the ability of elected officials and TV talking heads to spin the public into a panic, with claims that the nation is honeycombed with sleeper cells, that operatives are streaming across the border into Texas or that the group will soon be spraying Ebola virus on mass transit systems — all on the basis of no corroborated information,” said Mr. Benjamin, who is now a scholar at Dartmouth College.

(For a taste of alarmist statements by politicians, please read my recent post: The Congressional Hyperbole Caucus.)

A few paragraphs later, “some American officials” return, warning “of the potential danger of a prolonged military campaign in the Middle East, led by the United States” and saying “there are risks that escalating airstrikes could do the opposite of what they are intended to do and fan the threat of terrorism to American soil.”

The Times writers raise the very legitimate concern that Obama may be playing right into the Islamic State’s hands:

Even a limited air campaign could play into an ISIS narrative that American infidels were intervening on behalf of apostate governments in Iraq and Syria.

In the Washington Post this morning, Rajiv Chandrasekaran focuses on all the implausible things that have to go right beyond “U.S. bombs and missiles hitting their intended targets”:

In Iraq, dissolved elements of the army will have to regroup and fight with conviction. Political leaders will have to reach compromises on the allocation of power and money in ways that have eluded them for years. Disenfranchised Sunni tribesmen will have to muster the will to join the government’s battle. European and Arab allies will have to hang together, Washington will have to tolerate the resurgence of Iranian-backed Shiite militias it once fought, and U.S. commanders will have to orchestrate an air war without ground-level guidance from American combat forces.

Meanwhile, in Syria, prospects are way worse:

The strategy imagines weakening the Islamic State without indirectly strengthening the ruthless government led by Bashar al-Assad or a rival network of al-Qaeda affiliated rebels — while simultaneously trying to build up a moderate Syrian opposition…

“Figuring out where we can strike ISIL so that it weakens them and empowers a more moderate Sunni group instead of the government — you have to think that one through,” said Michele Flournoy, a former U.S. undersecretary of defense. “I’m not sure we know yet how to pull that off.”

And Chandrasekaran reports that Obama’s approach “was not the U.S. military’s preferred option.”

Responding to a White House request for options to confront the Islamic State, Gen. Lloyd Austin, the top commander of U.S. forces in the Middle East, said that his best military advice was to send a modest contingent of American troops, principally Special Operations forces, to advise and assist Iraqi army units in fighting the militants, according to two U.S. military officials. The recommendation, conveyed to the White House by Gen. Martin Dempsey, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, was cast aside in favor of options that did not involve U.S. ground forces in a front-line role, a step adamantly opposed by the White House.

It’s a classic damned-if-you-do, damned-if-you-don’t scenario: “Supporters of the president’s approach” point out that putting U.S. ground troops in the lead would encourage the Iraqi soldiers to hang back, while “Austin’s predecessor, retired Marine Gen. James Mattis, says “the decision not to send ground troops poses serious risks to the mission.”

The Associated Press’s Julie Pace writes a bold first paragraph:

For a president criticized as overly cautious and reluctant to lead, Barack Obama is taking a huge risk. He is thrusting U.S. fighting forces into a growing military operation with clear dangers, unknown costs, an indefinite length and unpredictable consequences.

Meanwhile, AP colleagues Zeina Karam and Vivian Salama make the previously almost-unheard argument that maybe the Islamic State isn’t worth all the fuss. There “has been an inclination to exaggerate the group’s capabilities,” they write.

The Islamic State group is often described as the most fearsome jihadi outfit of all: a global menace outweighing al-Qaida, with armies trembling before its advance.

But while the group has been successful at seizing parts of Iraq and Syria, it is no unstoppable juggernaut. Lacking the major weaponry of an established military, it wields outsize influence through the fanaticism of a hard core of several thousand, capitalizing on divisions among its rivals, and disseminating terrifying videos on social media.

And they offer up some numbers:

Most analysts… estimate the number of Islamic State fighters in both Iraq and Syria to be about 20,000…

The Iraqi military and police force are estimated at more than 1 million. The Syrian army is estimated at 300,000 soldiers. There are believed to be more than 100,000 Syrian rebels, including the al-Qaida-linked Nusra Front and the powerful Islamic Front rebel umbrella group, currently fighting the Islamic State group in Syria. Tens of thousands of Kurdish Peshmerga forces are fighting the group in Iraq.

Julian E. Barnes and Siobhan Gorman write in the Wall Street Journal:

A cornerstone of the expanded U.S. military campaign against Islamic State militants will be reliance on U.S.-trained local forces to confront the group head on.

But good luck with that:

In Iraq, Libya, Afghanistan and elsewhere, results have been mixed at best in U.S. efforts to push local forces to the forefront of fights against extremists. U.S. military campaigns conducted with little or no local ground support—such as those in Pakistan and Yemen—have met with some success but have lasted for years. Success, officials and experts say, is especially difficult when American troops are prohibited from serving alongside local units on the front lines or without a yearslong U.S. presence to train, advise and mentor the partner forces.

There’s also that little problem of giving weapons and training to precisely the wrong people:

In Syria, officials have repeatedly raised the problem of adequately vetting rebels to ensure the people trained and armed by the U.S. don’t join the ranks of Islamic State. In Iraq, the U.S. believes that many of the Shiite-dominated military forces have been penetrated by Iranian agents.

The McClatchy Newspapers Washington bureau , finally no longer alone in expressing skepticism about Obama’s plans, goes all Buzzfeed with a Hannah Allam story: “5 potential pitfalls in Obama’s plan to combat the Islamic State“.

Allam notes that Yemen and Somalia are hardly examples of success; that the new Iraqi government is hardly “inclusive”; that training of Iraqi soldiers hasn’t worked in the past; that in Syria it’s unclear which “opposition” Obama intends to support; and that it may be too late to cut off the flow of fighters and funds.

Even USA Today gets into the game, with Jim Michaels pointing out some of the “risks” involved.

Attacks on Islamic State militants in Syria could inadvertently help President Bashar Assad, whom the Obama administration has been trying to oust. Islamic State militants have been the most effective force in fighting the Assad regime…

Another worry with airstrikes is the risk of civilian casualties, which can quickly undermine public support. As airstrikes increase, Islamic State militants are likely to mingle more among the population, making targeting more difficult and increasing the risks of civilian casualties.

It’s great our leading mainstream news organization are finally pointing out the flaws of a president’s plan to bomb Iraq. Last time around, they waited until over a year after the invasion to suddenly pile on.

But nobody has the understanding of the region, the writing chops, and the moral standing of Andrew J. Bacevich, the Boston University political science professor and former Army colonel who lost his son in the Iraq war in 2007. He writes today for Reuters Opinion:

Even if Obama cobbles together a plan to destroy the Islamic State, the problems bedeviling the Persian Gulf and the greater Middle East more broadly won’t be going away anytime soon.

Destroying what Obama calls the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant won’t create an effective and legitimate Iraqi state. It won’t restore the possibility of a democratic Egypt. It won’t dissuade Saudi Arabia from funding jihadists. It won’t pull Libya back from the brink of anarchy. It won’t end the Syrian civil war. It won’t bring peace and harmony to Somalia and Yemen. It won’t persuade the Taliban to lay down their arms in Afghanistan. It won’t end the perpetual crisis of Pakistan. It certainly won’t resolve the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

All the military power in the world won’t solve those problems. Obama knows that. Yet he is allowing himself to be drawn back into the very war that he once correctly denounced as stupid and unnecessary — mostly because he and his advisers don’t know what else to do. Bombing has become his administration’s default option.

Rudderless and without a compass, the American ship of state continues to drift, guns blazing.

Photo of U.S. mortar fire in Iraq in 2004: Aaron Allmon II/U.S. Air Force via Getty Images

The post News Organizations Finally Realize Obama’s War Plan Is a Hot Mess appeared first on The Intercept.

Much is being made of the big turnaround for President Obama, from being a man firmly identified with pulling out of wars to a man launching a new one.

And he did, of course, announce a significant escalation of the U.S. military response to the Islamic State.

But if you parse his Wednesday night speech carefully, he also came about as close to saying “calm down” as was politically palatable, given the hysteria and hyperbole attending the matter here in Washington.

First, he established the context:

We can’t erase every trace of evil from the world, and small groups of killers have the capacity to do great harm. That was the case before 9/11, and that remains true today.

Quite philosophical, really.

And as for the Islamic State in particular, yes it’s “one of those groups” and yes it’s done some horrible things, but — in stark contrast to the sometimes nutty talk on TV — Obama made it clear that it’s hardly an imminent danger to America:

ISIL poses a threat to the people of Iraq and Syria, and the broader Middle East — including American citizens, personnel and facilities. If left unchecked, these terrorists could pose a growing threat beyond that region, including to the United States.

The theme of his message was, ultimately, a calming one:

I know many Americans are concerned about these threats. Tonight, I want you to know that the United States of America is meeting them with strength and resolve.

Jonathan Shainin, an editor at the Guardian, translated Obama’s speech this way:

One could argue that in the speech, Obama was trying to make that something he had to do as un-stupid as the fevered, blood-lusting political elites would let him get away with.

This was not going to be a huge deal, he indicated. He called it an “effort,” not a war, and stressed that “this effort will be different from the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. It will not involve American combat troops fighting on foreign soil.” There was no talk of shock and awe; what Obama had in mind was a ”counterterrorism campaign” that “will be waged through a steady, relentless effort.”

And Obama’s lack of any specificity regarding the scale of the effort, the timing, goals for partner participation, or any kind of metrics for success was either cover for him not really having a viable plan — or a brilliant rhetorical strategy to keep open the option of ratcheting everything back once the hysteria passes. Or both.

University of Michigan professor and Middle East blogger Juan Cole saw Obama’s posture as fundamentally defensive, particularly Obama’s assertion that his strategy agains the Islamic State “is one that we have successfully pursued in Yemen and Somalia for years.”

Cole writes:

Invoking Yemen and Somalia is a signal of minimalism in every way. On MSNBC, veteran, experienced and brilliant correspondent Richard Engel took apart this analogy. He pointed out that Yemen and Somalia are holding actions but that in Iraq the US and its allies would have to take territory.

But what if Obama is talking big but carrying a soft stick? What if he really does mean he has a Yemen-like situation in mind?…

What if Obama is a sharper reader of the Middle East than his critics give him credit for? He knows ISIL is likely not going away, just as, after 13 years, the Taliban have not. US military action may even prolong the lifetime of these groups…

Don’t listen to his expansive four-stage program or his retooled, stage-managed John Wayne rhetoric. Look at his metaphors. He is telling those who have ears to hear that he is pulling a Yemen in Iraq and Syria. He knows very well what that implies.

James M. Lindsay, blogging for the Council on Foreign Relations, took notice of how Obama described the threat:

Obama was also specific in describing who ISIS currently threatened: people in the Middle East, not Americans. He only granted that ISIS might become a threat to the United States “if left unchecked.”

That assessment puts Obama at odds with his critics. It also puts him at odds with his own advisers. Secretary of Defense Chuck Hagel has called ISIS an“imminent threat to every interest we have,” while Secretary of State John Kerry said it “poses a severe threat.” But Obama’s assessment does reflect the judgment of the U.S. intelligence community.

Lindsay’s conclusion? That for Obama, “laying out a detailed plan that would pass muster with experts wasn’t his primary purpose. Reassuring a public worried about the ISIS threat, and his response to it, was.”

Author and Boston Globe columnist Stephen Kinzer gave Obama props for refusing to panic — even when scaring the hell out of people would probably have bumped up his approval ratings. He wrote:

It is difficult to hear our President gently remind us, “We cannot erase every trace of evil from the world.” It challenges ideas of American power that are part of our collective psyche. Yet too many of our interventions in the Middle East have been aimed largely at fixing the messes left by our previous interventions. Obama signaled that he wants to pull the United States out of that cycle.

Here’s an internal inconsistencies in Obama’s plan noted by Middle East political analyst Michael Koplow:

I suspect that more of those contradictions will emerge over time. Obama has made many elements of Bushism the new normal. But he’s been pretty consistent about not getting the country mired in another land war, if he can help it.

Photo: Pool via Getty Images

The post Was Obama Actually Asking Everyone To Chill? appeared first on The Intercept.

Tiny Toadstool Tesla on a Teacup (sorry)