Originally shared by Mary Paniscus
http://www.slate.com/blogs/xx_factor/2015/11/25/rojava_is_a_radical_experiment_in_democracy_in_northern_syria_american_leftists.html
Sunday, November 29, 2015
I'm very sorry to wax political, but unfortunately, the times seem to require it.
I'm very sorry to wax political, but unfortunately, the times seem to require it.
Originally shared by Rugger Ducky
This is Army of God's website. Just now. If you're confused who they are, they're a violent anti-abortion Christian terrorist organization. They hid and protected Eric Rudolph through his years hiding from law enforcement.
I've had at least a dozen white Christian men tell me today there is no active hate machine determined to murder abortion providers. And certainly not in the name of their god.
Of course they're all applauding yesterday's murders.
Because they aren't pro life. They aren't Christians. They're hateful people looking for any excuse to hate someone. And this gives them the twisted belief that they're saving people.
http://www.armyofgod.com/index.html
Saturday, November 28, 2015
a bit of a counterweight to the Bernie Fever...
a bit of a counterweight to the Bernie Fever...
Originally shared by Steve S
You know idolization is going on when people start with their notion of perfection and project it onto their target to fill in all the blanks in their knowledge.
Reality:
"""
But on his home turf in Vermont, ... gay rights advocates say Mr. Sanders was less than a leader, and not entirely present, on the issue.
"""
In 1996, his office explained that he voted against the Defense of Marriage Act because it infringed on states’ rights, traditionally a conservative argument.
"""
“I don’t think anybody thought about Bernie Sanders,” said Jan Backus, a state senator at the time who called Mr. Sanders “invisible on the issue.”
"""
But getting the state’s congressman to express his position on gay marriage was like “pulling teeth ... from a rhinoceros,” wrote the Vermont publication Seven Days.
"""
Mr. Sanders was not “a real active participant in the fight” for civil rights, said David Moats, the author of “Civil Wars,” who won a Pulitzer Prize for his editorials on the issue in The Rutland Herald.
"""
When it came time for Mr. Sanders to speak, he deplored the demonization of gay people but complained that the virulent opposition to civil unions diverted attention from prescription drug costs, health care and other economic issues.
“There are a dozen other issues out there that are as important or more important as that issue,” he said.
"""
Asked in a debate against his Republican opponent whether the federal government should overturn laws on same-sex marriage, he argued that it was a states’ rights issue. When asked by a reporter whether Vermont should legalize same-sex marriage, he said, “Not right now, not after what we went through.”
"""
In 2009, the Vermont legislature overrode a governor’s veto and passed legislation that explicitly recognized same-sex marriages and extended more rights to same-sex couples. That year Mr. Sanders articulated his support for gay marriage.
"""
But as Mr. Sanders tells it, he was a champion on the issue for decades. “Twenty years have come and gone, and as the conservative Supreme Court said, everybody’s entitled to get marriage,” he said in the interview. “So what does it mean to be 19 years ahead of the curve?”
"""
Look, it was only recently that politicians could openly support same-sex marriage without shooting themselves in the foot, so this isn't really about whether, all things being equal, he supported same-sex marriage. Even Obama had to pretend to "evolve" on the issue, and then only after Biden's rainbow balloon was floated successfully.
The real issue is that Sanders is a real person, and a real politician, not some fucking leftist unicorn. When I speak with his supporters, I often feel that I'm comparing an actual human being in the form of Clinton with an imaginary idol named Sanders, and this disconnect from reality is unhealthy.
(Oh, and a shout-out to that asshole, +Ole Olsen, who's done his level best to prop up the myth and hide the man. He's the GOP's best friend among progressives.)
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/11/28/us/politics/as-gay-rights-ally-bernie-sanders-wasnt-always-in-vanguard.html
Originally shared by Steve S
You know idolization is going on when people start with their notion of perfection and project it onto their target to fill in all the blanks in their knowledge.
Reality:
"""
But on his home turf in Vermont, ... gay rights advocates say Mr. Sanders was less than a leader, and not entirely present, on the issue.
"""
In 1996, his office explained that he voted against the Defense of Marriage Act because it infringed on states’ rights, traditionally a conservative argument.
"""
“I don’t think anybody thought about Bernie Sanders,” said Jan Backus, a state senator at the time who called Mr. Sanders “invisible on the issue.”
"""
But getting the state’s congressman to express his position on gay marriage was like “pulling teeth ... from a rhinoceros,” wrote the Vermont publication Seven Days.
"""
Mr. Sanders was not “a real active participant in the fight” for civil rights, said David Moats, the author of “Civil Wars,” who won a Pulitzer Prize for his editorials on the issue in The Rutland Herald.
"""
When it came time for Mr. Sanders to speak, he deplored the demonization of gay people but complained that the virulent opposition to civil unions diverted attention from prescription drug costs, health care and other economic issues.
“There are a dozen other issues out there that are as important or more important as that issue,” he said.
"""
Asked in a debate against his Republican opponent whether the federal government should overturn laws on same-sex marriage, he argued that it was a states’ rights issue. When asked by a reporter whether Vermont should legalize same-sex marriage, he said, “Not right now, not after what we went through.”
"""
In 2009, the Vermont legislature overrode a governor’s veto and passed legislation that explicitly recognized same-sex marriages and extended more rights to same-sex couples. That year Mr. Sanders articulated his support for gay marriage.
"""
But as Mr. Sanders tells it, he was a champion on the issue for decades. “Twenty years have come and gone, and as the conservative Supreme Court said, everybody’s entitled to get marriage,” he said in the interview. “So what does it mean to be 19 years ahead of the curve?”
"""
Look, it was only recently that politicians could openly support same-sex marriage without shooting themselves in the foot, so this isn't really about whether, all things being equal, he supported same-sex marriage. Even Obama had to pretend to "evolve" on the issue, and then only after Biden's rainbow balloon was floated successfully.
The real issue is that Sanders is a real person, and a real politician, not some fucking leftist unicorn. When I speak with his supporters, I often feel that I'm comparing an actual human being in the form of Clinton with an imaginary idol named Sanders, and this disconnect from reality is unhealthy.
(Oh, and a shout-out to that asshole, +Ole Olsen, who's done his level best to prop up the myth and hide the man. He's the GOP's best friend among progressives.)
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/11/28/us/politics/as-gay-rights-ally-bernie-sanders-wasnt-always-in-vanguard.html
Friday, November 27, 2015
From "Climate Wars: The Fight for Survival as the World Overheats"
From "Climate Wars: The Fight for Survival as the World Overheats"
by Gwynne Dyer. This is a worst case business-as-usual scenario:
'Scenario 1
The Year: 2045
Average global temperature: 2.8 degrees Celsius higher than 1990
Global population: 5.8 billion.
'Since the final collapse of the European Union in 2036, under the stress of mass migration from the southern to the northern members, the reconfigured Northern Union (France Benelux, Germany, Scandinavia, Poland and the old Hapsburg domains in central Europe) has succeeded in closing its borders to any further refugees from the famine-stricken Mediterranean countries. Italy, south of Rome, has been largely overrun by refugees from even harder hit north African countries and is no longer part of an organised state, but Spain,
Padania (northern Italy) and Turkey have all acquired nuclear weapons and are seeking (with little success) to enforce food sharing on the better-fed countries of northern Europe. Britain, which has managed to make itself just about self-sufficient in food by dint of a great national effort, has withdrawn from the continent and shelters behind its enhanced nuclear deterrent.
'Russia, the greatest beneficiary of climate change in terms of food
production, is the undisputed great power of Asia. However, the
reunification of China after the chaos of the 2020s and the 2030s poses a renewed threat to its Siberian borders, for even the much reduced Chinese population of eight hundred million is unable to feed itself from the country's increasingly arid farmland, which was devastated by the decline of rainfall over the north Chinese plain and the collapse of the major river systems. Southern India is re-emerging as a major regional power, but what used to be northern India, Pakistan and Bangladesh remain swept by famine and anarchy, due to the collapse of the flow in the glacier-fed Indus, Ganges and Brahmaputra rivers and the increasingly frequent failure of the monsoon. Japan, like Britain, has withdrawn from its continent and is an island of relative prosperity bristling with nuclear weapons.
'The population of the Islamic Republic of Arabia, which had risen to forty million, fell by half in five years after the exhaustion of the giant
Ghawar oil field in 2020, and has since halved again due to the exorbitant price of what little food remains available for import from any source. Uganda's population, 5 million at independence in 1962, reached 110 million in 2030 before falling back to 30 million, and the majority of the survivors are severely malnourished. Brazil and Argentina still manage to feed themselves, but Mexico has been expelled from the North American Free Trade Area, leaving the United States and Canada with just enough food and water to maintain at least a shadow of their former lifestyles. The wall along the US-Mexican border is still holding.
'Human greenhouse-gas emissions temporarily peaked in 2032, at 47 percent higher than 1990, due largely to the dwindling oil supply and the Chinese Civil War. However, the release of thousands of megatons of methane and carbon dioxide from the melting permafrost in Arctic Canada, Alaska and Siberia has totally overwhelmed human emissions cuts, and the process has slid beyond human ability to control. The combined total of human
and'-neo-natural' greenhouse-gas emissions continues to rise rapidly, and the average global temperature at the end of the century is predicted to be 8 or 9 degrees Celsius higher than 1990.'
by Gwynne Dyer. This is a worst case business-as-usual scenario:
'Scenario 1
The Year: 2045
Average global temperature: 2.8 degrees Celsius higher than 1990
Global population: 5.8 billion.
'Since the final collapse of the European Union in 2036, under the stress of mass migration from the southern to the northern members, the reconfigured Northern Union (France Benelux, Germany, Scandinavia, Poland and the old Hapsburg domains in central Europe) has succeeded in closing its borders to any further refugees from the famine-stricken Mediterranean countries. Italy, south of Rome, has been largely overrun by refugees from even harder hit north African countries and is no longer part of an organised state, but Spain,
Padania (northern Italy) and Turkey have all acquired nuclear weapons and are seeking (with little success) to enforce food sharing on the better-fed countries of northern Europe. Britain, which has managed to make itself just about self-sufficient in food by dint of a great national effort, has withdrawn from the continent and shelters behind its enhanced nuclear deterrent.
'Russia, the greatest beneficiary of climate change in terms of food
production, is the undisputed great power of Asia. However, the
reunification of China after the chaos of the 2020s and the 2030s poses a renewed threat to its Siberian borders, for even the much reduced Chinese population of eight hundred million is unable to feed itself from the country's increasingly arid farmland, which was devastated by the decline of rainfall over the north Chinese plain and the collapse of the major river systems. Southern India is re-emerging as a major regional power, but what used to be northern India, Pakistan and Bangladesh remain swept by famine and anarchy, due to the collapse of the flow in the glacier-fed Indus, Ganges and Brahmaputra rivers and the increasingly frequent failure of the monsoon. Japan, like Britain, has withdrawn from its continent and is an island of relative prosperity bristling with nuclear weapons.
'The population of the Islamic Republic of Arabia, which had risen to forty million, fell by half in five years after the exhaustion of the giant
Ghawar oil field in 2020, and has since halved again due to the exorbitant price of what little food remains available for import from any source. Uganda's population, 5 million at independence in 1962, reached 110 million in 2030 before falling back to 30 million, and the majority of the survivors are severely malnourished. Brazil and Argentina still manage to feed themselves, but Mexico has been expelled from the North American Free Trade Area, leaving the United States and Canada with just enough food and water to maintain at least a shadow of their former lifestyles. The wall along the US-Mexican border is still holding.
'Human greenhouse-gas emissions temporarily peaked in 2032, at 47 percent higher than 1990, due largely to the dwindling oil supply and the Chinese Civil War. However, the release of thousands of megatons of methane and carbon dioxide from the melting permafrost in Arctic Canada, Alaska and Siberia has totally overwhelmed human emissions cuts, and the process has slid beyond human ability to control. The combined total of human
and'-neo-natural' greenhouse-gas emissions continues to rise rapidly, and the average global temperature at the end of the century is predicted to be 8 or 9 degrees Celsius higher than 1990.'
Thursday, November 26, 2015
Greybeard in command...
Greybeard in command...
Originally shared by Venus Panthar
If you have not heard Jimmy Herring before - you are in for a mega big time ear treat!!! Check out this #Beatles cover of "Within You Without You" (2020) AWESOME #Live perfomance!!
#guitarsolo #GuitarInstrumental #GuitaristsCommunity #MusiciansCommunity #Music #MusicVideo
https://www.youtube.com/attribution_link?a=0C3dVBwnA7M&u=%2Fwatch%3Fv%3DVAPqfeSvf9s%26feature%3Dshare
Originally shared by Venus Panthar
If you have not heard Jimmy Herring before - you are in for a mega big time ear treat!!! Check out this #Beatles cover of "Within You Without You" (2020) AWESOME #Live perfomance!!
#guitarsolo #GuitarInstrumental #GuitaristsCommunity #MusiciansCommunity #Music #MusicVideo
https://www.youtube.com/attribution_link?a=0C3dVBwnA7M&u=%2Fwatch%3Fv%3DVAPqfeSvf9s%26feature%3Dshare
Originally shared by rare avis
Originally shared by rare avis
The notion that animals think and feel may be rampant among pet owners, but it makes all kinds of scientific types uncomfortable.
“If you ask my colleagues whether animals have emotions and thoughts,” says Philip Low, a prominent computational neuroscientist, “many will drop their voices to a whisper or simply change the subject. They don’t want to touch it.” Jaak Panksepp, a professor at Washington State University, has studied the emotional responses of rats. “Once, not very long ago,” he said, “you couldn’t even talk about these things with colleagues.”
That may be changing. A profusion of recent studies has shown animals to be far closer to us than we previously believed — it turns out that common shore crabs feel and remember pain, zebra finches experience REM sleep, fruit-fly brothers cooperate, dolphins and elephants recognize themselves in mirrors, chimpanzees assist one another without expecting favors in return and dogs really do feel elation in their owners’ presence.
In the summer of 2012, an unprecedented document, masterminded by Low — “The Cambridge Declaration on Consciousness in Human and Nonhuman Animals” — was signed by a group of leading animal researchers in the presence of Stephen Hawking. It asserted that mammals, birds and other creatures like octopuses possess consciousness and, in all likelihood, emotions and self-awareness.
Scientists, as a rule, don’t issue declarations. But Low claims that the new research, and the ripples of unease it has engendered among rank-and-file colleagues, demanded an emphatic gesture. “Afterward, an eminent neuroanatomist came up to me and said, ‘We were all thinking this, but were afraid to say it,’” Low recalled.
It is not the habit of researchers to speculate broadly about the implications of their work; even groundbreaking studies tend to light up grottoes of data without revealing an overall vista. “We’re on the same page in general, but not at all on the specifics,” said Panksepp, who was a signatory of the declaration.
“As far as science is concerned, animal thought remains at the argumentative level.” Low readily admits that scientists have not even been able to agree on a working definition of consciousness. “When we were discussing the declaration, we agreed to shelve that issue for the time being,” he told me.
Though he follows the research, Virga, 56, is not a researcher; his convictions about animal individuality predate the recent science. And while the hypotheses and theories about animal cognition are fascinating to consider, they aren’t always germane to a behaviorist crouching behind a barn door amid a row of trash cans while being charged by a 700-pound takin — a hirsute Tibetan goat-antelope with a not-trivial set of horns — named Chopper.
Zoos contact Virga when animals develop difficulties that vets and keepers cannot address, and he is expected to produce tangible, observable results. Often, the animals suffer from afflictions that haven’t been documented in the wild and appear uncomfortably close to our own: He has treated severely depressed snow leopards, brown bears with obsessive-compulsive disorder and phobic zebras.
“Scientists often say that we don’t know what animals feel because they can’t speak to us and can’t report their inner states,” Virga told me.
“But the thing is, they are reporting their inner states. We’re just not listening.”
more
http://www.nytimes.com/2014/07/06/magazine/zoo-animals-and-their-discontents.html
The notion that animals think and feel may be rampant among pet owners, but it makes all kinds of scientific types uncomfortable.
“If you ask my colleagues whether animals have emotions and thoughts,” says Philip Low, a prominent computational neuroscientist, “many will drop their voices to a whisper or simply change the subject. They don’t want to touch it.” Jaak Panksepp, a professor at Washington State University, has studied the emotional responses of rats. “Once, not very long ago,” he said, “you couldn’t even talk about these things with colleagues.”
That may be changing. A profusion of recent studies has shown animals to be far closer to us than we previously believed — it turns out that common shore crabs feel and remember pain, zebra finches experience REM sleep, fruit-fly brothers cooperate, dolphins and elephants recognize themselves in mirrors, chimpanzees assist one another without expecting favors in return and dogs really do feel elation in their owners’ presence.
In the summer of 2012, an unprecedented document, masterminded by Low — “The Cambridge Declaration on Consciousness in Human and Nonhuman Animals” — was signed by a group of leading animal researchers in the presence of Stephen Hawking. It asserted that mammals, birds and other creatures like octopuses possess consciousness and, in all likelihood, emotions and self-awareness.
Scientists, as a rule, don’t issue declarations. But Low claims that the new research, and the ripples of unease it has engendered among rank-and-file colleagues, demanded an emphatic gesture. “Afterward, an eminent neuroanatomist came up to me and said, ‘We were all thinking this, but were afraid to say it,’” Low recalled.
It is not the habit of researchers to speculate broadly about the implications of their work; even groundbreaking studies tend to light up grottoes of data without revealing an overall vista. “We’re on the same page in general, but not at all on the specifics,” said Panksepp, who was a signatory of the declaration.
“As far as science is concerned, animal thought remains at the argumentative level.” Low readily admits that scientists have not even been able to agree on a working definition of consciousness. “When we were discussing the declaration, we agreed to shelve that issue for the time being,” he told me.
Though he follows the research, Virga, 56, is not a researcher; his convictions about animal individuality predate the recent science. And while the hypotheses and theories about animal cognition are fascinating to consider, they aren’t always germane to a behaviorist crouching behind a barn door amid a row of trash cans while being charged by a 700-pound takin — a hirsute Tibetan goat-antelope with a not-trivial set of horns — named Chopper.
Zoos contact Virga when animals develop difficulties that vets and keepers cannot address, and he is expected to produce tangible, observable results. Often, the animals suffer from afflictions that haven’t been documented in the wild and appear uncomfortably close to our own: He has treated severely depressed snow leopards, brown bears with obsessive-compulsive disorder and phobic zebras.
“Scientists often say that we don’t know what animals feel because they can’t speak to us and can’t report their inner states,” Virga told me.
“But the thing is, they are reporting their inner states. We’re just not listening.”
more
http://www.nytimes.com/2014/07/06/magazine/zoo-animals-and-their-discontents.html
Tuesday, November 24, 2015
Originally shared by Jürgen Hubert
Originally shared by Jürgen Hubert
I do not get warm and fuzzy feelings upon reading this. In fact, pretty much the opposite.
http://www.bbc.com/news/world-middle-east-34907983
I do not get warm and fuzzy feelings upon reading this. In fact, pretty much the opposite.
http://www.bbc.com/news/world-middle-east-34907983
Monday, November 23, 2015
Thursday, November 19, 2015
I like to listen to this once in a while...
I like to listen to this once in a while...
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Hio_22IrGc0
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Hio_22IrGc0
Originally shared by Kee Hinckley
Originally shared by Kee Hinckley
Sultans of Swing. Still one of my favorite songs of all time.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xo-J1wf2KHc&feature=share
Sultans of Swing. Still one of my favorite songs of all time.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xo-J1wf2KHc&feature=share
Sunday, November 15, 2015
Originally shared by Mary T
Originally shared by Mary T
Animals will be considered “sentient beings” instead of property in a bill tabled in the Canadian province of Quebec. The legislation states that "animals are not things. They are sentient beings and have biological needs."
Agriculture Minister Pierre Paradis proposed the bill and wants to change Quebec's infamous image as a haven for puppy mills.
The legislation specifies that animals have biological needs and includes fines of up to $250,000 for those who are cruel to animals, as well as jail time for repeat offenders.
Paradis said the bill puts Quebec more in line with other Canadian provinces like Ontario, British Columbia and Manitoba. The act will apply to all domesticated and farm animals and certain wild animals. Paradis said he wants to see animals “treated with dignity as much as possible” it doesn’t matter what animal.
"If you have a goldfish you have to take care of it," he said. "Don't get a goldfish if you don't want to take care of it."
Under the bill inspectors will have the power to demand to see an animal if they have “reasonable cause” to suspect the pet or animal is being mistreated. They also can also obtain a warrant to enter a home and seize animals. Repeat offenders would also come under fire as authorities and judges would have the discretion to increase fines and sentence serial violators to jail for up to 18 months.
Read more at http://www.dogheirs.com/tamara/posts/6804-quebec-bill-changes-animals-from-property-to-sentient-beings-and-includes-jail-time-for-cruelty#BLccpxUBcPz9DXjq.99
http://www.dogheirs.com/tamara/posts/6804-quebec-bill-changes-animals-from-property-to-sentient-beings-and-includes-jail-time-for-cruelty
Animals will be considered “sentient beings” instead of property in a bill tabled in the Canadian province of Quebec. The legislation states that "animals are not things. They are sentient beings and have biological needs."
Agriculture Minister Pierre Paradis proposed the bill and wants to change Quebec's infamous image as a haven for puppy mills.
The legislation specifies that animals have biological needs and includes fines of up to $250,000 for those who are cruel to animals, as well as jail time for repeat offenders.
Paradis said the bill puts Quebec more in line with other Canadian provinces like Ontario, British Columbia and Manitoba. The act will apply to all domesticated and farm animals and certain wild animals. Paradis said he wants to see animals “treated with dignity as much as possible” it doesn’t matter what animal.
"If you have a goldfish you have to take care of it," he said. "Don't get a goldfish if you don't want to take care of it."
Under the bill inspectors will have the power to demand to see an animal if they have “reasonable cause” to suspect the pet or animal is being mistreated. They also can also obtain a warrant to enter a home and seize animals. Repeat offenders would also come under fire as authorities and judges would have the discretion to increase fines and sentence serial violators to jail for up to 18 months.
Read more at http://www.dogheirs.com/tamara/posts/6804-quebec-bill-changes-animals-from-property-to-sentient-beings-and-includes-jail-time-for-cruelty#BLccpxUBcPz9DXjq.99
http://www.dogheirs.com/tamara/posts/6804-quebec-bill-changes-animals-from-property-to-sentient-beings-and-includes-jail-time-for-cruelty
You have probably already seen this, but if you haven't, Yonatan Zunger 's commentary is a long read, but well worth it.
You have probably already seen this, but if you haven't, Yonatan Zunger 's commentary is a long read, but well worth it.
Originally shared by Yonatan Zunger
Twenty-four hours after an attack by Da'esh (the organization formerly known as ISIS [1]) on Paris left 129 dead and 352 wounded, the Internet and the airwaves alike have been filled with profound waves of self-serving nonsense and stupidity from left and right alike. Everyone seems to have found a way in which this situation justifies their position – protect the refugees! Exile the refugees! Bomb someone! Stop all bombing of anyone! – and magically, it seems that one of the most complex political situations of our time can be reduced to simple slogans.
Well, I've run out of patience with this, so let me seriously discuss what just happened here, and what it tells us. I'm going to talk about three things which have combined to lead to yesterday's massacre: the refugee crisis, Europe's Muslim population, and Da'esh. I'll then talk about a few things which I think have little or nothing to do with what we're seeing – most importantly, religion and oil – and a few things which do – such as food and water. And finally, we'll talk about what it's going to take to fix this, both in the short term and the long term.
Being entirely out of patience right now, forgive me for being particularly blunt. I suspect that, by the end of this, you will be thoroughly offended by my opinions, whether you are American, European, or Middle Eastern, left or right: nobody has behaved well in the lead-up to this.
The first thing to realize about the refugees streaming into Europe from Syria and its environs is that not only are they not, by and large, terrorists – they're people fleeing these exact terrorists. France was just hit by Da'esh, with over five hundred casualties; in Syria, people are surrounded by Da'esh on one side, and a bloodthirsty army on the other side, and have been seeing death on the scale of yesterday's attack every single day for the past four and a half years. [2] If you were living there, you would very likely be fleeing, too.
But the second thing to realize about the refugees is that there are, in fact, Da'esh members among them. It's clear that at least one of the attackers came in from Syria as part of October's refugee flood, and there's no reason at all not to believe that quite a few more are among them, working both at short- and long-term goals. (More on which in a moment)
Everyone seems to have simplistic solutions, here: kick out all the Muslims (as America's Ann Coulter and Donald Trump suggest), settle the refugees more permanently, build giant prison camps. These solutions tend to miss a few very basic points:
(1) When you have hundreds of thousands of people who are quite literally willing to risk not only their deaths, but the deaths of their families, in order to escape, your odds of being able to keep them out aren't actually great, unless your plan is to mobilize a giant army and start attacking inward until they're fleeing in the opposite direction.
(2) You do not have enough prison camp capacity to handle this many people, nor could you build it. Nor do you have enough housing and residential infrastructure capacity to easily settle this many people, because the flux you're seeing out of Syria is very far from the end of it.
This is why large regional disasters quickly tend to spread into adjacent regions. This is why it's important not to let regional disasters get out of hand, no matter how politically appealing isolationism may appear.
The second thing to be aware of is that this didn't happen in a vacuum: Europe has a very large Muslim population, and it seems that most of the attackers were French or Belgian citizens. This started out with Europe's colonial ambitions, back in the day: France, for example, ruled over Algeria with a mind-bogglingly bloodthirsty approach [3] for decades, but now has a large population of people with a right to French residence who have been moving in to the country in search of a better economic situation. (Hardly surprising, when you leave behind a colony wracked by a horrifying civil war for decades) And France is far from alone in this.
Europe's Muslim population is both profoundly European and profoundly not European. They are European in that they have been living there, often for more than a generation; they work there, they pay taxes, they have become as assimilated as they can. They are not European in that Europe has been profoundly unwilling to allow them to assimilate. This is far from a historical anomaly: Europe has historically defined itself in terms of villages or cities and their local populations, which one can't really join very easily. Groups marked as outsiders – be they Jews, Romany, or Muslims – have been considered only marginally European. At times, there has been a high degree of apparent assimilation: for example, Jews were thoroughly integrated into European culture in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, intermarrying, forming friendships and professional associations across the board. As you may notice, "thorough integration" can be an awfully chancy business.
Muslims in today's Europe, on the other hand, don't have anything close to this superficial level of integration; France has been routinely passing laws banning Muslims from dressing the way they did in their home countries in the past few years, which should tell you a great deal about local opinions of that population.
So you have a large population who finds it systematically hard to find work, impossible to be accepted, the regular target of police, and told every day that they should probably be kicked out of the country. I'm sure you will find it shocking that, if you do this to a few tens of millions of people for a few decades at a stretch, you will end up with a disillusioned and disenfranchised youth, some of which will combine this with the general hot-headedness and stupidity of being a young adult to become easy fodder for people who have shown up to recruit.
Lots of people seem to have half-assed solutions here, and they tend to be even more foolish than the solutions to the refugee crisis. "Send them back," the European right frequently cries: back to where? Most of the Muslim population is no longer fresh immigrants; they are second and third generation Europeans. They don't have homes anywhere else. The European left, on the other hand, preaches a mealymouthed combination of urging assimilation and unmistakeable racism.
For some context, go back to the Charlie Hebdo attacks several months ago. There was a large outcry, saying that what the magazine (a notable left-wing satirical organ) had been doing was entirely in the bounds of proper satire, that the satire of religion was a hallowed European tradition. What this explanation glosses over is that nobody on the receiving end of the satire saw it as satire of religion, for the simple reason that religious affiliation, in Europe as in the Middle East, has little to do with what you believe and much to do with who you are. Charlie Hebdo's targets weren't simply religious extremists preaching from Saudi mosques; they were a portrayal of the French Muslim population as violent extremists, the dangerous other. And that's precisely the European left-wing line: Muslims are fine, so long as they become completely European, to the extent that we can forget that they were ever from someone else. Which, realistically, might mean they have to intermarry for a few generations and acquire blue eyes and blond hair, but that's OK, we welcome them!
The honest fact is this: neither the European left nor the right have ever made the large Muslim community into a full part of society. One side has covered it in nice words, while the other side has blared its xenophobia from the rooftops, but nobody on the receiving end of either of these has been fooled.
You sow the wind, you reap the whirlwind. What did you expect was going to happen?
And then we come over to our friends in the Middle East, the psychotically bloodthirsty bastards of Da'esh itself. It's a bit off to even refer to them as Islamist extremists in the mold of al-Qaeda; they've gone so far off the rails of Islam that the only clear ideology that often seems left is power and murder. Exhortations from theologians of any stripe aren't really going to have an effect on them.
But they seem to have realized that they are on an upswing of power, nobody having the resources or will to stop them, and have come up with the idea of spreading this worldwide, with attacks spreading to places like Russia and France – and, as soon as they can, everywhere else. Because as far as anyone can tell, they want to take over the world.
(Yes, this is a kind of screwy plan, and they barely even control chunks of land in the ass end of Syria and Iraq. But they've had enough luck with killing people that they seem to have convinced themselves that if they engage in even more killing people, it'll continue to work just as well. [4])
They seem to have one fairly simple strategic objective with these new attacks: drive a hard wedge between Muslim and infidel populations around the world, so that the Muslims will have no choice but to join them and become their army, overthrowing the local governments and establishing a world-wide Caliphate.
Unfortunately, political stupidity seems likely to help them. If the response to these attacks is to further isolate Muslim populations – both settled and refugee – then they will certainly have a far easier time recruiting among them. It's not actually going to lead to them taking over the world, but it will lead to bloodshed.
This recruitment tends to take a few forms. One is to recruit fighters to come and help in the bloodshed in existing battlefields; the second is to recruit suicide bombers and the like in other countries. These are somewhat disjoint processes, since the process of recruiting someone to commit suicide is rather different and targets different sorts of people, but there is also overlap: one strategy which al-Qaeda long favored was to recruit people to come to places like Iraq, Afghanistan, or Chechnya to fight, and later export trained fighters elsewhere.
One important thing about these tactics is that they seem to be realizing that surprisingly little training and planning is required. Yesterday's attack required some coordination among teams, but nothing spectacular; it did require practice in gunplay. But even this was fairly complex compared to the bare minimum required; consider the amount of chaos caused by the D.C. Sniper back in 2002.
Da'esh poses a particular danger because they seem to have latched onto the idea of exporting their violence to the rest of the world, but they're hardly the first or the last group to do this. If they were to be wiped out, I wouldn't bet any money that someone else wouldn't get the same idea soon after, much like al-Qaeda did before them. It's not even a particularly regional idea; the notion that if we kill enough people we can restructure the world to be perfectly {Aryan, Muslim, Democratic, Christian, Communist, etc.}, or to be the economic vassal states of the {X} empire, is frankly a cliché by now on pretty much every square kilometer of the planet.
So let's review where we are, for a moment. There's a large European Muslim population which is disillusioned, disenfranchised, underemployed, and generally treated as outsiders and fair political punching bags by the society as a whole. There's a giant stream of refugees pouring in to Europe, combining huge numbers of people running for their lives from bloodthirsty maniacs with small numbers of bloodthirsty maniacs looking to recruit. There's a factory of particularly bloodthirsty maniacs with a vision of taking over the world through (a) killing people and (b) convincing the rest of the world to treat Muslims even more like outsiders, who are actively trying to both create refugee streams and send out recruiters, to this end.
At this point, I expect to hear a chorus of voices blaming two things for this: religion (specifically, Islam), and oil (specifically, the West's insatiable need for it). To which my main response to both is "hogwash."
The reason I reject Islam as an explanation for this is that there's nothing particularly Muslim about any of it. The European Muslims which are being treated as second-class citizens aren't being treated that way because they pray on rugs facing Mecca, rather than in pews facing an altar; they're being treated this way because they're "dirty foreigners." (I'll spare you the actual terms used to describe them) Da'esh's plan to take over the world isn't rooted in a theological destiny of Muslims; it's rooted in an explicitly political vision of conquest. And quite frankly, the people being shot at the most are Muslims, too; remember who the refugees were running from?
More profoundly, people in the Middle East aren't systematically any more religious than people are in America. You have the same spectrum from the wholly secular to the crazed fundamentalist, with the former predominating in cities and the latter in the countryside. There's a tendency to assume (for example) that any woman wearing a headscarf must be extremely devout, or subject to domination and terror by some devout man; you have to back away and look at it in its local context, where sometimes it's a sign of devotion or a political statement, but it's also just what people wear; for many people, walking around with one's hair exposed is not done in much the same way people don't walk around in most of the US or Europe with their asses hanging out.
Oil is generally used as a proxy for "if only the Americans|Europeans never intervened in the Middle East, it would be peaceful there!" This bespeaks a rather curious innocence as to the history of the Middle East, combined with a reversed vision of (generally American) exceptionalism, that somehow our surpassing evil can corrupt otherwise noble savages. It's certainly true that without oil, most of the Middle East would be desperately poor – but as it happens, most of it is desperately poor anyway. Oil is not uniformly distributed, and Syria doesn't have that much of it to begin with.
There is one sense in which this is true, which is that the 2003 invasion of Iraq created a spectacular disaster. George W. Bush's belief that if we just created enough of a power vacuum, democracy would magically rush in to fill the void – the precise belief which his father didn't have, mind you, which is why GHWB made the explicit and deliberate decision to leave Saddam Hussein in power – proved to be exactly as unwise as it sounds when written so plainly. The result was a giant area of anarchy and civil war smack in the center of the Middle East, into which would-be fighters from all over the region (as well as other regions) swarmed: veterans of Chechnya and Bosnia found new employment in Iraq, as Sunnis and Shi'ites alike slaughtered one another. This anarchy, never resolved, has been the perfect factory of chaos which quite easily spilled over elsewhere.
But there's one profound factor which has driven the violence in the Middle East far more than oil ever could: water.
The entire Middle East has been in a water, and thus food, crisis for decades. In Egypt, for example, the Nile Valley has been drying out ever since the Aswan Dam was completed in 1970; as this once-fertile soil turned to desert, people have streamed into Cairo, doubling and tripling its population by forming tremendous shantytowns. Unemployment was extreme, as it's not like the cities suddenly had tens of millions of new jobs in them; the government kept order as well as it could by importing grain in tremendous quantities (the government's by-far largest annual expense) and selling bread cheaply. Unfortunately, a drought in Russia and Ukraine, Egypt's primary suppliers, caused those countries to cut off wheat exports in 2011 – and the government collapsed soon after.
Syria is a similar story: the lead-in to the collapse of Bashar al-Assad's dictatorship was steady droughts in the Syrian countryside driving people into the cities by the hundreds of thousands, leading to mass unemployment and unrest. People's livelihoods had simply disappeared. Stories like this repeat across the entire Middle East.
When we talk about the ultimate causes of the situation, this is the fact we tend to ignore: at the root of it, there isn't enough water, and there isn't enough food, and droughts have been hitting the area harder and harder for a decade. When there isn't enough food, people move from the countryside to the cities; and now you have giant groups of people who still don't have jobs or food, and that's a recipe for the collapse of governments as surely today as it was in Europe in the 1840's.
If you've ever wondered why I have often said that we need to be very actively worried about climate change, this is it. Changing climate breaks agriculture in various areas; the people who were farming there don't magically turn into factory workers or teleport to places which are (slowly) becoming more fertile; they become desperate former farmers, generally flooding into cities.
So given all of this, what can we actually conclude? I think the most important thing is that you can't bury your head in the sand, and assume that problems in some other part of the world aren't your own. A drought or a civil war somewhere else can easily start to spill over in unexpected ways.
If you want to avoid terrible consequences, what you have to do is plan, and in particular never let kindling build up. For example:
(1) If you have a large, disenfranchised, population, this is trouble waiting to start. The only way to fix this problem is to enfranchise them: give them a full stake in your society. Yes, that means treating people who are very different from you like full equals. Yes, it also means that your society – that is, the set of people that you're responsible for – now includes a bunch of people who are a lot poorer than you are, and this is going to be expensive to fix. You're not going to like it. But you're going to like the alternative a whole lot less.
(2) If there's political instability, or worst of all, food supply instability somewhere else in the world, it doesn't matter how far away it seems: you need to get together with everyone else and have a serious plan to deal with it. Once masses of hundreds of thousands of people start streaming across the countryside, chaos will follow in their wake.
(3) Climate change isn't an abstract fear for the future; it's a major political problem right now. You can't punt it away and talk about what to do about carbon emissions or its effect on the economy; you have to sit down and come up with serious strategic plans for what to do when agricultural productivity in critical breadbaskets drops sharply, or watersheds dry up. Contingency planning for any government needs to include anything from hurricanes to long-term droughts, and not just as one-offs, but what to do if these start happening a lot. The reason you need to plan for this is that it's not a goddamned hypothetical, you idiot.
What do we do in the short term? This is harder, because right now Da'esh has been sending agents across the planet to cause as much trouble as they can. One obvious prong of the solution is ordinary police work; that's proven far more effective than complex intelligence solutions at catching terrorists. Another prong is stopping their support system at the root. Because Da'esh's plans are so focused on actual conquest, a collapse of their regime back home is likely to have more of an effect on their satellite agents than the collapse of a more ideologically-oriented organization like al-Qaeda.
A third prong is to stabilize the situation in Syria: here the key isn't so much blowing anyone up as giving people a way to stop fighting. There are three key obstacles to this. One is Da'esh, which seems to be pretty committed to fighting for its own sake; this is unlikely fixable by any means short of straightforward military defeat. One is the underlying lack of food availability. The third is that quite a lot of people have reason to believe that they will be killed either if al-Assad regains power, or if he loses power. They need a serious guarantee of personal safety in any peace.
What this probably means is that a peace agreement will require very heavy international support: aid to rebuild the country, neutral military forces to guarantee cease-fires, and some way to deal with the underlying economic issues. That's going to require heavy international coordination of the profoundly unsexy sort: not deploying giant militaries to bomb targets and wave banners, or propping up regimes and helping them "suppress insurgencies," but working on the long-term realities of helping locals build a government that they're invested in – even when said government is unlikely to be either similar to Western norms, or friendly to Western aims. Military force to crush Da'esh is almost certainly needed as a precondition to this, but it's by far the smaller part of the game.
The short version is: if you want to fix problems, you're going to have to deal with some very serious, expensive, and unsexy solutions. Because life isn't simple, and you can't just bomb your way out of trouble.
[1] See this recent editorial for the argument for switching to the term Da'esh more broadly: https://www.freewordcentre.com/blog/2015/02/daesh-isis-media-alice-guthrie/ [Thanks to Lisa Straanger for finding this more in-depth discussion than the Boston Globe op-ed which I had earlier cited]
[2] cf, for example, this infographic: http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2015/09/14/world/middleeast/syria-war-deaths.html
[3] cf, for example, this obituary of a proud French torturer: https://plus.google.com/+YonatanZunger/posts/1PQQQ3XfnYA
[4] cf https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2B3slX6-_20
https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/string-of-paris-terrorist-attacks-leaves-over-120-dead/2015/11/14/066df55c-8a73-11e5-bd91-d385b244482f_story.html?hpid=hp_hp-banner-high_paris-330am%3Ahomepage%2Fstory
Originally shared by Yonatan Zunger
Twenty-four hours after an attack by Da'esh (the organization formerly known as ISIS [1]) on Paris left 129 dead and 352 wounded, the Internet and the airwaves alike have been filled with profound waves of self-serving nonsense and stupidity from left and right alike. Everyone seems to have found a way in which this situation justifies their position – protect the refugees! Exile the refugees! Bomb someone! Stop all bombing of anyone! – and magically, it seems that one of the most complex political situations of our time can be reduced to simple slogans.
Well, I've run out of patience with this, so let me seriously discuss what just happened here, and what it tells us. I'm going to talk about three things which have combined to lead to yesterday's massacre: the refugee crisis, Europe's Muslim population, and Da'esh. I'll then talk about a few things which I think have little or nothing to do with what we're seeing – most importantly, religion and oil – and a few things which do – such as food and water. And finally, we'll talk about what it's going to take to fix this, both in the short term and the long term.
Being entirely out of patience right now, forgive me for being particularly blunt. I suspect that, by the end of this, you will be thoroughly offended by my opinions, whether you are American, European, or Middle Eastern, left or right: nobody has behaved well in the lead-up to this.
The first thing to realize about the refugees streaming into Europe from Syria and its environs is that not only are they not, by and large, terrorists – they're people fleeing these exact terrorists. France was just hit by Da'esh, with over five hundred casualties; in Syria, people are surrounded by Da'esh on one side, and a bloodthirsty army on the other side, and have been seeing death on the scale of yesterday's attack every single day for the past four and a half years. [2] If you were living there, you would very likely be fleeing, too.
But the second thing to realize about the refugees is that there are, in fact, Da'esh members among them. It's clear that at least one of the attackers came in from Syria as part of October's refugee flood, and there's no reason at all not to believe that quite a few more are among them, working both at short- and long-term goals. (More on which in a moment)
Everyone seems to have simplistic solutions, here: kick out all the Muslims (as America's Ann Coulter and Donald Trump suggest), settle the refugees more permanently, build giant prison camps. These solutions tend to miss a few very basic points:
(1) When you have hundreds of thousands of people who are quite literally willing to risk not only their deaths, but the deaths of their families, in order to escape, your odds of being able to keep them out aren't actually great, unless your plan is to mobilize a giant army and start attacking inward until they're fleeing in the opposite direction.
(2) You do not have enough prison camp capacity to handle this many people, nor could you build it. Nor do you have enough housing and residential infrastructure capacity to easily settle this many people, because the flux you're seeing out of Syria is very far from the end of it.
This is why large regional disasters quickly tend to spread into adjacent regions. This is why it's important not to let regional disasters get out of hand, no matter how politically appealing isolationism may appear.
The second thing to be aware of is that this didn't happen in a vacuum: Europe has a very large Muslim population, and it seems that most of the attackers were French or Belgian citizens. This started out with Europe's colonial ambitions, back in the day: France, for example, ruled over Algeria with a mind-bogglingly bloodthirsty approach [3] for decades, but now has a large population of people with a right to French residence who have been moving in to the country in search of a better economic situation. (Hardly surprising, when you leave behind a colony wracked by a horrifying civil war for decades) And France is far from alone in this.
Europe's Muslim population is both profoundly European and profoundly not European. They are European in that they have been living there, often for more than a generation; they work there, they pay taxes, they have become as assimilated as they can. They are not European in that Europe has been profoundly unwilling to allow them to assimilate. This is far from a historical anomaly: Europe has historically defined itself in terms of villages or cities and their local populations, which one can't really join very easily. Groups marked as outsiders – be they Jews, Romany, or Muslims – have been considered only marginally European. At times, there has been a high degree of apparent assimilation: for example, Jews were thoroughly integrated into European culture in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, intermarrying, forming friendships and professional associations across the board. As you may notice, "thorough integration" can be an awfully chancy business.
Muslims in today's Europe, on the other hand, don't have anything close to this superficial level of integration; France has been routinely passing laws banning Muslims from dressing the way they did in their home countries in the past few years, which should tell you a great deal about local opinions of that population.
So you have a large population who finds it systematically hard to find work, impossible to be accepted, the regular target of police, and told every day that they should probably be kicked out of the country. I'm sure you will find it shocking that, if you do this to a few tens of millions of people for a few decades at a stretch, you will end up with a disillusioned and disenfranchised youth, some of which will combine this with the general hot-headedness and stupidity of being a young adult to become easy fodder for people who have shown up to recruit.
Lots of people seem to have half-assed solutions here, and they tend to be even more foolish than the solutions to the refugee crisis. "Send them back," the European right frequently cries: back to where? Most of the Muslim population is no longer fresh immigrants; they are second and third generation Europeans. They don't have homes anywhere else. The European left, on the other hand, preaches a mealymouthed combination of urging assimilation and unmistakeable racism.
For some context, go back to the Charlie Hebdo attacks several months ago. There was a large outcry, saying that what the magazine (a notable left-wing satirical organ) had been doing was entirely in the bounds of proper satire, that the satire of religion was a hallowed European tradition. What this explanation glosses over is that nobody on the receiving end of the satire saw it as satire of religion, for the simple reason that religious affiliation, in Europe as in the Middle East, has little to do with what you believe and much to do with who you are. Charlie Hebdo's targets weren't simply religious extremists preaching from Saudi mosques; they were a portrayal of the French Muslim population as violent extremists, the dangerous other. And that's precisely the European left-wing line: Muslims are fine, so long as they become completely European, to the extent that we can forget that they were ever from someone else. Which, realistically, might mean they have to intermarry for a few generations and acquire blue eyes and blond hair, but that's OK, we welcome them!
The honest fact is this: neither the European left nor the right have ever made the large Muslim community into a full part of society. One side has covered it in nice words, while the other side has blared its xenophobia from the rooftops, but nobody on the receiving end of either of these has been fooled.
You sow the wind, you reap the whirlwind. What did you expect was going to happen?
And then we come over to our friends in the Middle East, the psychotically bloodthirsty bastards of Da'esh itself. It's a bit off to even refer to them as Islamist extremists in the mold of al-Qaeda; they've gone so far off the rails of Islam that the only clear ideology that often seems left is power and murder. Exhortations from theologians of any stripe aren't really going to have an effect on them.
But they seem to have realized that they are on an upswing of power, nobody having the resources or will to stop them, and have come up with the idea of spreading this worldwide, with attacks spreading to places like Russia and France – and, as soon as they can, everywhere else. Because as far as anyone can tell, they want to take over the world.
(Yes, this is a kind of screwy plan, and they barely even control chunks of land in the ass end of Syria and Iraq. But they've had enough luck with killing people that they seem to have convinced themselves that if they engage in even more killing people, it'll continue to work just as well. [4])
They seem to have one fairly simple strategic objective with these new attacks: drive a hard wedge between Muslim and infidel populations around the world, so that the Muslims will have no choice but to join them and become their army, overthrowing the local governments and establishing a world-wide Caliphate.
Unfortunately, political stupidity seems likely to help them. If the response to these attacks is to further isolate Muslim populations – both settled and refugee – then they will certainly have a far easier time recruiting among them. It's not actually going to lead to them taking over the world, but it will lead to bloodshed.
This recruitment tends to take a few forms. One is to recruit fighters to come and help in the bloodshed in existing battlefields; the second is to recruit suicide bombers and the like in other countries. These are somewhat disjoint processes, since the process of recruiting someone to commit suicide is rather different and targets different sorts of people, but there is also overlap: one strategy which al-Qaeda long favored was to recruit people to come to places like Iraq, Afghanistan, or Chechnya to fight, and later export trained fighters elsewhere.
One important thing about these tactics is that they seem to be realizing that surprisingly little training and planning is required. Yesterday's attack required some coordination among teams, but nothing spectacular; it did require practice in gunplay. But even this was fairly complex compared to the bare minimum required; consider the amount of chaos caused by the D.C. Sniper back in 2002.
Da'esh poses a particular danger because they seem to have latched onto the idea of exporting their violence to the rest of the world, but they're hardly the first or the last group to do this. If they were to be wiped out, I wouldn't bet any money that someone else wouldn't get the same idea soon after, much like al-Qaeda did before them. It's not even a particularly regional idea; the notion that if we kill enough people we can restructure the world to be perfectly {Aryan, Muslim, Democratic, Christian, Communist, etc.}, or to be the economic vassal states of the {X} empire, is frankly a cliché by now on pretty much every square kilometer of the planet.
So let's review where we are, for a moment. There's a large European Muslim population which is disillusioned, disenfranchised, underemployed, and generally treated as outsiders and fair political punching bags by the society as a whole. There's a giant stream of refugees pouring in to Europe, combining huge numbers of people running for their lives from bloodthirsty maniacs with small numbers of bloodthirsty maniacs looking to recruit. There's a factory of particularly bloodthirsty maniacs with a vision of taking over the world through (a) killing people and (b) convincing the rest of the world to treat Muslims even more like outsiders, who are actively trying to both create refugee streams and send out recruiters, to this end.
At this point, I expect to hear a chorus of voices blaming two things for this: religion (specifically, Islam), and oil (specifically, the West's insatiable need for it). To which my main response to both is "hogwash."
The reason I reject Islam as an explanation for this is that there's nothing particularly Muslim about any of it. The European Muslims which are being treated as second-class citizens aren't being treated that way because they pray on rugs facing Mecca, rather than in pews facing an altar; they're being treated this way because they're "dirty foreigners." (I'll spare you the actual terms used to describe them) Da'esh's plan to take over the world isn't rooted in a theological destiny of Muslims; it's rooted in an explicitly political vision of conquest. And quite frankly, the people being shot at the most are Muslims, too; remember who the refugees were running from?
More profoundly, people in the Middle East aren't systematically any more religious than people are in America. You have the same spectrum from the wholly secular to the crazed fundamentalist, with the former predominating in cities and the latter in the countryside. There's a tendency to assume (for example) that any woman wearing a headscarf must be extremely devout, or subject to domination and terror by some devout man; you have to back away and look at it in its local context, where sometimes it's a sign of devotion or a political statement, but it's also just what people wear; for many people, walking around with one's hair exposed is not done in much the same way people don't walk around in most of the US or Europe with their asses hanging out.
Oil is generally used as a proxy for "if only the Americans|Europeans never intervened in the Middle East, it would be peaceful there!" This bespeaks a rather curious innocence as to the history of the Middle East, combined with a reversed vision of (generally American) exceptionalism, that somehow our surpassing evil can corrupt otherwise noble savages. It's certainly true that without oil, most of the Middle East would be desperately poor – but as it happens, most of it is desperately poor anyway. Oil is not uniformly distributed, and Syria doesn't have that much of it to begin with.
There is one sense in which this is true, which is that the 2003 invasion of Iraq created a spectacular disaster. George W. Bush's belief that if we just created enough of a power vacuum, democracy would magically rush in to fill the void – the precise belief which his father didn't have, mind you, which is why GHWB made the explicit and deliberate decision to leave Saddam Hussein in power – proved to be exactly as unwise as it sounds when written so plainly. The result was a giant area of anarchy and civil war smack in the center of the Middle East, into which would-be fighters from all over the region (as well as other regions) swarmed: veterans of Chechnya and Bosnia found new employment in Iraq, as Sunnis and Shi'ites alike slaughtered one another. This anarchy, never resolved, has been the perfect factory of chaos which quite easily spilled over elsewhere.
But there's one profound factor which has driven the violence in the Middle East far more than oil ever could: water.
The entire Middle East has been in a water, and thus food, crisis for decades. In Egypt, for example, the Nile Valley has been drying out ever since the Aswan Dam was completed in 1970; as this once-fertile soil turned to desert, people have streamed into Cairo, doubling and tripling its population by forming tremendous shantytowns. Unemployment was extreme, as it's not like the cities suddenly had tens of millions of new jobs in them; the government kept order as well as it could by importing grain in tremendous quantities (the government's by-far largest annual expense) and selling bread cheaply. Unfortunately, a drought in Russia and Ukraine, Egypt's primary suppliers, caused those countries to cut off wheat exports in 2011 – and the government collapsed soon after.
Syria is a similar story: the lead-in to the collapse of Bashar al-Assad's dictatorship was steady droughts in the Syrian countryside driving people into the cities by the hundreds of thousands, leading to mass unemployment and unrest. People's livelihoods had simply disappeared. Stories like this repeat across the entire Middle East.
When we talk about the ultimate causes of the situation, this is the fact we tend to ignore: at the root of it, there isn't enough water, and there isn't enough food, and droughts have been hitting the area harder and harder for a decade. When there isn't enough food, people move from the countryside to the cities; and now you have giant groups of people who still don't have jobs or food, and that's a recipe for the collapse of governments as surely today as it was in Europe in the 1840's.
If you've ever wondered why I have often said that we need to be very actively worried about climate change, this is it. Changing climate breaks agriculture in various areas; the people who were farming there don't magically turn into factory workers or teleport to places which are (slowly) becoming more fertile; they become desperate former farmers, generally flooding into cities.
So given all of this, what can we actually conclude? I think the most important thing is that you can't bury your head in the sand, and assume that problems in some other part of the world aren't your own. A drought or a civil war somewhere else can easily start to spill over in unexpected ways.
If you want to avoid terrible consequences, what you have to do is plan, and in particular never let kindling build up. For example:
(1) If you have a large, disenfranchised, population, this is trouble waiting to start. The only way to fix this problem is to enfranchise them: give them a full stake in your society. Yes, that means treating people who are very different from you like full equals. Yes, it also means that your society – that is, the set of people that you're responsible for – now includes a bunch of people who are a lot poorer than you are, and this is going to be expensive to fix. You're not going to like it. But you're going to like the alternative a whole lot less.
(2) If there's political instability, or worst of all, food supply instability somewhere else in the world, it doesn't matter how far away it seems: you need to get together with everyone else and have a serious plan to deal with it. Once masses of hundreds of thousands of people start streaming across the countryside, chaos will follow in their wake.
(3) Climate change isn't an abstract fear for the future; it's a major political problem right now. You can't punt it away and talk about what to do about carbon emissions or its effect on the economy; you have to sit down and come up with serious strategic plans for what to do when agricultural productivity in critical breadbaskets drops sharply, or watersheds dry up. Contingency planning for any government needs to include anything from hurricanes to long-term droughts, and not just as one-offs, but what to do if these start happening a lot. The reason you need to plan for this is that it's not a goddamned hypothetical, you idiot.
What do we do in the short term? This is harder, because right now Da'esh has been sending agents across the planet to cause as much trouble as they can. One obvious prong of the solution is ordinary police work; that's proven far more effective than complex intelligence solutions at catching terrorists. Another prong is stopping their support system at the root. Because Da'esh's plans are so focused on actual conquest, a collapse of their regime back home is likely to have more of an effect on their satellite agents than the collapse of a more ideologically-oriented organization like al-Qaeda.
A third prong is to stabilize the situation in Syria: here the key isn't so much blowing anyone up as giving people a way to stop fighting. There are three key obstacles to this. One is Da'esh, which seems to be pretty committed to fighting for its own sake; this is unlikely fixable by any means short of straightforward military defeat. One is the underlying lack of food availability. The third is that quite a lot of people have reason to believe that they will be killed either if al-Assad regains power, or if he loses power. They need a serious guarantee of personal safety in any peace.
What this probably means is that a peace agreement will require very heavy international support: aid to rebuild the country, neutral military forces to guarantee cease-fires, and some way to deal with the underlying economic issues. That's going to require heavy international coordination of the profoundly unsexy sort: not deploying giant militaries to bomb targets and wave banners, or propping up regimes and helping them "suppress insurgencies," but working on the long-term realities of helping locals build a government that they're invested in – even when said government is unlikely to be either similar to Western norms, or friendly to Western aims. Military force to crush Da'esh is almost certainly needed as a precondition to this, but it's by far the smaller part of the game.
The short version is: if you want to fix problems, you're going to have to deal with some very serious, expensive, and unsexy solutions. Because life isn't simple, and you can't just bomb your way out of trouble.
[1] See this recent editorial for the argument for switching to the term Da'esh more broadly: https://www.freewordcentre.com/blog/2015/02/daesh-isis-media-alice-guthrie/ [Thanks to Lisa Straanger for finding this more in-depth discussion than the Boston Globe op-ed which I had earlier cited]
[2] cf, for example, this infographic: http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2015/09/14/world/middleeast/syria-war-deaths.html
[3] cf, for example, this obituary of a proud French torturer: https://plus.google.com/+YonatanZunger/posts/1PQQQ3XfnYA
[4] cf https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2B3slX6-_20
https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/string-of-paris-terrorist-attacks-leaves-over-120-dead/2015/11/14/066df55c-8a73-11e5-bd91-d385b244482f_story.html?hpid=hp_hp-banner-high_paris-330am%3Ahomepage%2Fstory
Saturday, November 14, 2015
Originally shared by ****
Originally shared by ****
It is well established that ISIS uses social media to recruit. Make sure careless words aren't spoken; if not for refugees then for your own security.
Friday, November 13, 2015
Thursday, November 12, 2015
Originally shared by Victor H
Originally shared by Victor H
There's a lot riding on this next election and I am supporting Sanders. However, I have to agree with this article 100%, if HRC gets the nod, she gets my vote. To stay home and pout should Sanders not get nominated is foolishness, and will impact future generations in a bad way should the GOP regain the Presidency.
http://www.salon.com/2015/11/12/hey_progressives_hillary_isnt_the_enemy_im_a_sanders_supporter_but_im_sick_of_bernie_bros_clinton_derangement_syndrome/?source=newsletter
There's a lot riding on this next election and I am supporting Sanders. However, I have to agree with this article 100%, if HRC gets the nod, she gets my vote. To stay home and pout should Sanders not get nominated is foolishness, and will impact future generations in a bad way should the GOP regain the Presidency.
http://www.salon.com/2015/11/12/hey_progressives_hillary_isnt_the_enemy_im_a_sanders_supporter_but_im_sick_of_bernie_bros_clinton_derangement_syndrome/?source=newsletter
Sunday, November 8, 2015
Originally shared by Lauren Weinstein
Originally shared by Lauren Weinstein
// "Yes, we do agree on a number of issues, and by the way, on her worst day, Hillary Clinton will be an infinitely better candidate and president than the Republican candidate on his best day," he said. //
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/bernie-sanders-hillary-clinton_563f6c93e4b0b24aee4aa19a
// "Yes, we do agree on a number of issues, and by the way, on her worst day, Hillary Clinton will be an infinitely better candidate and president than the Republican candidate on his best day," he said. //
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/bernie-sanders-hillary-clinton_563f6c93e4b0b24aee4aa19a
Friday, November 6, 2015
more important than it might seem...
more important than it might seem...
https://www.gofundme.com/savewifi
https://www.gofundme.com/savewifi
Thursday, November 5, 2015
Those NASA people are really artistic...
Those NASA people are really artistic...
http://apod.nasa.gov/apod/image/1403/marsHirise_ESP_035143_1325.jpg
http://apod.nasa.gov/apod/image/1403/marsHirise_ESP_035143_1325.jpg
Wednesday, November 4, 2015
Tuesday, November 3, 2015
Monday, November 2, 2015
Originally shared by Marcel Gagne
Originally shared by Marcel Gagne
Speaking of inconvenient truths. Science has been described as either physics or stamp collecting. On one hand, you collect lots and lots and lots of data, looking for patterns that form part of the 'observation, hypothesis, experimentation' loop. Once you have enough data to generate a response, what's left is physics, namely the natural forces that explain all the data you collected. Science is never finished because it's always open to more stamp collecting, but we like to think that the answers we provide as we go through the loop toward the physics part of science aren't going to get us killed. Scientists are often just curious people looking to satisfy their curiosity. If we're lucky, the scientists share the interesting parts of their stamp collecting with us. Generally, unless they're going up against some kind of hardcore religion, where truth can really be inconvenient, they don't expect to receive death threats for sharing information about their stamp collecting.
http://www.theglobeandmail.com/news/british-columbia/canadian-researcher-targeted-by-hate-campaign-over-fukushima-findings/article27060613
Speaking of inconvenient truths. Science has been described as either physics or stamp collecting. On one hand, you collect lots and lots and lots of data, looking for patterns that form part of the 'observation, hypothesis, experimentation' loop. Once you have enough data to generate a response, what's left is physics, namely the natural forces that explain all the data you collected. Science is never finished because it's always open to more stamp collecting, but we like to think that the answers we provide as we go through the loop toward the physics part of science aren't going to get us killed. Scientists are often just curious people looking to satisfy their curiosity. If we're lucky, the scientists share the interesting parts of their stamp collecting with us. Generally, unless they're going up against some kind of hardcore religion, where truth can really be inconvenient, they don't expect to receive death threats for sharing information about their stamp collecting.
http://www.theglobeandmail.com/news/british-columbia/canadian-researcher-targeted-by-hate-campaign-over-fukushima-findings/article27060613
Originally shared by Pierre Markuse
Originally shared by Pierre Markuse
Active Fires on Earth in September 2015
In this image you can see active fires on Earth in September 2015 imaged by the Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS) aboard the Terra satellite. The image is color-coded, white pixels show the high end of the count — as many as 100 fires in a 1,000-square-kilometer area per day. Yellow pixels show as many as 10 fires, orange shows as many as 5 fires, and red areas as few as 1 fire in a 1,000-square-kilometer area per day.
More active fire maps and other datasets can be found here at NASA's Earth Observation (NEO) website:
http://neo.sci.gsfc.nasa.gov/
Terra (EOS AM-1) satellite
The Terra satellite is part of the Earth Observing System (EOS, https://goo.gl/XYed36), its Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS) can take measurements in 36 spectral bands ranging in wavelength from 0.4 µm to 14.4 µm, another MODIS instrument is orbiting Earth aboard the Aqua satellite.
More on the Terra satellite and the Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS) here:
http://terra.nasa.gov/
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Terra_(satellite)
http://modis.gsfc.nasa.gov/about/design.php
Image credit: ACTIVE FIRES SEPTEMBER 2015 (1 MONTH - TERRA/MODIS)These Fire Maps were created by Reto Stockli, NASA's Earth Observatory Team, using data courtesy the MODIS Land Science Team at NASA Goddard Space Flight Center http://goo.gl/IQXKix
#science #earth #fire #wildfire #modis #eos #terra #spacetechnology #earthobservation
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