It’s Tuesday night and I’m on the bus back home from Drinking Liberally. I just realized that I haven’t written anything for the open thread, and I just want to go to sleep when I get home. So here’s not much. Sorry.
2 things: I love talking the bus home, but this is the second week in a row where the post 11:00 bus has some unfortunate smells. Also the driver is really shouting at some driver parked in a bus stop.
Hope this isn’t too incoherent.
Please join us this evening as we spill national intelligence in fits of insecurity bragging at the Seattle Chapter of Drinking Liberally.
We meet every Tuesday at the Roanoke Park Place Tavern, 2409 10th Ave E, Seattle. You’ll find us in the small room at the back of the tavern beginning about 8pm.
Can’t make it to Seattle? Check out one of the other 230 chapters of Living Liberally, including nineteen in Washington state, three in Oregon and one in Idaho. Find, or go out and start, a chapter near you.
It’s filing week. If you’re in Seattle, that means you’re probably filing for mayor. But if you aren’t happy with your local elected officials or if there’s an open seat, you should consider running for something.
Revelation 9:7-10
The locusts looked like horses prepared for battle. They had what looked like gold crowns on their heads, and their faces looked like human faces. They had hair like women’s hair and teeth like the teeth of a lion. They wore armor made of iron, and their wings roared like an army of chariots rushing into battle. They had tails that stung like scorpions, and for five months they had the power to torment people.
Discuss.
Anne Barnard, the New York Times Beirut bureau chief, writes:
The world seems awash in chaos and uncertainty, perhaps more so than at any point since the end of the Cold War.
Authoritarian-leaning leaders are on the rise, and liberal democracy itself seems under siege. The post-World War II order is fraying as fighting spills across borders and international institutions – built, at least in theory, to act as brakes on wanton slaughter – fail to provide solutions. Populist movements on both sides of the Atlantic are not just riding anti-establishment anger, but stoking fears of a religious “other”, this time Muslims.
These challenges have been crystallized, propelled and intensified by a conflagration once dismissed in the West as peripheral, to be filed, perhaps, under “Muslims killing Muslims”: the war in Syria.
The war in Syria, and what the United States should do about it, is one of those issues where I’m not in strong disagreement with one side or the other so much as I’m bothered by anyone who think there’s an easy answer to it. The conflict has split the country into a multi-sided civil war with various extremist factions, created millions of refugees, and is blazing a path of destabilization through Turkey and up into Europe. Russia, Turkey, Israel, Iran, and the United States have all been involved militarily, each with their own disparate set of proxies and objectives. None of this will be fixed easily, or soon.
I’d wavered a lot on what should’ve been done back from 2011 to 2013 as initially peaceful protests led to a genocidal backlash from the Assad regime. Initially, I thought Obama made the right decision to hold back from a large scale effort to stop the bloodshed. But the years since have given me some pause. As Assad’s position has strengthened, the opposition has become more radicalized and violent in return, and millions of moderate civilians who were hopeful of American intervention, or were even willing to take up arms to protect their communities, have fled. The United States has intervened in small ways, mostly to fight an emboldened ISIS, but has held back from anything that could seriously threaten the regime. And to add insult to injury, we’ve now elected a President who’s trying to keep any of these refugees from re-settling here.
In Libya, we chose to go all-in on restraining Gaddafi, and this intervention led to his removal. And while Libya has it’s problems today, it’s nowhere near the catastrophe that Syria has become. Would Libya look a lot more like Syria if Gaddafi were still there commanding his army to massacre civilians? Would Aleppo still have become an apocalyptic hellscape had Obama intervened and been able to spark Assad’s removal?
Writing in the Atlantic, Shadi Hamid sees our lack of greater involvement in Syria as a profound failure and explains:
The alternative to a proactive and internationalist U.S. policy is to “do no harm,” and this might seem a safe fallback position: Foreign countries and cultures are too complicated to understand, so instead of trying to understand them, let’s at least not make the situation worse. The idea that the U.S. can “do no harm,” however, depends on the fiction that the most powerful nation in the world can ever be truly “neutral” in foreign conflicts, not just when it acts, but also when it doesn’t. Neutrality, or silence, is often complicity, something that was once the moral, urgent claim of the Left. The fiction of neutrality is growing more dangerous, as we enter a period of resurgent authoritarianism, anti-refugee incitement, and routine mass killing.
This logic has always resonated with me and keeps me from being reflexively anti-interventionist. This rationale was central to why I thought it made sense to intervene in Libya, despite all the potential downstream risk. And since then, I’ve seen this difficult balancing act presented in a very different context, but with a oddly similar dynamic – in Jill Leovy’s book Ghettoside.
In Ghettoside, Leovy discusses the history of homicide in the black communities in Los Angeles. That history involved mass migrations of African-Americans from the deep south of Louisiana and Mississippi to communities in the South Central part of Los Angeles. These transplanted communities were used to an environment in the deep south where the justice system would often be massively punitive against relatively minor crimes that affected the larger white majority, but barely responsive to crimes where members of their own community were the victims. In an environment like this, the police were viewed with suspicion and the vacuum created by this mistrust encouraged people to take the law into their own hands. It’s a more nuanced understanding of the roots of black-on-black crime, which Leovy summarizes and defends here:
This is not an easy argument to make in these times. Many critics today complain that the criminal justice system is heavy-handed and unfair to minorities. We hear a great deal about capital punishment, excessively punitive drug laws, supposed misuse of eyewitness evidence, troublingly high levels of black male incarceration, and so forth.
So to assert that black Americans suffer from too little application of the law, not too much, seems at odds with common perception. But the perceived harshness of American criminal justice and its fundamental weakness are in reality two sides of a coin, the former a kind of poor compensation for the latter. Like the schoolyard bully, our criminal justice system harasses people on small pretexts but is exposed as a coward before murder. It hauls masses of black men through its machinery but fails to protect them from bodily injury and death. It is at once oppressive and inadequate.
Leovy’s book is a masterpiece that dives into the lives of LAPD officers who’ve dedicated their careers to upending this perception and providing real justice to members of the “Ghettoside” communities of South LA. The lack of trust they encounter is deeply entrenched and impossible to understand without this historical view. It’s the heart of why attacking the Black Lives Matter movement over black-on-black crime is historically tone-deaf. Black-on-black crime has always been a direct result of institutional neglect when it comes to providing justice in black communities.
In America today, there’s little question about whether our law enforcement institutions have a responsibility to deal with crime in the black community. For many years, it wasn’t always a priority, and in many parts of America, that responsibility is still not being met. But if there’s a vacuum in local enforcement, or even outright malice, we’ll see calls for America’s federal law enforcement agencies to step in and fix it (notwithstanding the potential rollback of the DOJ’s efforts under Sessions). Outside of America’s borders, however, there’s no broad expectation for this, and while this seems perfectly rational, the downstream effects of those who experience the dichotomy in our military priorities are clearly being pushed in a direction of greater mistrust and radicalization.
Going back to Barnard’s NYT piece, she explains what this means in that region with respect to Islamist terror and state-driven violence:
In my decade of covering violence against civilians in the Middle East, mass murder by states has often seemed less gripping to Western audiences than far smaller numbers of theatrically staged killings – horrific as they are – by the Islamic State and its Qaeda predecessors.
It is hard to escape the sense that Western fears of Islamist terrorism have grown so intense that many are willing to tolerate any number of deaths of Arab or Muslim civilians, and any abuses of state power, in the name of fighting it.
The United States’ own “war on terror” played a part in making violations of humanitarian and legal norms routine: detentions at Guantanamo Bay, the torture at Abu Ghraib and the continuing drone and air wars with mounting civilian tolls in Syria, Iraq, Yemen and elsewhere.
Making the argument that we need to be more involved in humanitarian efforts in the Middle East is nearly impossible right now. Intense political pressure against intervening in Syria influenced Obama’s decision to hold back. Both legally and politically, it’s easier to fight groups like ISIS (who openly threaten the west) than to fight a murderous dictator like Assad who’s only killing his own citizenry. But to those in Syria, Assad is the far larger threat. And this will continue to play into the impression Barnard writes about.
Terrorist groups like ISIS have come about for a number of reasons, but what sustains them is a pervasive feeling of powerlessness. Nothing fuels this pervasive feeling of powerlessness more than having to wage an asymmetrical war against an immovable and violent oppressor. It’s hard to really overstate how damaging our invasion of Iraq was in this respect. ISIS was born in that environment, but Assad’s onslaught gave it new life. Fighting ISIS without dealing with Assad is merely treating a symptom of the problem, rather than dealing with the root cause. And if you don’t deal with the root cause (the overbearing feeling of powerlessness that drives young men and women to radicalism), you never win that battle. This is why we’ve spent 16 years in Afghanistan continually driving back the Taliban and watching them come back months later stronger than ever. Once you become the oppressor, and the root cause of the powerlessness that drives the radicalization, you can no longer defeat it directly, you can only exacerbate that dynamic and make it worse.
Coming back to the question of what we should do in Syria, and the uncomfortable conclusion is that we should do more, and many people expect us to do more, but for many reasons, we can’t. We already lost the kind of trust we’d need in that region to really make transformative democratic reforms. And I find it extremely unrealistic that we’d ever be able to intervene in Syria in a way that puts the interests of the Syrians ahead of even the short-term political interests of our leaders. Even if Obama had aggressively implemented a no-fly zone and gave the opposition to the breathing room to overthrow the regime, there’s little doubt ISIS and other extremist groups would’ve celebrated his ouster and played a larger role in whatever came next. Even if this is a better outcome for Syria long term (and I’d argue it would be), it would be bad for us in the short term, and devastating politically.
All of this takes place in the shadow of (and is in no small part being driven by) growing isolationist sentiment in the west. Intervening in other countries’ internal battles has become an even more toxic proposition. It’s just “Muslims killing Muslims” to the American public and not worth the lives of our young men in the military to get in the middle of. It has always felt inevitable to me that when events across the world can readily be seen in real time, we’ll get to a point where we feel compelled and empowered to fix the things we see, but for the time being, we’re actually moving farther away from it. Instead, we’re growing numb and turning away. And despite the huge role America has played in lighting the fires that rage in that region, we now feel forced to step back and watch it burn. We’re simply content – as we’ve long been with Egypt, Saudi Arabia and other places – to allow our proxy strongmen do the dirty work for us, rather than sticking our necks out for the rights of those who don’t make headlines in western newspapers when they’re being slaughtered. It’s this dynamic that leads to that Ghettoside mentality hardening and thereby making it even more difficult to intervene in the future.
I initially started writing this post about 18 months ago, and just gave up. When I dive into an issue, I tend to be an optimist and want to believe that there are paths forward that would work to solve things. Maybe that’s the engineer in me coming out. But with this issue, and with the larger question of how to deal with what Assad has done and continues to do, I don’t have any optimism about anything. It’s easy in this environment to look at America’s tremendous military prowess and believe that it can solve things, but as we’ve seen over and over again, moving this region towards both peace and stability requires more than that. It requires a level of trust and respect on the ground that we currently have no way to achieve. This is especially true now that we have a President who’s woefully unfit for the job and with a rudderless foreign policy apparatus. If there’s any reason to be optimistic about any approach, I don’t see it. And I say that fully knowing that not doing anything has it’s drawbacks. It does, but it’s still very likely the least damaging approach.
VOX: Food waste is the worlds dumbest problem.
Stephen talks to a bill.
Jimmy Dore chats with Jeb Bush:
Terminator Трамп and his Troop of Tyrants:
History of the entire world.
Jimmy Dore: Right wing smear of Jimmy Kimmel laughably hateful.
Sam Seder: Alex Jones says stupid shit.
ONN: Here’s why you are wrong.
CongressCritters:
Planet Earth: Predators attack the EPA.
Jimmy Dore chats with Bill-O-The-Fired-Harassing-Clown:
How one tattoo artistdecided to battle hate.
Mental Floss: 30 interesting facts about the oceans.
Last week’s Friday Night Multimedia Extravaganza can be found here.
What a great idea to end homelessness! Just make it illegal to be homeless. Doy. Most people enjoy sleeping in tent cities and on benches so much that the only way you can possibly incentivize them against it is criminalizing it.
We can all agree that people with a criminal record are the ones we do best at integrating back into society. I mean look at how well it worked for drugs.
I am writing because I hope you will do everything you can to support an independent commission investigating Russia. With the firing of James Comey and, holy cow, the interview with Lester Holt, it’s clear that something is up. I don’t know the extent of Russian ties and I don’t know that anyone can at this point. But Trump’s words are clearly lies.
Thank you,
Carl Ballard
HorsesAss.org
(You can contact Senator Murray or Senator Cantwell for this or anything else.)
Today, on this 12 blogoversary of HorsesAss, we find the editorial board unleashing a blizzard of opinions over whether or not Seattle Mayor Ed Murray should run for Mayor. Not all opinions & geographies have been heard from, thus far. So this faction of the HA Editorial Board finds it necessary to weigh in. We call upon Seattle Mayor Ed Murray to NOT run for Mayor of Redmond. Seriously, Mayor Murray has not yet made any public statements, written or verbal, on whether or not he will run for Mayor of Redmond. We call upon Mayor Murray to clarify his intentions in this regard and then just not do it if he decides to do it. Thank you.
Only several hours after Ed Murray decided against running for reelection, the HA Editorial Board decided to endorse Ed Murray not running for reelection. Unlike The Seattle Times or other editorial boards, the HA Editorial Board encourages dissent (at Drinking Liberally last night).
So no, Ed Murray can run if he wants. Nothing has been proven. That said, if he decides to run, or even just in his public statements and defense in court, he should stop the victim blaming. And obviously, fuck him if he did it.
Carl Ballard
Dear Mayor Ed Murray,
Rumors suggest you might have dropped out of the mayoral race as early as earlier this morning. So do newspaper headlines. Also, your live and prepared statements. In the interests of the city and in making us look concerned about the interests of the survivors of sexual assault, we hope the rumors are true.
To be clear, we really were not paying much attention to Twitter this morning. We’re not proclaiming your guilt or innocence in a civil case alleging you sexually assaulted a teenager in the 1980s. Our conclusion that you should not seek re-election comes in reaction to the news that you are not seeking reelection.
From taking up the cause of raising the minimum wage, to bringing developers and affordable housing advocates to the table, to your groundbreaking work on advancing LGBT equality during your tenure in the state legislature, you’ve made a positive mark on this city and this state.
But now that you are not seeking re-election, we ask that you not seek re-election.
Sincerely,
The Editors*
*NOTE: Clearly, nobody edits anything here on HA.
The Seattle Chapter of Drinking Liberally meets tonight for political discussion over drinks. Please stop by.
We meet every Tuesday at the Roanoke Park Place Tavern, 2409 10th Ave E, Seattle. You’ll find us in the small room at the back of the tavern beginning about 8pm.
Can’t make it to Seattle? Check out one of the other 230 chapters of Living Liberally, including nineteen in Washington state, three in Oregon and one in Idaho. Find, or go out and start, a chapter near you.
The headline is a little off (he was held in one facility rather than transferred to a different facility). And even if it was accurate, we’re not as a society going to be as worried about violent criminals in jail too long as we are with the early release scandal that happened earlier. Still and all, I hope he’s the only one. And we should have better safeguards going forward.
1 Samuel 5:6
But the hand of the LORD was heavy upon those of Ashdod, and He destroyed them and smote them with hemorrhoids.
Discuss.
David Hawkings’ Whiteboard: What’s a whip?.
George W. Bush does the Not the White House Correspondents’ Dinner
Mental Floss: The history of mowing lawns.
Putin’s Cock Holster:
Trevor: The one who got away.
Samantha Bee roasts the Presidents.
Commandant Comey:
Samantha Bee: FAUX News In Memoriam
PsychoSuperMom: Facts Have A Liberal Bias.
Seth Meyers: Airline deregulation.
“Rep. Jim Martin“:
Samantha Bee: Alt White House Correspondences’ Dinner.
The House GOP Congresscritters Are Literally Trying to Kill People:
Jimmy Dore: Rick Steeves invests in housing homeless.
Samantha Bee: What is facts>?
Last week’s Friday Night Multimedia Extravaganza can be found here.
Eager to share our brilliant political commentary and blunt media criticism, but too genteel to link to horsesass.org? Well, good news, ladies: we also answer to HASeattle.com, because, you know, whatever. You're welcome!