Music: Nils Petter Molvær — ‘Kakonita’
The progress of inglorious revolutions
David A Bell writes: Two and a half years after it began, the revolution was widely considered a quagmire, even a disaster. Rebels had made disappointingly little headway against the forces of the hated tyrant. The capital and the country’s second major city remained under his control. Foreign powers had provided sympathy, but very little real aid. And despite promising to respect human rights, rebel forces were committing widespread abuses, including murder, torture and destruction of property. In short, the bright hopes of an earlier spring were fading fast.
This may sound like a description of Syria today, but it also describes quite well the situation of another country: the young United States in the winter of 1777–1778. George Washington had taken refuge in the miserable winter encampment of Valley Forge. Philadelphia (then the capital) and New York were both in British hands. France had not yet agreed to help the new republic militarily. And in areas under rebel control, loyalists were being persecuted—far more than most American school textbooks admit.
There is little reason to think that conditions in Syria will turn around the way they did in the United States between 1778 and 1781, when the American revolutionaries managed to eke out a military victory. But the comparison illuminates a different point. Historically, very few revolutions have been quick successes. They have been messy, bloody, long, drawn-out affairs. Victory has very rarely come without numerous setbacks, and, unfortunately, without abuses carried out by all sides. It has generally taken many years, even decades, for the real gains, if any, to become apparent. Yet today, international public opinion and international institutions usually fail to recognize this historical reality. There is an expectation that revolutions, where they occur, must lead within a very short period to the establishment of stable democracy and a full panoply of human rights, or they will be viewed as failures.
Consider, for instance, the disappointments that followed the Arab Spring and the resulting worldwide hand-wringing. Thomas Friedman, that great barometer of elite American conventional wisdom, wrote in May 2011 about the young Arabs who had begun to “rise up peacefully to gain the dignity, justice and self-rule that Bin Laden claimed could be obtained only by murderous violence.” Less than two years later, he was lamenting that “the term ‘Arab Spring’ has to be retired,” and comparing events in the region to the seventeenth century’s massively destructive Thirty Years’ War, in which areas of Central Europe lost up to a third of their populations. Many other commentators throughout the world now write off the Arab Spring as a disaster and failure, pure and simple. But arguably, not the least of the problems bedeviling the Arab revolutionaries of the last two and a half years has been the absurdly inflated expectations they have had to live up to. Put simply, they have been asked to achieve the sort of rapid and complete success that hardly any predecessors, including in the West, ever managed. [Continue reading…]
Rapid loss of top predators ‘a major environmental threat’
The Guardian reports: The rapid loss of top predators such as dingoes, leopards and lions is causing an environmental threat comparable to climate change, an international group of scientists has warned.
A study by researchers from Australia, the US and Europe found that removing large carnivores, which has happened worldwide in the past 200 years, causes a raft of harmful reactions to cascade through food chains and landscapes.
Small animals are picked off by feral pests, land is denuded of vegetation as herbivore numbers increase and streams and rivers are even diverted as a result of this loss of carnivores, the ecologists found.
“There is now a substantial body of research demonstrating that, alongside climate change, eliminating large carnivores is one of the most significant anthropogenic impacts on nature,” the study states.
The research looked at the ecological impact of the world’s 31 largest mammalian carnivores, with the largest body of information gathered on seven key species – the dingo, grey wolf, lion, leopard, sea otter, lynx and puma. [Continue reading…]
Fight poverty, not terrorism
Kennedy Odede writes: Terrorism is a global reality, and for me as a Kenyan, this struck close to home in September with the siege of the Westgate mall. Yet in many ways, growing up in Nairobi I was always in the midst of terror. As a boy living in extreme poverty in Kibera, one of Africa’s largest slums, I learned early on that I was disposable, that human life is not equally valued. Life expectancy in Kibera is estimated at 30 years, compared with 64 in the rest of Kenya and 70 worldwide. In Kibera, people are desensitized to death. Living is understood to be the exception.
I am 29 years old — on the threshold of a new decade of life. All my close friends from childhood, save for two, were robbed of this experience. Some took risks to feed their families; for stealing bread or charcoal, they were shot by the police. Others, who worked for as little as $1 per day, fell from construction sites or burned in factory fires. Still others perished in the violence after the 2007 election. Violence and loss became part of day-to-day life.
These are more than singular tragedies; they contribute to the psyche of being poor. This psyche inculcates hopelessness, dispels a belief in the possibility of tomorrow’s being better than today, compels a resignation to the fact that you may suffer the same tragic fate as your peers, and fuels anger because there is no escape and you did not choose this — you simply drew life’s short straw.
This, perhaps, is terrorism’s fertile ground. Because if you grew up as I did, self-protection requires coming to terms with violence and terror. Violence becomes a vehicle of survival. My friend Boi was 16 when he joined a gang with the goal of supporting his mother and sister. If stealing or fighting was the only way, he was ready. In the end, he was shot dead.
An environment in which you cannot get a job despite ability, ambition and persistence fosters anger. My friend James and I used to leave the slum together each morning to look for work as day laborers. We always hoped we’d be lucky, only to be told “not today” — day after day after day. Then one day, James and I got construction jobs. While carrying heavy stones, two of James’s fingers were crushed. He was not compensated and was out of work for more than two years. Later, James caught another break and got a job as a security guard at an upper-class estate. The estate was robbed, and James was fired and never paid.
Something broke in James. In the constant degradation he saw that for people like us there was no justice. He joined a local group infamous for terrorizing the community, robbing and stealing. James was ready to die, willing to do anything to provide what he could for his family. Today, this world of violence and uncertainty remains his reality.
News reports inform us that Kenya’s slums are ripe for terrorist recruitment. No one is born a terrorist. But being paid a reported $1,000 to undergo militant training in Somalia is more than enough financial incentive; the young people in Nairobi’s slums are accustomed to taking risks that pay far less. [Continue reading…]
Social Darwinism isn’t dead
Matthew Hutson writes: London’s mayor, Boris Johnson, drew criticism late last year for saying that economic inequality can be attributed, in part, to IQ. “I am afraid that [the] violent economic centrifuge [of competition] is operating on human beings who are already very far from equal in raw ability,” he told an audience at the Centre for Policy Studies.
That’s a satisfying worldview for someone who is successful and considers himself unusually bright. But a quick look at the data shows the limitations of raw smarts and stick-to-itiveness as an explanation for inequality. The income distribution in the United States provides a good example. In 2012 the top 0.01 percent of households earned an average of $10.25 million, while the mean household income for the country overall was $51,000. Are top earners 200 times as smart as the rest of the field? Doubtful. Do they have the capacity to work 200 times more hours in the week? Even more doubtful. Many forces out of their control, including sheer luck, are at play.
But say you’re in that top 0.01 percent — or even the top 50 percent. Would you want to admit happenstance as a benefactor? Wouldn’t you rather believe that you earned your wealth, that you truly deserve it? Wouldn’t you like to think that any resources you inherited are rightfully yours, as the descendant of fundamentally exceptional people? Of course you would. New research indicates that in order to justify your lifestyle, you might even adjust your ideas about the power of genes. The lower classes are not merely unfortunate, according to the upper classes; they are genetically inferior.
In several experiments published in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, Michael Kraus of the University of Illinois at Urbana–Champaign and Dacher Keltner of the University of California at Berkeley explored what they call social class essentialism. Essentialism is the belief that surface differences between two groups of people or things can be explained by differences in fundamental identities. One sees categories as natural, discrete, and stable. Dogs have a certain dogness to them and cats a certain catness.
Researchers have found that people hold essentialist beliefs about generally biological categories such as gender, race, and sexuality, as well as about more cultural ones such as nationality, religion, and political orientation. Essentialism leads to stereotyping, prejudice, and a disinclination to mingle with outsiders. Kraus and Keltner wanted to know if we see social class as an essential category. [Continue reading…]
Americans’ views of other countries
PolicyMic: A new Pew Poll conducted near the end of 2013 asked Americans which countries they liked and which ones they didn’t. While the results are colored by ongoing events across the world, they also reflect Americans’ long-standing attitudes towards some of our neighbors.
At the top of America’s favorite-country list is Canada, at 81% approval, presumably because Canada is about as inoffensive and friendly a country as you can imagine. Americans also remained steadfast friends with Great Britain at 79% approval, and were big fans of Japan at 70% approval despite the two nations’ economic competition.
Other countries didn’t fare so well on the favorability index. Israel remains largely liked by Americans at 61%, but if a Gallup poll from 2012 is to be believed, that’s down from 68% in 2011 and 71% in 2012 (Gallup’s numbers seem higher than Pew’s, so the spread may be less significant). But it’s now more widely disliked than France at 26% and 24% respectively. The ratings have a partisan spin, with 74% of Republicans and just 55% of Democrats approving of Israel this year. [Continue reading…]
None of these numbers are particularly surprising, but for me the most striking one is a 52% unfavorable view of Mexico.
I’m inclined to assume that American views of Mexico and of Mexicans are firmly intertwined and thus that this unfavorable view of America’s southern neighbor is mirrored in views about Mexicans who live this side of the border.
I used to live in California and was at that time a legal alien but like the many illegal aliens in that state, I was more struck by the fact that we were being branded as aliens rather than which might be deemed legal or illegal.
Moreover, since I was not visibly alien (so long as I kept my mouth shut), the greatest insult in being branded this way was clearly being imposed on the people who were visibly indigenous to this continent.
Whether it’s in North America or the Middle East, the settlers have no right to pass judgement on who belongs on these lands.
Syria: Confusion over retreat of Islamic State of Iraq
Scott Lucas writes: More than 24 hours after the Islamic State of Iraq left Aleppo, in the face of attacks by insurgents, the situation is confused.
Is ISIS retreating across northern and eastern Syria without a fight, or is it counter-attacking, possibly with a series of bombings?
There were multiple claims throughout Thursday of ISIS making stands and even taking back pockets of territory. Others continued the assertions, made since the start of the week, of ISIS suicide bombers wreaking havoc.
Almost none of these declarations could be confirmed, however. The situation was further muddled by a leading source for mainstream media, the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, passing off chatter on social networks as established fact.
What it’s like when the FBI asks you to backdoor your software
SecurityWatch: At a recent RSA Security Conference, Nico Sell was on stage announcing that her company — Wickr — was making drastic changes to ensure its users’ security. She said that the company would switch from RSA encryption to elliptic curve encryption, and that the service wouldn’t have a backdoor for anyone.
As she left the stage, before she’d even had a chance to take her microphone off, a man approached her and introduced himself as an agent with the Federal Bureau of Investigation. He then proceeded to “casually” ask if she’d be willing to install a backdoor into Wickr that would allow the FBI to retrieve information.
This encounter, and the agent’s casual demeanor, is apparently business as usual as intelligence and law enforcement agencies seek to gain greater access into protected communication systems. Since her encounter with the agent at RSA, Sell says it’s a story she’s heard again and again. “It sounds like that’s how they do it now,” she told SecurityWatch. “Always casual, testing, because most people would say yes.” [Continue reading…]
NSA and GCHQ activities appear illegal, says EU parliamentary inquiry
The Guardian reports: Mass surveillance programmes used by the US and Britain to spy on people in Europe have been condemned in the “strongest possible terms” by the first parliamentary inquiry into the disclosures, which has demanded an end to the vast, systematic and indiscriminate collection of personal data by intelligence agencies.
The inquiry by the European parliament’s civil liberties committee says the activities of America’s National Security Agency (NSA) and its British counterpart, GCHQ, appear to be illegal and that their operations have “profoundly shaken” the trust between countries that considered themselves allies.
The 51-page draft report, obtained by the Guardian, was discussed by the committee on Thursday. Claude Moraes, the rapporteur asked to assess the impact of revelations made by the whistleblower Edward Snowden, also condemns the “chilling” way journalists working on the stories have been intimidated by state authorities.
Though Snowden is still in Russia, MEPs are expected to take evidence from him via video-link in the coming weeks, as the European parliament continues to assess the damage from the disclosures. Committee MEPs voted overwhelmingly on Thursday to have Snowden testify, defying warnings from key US congressmen that giving the “felon” a public platform would wreck the European parliament’s reputation and hamper co-operation with Washington. [Continue reading…]
Video: TED Talks — ‘middlebrow megachurch infotainment’
Hollywood figures spied for CIA, book asserts
The Los Angeles Times reports: It’s well known that Hollywood loves a good spy story. But what is also true, according to a new memoir by a former senior CIA official, is that movie makers regularly do some real-life spying.
“The CIA has long had a special relationship with the entertainment industry, devoting considerable attention to fostering relationships with Hollywood movers and shakers—studio executives, producers, directors, big-name actors,” John Rizzo, the former acting CIA general counsel, wrote in his new book, “Company Man: Thirty Years of Crisis and Controversy in the CIA.”
People might assume that since Hollywood leans to the political left, the CIA’s relationships “would be with the sort of conservative picket of Hollywood,” Rizzo said in an interview. “Well, that’s not true. People one would normally associated with liberal causes have assisted CIA.”
Alas, Rizzo is prohibited from naming names. They are classified. The CIA declined to comment.
He did, however, provide some detail about the types of help the agency has solicited from Hollywood. At times, Rizzo said, film makers will be asked to allow a CIA operative to pose as a member of their crew, particularly if a movie is being filmed in a country where the spy agency has difficulty operating.
The CIA also recruits actors to give more visibility to propaganda projects abroad, such as a documentary secretly produced by the agency, Rizzo said. And the agency sometimes takes advantage of the door-opening cachet that movie stars and other American celebrities enjoy. A star who met a world leader, for example, might be asked for details about that meeting.
The CIA has officials assigned full time to the care and feeding of Hollywood assets, Rizzo wrote. Other former CIA officials added that some of those operatives work in the Los Angeles office of an agency department called the National Resources Division, which recruits people in the U.S. to help America spy abroad.
Music: Weather Report – ‘Badia’
How the NSA almost killed the Internet
Wired reports: On June 6, 2013, Washington Post reporters called the communications departments of Apple, Facebook, Google, Yahoo, and other Internet companies. The day before, a report in the British newspaper The Guardian had shocked Americans with evidence that the telecommunications giant Verizon had voluntarily handed a database of every call made on its network to the National Security Agency. The piece was by reporter Glenn Greenwald, and the information came from Edward Snowden, a 29-year-old IT consultant who had left the US with hundreds of thousands of documents detailing the NSA’s secret procedures.
Greenwald was the first but not the only journalist that Snowden reached out to. The Post’s Barton Gellman had also connected with him. Now, collaborating with documentary filmmaker and Snowden confidante Laura Poitras, he was going to extend the story to Silicon Valley. Gellman wanted to be the first to expose a top-secret NSA program called Prism. Snowden’s files indicated that some of the biggest companies on the web had granted the NSA and FBI direct access to their servers, giving the agencies the ability to grab a person’s audio, video, photos, emails, and documents. The government urged Gellman not to identify the firms involved, but Gellman thought it was important. “Naming those companies is what would make it real to Americans,” he says. Now a team of Post reporters was reaching out to those companies for comment.
It would be the start of a chain reaction that threatened the foundations of the industry. The subject would dominate headlines for months and become the prime topic of conversation in tech circles. For years, the tech companies’ key policy issue had been negotiating the delicate balance between maintaining customers’ privacy and providing them benefits based on their personal data. It was new and controversial territory, sometimes eclipsing the substance of current law, but over time the companies had achieved a rough equilibrium that allowed them to push forward. The instant those phone calls from reporters came in, that balance was destabilized, as the tech world found itself ensnared in a fight far bigger than the ones involving oversharing on Facebook or ads on Gmail. Over the coming months, they would find themselves at war with their own government, in a fight for the very future of the Internet. [Continue reading…]
Silicon Valley’s fight against data protection
Bloomberg reports: Google’s top privacy official said the European Union’s “flawed” attempt to overhaul data-protection rules is “dead” and urged politicians to go back to the drawing board.
“Europe’s much-ballyhooed, and much-flawed, proposal to re-write its privacy laws for the next 20 years collapsed,” Peter Fleischer, global privacy counsel at Mountain View, California-based Google, said in a blog post today. “The old draft is dead, and something else will eventually be resurrected in its place.”
EU nations have dragged their heels over measures that could empower regulators to levy fines of as much as 100 million euros ($136 million) against technology companies for privacy violations when they process EU citizens’ data. U.S. firms from Google to Facebook would be covered by the law.
This is “another try of Fleischer to kill the data-protection regulation by calling it dead,” said Jan Philipp Albrecht, a German Green Party politician who has steered the draft EU law through the European Parliament. The “EU would have already agreed if Google wouldn’t fight every regulation” with hundreds of millions of dollars “for lobbyists in Washington D.C. and Brussels.”
Record-high 42% of Americans identify as independents
Gallup: Forty-two percent of Americans, on average, identified as political independents in 2013, the highest Gallup has measured since it began conducting interviews by telephone 25 years ago. Meanwhile, Republican identification fell to 25%, the lowest over that time span. At 31%, Democratic identification is unchanged from the last four years but down from 36% in 2008.
The results are based on more than 18,000 interviews with Americans from 13 separate Gallup multiple-day polls conducted in 2013.
In each of the last three years, at least 40% of Americans have identified as independents. These are also the only years in Gallup’s records that the percentage of independents has reached that level.
Americans’ increasing shift to independent status has come more at the expense of the Republican Party than the Democratic Party. Republican identification peaked at 34% in 2004, the year George W. Bush won a second term in office. Since then, it has fallen nine percentage points, with most of that decline coming during Bush’s troubled second term. When he left office, Republican identification was down to 28%. It has declined or stagnated since then, improving only slightly to 29% in 2010, the year Republicans “shellacked” Democrats in the midterm elections.
Not since 1983, when Gallup was still conducting interviews face to face, has a lower percentage of Americans, 24%, identified as Republicans than is the case now. That year, President Ronald Reagan remained unpopular as the economy struggled to emerge from recession. By the following year, amid an improving economy and re-election for the increasingly popular incumbent president, Republican identification jumped to 30%, a level generally maintained until 2007.
Democratic identification has also declined in recent years, falling five points from its recent high of 36% in 2008, the year President Barack Obama was elected. The current 31% of Americans identifying as Democrats matches the lowest annual average in the last 25 years.
What Iran wants in 2014
Hassan Rouhani writes: When I campaigned to become President of Iran, I promised to balance realism and the pursuit of the Islamic Republic’s ideals – and won Iranian voters’ support by a large margin. By virtue of the popular mandate that I received, I am committed to moderation and common sense, which is now guiding all of my government’s policies. That commitment led directly to the interim international agreement reached in November in Geneva on Iran’s nuclear program. It will continue to guide our decision-making in 2014.
Indeed, in terms of foreign policy, my government is discarding extreme approaches. We seek effective and constructive diplomatic relations and a focus on mutual confidence-building with our neighbors and other regional and international actors, thereby enabling us to orient our foreign policy toward economic development at home. To this end, we will work to eliminate tensions in our foreign relations and strengthen our ties with traditional and new partners alike. This obviously requires domestic consensus-building and transparent goal-setting – processes that are now underway.
While we will avoid confrontation and antagonism, we will also actively pursue our larger interests. But, given an increasingly interconnected and interdependent world, challenges can be addressed only through interaction and active cooperation among states. No country – including big powers – can effectively address on its own the challenges that it faces. [Continue reading…]
Hamas and Iran rebuild ties three years after falling out over Syria
The Guardian reports: A rapprochement between Hamas and Tehran is under way almost three years after a breach over the Palestinian party’s refusal to back the Syrian government in the civil war, and amid its current political isolation following the demise of the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt.
The rebuilding of the relationship is likely to dismay Israel and the US, which had welcomed the weakened ties between Gaza’s rulers and their powerful political, financial and military sponsors.
“Relations between us are now almost back to how they were before [the crisis over Syria]. We believe we will soon be back at that point,” said Taher al-Nounou, an aide to Gaza’s prime minister, Ismail Haniyeh. Contacts between high-ranking officials from both sides had resumed, he said.
Khaled Meshaal, the head of Hamas’s political bureau, based in Qatar, has met Iranian representatives in Ankara and Doha in recent months, and may visit Tehran in the coming months.
According to Nounou, a delegation of Hamas officials based outside Gaza visited Tehran two months ago. Hamas leaders inside Gaza have been unable to leave the blockaded coastal strip since the military coup in Egypt last July.
Another senior Hamas official, Bassem Naim, confirmed the renewed contacts between his organisation and Tehran. “Ties had never been conclusively severed, but recently there have been a number of meetings that brought new blood back into our relationship with Iran,” he said. [Continue reading…]
Syrian rebels deal Qaeda-linked group a reversal
The New York Times reports: For months, the patchwork of rebel brigades spread across northern Syria watched with foreboding as a new group gradually expanded its control, filling a vacuum left by nearly three years of war.
The group, the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria, which is linked to Al Qaeda and known as ISIS, seemed less interested in fighting President Bashar al-Assad than in imposing its ultraconservative version of Islam, antigovernment activists said. It banned smoking, ousted other rebels from their bases, and detained and executed those it decided were opposed to its international jihadist project.
Last week, mounting tensions between the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria and other rebel groups exploded into clashes that have raged across northern Syria, left hundreds dead and further shattered the battle lines in a conflict that is increasingly destabilizing neighboring countries. Rebel fighters have driven the group from a number of areas in recent days, and on Wednesday they ejected it from its headquarters in the major city of Aleppo, dealing the group a sharp reversal. [Continue reading…]