Basically, we've all grown up with the idea that mental illness is a Western phenomenon
Speak for your own distant filter bubble.
Who is the Richard Lewis of the Zulu?
Far be it from me to tar the the good editors of The Guardian with one brush, but who publishes the kind of idiot that equates psychotherapy with psychiatry, repeatedly?
Relevant. More tone poem than information, but well worth the watch. (Doesn't seem to be streaming yet.)
I think the wave of the future is magnetizing your brain.
5 is unfair. Lots of information, but impressionistic rather than systematic.
I have seen schizophrenia characterized as a Western thing. The idea being that other, more family-centered, cultures deal more successfully with odd relatives.
In 2007, Patel and several other experts published a series of articles on global mental health that inaugurated a profound change in approaches to treatment worldwide. The series, in the prominent British medical journal The Lancet, warned that mental health disorders are neglected and stigmatised, and pointed to the critical shortage in mental health care.All of these things were mentioned, just by the by, as totally uncontroversial facts in my first-year psych lectures a year before that, by my HS guidance teacher (FFS) two years before that. (This isn't to knock Patel et al, they seem to be doing good work. It's to knock anyone who found or finds these things to be revelations in 2019.)
To be fair, it was only in 2014 that Ohio stopped coverage for treatment of people with schizophrenia by drilling a hole in the skull to let out evil spirits.
Well you had to do something with all those old oil rigs.
Equates all of mental healthcare with psychotherapy, rather.
The OP captures the complicatedness of all this.
- Evidence comes in that people in non-western cultures have different mental disorders: A blow to the assumptions of Western psychologists who tend to over-generalize from an unrepresentative sample instead of recognizing equally valid ways of being
- Evidence comes in that people in non-western cultures have different mental disorders: A blow to the assumptions of Western psychologists who tend to Orientalize the Other instead of recognizing people's shared experiences
I've had upper-middle-class USians argue that poor people in the US didn't get depressed. (I believe it's true that fewer poor people got diagnosed, certainly before the ACA.)
I have Latinx friends who are categorically opposed to the idea of therapists, because they're for white people. Which is not the same claim as the rich people in 15, but does relate to people categorizing mental health along race and cultural lines.
Mutatis mutandis, 9.2 to 16.
People who are surprised that other people were surprised by Patel's findings forget how highly motivated some people are to say that people with mental health problems are just spoiled weaklings. "Oh quitcherbitchen! Do you think starving people in Africa sit around and mope like you do."
The problem is that no one who would be surprised by Patel's findings will actually be moved by them. They are people who are driven pretty much exclusively by biases than are immune to empirical refutation.
This is yet another article about "How One Bold Young Scientist Overturned Centuries Of Establishment Thinking By Discovering Something That We Are Going To Assert Wasn't Already Widely Believed" isn't it?
Also I don't think that a common racist stereotype of non Western cultures is that none of them were mentally ill. Some of them were actually called things like The Mad Mullah.
21: It means there are effectively no Latin Americans in Mossheimat, but comparable stereotypes about whitey psychology apply.
And did anyone ever think things through?
the more communal nature of society and the stronger family ties in poor countries inoculated people against depression, which was linked to the loneliness, stress and materialistic culture of western life.How exactly does this inoculation work? Does living with four generations in one household headed by your mother-in-law make for good mental health? Maybe, but my sense is that a very large proportion of all human literature essentially chronicles the ways that it doesn't.
I'm not saying this makes sense, but I think the idea is that if you have real problems (like an abusive mother-in-law) you might be sanely unhappy, but you won't be depressed. And when I say I'm not saying this makes sense, I mean I think it's completely wrong, but I think that's how it's supposed to work.
My sense is that a very large proportion of all human literature essentially ends in depression-induced suicides.
Some mental health problems are culturally specific, or at least have culturally specific manifestations. Most are not. It is interesting to know where the boundary is.
26: Sure! So clearly the problem is that people that write literature have too much time to think about how miserable they are.
FWIW, the only time I've encountered anyone like a professional in the field make anything like a claim that mental illness is a Western phenomenon was one non clinical professor in in undergrad who was something of an extreme social constructionist. I remember arguing with him about the existence of other historical characterizations of "depression," like "melancholic temperament." No one thought he was mainstream in the department or the field. The claim that this is a prominent view in the field sits pretty uneasily with its enthusiasm for the disease model.
I mean, I'm sure many people think (I'm one of them!) that injustice of some sort is a causal factor in a lot of depression, but that doesn't mean anything about the way that it feels (of which there are likely cultural determinants*, and which doesn't seem likely to me to be likely to be strongly related to the source of a person's despair), and it doesn't say anything about whether therapy would be beneficial.
I can certainly imagine (and have read about) a lot of people saying a lot of racist nonsense but that doesn't mean there aren't likely to be some contextual determinants of what causes depression.
I've never seen the claim in 8, but there is a related, afaict correct claim that people with schizophrenia in developing countries have better outcomes than in the US, provided some baseline level of peace and food security.
Anyway as I scroll the article is making a case for lay mental health workers! That's great! In a sense I am a half-lay mental health worker and in fact I resent the steepness of the barriers to licensure. It kind of verges, though, on being all "everyone is the same, there was no reason to be worried about medical colonialism, you know what would help poor countries? American-trained psychiatrists and the enthusiastic adoption of the medical model," all of which I find very suspect and unsupported by any piece of evidence offered.
*greater somaticization, fewer explicit feeling words in Japanese relative to Western depressed people is a phenomenon discussed in Crazy Like Us and also anecdotally endorsed by one clinician of Japanese origin I work with.
How exactly does this inoculation work? Does living with four generations in one household headed by your mother-in-law make for good mental health? Maybe, but my sense is that a very large proportion of all human literature essentially chronicles the ways that it doesn't.
It's a claim that people make about Mexican-American families. I think I posted an article here about how something like 25% of elderly daycares in the nation are located in the Rio Grande Valley. The article claimed that the combination of bad health and diabetes and living with family members meant that people lived longer with their wits intact, due to the benefits of a strong social community, but in worse health, due to the poor nutrition and diabetes, and so there was a unusually large population of people who were a good fit for elder daycare.
For ex:
The prevalence of adult day cares in the Valley, which is 90 percent Hispanic, is part cultural, part economic. Hispanic seniors are more likely than Anglos to live at home with their children or other family members. The Valley also has a persistently high poverty rate and a percentage of seniors with diabetes, heart disease, depression and dementia that is alarmingly higher than the national average. This points to a paradox: Despite higher rates of chronic illness nationwide, Hispanic seniors have a significantly higher life expectancy than Anglos or African Americans, in part due to robust networks of family and social support. While a 65-year-old Hispanic senior can expect to live to 86, on average he or she will spend almost half those years living with serious physical or cognitive impairment that necessitates the kind of low-level long-term care an adult day care can provide.
So this claim does get made, and seems plausible in certain ways.
If all these mental health workers were lay, end to end, I shouldn't be surprised.
27 is wrong. Anyone interested in this topic should read Crazy Like Us. It's a wonderful book.
27 makes a very weak claim, so weak I have trouble to see how it could be wrong. Consider the existence of fan death, or more generally culture-bound syndromes.
Of course, embarrassingly, in the relevant lists from the DSM and ICD-10, every such listed syndrome is either non-Western or limited to a lower SES culture. Convenient.
Wasn't there a fairly recent book on depression with s name like the Noonday demon which culminated in the Western (American) author getting a traditional treatment some where like Mali, which worked as well as anything else?
I once killed a fan. I stuck my finger in the path of the blades by accident and the fan broke.
People who are surprised that other people were surprised by Patel's findings forget how highly motivated some people are to say that people with mental health problems are just spoiled weaklings.
There is a liberal equivalent to this: Someone isn't disordered; they're just different. Often true! But then again, there are things that could plausibly be described as mental illness that I would attribute to moral infirmities, viz., Donald Trump's thought process.
Had I written 8 better, it would have come out like 29.4.
36: The Noonday Demon: An Atlas Of Depression by Andrew Solomon
Like "Eat, Pray, Love," but for men?
I have had a history of major depressions (now 10 years in the past), and I am on team it-is-an inescapably-cultural phenomenon. I don't think most mental disorders are natural kinds. So much about their etiology, expression, and treatment varies contextually. For example, I regularly have severe de-personalization symptoms in deep meditation, bit they're generally devoid of any of the negative affect that occurred in my depressions, because other things are going on in the whole of my conscious experience (and under the hood), and the self that arises with the symptoms is reading them very differently. For these and other reasons, I think the whole illness paradigm obscures as much as it helps in many cases, even if it's the best we have.
There's also more somatization some places. The Chinese claim not to have depression.
But neurasthenia shares similar attributes. Stigma against people with mental illlness seems to be universal.
Pwned by Tia.
I am deeply skeptical of the claim that people with schizophrenia do better in traditional cultures. I have a feeling that it's more people take better care of them. The example I heard was someone in India who let a person with schizophrenia sleep on his property and they gave them clothes and food - not exactly fully employed.
They say that People with schizophrenia do worse in cities, but I would like to know if there isn't migration which means that there are more of them. Some of this is Greyhound therapy - other jurisdictions paying for a 1 way ticket, and some of this is the fact that getting around to things if you are disabled is easier in an urban environment.
Pwned by Tia.
I am deeply skeptical of the claim that people with schizophrenia do better in traditional cultures. I have a feeling that it's more people take better care of them. The example I heard was someone in India who let a person with schizophrenia sleep on his property and they gave them clothes and food - not exactly fully employed.
They say that People with schizophrenia do worse in cities, but I would like to know if there isn't migration which means that there are more of them. Some of this is Greyhound therapy - other jurisdictions paying for a 1 way ticket, and some of this is the fact that getting around to things if you are disabled is easier in an urban environment.
Culture must matter for some things. In the west, we have castration anxiety but in southern China, there's koro.
I don't think claims like "people of culture X don't experience Y" are going to clarify much, more like "people of culture X experience some of the symptoms that we group together and conceptualize as condition 'Y' as a result phenomena of a, b, c and deal with them in a', b', c' ways. a', b', c' seem--individually or collectively--good at this, bad at that, but the good and bad are in some cases hard to disentangle from their whole cultural context in a discrete way that could be replicated in another culture."
35: no it makes a strong claim on the opposite direction and that's the sense in which it's wrong. It's not true that most mental illnesses do not have culturally specific manifestations.
My son is suffering from what appears to be schizophrenia. Everyone who wants to tell me that in other cultures being tormented by voices is viewed as a gift of some kind can just fuck right off.
Riffing, a bit, about something that makes the claim "depression feels the same everywhere" particularly absurd -- depression doesn't feel the same to everyone within *this* cultural context. It's a heterogeneous syndrome and to qualify for a diagnosis you only need 5 of 9 symptoms. People have calculated the permutations of ways you can qualify for a diagnosis to roll their eyes at the categorical approach of the DSM. I myself have felt irritated and alienated by people being all, I'm going to tell you what depression is like, rather than what their experience of depression is, even on this very blog. There's a transcultural experience of defeat and despair that's going to arise everywhere in some form but that will take different forms and already has in "the west".
32: So this claim does get made, and seems plausible in certain ways.
A claim that gets made while contradicting itself with its own evidence:
The Valley also has [...] a percentage of seniors with [...] depression and dementia that is alarmingly higher than the national average.
Responding in general: elderly dementia is only a fraction of all mental health problems, and elderly Westerners also show cognitive benefits from increased interactions, even with houseplants. The benefits of such interaction can be and are achieved in well-run retirement communities, independent of family structure. (And as we belabor here so often, the atomistic depersonalized State can finance such things much better than families can.)
My best wishes, Angry President.
48: Guh, I fucked up my hedging. The "Most are not" was to "some mental health problems are culturally specific," not "have culturally specific manifestations" (which I added later). Sorry. Yes, everything humans experience is mediated through culture, and particularly so things of the mind. My goal was to say something close to your "there's a transcultural experience of defeat and despair that's going to arise everywhere in some form but that will take different forms."
49: I'm sorry, and I wish you and him the best.
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I've been binge-reading a Jane Casey series on my Kindle app, and the latest book (Cruel Acts) has not yet found a US publisher. Anyone in the U.K. willing to buy it, strip DRM, and email it to me? I will, of course, repay you.
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49: So sorry, AP. My sister has a psychotic spectrum disorder which is probably schizophrenia. It is devastating to watch. Hope you can get good help - both for him and yourself.
Huge sympathies, AP. This happened to a very old friend of mine, whose son probably triggered the experience by smoking a lot of skunk. Definitely not a gift in any culture.
Tia, may I ask what field you work in?
Oh man, AP. I'm sorry.
I don't have much to add to the discussion here, except to note that I've sometimes wondered what an anthropologist-on-Mars description of postpartum depression in the U.S. would look like.
"The new mother is expected to bear most of the burden for caring for the infant and her household herself, while recovering from birth, with little financial help and no sleep. She is expected to do this cheerfully, and sometimes after weeks of no sleep, she experiences what the locals call postpartumdepression, which they attempt to treat with medication and social shame."
(To be clear, having had it twice, I'm not denying it's real. Just that it's an interesting mental exercise to imagine how we'd approach it if it were unique to some other culture.)
49: I'm so sorry. How awful for him and your family.
61.3: I just read an advice column where a new mother wrote in about how anxious she was about her baby. The columnist suggested postpartum anxiety and a doctor's appointment. I did the same thought exercise. "Here's your new baby! Don't break it! The world is scary and polluted and full of broken people! Good luck! Oh, and can't you just relax?!" I know it's a thing; it just seems like such a reasonable response to the situation.
Also, the lactation consultant is telling you not to use formula right to until the baby gets so dehydrated you need to return to the hospital.
60: Right now, in order of time spent and level of compensation, I am a computer programmer in a neuroscience lab, a CBT-style therapist in a hospital clinic that treats [actually going to leave this out right now because it's fairly identifying, including, potentially, to my patients, so maybe this answer is useless!], and I continue sporadically to work on and try to wrap up a social neuroscience research project that I used to be paid for and am now no longer.
OT: Can somebody reassure me that Trump isn't going to start a war with Iran this week in order to distract from his avoiding subpoenas? If not, at least that the media won't blame the House Democrats for forcing him to start a war to distract their investigation?
No. Nobody can reassure you that Trump will or will not do anything. Not even Trump himself.
Trump is probably profiting off evading his own sanctions and war would cut that off.
This is Bolton pointing at loads of stuff that was announced weeks or months ago and saying "see? I just did that!" The CVBG deployment was announced by the Navy a month ago. Bomber groups rotate in and out of the Middle East all the time.
Also, to quote myself from 2016: http://www.unfogged.com/archives/comments_15274.html#1872805
Remember how everyone was absolutely convinced, from about 2004 onwards, that there were going to be US air strikes on Iran? Either Bush was going to do it out of sheer bloodthirst, or Obama was going to get suckered into a war on Iran by the devious Zionist puppet masters or whoever?
And yet, in 2004, the US didn't attack Iran. In 2005, the US didn't attack Iran. In 2006, the US didn't attack Iran. In 2007, the US didn't attack Iran. In 2008, the US didn't attack Iran. In 2009, the US didn't attack Iran. In 2010, there was another panic on this very blog, and I said "This is me sticking my neck out: there will be no US attack on Iran this year, or next year, or the year after, for that matter." And there wasn't. Nor was there one in 2013 or 2014 or 2015....
...nor in 2016 or 2017 or 2018.
69: The US probably won't attack Iran, and it is reasonable to be concerned about the unacceptably high possibility that the US will attack Iran. These are not contradictory beliefs.
I think people generally fail to recognize how close we came.
In 2007, the intelligence community put out a National Intelligence Estimate that indicated the intelligence folks weren't going to play ball the way they did in Iraq.
Is there any question that Bolton is attempting to subvert intelligence operations? Is there no chance he will succeed?
I think people generally fail to recognize how close we came.
When?
See, thing is, I don't think it is reasonable to be concerned about the US attacking Iran, because I don't think there is a significant possibility that this will happen. And there are several reasons for this:
First is the quasi-Bayesian one that the US has, over the last fifteen years, made much louder noises than at present about attacking Iran, and these have proved not to be a sign of an impending attack on Iran.
Second, the US, being a democracy, tends not to pick fights with countries that it is obvious it cannot defeat.
Third, the US making aggressive noises about a country is not a good indicator of an imminent attack on that country.
Fourth, you can't go to war with Iran with one bomber group of B-52s and a single carrier.
You can bomb it with one bomber group. It's right there in the name of the group.
I don't think B-52s would do very well against a modern air defence network without some serious SEAD support. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/S-300_missile_system#Operators_and_other_versions
Essentially I agree with ajay. That said, (1) the sheer incompetence of this administration can't be overestimated and (2) the forces needed for war (especially incompetent unssuccesful war) are far smaller those needed for invasion.
Plus, remember, Trump is a coward who avoids confrontation at all costs.
He is indeed. But he's also been unprecedented in how much he is willing to do for Saudi Arabia and for Israel.
71: I think it was reasonable in 2006 to be worried about it for 2007 - and really right up until November of that year when the NIE was released. Had McCain won the presidency (which, again, wasn't likely but wasn't out of the question) the danger would have been much higher even with the NIE.
72: "First" and "Third" seem contradictory. If "Second" is meant to suggest that Iraq was, beforehand, obviously going to result in victory, well, I don't think you and I agree on the meaning of the word "victory." I bet such a victory can be achieved in Iran.
To address "Fourth," I didn't mean to imply that the current military moves are being done as military preparations for war. There are two potential risks, though. One is that the moves are meant to send a message to Americans about the necessity for military action; the other is that a Gulf of Tonkin incident can be invented/provoked.
Again: On balance, I doubt that's how it will play out, if only because the Deep State has come out against it and Trump doesn't have the attention span that GW Bush had. (But Bolton does!) Still, idiot warmongers are a constituency that is over-represented in the Trump administration.
I bet such a victory can be achieved in Iran.
How? I mean define victory here. Are we talking about occupation? That would mean occupying a country almost four times the landmass of Iraq, much of it mountainous, and twice the population. And with a military that's still functional (and in fact, battle-tested and hardened).
76: I think there's a lot of truth to that, although I'd phrase it as, "Trump is a bully who never picks on anyone who can fight back."
In the end, though, the clincher that will prevent war in Iran will be Putin's veto.
I mean we can bomb the shit out of almost any old place but that doesn't constitute victory.
If all else fails 80.2 is correct.
If the ensuing disaster blocks the release of Trump's tax returns until it's too late to matter or keeps something what hidden, that's a victory.
Though I guess the threat of bombing maybe works as well for that as actual bombing.
"First" and "Third" seem contradictory.
Not at all: if anything, they overlap. The US talking tough about a country doesn't always mean impending war in general; the US has talked tougher about IRan in the past than at present and still nto gone to war.
If "Second" is meant to suggest that Iraq was, beforehand, obviously going to result in victory, well, I don't think you and I agree on the meaning of the word "victory." I bet such a victory can be achieved in Iran.
No, that's not what it meant. "The US will not get into wars that it will obviously not win" does not mean "The US will always win wars".
I think it was reasonable in 2006 to be worried about it for 2007 - and really right up until November of that year when the NIE was released
I would disagree - 2006-7 was the peak of US involvement in Iraq _and_ involvement in Afghanistan was starting to ramp up (due to what was happening in the southern provinces). I don't think it was reasonable to be worried that the US would decide to get involved in a third war at that time.
And I would add that it would be useful to draw a firm line between "people who actually want wars" and "people who want to go on TV and talk about wars" and put Bolton on the correct side of it. Wolfowitz and Rumsfeld actually wanted wars. Bolton isn't a serious person, he's a joke, a talking head.
I mean we can bomb the shit out of almost any old place but that doesn't constitute victory.
Even this; I'm not entirely sure that Iran is in the "any old place" category. They have some nasty air defence going on. And the US air force, never a competent organisation at the best of times, hasn't done serious SEAD since 1991. Are they really going to downtown Teheran with an air force that's done nothing more challenging than plinking Toyotas for the last two decades?
I feel like you're slighting our ability to bomb shit.
Putin would be delighted to get the US bogged down in another war; it would further isolate and weaken the US, and make Iran more dependent on him.
88: The Russians have spent all those years since 1991 figuring out how to shoot down US planes. The fruits of their labor are in Iran.
Maybe we should try just to keep the defence contractors honest.
86: I agree that he's a joke, but I'm not sure that means he's not dangerous.
In fact, Bolton has believed for decades that these are the only two choices. In the early two-thousands, as the Bush Administration was negotiating to limit North Korea's nuclear program, Bolton stridently advocated war. Wilkerson, Powell's chief of staff, was so concerned that he brought Bolton into a private meeting on the consequences of military strikes: "I gave him a ten-minute brief on what a war with North Korea would look like--a hundred thousand casualties in the first thirty days, many of them Americans. The Japanese that would die. The Chinese that would die. The fact that Seoul, one of the most modern and forward-looking cities in the world, would probably be reduced to the Dark Ages. I told him, 'That's Passchendaele, John. That's Ypres.' "
He said that Bolton was unmoved: "John looked at me and said, 'Are you done? Clearly, you do war. I don't do war. I do policy.' "
86: Bolton is a talking head in the same sense that Trump is a reality TV star -- it's a description that is correct and appropriately dismissive, but it doesn't capture the full picture. Bolton is an experienced and effective bureaucrat who is National Security Advisor.
As a betting man, I'd say he is less likely to achieve military action against Iran than he is to be fired for trying to start a war, but I am pretty uncomfortable having a guy like that in a position like that.
Bolton is an experienced and effective bureaucrat
Is he, though? What are some examples of him being effective? He's a very loud and camera-ready supporter of regime change in (among other places) Syria, Venezuela, Iran, Cuba, and North Korea, but I can't help noticing that all those regimes are still in place. He managed to get Bustani kicked out of the OPCW in 2002; OK, that's a win. He managed 18 months as UN ambassador and achieved... not very much. He hated the ICC; it's still there. He's completely failed to get Trump to cool on Russia.
92: and how did that turn out? Did Bolton, the experienced and effective bureaucrat, manage to get the US actually to go to war with North Korea, as he believes it should?
Bolton is probably smarting after last week's Venezuelan coup didn't take, and now he's blowing off some steam.
95: No. But he's in a more a powerful position now.
96: Yes, maybe Bolton's problem is that he always wants the U.S. to attack everyone. If he could focus on one single target, maybe he could actually succeed.
94-5: While I again basically agree, Bolton is AFAIK easily the most experienced bureaucrat in the White House or on the NSC (where apparently he has systematically shut out all the other experienced bureaucrats from other agencies). See one-eyed man etc.
I'm more worried about an attack of some kind on Iran in September or October of 2020. Lots of groundwork to lay, of course: the President needs to look like he's been reluctantly forced into it.
On the other hand, a "victory" of any sort at all that he can claim resulted demonstrating "strength" is better than anything actually achievable with arms. This might be where Russian interest comes out: get Trump some sort of cosmetic diplomatic triumph in the fall of 2020 -- it can be something that evaporates completely in December of 2020 -- is good for nearly everyone, and maybe Iran can be paid off enough in some way to go along.
100.2 is much more plausible. Something along the lines of North Korea, where he has a couple of summits, achieves nothing in return, and announces it as a great victory.
94: Bolton plays a long game, and his reach exceeds his grasp. He sets extraordinarily ambitious goals. To say he has failed to achieve war with North Korea is true, but he's still in there pitching, and such a war would be so insane that even folks like GW Bush (and, one hopes, Trump) aren't into it. Bolton was certainly an important figure in the runup to war with Iraq -- a genuinely audacious policy success for him and his accomplices.
He's having something of a moment right now with Iran, what with sanctions-tightening and sabre-rattling, even if he doesn't get the war he wants.
Bolton's stance against the ICC has been impressively successful, with American hostility to the organization institutionalized, and something like 100 bilateral agreements the US has entered into to keep Americans from being prosecuted.
The fact that he hasn't been able to turn Trump around on an absolute core value -- subservience to Putin -- hardly suggests that he is ineffective.
Note that when I say "effective," I mean something different from "all powerful." To cite Venezuela as an example of a Bolton failure seems ... premature.
Regarding the US presence in Syria, Bolton staked out a position that directly contradicted the president's, and he won a compromise (at least) there.
To cite Venezuela as an example of a Bolton failure seems ... premature.
Well, sure, but I'm just saying last week, specifically, was a major cock-up.
Only in the sense of a terrible, avoidable public failure clearly linked to the administration.
You can say Iraq was a huge fuckup, too, but that's not the way Bolton sees it. (And I was referring to ajay's critique, not yours, which I agree with).
Bolton was able to secure the NSA job without shaving off his ridiculous walrus mustache despite Trump hating it. That's pretty darn effective!
I can't even buy oatmeal or diabetes treatment supplies without people making jokes.
Bolton plays a long game, and his reach exceeds his grasp. He sets extraordinarily ambitious goals. To say he has failed to achieve war with North Korea is true
Yes, it is true. He has failed. Also true: he has failed to achieve pretty much every other goal he has set himself. You can't be effective unless you've actually had effects! Merely setting yourself ambitious goals and constantly trying to achieve them is not the same as being effective.
If you ignore his successes with the ICC, Iran, Venezuela etc., then yeah, he's had nothing but failures.
Fred Kaplan* is out today with a smart take on Bolton.
*Slate should split into Smart Slate and Silly Slate. Kaplan or Lithwick would edit the former, and Saletan would run the latter.
113.1: he hasn't had any success with Venezuela, unless I've missed something recently. Maduro is still in power.
He hasn't had any success with Iran. He wants regime change and he hasn't got it.
He also hasn't had any success with North Korea, Cuba, Russia or Syria.
The ICC, yes, but was that actually his success? Republican opposition to it goes back to the 1990s. Clinton didn't even bother trying to get the treaty ratified because he knew the Republicans in the Senate would refuse.
*Slate should split into Smart Slate and Silly Slate
This is more true of Unfogged, except this place selects for people who enjoy the combination.
Walruses are great. If I can't reincarnate as an orca I'll take walrus.
I don't think getting the vast unwashed Trumpentariat to pay attention to Venezuela, and accept, theoretically at least, that there are genuine US national security interests at stake in who runs that country, to be nothing. As with Iran, these are necessary precursors to either (a) the kind of military action that Bolton wants* or (b) the bloodless diplomatic victory that Trump wants. What do Putin, Netanyahu, and MbS want? No sane person, perhaps not even Bolton (see *) actually wants a real war with Iran.
Thinking more about 100.2, it probably helps Trump in 2020 to show that his cozying up to Putin has helped lead the the by-then-apparent bloodless diplomatic "victory" over Iran.
* Does Bolton actually want war, or does he want to 'own the libs'? I'm not sure I have a guess on that.
It's only a "real" diplomatic victory of the other guy is so bad, so dangerous, that war is not only thinkable but seemingly inevitable. Required. Isn't think the exact play run with North Korea?
118: I think Trump's claims of victory, and his voters' acceptance of such claims, have no relation to reality.
DPRK is also different from Iran in that it was actually doing a bunch of aggressive weapons testing, which pissed off not just Trump but a bunch of other interested parties.
I'm also unwilling to characterize Trump's DPRK policy as a "play". It was essentially normal US policy (offer concessions for less bad behavior), but executed with utter incompetence (trading major concessions for nothing of substance) followed by totally unfounded claims of success. It came unstuck in Hanoi because Kim figured he could just get more of the same, but even Trump (and presumably Bolton in his ear) wasn't dumb enough to fall for it. Hanoi also suggests to me that Trump wasn't running a PR policy, he actually drank the kool aid and expected to walk out of there with all the nukes on a platter.
Haven't you heard? Trump is in love with Kim Jong Un.
I don't think dprk is or was a threat to the US.
I'm not saying that the threat has to be real for its avoidance to be victory. Only that the target audience think it real. And Boltons performance is part of that. The risk here is the Trump ends up having maneuvered himself into a choice between fighting or looking weak. Bolton is a dangerous person to have in the room ifwhen that moment arrives.
even Trump (and presumably Bolton in his ear) wasn't dumb enough to fall for it
Pompeo, not Bolton, judging by North Korea's attempt to remove him from negotiations.
They might just find him very annoying, which would be understandable.
Imo, Bolton maybe actually cares, at least at some level, about NK as NK. Pompeo, imo, does not except to the extent he can 'win' one for the Boss. Working with someone as annoying, generally, as ol' Pomp, with no authority and little agende, is going to be worse than a waste of time.
Really struggling to see where you would get the idea Bolton cares about human life in any capacity.
He's very fond of a specific subset of white peoples.
I don't mean to say I think he cares about North Koreans. I mean that he can find it on a map, knows a little about the (recent) history, wants to defeat them in particular. Trump would just as soon "defeat" Mexico, if he can find a way to do that. Or Germany.
If Trump had the attention span to watch a whole movie, they could show him that Eastwood film about Grenada, and get him all excited about some small island.
I saw that movie, but not in the theater because I wasn't allowed to go to R-rated movies.
I think I saw it with a specific subset of white peoples that included someone whose parents owned a video store.
I mean, I'm not racist or anything and I really like white people, but you have to admit, their culture has got some serious problems.
I knew a white people who didn't even want to shoot up a school even if they could get away with it.
They probably didn't go to school where I did. I remember, many years ago, discussing the movie Rock & Roll High School with a work colleague. I told him how the movie ended with every student's fantasy of burning down the high school. He looked at me like I was crazy.
I liked high school, at least the last two years of it. Thank you driver's licenses, cheap beer, and friends with older brothers.
I am not sure if recent events undermine my rant above (69 et seq) because it seems that the US very nearly did go to war with Iran, or reinforce it because it confirmed that Trump is a massive coward who shrinks from confrontation, or do neither because we have no way of knowing if the US really did nearly bomb Iran or not.
Or both, plus my 2 cents, because the US quite possibly almost stumbled into an accidental incompetent inadequately resourced war far short of invasion.