The Periscope Post

Opinion-makers: Who to read (and watch) today.

War on drugs hurts war in Afghanistan
The accepted wisdom among military decisions makers and strategists is that the thriving drug trade in Afghanistan is aiding the Taliban. Mark Kleiman, co-author of a report on drug trafficking and security in Afghanistan for the Centre on International Cooperation, disagreed in an op-ed for the Financial Times: “Yes, the drug trade helps the Taliban and harms the Afghan government. But efforts to fight drugs strengthen the insurgency rather than weaken it. Counter narcotics policies reward those who remain successful drug-dealers, concentrating those rewards in the hands of the Taliban, warlords and corrupt officials.” Kleiman explained that Afghanistan has a “virtual lock” on the opium trade, owing to its extremely low-cost production and extensive inventories. Counter drug efforts only push production from one region to another, and now, production is concentrated in seven, Taliban-controlled provinces: “Our policies have given the insurgency the ability to tax virtually the entire world supply of illicit opium.” Advised Kleiman, “There simply are not many feasible drug-control activities in Afghanistan that do more good than harm. This is a case where less really is more: since the natural tendency of counter drug efforts is to help our enemies, we should pursue those efforts as little as possible.”

King Le Bron holds court – but did ESPN overstep the line in letting him?
LeBron James, perhaps the biggest and most sought after star in American basketball, enjoyed an hour-long programme on ESPN last night to announce what team he’ll play for next and, it goes without saying, to promote himself. Called The Decision, the show was, as The Daily Beast’s Bryan Curtis put it, “perhaps the biggest free-advertising giveaway in the history of sports (dare we call it?) journalism” and revealed not just James’s decision to play for the Miami Heat, but something more fundamental about sports today. Media critics found ESPN’s decision to offer James the hour-long show bizarre and a bit cringe-worthy – but Curtis pointed out that it’s not exactly contrary to ESPN’s nature, which pays a lot of money to air basketball games. “There are journalistic elements to an NBA broadcast—the sideline interviews, the comments from the color man in the booth. But a televised basketball game is not journalism in any traditional sense. It is a high-dollar, mutually agreeable tango, benefitting the network and the players, just like the James special,” Curtis wrote. “Which is not to say there’s no such thing as sports journalism, including on ESPN. It is to say that there is a bunch of free advertising out there that millions of us have been gobbling up for years.”

LeBron’s decision:

Parenting makes you miserable, part II
On Wednesday, we brought up Jennifer Senior’s article in New York Magazine about how parents may love their children, but hate parenting, and some of the response to that article. About once every few months, an article like this one comes out, tossing a Molotov cocktail in a baby bottle into the Mommy-sphere; accordingly, people are still talking about it. Michelle Goldberg, a former Salon writer and freelancer, looked at the article with Michelle Cottle, of The New Republic at Bloggingheads.tv, trying to get to the bottom of the obsession with the article and the genre – writing about having children or not having children – to which it belongs. As Cottle says, “Nothing makes people crazier than this decision.”

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