Category: Uncategorized (Page 17 of 20)

The rhetoric from the AfV party and the Chancellor Fredrick Mertz is part of a larger trend worldwide towards far-right anti-immigration sentiments. When reading about the methods for deterring refugees from entering Germany, I was struck by the similarities between their method and the policies in the US; offering money to those who are deported, a focus on criminality in the selection process for deportations, and a rollback of refugee initiatives. One quote that struck me from the Reuters article was from the chief of staff to Mertz: “As long as we have irregular and illegal migration to Germany, we simply cannot implement voluntary admission programs.” I find this statement highly concerning. The idea that refugee policies wouldn’t be reinstated until illegal immigration falls to zero is not only unrealistic, but is very clearly a false rationalization of their anti-immigration policies to avoid responsibility for refugees. 

Negative consequences of changes in immigration and refugee policies are clearly seen in the Pakistan guesthouse, holding Afghan women initially promised asylum. The women cannot envision a life back in Afghanistan, but fear they may be returned if Germany continues closing doors for refugees. I find the arguments given by the AfV party for anti-immigration policies completely unconvincing when set in contrast with the situation of these women. The idea that Germany must shut its doors to women fearing prosecution because the country has reached “capacity” for refugees is hard to believe. Especially when analyzing the attack on Church asylums, a space able and willing to house refugees, the government’s claim appears completely unsubstantiated. 

Reading the introduction to the investigation pieces on the Pentagon records, a set of clear and concise facts are presented. As a student of journalism, however, I know the process to get to the point where an author can make those claims is incredibly difficult and lengthy. The authority the author of the piece claims is so strong because they have done their due diligence on the story so thoroughly there can be no question of the truth. Writing with full certainty is hard to find in some shorter form news pieces, as they generally discuss the “what” and not always can determine the “why” or the “how.” 

Additionally, reading this series I felt reassured that the way in which our country, as well as other struggling democracies, will eventually come back together must be through a strong journalistic backdrop. As these articles helped uncover government secrets many would have regarded as untouchable, it is clear that this type of reporting holds governments to a level of accountability that is not otherwise possible. The depth into which this investigation reaches is hard to do in a way that keeps the reader convinced of both its veracity and the author’s authority. As a reader, I can understand how dropping in pieces of information, like the number of interviews the Times conducted or links to official government documents, serves to strengthen the impact of the story.

As I read Azmat Khan’s brilliantly executed investigative pieces in the Times, I was repeatedly reminded of one of my favorite works of investigative audio journalism: Season 3 of the New Yorker’s podcast In The Dark by Madeleine Baran, which covered the Haditha Massacres of Iraq in 2005. Baran describes, through years of intensive investigative reporting in line with that of Khan’s, how U.S. Marines knowingly executed 25 unarmed Iraqi civilians in their homes and evaded responsibility after an inconceivably lazy accountability process employed by the American military courts. In some ways, I found Khan’s story even more insidious than Baran’s: the gamification of the loss of civilian lives through physical distance — airstrikes coordinated by those far removed from the reality of its aftermath and chat histories that resemble video game colloquialisms, for example — enabled a moral distance from the horrific realities of the civilians they brutalized as well. (I was especially disturbed by the term ‘squirters’, which referenced fleeing children in the aftermath of an airstrike.)

That theme of moral and physical distance from the horrors of war is a recurring one in all of this week’s readings. For the Afghans who flee state violence only to be met with the violence of a different kind in a new country or the children of Mosul like Mustafa Hakeem Abdullah, their suffering is reduced to statistics and concealed behind the bureaucratic veils of the West’s political and military world (I thought Valerio articulated these ideas on the declining trust against Western institutions very well in his blog post.) Since when did the West, a section of the world that lauds itself as the bastion of liberalism and democracy, start treating the lives of men (and children!) as collateral investments secondary to tactical advantage or political righteousness? Since when were American soldiers able to get away with deploying larger, more powerful bombs in civilian-occupied areas for the sake of convenience? Is better accountability in situations like these even possible?

It’s clear the U.S. has a responsibility to engage in warfare ‘better’. It’s also clear that they need a better system of checks and balances — one that involves third-party investigations into accusations of war crimes or military negligence (the conflicts of interest in the current military judicial system are quite appalling.) But I wonder if the U.S., too, has a responsibility to embrace tactical disadvantage for the sake of preserving civilian lives — or redefine the term ‘tactical advantage’ altogether. Does America truly advance a mission of peace, justice, and democracy in any efficacious way when it kills 1 ISIS recruiter in exchange for the lives of 20 civilians? I doubt it. When we read the term ‘military tactics’ as an action or strategy that advances a particular mission, perhaps good ‘military tactics’ come in decisions that put America’s democratic and liberal aims as an actual priority — even if it means deploying more soldiers on the ground or investing in technologies that enable more precise strikes.

This week’s news articles help readers understand the fragility of modern-day immigration. Germany’s reversal of its resettlement program, for example, speaks volumes about public sentiment on refugees. Domestic politics all over the world, in fact, seem to have clearly taken priority over international commitments. In Riham Alkousaa’s and Charlotte Greenfield’s article on Reuters, Kimia’s story is as much a warning as it is an outcry. According to the Politico article, for example, around 2500 Afghans are living in Islamabad, Pakistan, awaiting their relocation to Germany. This number is staggering because of the implications of what a return to Afghanistan would mean for these individuals. In many instances, it would be a matter of life or death. For 25-year-old Kimia, relocation back to Afghanistan is “unthinkable.” These implications are often easy to glaze over, but are important in order for anyone to understand the consequences of such an action.

Although the content provided in the articles this week was fascinating, I was also a little intrigued by what was not present in many of the articles. The Reuters article, for example, included heartbreaking stories about what was unfolding in Pakistan as Germany halted their entry programs. The piece, however, did not substantially mention or question Germany’s decision-making or reasoning for halting such an important program. Although many articles mention an increase in crime as a leading cause of anti-immigrant sentiment, it doesn’t go much further than that. In reality, the people that are being talked about in many of these news pieces are not simply migrants begging a foreign government to allow them to relocate. The reality of the situation seems to be much more complicated. Germany seems to have an obligation to many of these migrants, both legally and ethically. But because there was sparse mention of why the German government is making the decisions they are, I found it difficult to really understand the government’s perspective.

Additionally, some of the articles I read this week make it clear that the migration issue is a huge political problem. For example, not only is the right-wing party in Germany pushing for the removal of many migrants, but they are also politicizing horrible crimes that were committed by a small portion of that asylum-seeking population. By weaponizing these instances, politicians seem to have at least somewhat successfully brought up policy changes that impact innocent refugees as well. Although outrage is warranted when horrific acts are committed against innocent people, I think it is also important to acknowledge that our politicized society has allowed for selective outrage that harms some groups more than others.

As the Euronews piece points out, Germany has decided who it believes needs to be deported back to Afghanistan. Although they mention that the people who were deported had a criminal record, the article does not further specify what these criminal records entail. Furthermore, this article made me question what exactly deportations like these would mean for those being deported. Is German society impacted by these removals in any particular way? Finally, I find it crucial to further investigate how these countries decide who is worthy of protection and who isn’t. With a country like Afghanistan, I personally find it difficult to make such a distinction. Azmat Khan’s NYT series helps shed light on how accountability has been elusive for many people and governments who have made these very distinctions. Khan’s work showed me that many countries have an accountability issue. Many countries, for example, have contributed to many deadly airstrikes in the Middle East, yet these governments still refuse to accept refugees from many of these countries. I find that troubling.

This week’s readings included the incredible investigative reporting conducted by Azmat Khan uncovering the U.S. military’s systemic failure to avoid and detect harm to civilian populations during the “forever wars” in Iraq and Syria. Discovery of these institutional failures, as well as a disturbing culture among soldiers, was based on on-the-ground interviews, site visits, and military documents obtained through the Freedom of Information Act. One part of Khan’s article that felt extremely resonant this week was the description of the video game-esque language used by soldiers that gamifies the murder of civilians. Similarly, the alleged killer of right-wing podcaster and media personality Charlie Kirk inscribed bullet casings with slang from video games and internet forum culture. These phrases, similar to the messages Khan discovered sent between soldiers like “this area is poppin” and “play time?,” point to a larger normalization of inhumanity and legitimization of violent tendencies by games in which the murder of civilians gives a player points in order to win. Evidence of violence translating from the screen into the real world is undeniable, as exemplified in these two cases among others. I found this idea to be well encapsulated in Nathan Taylor Pemberton’s September 14th opinion piece in the New York Times, in which he writes, “While the internet’s rot once felt safely bottled, or fire-walled, within a digital realm, this act of political violence may have punctured whatever barrier once existed. We can no longer ignore that we live in an era where the online and the lived are indistinguishable.”

Other readings from this week detailed the struggles Afghan refugees face gaining asylum in Germany amidst the rising tide of anti-migrant sentiment and the growing influence of the far right-wing party, Alternative für Deutschland. Chancellor Friedrich Merz has vowed to increase deportations and limit asylum applications. These accounts reminded me of my work this summer as an immigration case worker, where many cases involved Afghan families who had supported the U.S. military against the Taliban and were waiting in Pakistan for resettlement in the United States. Yet, unlike in Germany, Afghan refugee cases in the U.S. face an additional challenge: over this summer, President Trump issued an executive order that limited the entry of foreign nationals from certain countries under the guise of protecting national security, effectively a continuation of the ‘travel ban’ or ‘Muslim ban’ from his first term. Afghanistan is one of the countries on the list. Meanwhile, refugees in Pakistan too face uncertainty. In April of this year, the Pakistani government deported more than 19,500 Afghans. Many Afghans risked their lives to aid U.S. forces against the Taliban, with the promise of eventual safety in America. Now abandoned by U.S. forces, they face a seemingly impossible question: where can they find safety? They cannot return to Afghanistan without risking retaliation from the Taliban, cannot enter the U.S. under current legislation, cannot remain in Pakistan amid daily deportations, and now, as is evident in these articles, cannot rely on Germany, where immigration policies have grown increasingly hostile.

For the Afghans waiting in limbo or the families mourning airstrike victims, words like “humanitarian protection” and “precision” must sound bitterly ironic. Western governments present themselves as careful guardians of safety and rights, but the readings show how fragile those claims become once tested by political shifts or flawed intelligence. What remains is a collapse of trust in the very institutions that claimed to offer protection in the first place.

In the German case, the breakdown of trust is immediate and personal. Reuters shows how Afghans like Kimia, who risked their lives as women’s rights activists, entered a program that promised resettlement, only to be abandoned when the new government suspended it. Politico notes that women, LGBTQ+ people, and educators deemed “particularly vulnerable” were stranded after Merz’s government froze flights. Euronews emphasises the punitive framing of deportations (all 81 deportees had criminal records) but that framing blurs into a wider deterrent logic. Trust is eroded at two levels: Afghans who believed German commitments discovered those promises were politically reversible, and German society is told that humanitarian admissions are incompatible with “integration capacity.” What began as a moral obligation is reframed as a discretionary favor, withdrawn when electorally inconvenient.

The American case similarly exposes how the military’s narrative of precision collapses under scrutiny. The Pentagon records analysed by the New York Times document case after case where flawed intelligence produced lethal civilian casualties. “Men on motorcycles” mistaken for fighters, a “heavy object” actually being a child. The Mosul strike that killed the Zeidan family shows how assessments of “no civilian presence” were treated as fact despite contradictory evidence. Here too, trust was central: U.S. leaders sold drone warfare as “the most precise air campaign in history.” But the investigation shows that precision rhetoric masked systemic failures and allowed officials to sidestep accountability. The very technology that was supposed to guarantee moral warfare became a tool for sustaining illusions.

The broader question that kept coming up during these readings is: what happens when states systematically break the trust of those who depended on them most? The Afghans waiting in Islamabad, the families killed in Mosul. Both are emblematic examples that represent people who had no power over the policies that determined their fate. Their safety depended on the reliability of German promises and American intelligence. Instead, they became expendable to political calculus or military convenience.

This erosion of trust has long-term consequences that are not widely understood, yet. It undermines the credibility of Western claims to moral leadership. When Germany tells activists to “just wait” while shutting the program down, or when the U.S. dismisses civilian deaths as inevitable mistakes, both are implicitly saying that Afghan lives are conditional, valued only when politically or strategically advantageous. The deeper question raised by these readings, then, is whether humanitarian and military commitments are ever more than provisional tools of statecraft. If protection can be suspended at will, and accountability indefinitely deferred, is trust in such commitments anything more than a fiction?

To Alex’s post: I think the Times did a great job in packaging its reporting into a varied set of products to reach the widest audience possible. While Khan’s long-form writing is a lengthy investment, both parts are split up into digestible chunks: headers, highlighted messages between U.S. army members, pictures of survivors and the aftermath of strikes. Also, legal cases and reports are boring; footnotes even more so. The Times could have chosen to overwhelm the reader with statistic after statistic, airstrike after airstrike. But for the sake of public understanding, they have to narrativize and drop less important details. That’s not a bad thing.

The Times also made several big audience engagement choices that I think go a long way towards bringing more people into their reporting. First, they released thousands of pages of documents they obtained via FOIA, allowing anyone to investigate these attacks further. I think that’s especially important in the OSINT age, where breakthroughs might depend on an everyday person who happens to take a video of something newsworthy. Their database is exhaustive, and basically anything you click on is interesting (conversely, you could also argue that the Times should not withhold documents anyway because they were obtained via public records request). Additionally, they also wrapped up this long-form reporting into a “What you need to know” story that runs through key takeaways and narrative points. Finally, they also released CENTCOM’s responses to their reporting in full, as opposed to the clipped versions that made it into the piece — so that if anyone really had doubts about the narrative, they could see the (uninspiring) rebuttal and judge for themselves.

I think this type of lengthy disclosure, where possible, is especially important for war reporting. It feels like trust in media is particularly tenuous in this realm; look to the war in Gaza as an example. As Khan well acknowledges in her writing, reporters may have to do extra work to “push back” against a prevailing national narrative about X conflict being just and Y group of people being bad. Khan should also be commended for publicly detailing her extensive methodology, another step towards shoring up trust in reporting.

This kind of detailed, in-depth reporting takes years; Khan talked to people who lost family members in 2015 for an article published in 2021. That also means there are years of coverage that did not — and could not — include her new revelations. Attaching an editor’s note pointing to Khan’s reporting on every single story about an airstrike feels ham-fisted, but how should editors think about old coverage once it becomes outdated?

Azmat Khan’s Times pieces were done with the rigor of a social scientist, the care of a social worker, and the grit and determination of a professional reporter in her element. Khan had a tall order ahead of her. Not only did she have to demonstrate that the U.S. military was making errors that killed hundreds of civilians, but she also sought to prove that its disregard for Afghan lives was systemic in nature, as demonstrated through specific patterns of abuse that resoundingly discredited the military’s efforts to minimize its mistakes. This required an exceedingly thorough and systematic effort to document as many cases as possible, informed and supported by FOIAd evidence and additional documents. The logistical undertaking alone impressed me, and I wonder what interactions she had with academics to bolster the legitimacy of her methods. 

If anything, I felt as if the format of a feature piece, however longform, was almost a discredit to the evidence that Khan collected for the story itself. Synthesizing the information into a different format, such as a report or a legal case, may have given more force to the quantitative data that Khan disperses through the article (e.g. “The Pentagon says x percentage of civilians were killed in this way, but the Times found that it was actually a much higher y percent.”). The breathing room of appendices or footnotes could allow Khan to make the case not only with scattered quantitative data points mixed with devastating individual testimonies, but also with the sheer volume of evidence that Khan could only allude to in the abstract throughout the articles. To be sure: the piece in the Times wasn’t intended to be comprehensive, as its purpose was to address a wider public that would not have the time or patience to comb through all of Khan’s findings. Perhaps I’m just let down that Khan wasn’t able to demonstrate the full extent of her work, even if that wasn’t the point of her piece. Letting data points go to waste is never satisfying.

On another note, I thought that a fleeting moment in Khan’s second piece could have been emphasized to a greater extent. She devotes the first couple of grafs of section 8 in her second piece to arguing that, much as the rules of war provide psychological comfort to warriors because they would feel like they are abiding by some kind of morality, those rules also make people believe that the wars their country wages are just. This argument gets to the heart of the issue, in my opinion, taking it beyond the standard accountability journalism that the rest of the pieces seems to engage in (e.g., the airstrike model hid the true civilian death toll, legitimized the “expanded use” of drone strikes, lacked any kind of accountability or investigations into wrongdoings, etc.) by mobilizing that accountability angle to raise a much more fundamental question about the nature of war: what myths or narratives do we create that allow us to feel justified in putting innocent lives in danger? The role of technology and the narrative of precision, as she effectively argues, are significant answers to this question. I would have liked this claim to be more strongly articulated throughout the pieces.

A robust investigation by Azmat Khan’s reveals that the civilian death toll of America’s wars in Iraq and Afghanistan was much higher than what the Pentagon disclosed, investigated, or even counted. In Part 1 of her series, Khan explains how cultural misunderstandings and outdated intelligence led military airstrikes to target civilians instead of ISIS. She notes how the quality and quantity of video footage blinded officials to an air strike’s true victims. And she exposes a system of impunity in the U.S. military, which gives officials the authority to determine how many civilian deaths justify an enemy strike. Khan’s research makes clear that the technology of air warfare, which is meant to target enemies with precision, depends on adequate intelligence if it is to spare civilians. 

I found Part 2 of Khan’s project especially moving. For this section, Khan compares the Pentagon’s records, which are full of redactions, to the stories of people who survived or witnessed the strikes. What she finds reveals the failures of the U.S. military to accurately identify and target members of ISIS. Civilians with nothing to do with ISIS lost lives, homes, and family members when military officials mistook civilian areas for ISIS-controlled zones, and misidentified civilians as ISIS fighters. The Pentagon’s process for reviewing strikes neglected to investigate these cases. Meanwhile, civilians who lost family members or suffered injuries were left with confusion, grief, and anger. 

Khan’s project is enlightening not only because it details the underestimated–and underinvestigated–toll of air warfare, but also because it guides the reader along Khan’s own investigative process. At every moment, Khan is clear about the source of her findings. She explains how she obtained Pentagon records through FOIA requests, and used the evidence in these records to guide her investigation. She measured what the Pentagon wrote against stories from the ground. When gathering these stories, she navigated the possibility that civilians may misremember or misconstrue events. With this in mind, she made site visits without notice, asked open-ended questions, and ensured that subjects understood her motives. These details are both instructive and in line with journalistic ethics, which push for transparency.

While Khan’s reporting gives readers a window into the toll of war in Afghanistan, Iraq, and Syria, other news reports follow the huge exodus of people the wars spurred. Since the Taliban retook power in Afghanistan, scores have fled the country, with the U.S., Canada, and Germany receiving the most migrants from Afghanistan. At first, governments abroad organized special programs to take in Afghans fleeing the ruling Taliban. Operation Enduring Freedom gave many migrants humanitarian parole in the U.S., and protected citizens who helped the U.S. government during its invasion and subsequent occupation. Germany, in 2022, set up an admission program that aimed to bring in as many as 1000 Afghans per month. Though neither program was adequate (there were many more persecuted Afghans than seats on U.S. chartered flights, and many asylum seekers whose cases are yet to be processed in Germany). But each was an attempt to mitigate the humanitarian toll of the U.S.’s hasty abandonment of Afghans. Today, these attempts are dwindling as anti-immigrant politics slash humanitarian programs. After Trump took office, he suspended refugee admissions, withheld TPS from Afghans, and put a near-total ban on Afghans entering the U.S. Recently, Germany’s new chancellor suspended the program meant to admit Afghans, leaving thousands stranded in Pakistan. 

As memories of the withdrawal of U.S. forces in 2021 recede and right-leaning politics gains favor globally, countries leave Afghans vulnerable to the Taliban’s persecution. At the same time, the Taliban’s violence has created a migration crisis impossible for the international community to absorb, given the inadequate systems of support for refugees. Germany’s chancellor, Friedrick Merz, who is anti-immigrant, does raise an important question, of “how one deals with [the Taliban].” 

Asmat Khan’s investigation series in the Times struck the impressive balance of being both very repetitive and very gripping. On a technical level, the structure worked so well because it fit the content perfectly. The point was to demonstrate repetition, to provide irrefutable evidence that these civilian casualties have not been the exception but the rule, and to suggest that the pattern of deaths that emerged through the reporting is perhaps baked into the military system that allows for them and makes these mistakes time and again. By part two of the investigation, I was expecting to become desensitized to the barrage of civilian injuries and deaths, but couldn’t because each of Khan’s stories were hard-hitting and unique despite being representative of statistics of a much greater magnitude.

Following on last week’s drone conversation, the “gamer-boy” quality of modern warfare continues to trouble me. The part of the investigation I found myself rereading was the section titled “Play Time?” and the terminology “poppin.” One could imagine the exact same dialogue unfolding between two 13-year-old boys playing Fortnight from the comfort of their separate homes. The system seems designed to build just that—comfort—into the conducting of modern warfare. The technology lauded as “precise” clearly has its faults. But continuously using the language of precision to describe these acts of “mistaken” carnage they were carrying out allowed the American soldiers to remain a certain degree of separation from their actions and write off their errors as exceptional flaws. That drones could also come to provide some level of comfort to Afghan civilians was also a shock which we didn’t touch on when we spoke of the use of drones in Ukraine last week. It makes sense, but is also staggering, that the sight of a drone could bring a civilian a sense of security that they are being surveilled and therefore hopefully being accounted for by the U.S. army. But as we learn throughout the pieces, the idea that if you are seen by the technology, you are safe from its violence is a false narrative. Yet it might be a necessary false narrative that unites both the U.S. army and Afghan civilians in their ability to continue going about their lives without being consumed by guilt on the one hand and fear on the other.  Overall, the investigation series deepened my understanding of how drones are transforming war, and I’m curious about how this transformation is changing war-related migration patterns as well.

As for the shorter news pieces, I was interested in German churches’ capacities to shelter “irregular” migrants in light of chancellow Merz’ immigration crackdown and deportations. I’d like to learn more about the rise in immigration bans across Europe and in the U.S., and whether the increase in politicians campaigning on “tough” immigration policies can be traced to the same cultural and societal shifts in both places. The Reuters piece also points to an interesting gender dynamic in immigration practices, with the assumption that “sunni men in particular are not at risk under the Taliban.” Linking this back to the drone-warfare element makes me wonder how more technologically advanced wars are changing the proof required to demonstrate one is imperiled or persecuted in one’s country of origin. Based on the investigations, wouldn’t all civilians be sufficiently endangered?

In watching Faith Under Siege, reading the articles, and listening to the podcast on Reuters, it becomes clear that war itself has changed and global cooperation or at  least nations holding one another accountable is more important than ever.

Like oil and nuclear weapons, drones have now become a resource that allows countries to have a greater chance at competing on the world stage, furthering their presence. This can be seen in the case of Ukraine, but even more interesting than the Ukrainian use of drones is the role civilians are playing in the war effort even though the country has a military.

 It had me curious how although the United States has a stronger military, what a potential war would look like if civilians had to get involved in fighting back. My initial thought is that various militia groups may jump at the charge to fight as many are anti-government, and they may think that if given technological resources, they can be more effective than any military branch could be. Whereas on the other hand, those same militias tend to be very far-right, and some members in these groups have admitted to wanting to cause chaos, and having violent fantasies.  They may use these drones and other technology to focus on a different common enemy that doesn’t align with the U.S government’s interests, not an opposing nation, but immigrants who they think don’t deserve to be in their country.  If this were the case, then civilians “contributing” to the war effort wouldn’t be any better than the individuals who are contributing to the increase in attacks on asylum seekers and refugee shelters in Berlin as written about in The Guardian article. 

What the readings, podcast, and documentary all represent is the quest for control and/or power in the face of the uncertainty that comes with war. Additionally, what the materials this week do a good job at is trying to show how the war impacts those at a local level who have seen devastation in their communities, how it is seen at a foreign policy level by heads of government, and diplomats, and how the current war on Ukraine has implications for technology going forward. 

Given the amount of time the war has gone on for, it’s easier to not always stay updated or to feel like it is a lost cause. As mentioned in the article, the author makes the claim that Putin has concluded that “Trump will never be serious about punishing Russia for its refusal to accept a ceasefire or engage in serious peace talks,” and he’s right. Trump seems to never push Putin on the issue, never prioritizing standing with the US’s European allies and instead only focusing on being besties with Putin as shown in his summit with him in Alaska that resulted in a photo op and asking politely for a ceasefire, in which Putin said no and there was no backtalk from Mr. Trump. 

Similar to where neighboring countries of Germany, the Netherlands, Denmark, and Belgium have all left Germany to uphold the international protection regime and to fight its immigration crisis by themselves. Inaction and not having a unified front is only giving into Russia and this is leading to more Ukranian’s lives being disrupted, anti-immigrant rhetoric increasing, and many immigrants living off a “bed, bread, soap” lifestyle when there is more that can and should be done.