Year: 2013

After watching a screener of the new documentary League of Denial: The NFL’s Concussion Crisis, Dan Amira winced his way through Monday Night Football:

Like many football fans, I’ve always cringed a little during those big, loud helmet-to-helmet hits, the ones you can almost feel in your own neck as you watch them. But now, even during the mundane plays, I couldn’t shake the thought that men were mortgaging their futures away, and perhaps shortening their lives significantly, for my entertainment.

Andrew Sharp applauds the film for making the facts of the matter – and thus the moral quandary – “as clear and undeniable as possible”:

Nothing in the documentary is breaking news, but if nothing else, it gives us a definitive document of all the NFL’s hypocrisy and ignorance that’s defined this battle from day one. … I love football, and I hate talking about concussions, but everything we know about football makes it impossible to choose between the two without being just as reprehensible as an NFL doctor.

Eric Levenson describes football fans one of the “losers” of the documentary:

After watching, it’s hard not to feel conflicted about the sport, particularly after hearing about Pittsburgh Steelers lineman “Iron Mike” Webster, whose football-caused head injuries led to an early death. The documentary showed parts of his autopsy and it wasn’t pretty for fans to see: cracked feet, disfigured legs, and a brain filled with tangled tau protein, the tell-tale signs of Chronic Traumatic Encephalopathy, the degenerative condition most associated with damaged football players. And as a fan, it’s hard not to feel a little responsible for that.

Fantasy football enthusiast Greg Pollock wonders what responsibility fans like him bear for transforming NFL players “from real people into collections of stats”:

To succeed in a game, the player must distinguish information that serves his goal from information that does not. Becoming a better player means doing more of that automatically, without thinking, before thinking. For serious fantasy players—and it is hard not to play fantasy without becoming serious about it – that means automating the process by which we ignore information that does not affect points earned. This warps the way we watch football – Frank Gore blocked so Vernon Davis could get the touchdown? What a useless idiot!—but also the way we think about the league as a broader institution.

Meanwhile, Evin Demirel asks if the film could mark a turning point for the NFL:

[A]fter you’re through with the film, you can’t help but feel that the league’s days of dominance are numbered, even if League isn’t what ultimately destroys it. It’s not that football is too violent; it’s that we now know too much about that violence’s effects. A tipping point of mothers who find the sport dangerous will inevitably be reached, and football will become yet another relic of America’s past, one of those things it’s embarrassing we used to love.

Previous Dish on League of Denial here. To read our extensive thread on head injuries in professional sports, go here.

A reader writes:

Your acceptance of the “simply morally unacceptable” eating habits that you currently follow leads you to the “eat less meat, or eat better-raised meat” solution. That seems like an obvious, and perfectly reasonable, reaction when one views the evidence surrounding factory farming. But would that actually satisfy one’s moral compass? While eating less meat by definition reduces the number of animals killed, it implicitly gives sanction to eating some meat. I don’t think society generally accepts that sort of logic when approaching other acts that are morally frowned upon.  It would not be acceptable for the US to waterboard fewer prisoners, a rapist to target fewer victims, or an abusive father to beat his children less often, and claim to be acting in a morally upright manner.

And the option of only eating more humanely raised/killed meat is simply not a realistic option.  While specialty stores may stock meat that purports to be miraculously free of animal suffering, it is often little more than a marketing ploy.  The overwhelming majority of meat sold (in order to be economically competitive) comes from factory farms.  The same applies to the egg and dairy industries.

Eating less meat, or eating better-raised meat, as a morally-sound solution is simply a lie that many of us tell ourselves to feel better about our current habits.

I’m trying to be realistic here. Another vegan is less rigid and has some very helpful tips on cruelty-reduction:

You correctly state that people can still make big differences through their food choices in ways that suit their needs and desires. I would like to offer some guidance on that. No deep thoughts, just some practical advice. (Yes, some advice on eating animals from a vegan. Anything to reduce suffering!)

To begin with, if you want to reduce suffering as much as possible and still include animal products in your diet, reduce anything from pigs or birds.

These are by far the most abused animals in farming today because they can both be raised indoors in tight confinement. They have body parts hacked off to minimize the problems of living in such confinement, among other reasons. Pigs and birds are both very intelligent and social (crows are one of the five most intelligent non-human animals on earth). I believe you are totally wrong when you suggest that chickens have a low level of emotional experience – that describes clams, mussels, and oysters (but likely not most fish). Further, a single chicken yields far less meat than a single cow, so chickens are tortured in vast numbers.

First reduce or eliminate eggs, chicken, and turkey; and pork, ham, and bacon. Next on the reduce/eliminate priority list is dairy. Buy delicious nut milk cheeses and coconut milk/almond milk/soy milk/rice milk yogurt and ice cream.

Beef and lamb are much better choices, as they must live at least some of their lives out in pasture. “Grass fed” is good but deceptive, as they do end up in CAFOs eating grain. Grass-fed and grass-finished beef is better, as they don’t end up in feedlots – this is probably the closest to the “one bad day” school of agricultural animal welfare.

Be very suspicious of feel-good labeling, as most of it is highly deceptive. Terms like “cage free”; “free range”; “natural”; “humane” etc. are mostly used on products from atrocious factory farms. Do not believe them! Look for stores or products that use the labeling system from the Global Animal Partnership, as Whole Foods does, and try to stay in within the green labels. If you feel you must use eggs, make sure they are “pasture raised” or “pastured” – these still surely have their problems but are vastly better than anything without some form of the word “pasture” on them, when that word is used honestly.

Try ideas like Vegan Before Six, Meatless Mondays, meat as a small part of dishes, only on weekends or for special occasions, or any such approach that works for you. Buy vegetarian/vegan cookbooks. Read Jonathan Safran Foer’s book Eating Animals. Watch the documentary Earthlings (narrated by Joaquin Phoenix; music by Moby).

Of course if you add the environmental concerns to the cruelty concerns, then that may bring you closer to vegan … maybe, someday. Either way, everyone can help reduce suffering.

You may recall, even though it feels like a couple of centuries ago now, that there was quite some debate about the decision to hand over responsibility for Syria’s chemical weapons program to the UN, headed up by the Russians. Here is Mike Doran, who was on AC360 Later with me on Sep. 10:

It wouldn’t surprise me if, weeks from now, President Obama were attending the United Nations General Assembly while still holding meetings about a U.N. resolution to compel Assad to give up his chemical weapons. I guarantee you that as we speak, Assad’s chemical weapons team is frantically pouring bottles of Chanel No. 5, which Hezbollah stole from Lebanon, into missile shells that it will deliver to the U.N. in an elaborate demonstration of compliance with the agreement. We will take one whiff, call it perfume, and cry foul.

Surprise!

Russian officials and Secretary of State John Kerry have lauded the Syrian government for its cooperation with the preliminary work of the experts, sent by the Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons, a group based in The Hague that ensures compliance with the treaty banning them. Syria’s government joined that treaty last month after having spent decades amassing an enormous stockpile of the munitions and refusing to acknowledge it possessed them.

Syrian state television released a brief video on Tuesday showing the organization’s experts at work. The experts oversaw the first destruction of components on Sunday, with the goal of rendering inoperable all of Syria’s production, mixing and filling equipment by Nov. 1.

Perhaps Doran still believes this is all a “Potemkin disarmament effort,” as he once tweeted. I’d like to see him defend that posture against the current facts on the ground. Speaking of people who know nothing and never get called on it, here’s a statement about the UN agreement from Senator John McCain and Butters from less than a month ago:

We cannot imagine a worse signal to send to Iran as it continues its push for a nuclear weapon. Without a U.N. Security Council Resolution under Chapter 7 authority, which threatens the use of force for non-compliance by the Assad regime, this framework agreement is meaningless. Assad will use the months and months afforded to him to delay and deceive the world using every trick in Saddam Hussein’s playbook. It requires a willful suspension of disbelief to see this agreement as anything other than the start of a diplomatic blind alley, and the Obama Administration is being led into it by Bashar Assad and Vladimir Putin.

And yet what we learn today is that by November 1, “all of Syria’s production, mixing and filling equipment” will be inoperable. Will this buffoon ever concede this? Of course not. The same statement accuses Assad of deceiving the world like Saddam. But Saddam’s ultimate deception was leaving the impression that he had WMDs, when he didn’t. It appears McCain has yet to absorb the most basic fact of the last war he successfully lobbied for (he’s unsuccessfully lobbied for a few dozen since, if memory serves).

Here’s Jeffrey Goldberg who knows so much about the complexities of the Middle East:

This plan probably won’t work. Assad is a lying, murdering terrorist, and lying, murdering terrorists aren’t, generally speaking, reliable partners, except for other lying, murdering terrorists.

Wrong again! More neocon wrongness from Jon Tobin at the magazine that roasts war criminals, Commentary:

[T]he Russian-sponsored process to get rid of Assad’s chemical weapons is an invitation for the Syrian tyrant to delay and obstruct any efforts to actually remove the toxic material and lock the U.S. into a partnership with a man that even United Nations Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon labeled as a criminal.

So why are the UN, the US, and Russia so happy with how things have worked out thus far? Now, of course, this is still an early stage, and we may have to wait a much longer time to see the real truth. But I seriously doubt any of these alleged hard-nosed foreign policy experts would have predicted the thoroughness of the Syrian cooperation so far, do you? I doubt it just as much as the idea that they will ever concede error, even when it is staring them, like newly-charred bodies in Baghdad, in the face.

(Photo: U.S. Sen. John McCain (R-AZ) speaks about recent developments in Syria September 17, 2013 in Washington, DC. The senator was speaking during a forum at the Council on Foreign Relations. By Mark Wilson/Getty Images.)