Year: 2013

Matt Steinglass debates the question:

America has reached a point of relative tolerance for diversity of sexual orientation today. Looking back 30 years, it’s not at all clear that this was destined to be the case. The formation of sexual identity is fraught with fear, and it’s to be expected that social and political players will take advantage of that fear to build in-groups, stigmatise out-groups, and mobilise power. I’m not sure that even Millennials could possibly not know how this works in America, but it certainly ought to be familiar to those of us who remember how culture and politics worked here in the early 1980s. If we’re looking for particular American elements that are lacking in Russia, I would say the most important would be any history of successful civil-rights movements by minorities, which Russia has never really known.

Of course that would suggest that neither a boycott of Sochi nor the display of rainbow flags is likely to accomplish much; and they won’t. Then again, since a boycott has zero chance of happening, what we’re really talking about here is whether to display rainbow flags. And we should. Why not?

That’s my feeling too. What Russia’s law does is something never done in America. In America, the First Amendment allowed for expression of ideas about homosexuality even when social attitudes and legal prohibitions were far harsher. For centuries, the First Amendment was gays’ only real recourse to ameliorate our lot. There would have been no gay rights movement without a free press, without the Mattachine Review, without the Daughters Of Bilitis, without the ability of Frank Kameny and others to march outside the White House in the 1950s. They could take everything from us but our right to speak in public – and yet it is precisely our right to speak publicly that Putin’s neo-fascist government bans.

That’s why Pat Buchanan’s glowing endorsement of Putin is so repellent: not because Buchanan doesn’t know full well how to offend and provoke (his comparison between gay Russians wearing rainbow buttons with the Nazis is lazily Coulterish even for him), but because he is, before anything, a writer and polemicist, and he is effectively supporting the suppression of writers and polemicists and even simple button-wearers in another country. He is so caught up with his own disdain for homosexual equality that he does not see that he is now attacking the very freedoms that made his entire life and career possible. Can you imagine him supporting a foreign country’s right to suppress religious speech? How then can he support one that suppresses simple public expression of the fact of someone’s sexual orientation.

And yet I’m struck by how many gay writers are leery. Jim Burroway:

[I]n Africa, the belief that LGBT rights and that gay people themselves are a product of foreign meddling. Those charges find fertile ground in Africa where European colonialism — and its import of sodomy laws — still casts a long shadow. That is why public threats of cutting foreign aid (as distinguished from private diplomatic engagement in which the same messages have been delivered) have sometimes been much more disruptive than helpful to LGBT advocates on the ground. The same potential effect could conceivably play out in Russia, where an attack on its laws, however repulsive and oppressive to human rights they may be, is seen as an attack on Russian sovereignty itself. This is where foreign protests can backfire.

I can see that. But, as so often with civil rights movements, there is also a very simple need: to speak out in defense of core human dignity. Russia’s ban on even public statements of homosexual orientation, i.e. speaking mere truth, is so sweeping, so all-encompassing, and so likely to spawn brutal personal persecution it simply demands we protest it. We’re Americans. To be told that we cannot even wear a rainbow button in public at an Olympics event is outrageous. What if Russia banned public statements of Jewish or Muslim identity from the stadium or Olympic village? Would there be any question that the Sochi Games would now be over?

This is an attempt to cleanse the public sphere of all references to gay people – and to do so at an international event, allegedly open to all.

It is designed to make gay people, wherever they are from, non-persons, to enforce the closet by force.

If we stand by and let that occur – and even allow it to be imposed on our own citizens when visiting Russia – we are complicit in the persecution. I’m not a boycotter, but I strongly believe that Putin cannot both get the prestige from the Olympic Games and enforce laws as prohibitive and radical as this suppression of speech. And if we keep our nerve, I think we can call the bully’s bluff. Yesterday, the US track star, Nick Symmonds, showed what’s possible. On Russian soil, he dedicated his silver medal to his gay and lesbian friends:

“As much as I can speak out about it, I believe that all humans deserve equality as however God made them,” Symmonds told Russia’s R-Sport. “Whether you’re gay, straight, black, white, we all deserve the same rights. If there’s anything I can do to champion the cause and further it, I will, shy of getting arrested.” “I respect Russians’ ability to govern their people,” he added. “I disagree with their laws. I do have respect for this nation. I disagree with their rules.”

Let’s see what Putin does to him. I don’t believe in kowtowing to bullies. I believe in standing up to them.

Recent Dish on protesting Russia’s anti-gay laws here and here.

(Photo: Nick Symmonds of the United States celebrates winning silver in the Men’s 800 metres final during Day Four of the 14th IAAF World Athletics Championships Moscow 2013 at Luzhniki Stadium on August 13, 2013 in Moscow, Russia. By Julian Finney/Getty Images.)

A reader writes:

You quoted Sam Anderson as saying, “The tradition goes back at least to Benjamin Franklin, who chased twisters on horseback, watching them chew paths through virgin Colonial forest.” While I found the article very interesting overall, this seems a bit fanciful. While Franklin was known for his interest in thunderstorms, it seems doubtful that he ever saw more than one or two tornadoes. Franklin’s home of Philadelphia is far from tornado alley, and while tornadoes do occur along the Eastern seaboard, they do so far less often than the Great Plains (there are some goods maps and data here).

In addition, storms that might be visible from miles away on the plains wouldn’t be in the virgin colonial forest. The Philadelphia area sees between one and three tornadoes per year per 10,000 square miles (larger than neighboring New Jersey; overall Pennsylvania sees 2.22 tornadoes per 10k sq mi per year) and I doubt Mr. Franklin had the means to easily traverse a 100-mile-square area to find these two tornadic storms each year. Even if he could easily ride 10 miles in search of storms, he’d have to wait 50 years before a tornado crossed his neck of the woods.

I’ve lived on the East Coast most of my life and never seen a tornado here (or, for that matter, even in Minnesota, where I lived for several years). While Ben Franklin’s interest in electrical storms is well-documented, I doubt he every paid mind to tornadoes.

Update from a reader:

Look, I don’t know whether Ben Franklin chased tornados or not, but your reader is flat-out wrong about tornados in Philadelphia.  I lived in downtown Philly for 12 years and we had several damaging tornados while I was there. I was in the 1989 tornado that cut a path 50 yards wide through Society Hill and killed a girl from my neighborhood. Here’s a video of the aftermath of the 2011 tornado. Heck, a tornado touched down in South Jersey an hour from Philadelphia this morning.

Another:

Your reader’s response is a novel way of answering the question of whether Franklin saw a tornado. Another way is to go look at what Franklin wrote himself!

A cursory search of the great website franklinpapers.org, which makes his extant writings and incoming correspondence freely available to academics and the public alike, shows that Franklin did write about “whirlwinds.” I didn’t spot any evidence that he saw one in person. The pressing question for him seemed to be explaining waterspouts at sea. These were reported by sailors plying the busy ocean shipping lanes of the eighteenth century. Arm-chair natural philosophers such as Franklin later sought to explain such reports after the fact (and gain some prestige back in Europe while they were at it). A contemporaneous paper presented by one John Perkins to the American Philosophical Society in 1786 seems to have argued that these funnels were formed out of rainwater. I haven’t had the chance to read the paper myself, but an academic review describes it as “essentially extrapolated speculation and almost wholly erroneous.”

Franklin looks to have been closer to the mark by arguing that waterspouts were caused by low atmospheric pressure at their center, pulling up water at sea or debris on land as the vortex descended. I’m sure that other readers can better assess the scientific details of Franklin’s theory compared to our current understanding of tornadoes. At the least, while it would be false to picture Franklin as an eighteenth-century storm chaser on horseback, he did a better job of analyzing the data that other people collected than some of his contemporaries.

The reader follows up:

As a quick addendum to my previous email, it seems that I misunderstood that Perkins piece from 1786.  Perkins makes some correct arguments about rainwater in spouts, despite many other errors in his piece compared to current science.  Rather than having me stray so far from my own knowledge, perhaps you or your readers would be interested in reading Perkins’ paper here.  There must be a waterspout expert somewhere in the world who reads your blog!  And I hope that the point stands that Franklin wasn’t chasing cyclones around on horseback.

(Video: An interview with the author of Storm Kings: The Untold History of America’s First Tornado Chasers)

Max Fisher argues that Mexico’s new plan to allow global oil giants like Exxon and Shell to invest in its state oil monopoly could “potentially revolutionize the Mexican oil and gas industry.” But not everyone is onboard:

Mexicans opposed to the reforms worry that it may be a step toward privatizing [state-owned firm] Pemex or the entire Mexican energy sector outright, something [President] Peña Nieto pledges not to do. John M. Ackerman, a prominent Mexican law professor and columnist aligned with the political opposition, argued that the proposal “exposes the gross ambition of big national and foreign companies to get themselves an even larger slice of the national wealth.” He disputed what he characterized as the pro-reform view that “greater ‘involvement’ by Exxon-Mobil and Halliburton will automatically benefit the Mexican people.” Ackerman’s view seems to be a common one among those opposed to the plan.

The Bloomberg editors, on the other hand, are excited:

Mexico has much more oil to find, but Pemex lacks the technology and knowledge to tap new and complex deepwater fields.

And because its finances and management are tightly controlled by the government, which relies on Pemex for about one-third of its revenue, it can’t make strategic investments. One analysis says that the money needed to exploit current opportunities is equivalent to 30 years of Pemex’s 2013 investment budget.

Passage of the reforms could unlock tens of billions in needed investment and lift Mexico’s annual growth by as much as two percentage points. A less-heralded but in some ways equally disruptive element of Pena Nieto’s proposal would break the electricity distribution monopoly of the state power company CFE, whose grip on power has left Mexicans with some of the highest electricity costs in the developed world.

The Economist is more pessimistic:

Whatever reforms the government announces, they will stop a long way short of privatising Pemex. It is so wrapped up in a myth of national sovereignty that even the energy minister, a champion of reform, insists that not a “single screw” will be sold. Reformists hope the government will at least let private firms work with Pemex to develop shale, deep-water and other challenging fields. But even this would require constitutional changes, and would face much resistance. Since Mexico has no significant private-sector oil industry, much of the investment would have to come from foreign firms, and for nationalists this would be hard to stomach.

Juan Carlos Hidalgo calls the proposed reforms “timid”:

Peña Nieto’s efforts to bring more private investment to Mexico’s oil industry should be commended. However, even if his energy reform is approved, Mexico will still have the most tightly state-run energy sector in the Americas (even more than Cuba and Venezuela). That, in itself, should indicate how much room for further reform will be needed.