Month: January 2013

The disgraced cyclist has admitted to Oprah that he doped. Alex Massie, who saw this confession coming, recently dubbed Armstrong “the greatest cheat in the history of sport”:

[C]ancer became a carapace protecting Armstrong from the slings and arrows of outrageous criticism. Never mind the sport, face up to the fact he inspired so much hope. Maybe so. But the sorry truth is that cancer proved useful to Lance Armstrong. It didn’t just reshape his body and equip him with a startling measure of mental fortitude, it also made his critics wonder if they – I suppose I mean, we – were heels, scoffing sourly at the greatest inspiration of the age. What kind of person reacts to such a noble prospect by wishing to destroy it?

A wise one, as it turns out. Pace Christopher Hitchens, just as it suited Mother Theresa to keep her people poor, so it suited Armstrong to swaddle himself in the community of cancer sufferers. They were his human shields.

TNC piles on:

I’m not sure what I think about drugging when everyone else around you is drugging. I don’t think lying is a very good idea. I think trying to destroy people for telling the truth is a good deal worse. It’s that all-out war that really sets Armstrong apart. This isn’t just a “doping scandal.” It’s something much creepier.

Michael Specter spells out why Armstrong came clean:

Lance wants to compete in triathlons and other sporting events and U.S.A.D.A. wont let him—unless he owns up to what he did. That’s his reason. He wants to get back on the bike. But he will only race again (and probably not for years, in any case) if he names names, implicates colleagues, coaches, friends—many of the very people he threated to destroy if they ever revealed the truth about him.

Despite having been spectacularly wrong about Lance in the past, I will make one more prediction: Lance will talk and talk and talk. After all, he wants something for himself, and what else matters to him?

In lieu of a comments section, more angry readers light up the in-tray:

WTF?  So now Jodie Foster is an “enabler of homophobia“? How is that exactly? Has she made homophobic remarks or films?  No. Has she pretended to be straight?  No. Has she lied about her sexuality (as opposed to telling everyone it was her own business)? No. Where’s the homophobia, Andrew?

Moreover, she never “mounted an incoherent attack on the coming out of others.”  Her plea for privacy was a cri de coeur against the ridiculous, celebrity-obsessed world in which live. It wasn’t an attack on other celebrities, out or otherwise.  If anything, it was an attack on us, the general public, and our insatiable appetite for gossip.

Every gay person in the closet is an enabler of homophobia. Every single one. And in the past two decades, silence also equaled death. Yes, I feel strongly about this. I don’t believe in outing but I do believe in helping your community when it is besieged and dying in the hundreds of thousands. And yes, privacy is trumped by mass death. And she was attacking other out gay people with her absurd parody of what coming out entails. Many readers are dissenting along these lines:

So Anderson Cooper is out in his private life, but not out publicly due to privacy concerns (although it is widely known he’s gay). Then he comes out publicly via you and it is a great and brave thing. And Jodie Foster is out in her private life, but not out publicly due to privacy concerns (although it is widely know she is gay). Then she comes out publicly during an awards show, after having done something similar years ago, well before Cooper. But Foster’s actions are horrible, just horrible.

Not her actions. Her rhetoric. Compare Anderson’s honest, reasoned email with Foster’s incoherent, narcissistic rant and veiled attack on other out gay people. She attacked people for coming out at press conferences. Anderson didn’t. She effectively did. And I’ll just ask you one thing. What if she were Jewish, had hidden her Jewishness for “privacy” reasons, and then announced it publicly, while berating those who parade their public identity as Jews as some kind of grandstanding? When you think of it that way, you realize just how soaked in homophobia so much of our public discussion still is. Another:

And Hollywood royalty? Please. If Foster is, she didn’t inherit it; she worked her ass off to beat the odds. What really pains me is how easy it seems for critics to completely dismiss the fact that this woman fought to make the successful transition from child to adult actress and went on to be a director and producer in Hollywood, which, I don’t think I have to point out, is still a very rare occurence in that Boys’ Club. But helping knock down barriers for women in an industry that is shamefully every bit as sexist as it is homophobic counts for nothing because she didn’t officially come out the way that you think she should have?

So why did this feminist icon invite as her date a man who beat and threatened to kill his own wife, who has uttered vile anti-Semitic and homophobic rants? And why did she say he “saved” her? Seriously? You want her to be a feminist icon and ignore that? Why the fuck is he involved in this at all? Unless Foster’s politics are closer to his than we realize. Another reader:

Given that when accepting her Lifetime Achievement Award, the camera kept cutting away to Mel Gibson’s hideous mug, it was kind of weird to read a blurb on Wikipedia today that Jodie Foster has spent the past decade attempting to get a biopic of Leni Riefenstahl made, starring herself as the notorious Nazi filmmaker. Foster thinks Riefenstahl was “complicated” – that perhaps she got a bum rap. I hope Foster really is retiring now.

Maybe her date, Mel Gibson, will finance it. Another:

On the Foster speech, I think you are missing some of her broader point and perhaps willfully conflating her desire for privacy with the issue of sexuality. When I listened to her, I interpreted her statement that “Some day, in the future, people will look back and remember how beautiful it once was” as a simple statement that we’ll feel nostalgic about a time when we were not under 24 hour surveillance, tracked by the GPS in our phone, monitored in the books we read on our e-readers, or inspected by probing hands simply because we want to catch a plane. I feel that nostalgia. I can’t believe she was thinking that closeted sexuality was a beautiful thing. Really? I think you’re a more astute reader than to think she was speaking only in terms of sexuality. Part of the incoherence of her speech came from the complexity of our identities.

Another:

Sure, everyone is allowed to come out in his or her own way.  I am not gay, so I would never presume to suggest there is a “right” way to come out. That being said, what I found most disturbing about Jodie Foster’s rambling and confusing speech (don’t get me started on her “date” Mel Gibson), is that she seemed to be declaring herself on the high road while disparaging anyone who came out publicly.  As if protecting one’s privacy  – though her speech was a direct contradiction to her argument for privacy – is nobler than standing up for who you are.  As if she should be honored for not acknowleding her gayness because that’s how we do it in polite society.  Forget that kids are bullied to death for being gay. Forget that she has a fortress of success and money to protect her… SHE is the noble and persecuted one.  Give me a break.  She can live whatever life she wants, but her speech was disgusting to me.

You will probably watch a lot more of this 25-minute tour of the International Space Station than you think:

From the reader who passed it along:

It is my favorite Internet video in years. I couldn’t help but smile a million miles wide as I watched it.

Update from a reader:

I don’t watch anything online that has a TRT of longer than 30 seconds, my attention span ruined by the web. I can barely stand a 5 second preroll ad in front of a video. I scoffed at your preface that “you will probably watch more of this than you think.”

But I watched it all. What a tour guide Williams is.

I was remiss in not pointing out this disgusting piece of filth from the current president of Egypt:

“Either [you accept] the Zionists and everything they want, or else it is war. This is what these occupiers of the land of Palestine know – these blood-suckers, who attack the Palestinians, these warmongers, the descendants of apes and pigs.”

He didn’t say this as president of Egypt and he has shown a modicum of restraint toward Israel and the US since being elected. But that doesn’t excuse this kind of eliminationist rhetoric, so appallingly common in the Arab Middle East. Goldblog wonders why more wasn’t made of this in the US press. He’s right to criticize and I should have picked up on it.

But in the last few weeks, we have heard the word “anti-Semite” used promiscuously to describe Chuck Hagel, a man light years away from anything like this kind of poison. And Hagel isn’t the only victim of this kind of smear. Any dissenter from the Greater Israel Lobby – as extreme and as irrational a lobby as the NRA – is given this treatment. Do these fanatics not see that they are constantly trivializing one of history’s great hatreds by tossing this term around so casually to score cheap political points? Do they not understand they are empowering real anti-Semitism by attacking those of us who desperately want Israel to survive and prosper, but who, since 2008, have simply been appalled by the current government’s extremism, intervention in US politics, and contempt for the interests of the US?

Crying wolf when it comes to anti-Semitism is a very, very dangerous game. I’m past being offended. But I’m not past being concerned about the consequences for trivializing it the way so many neoconservatives have.

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Would Kathryn Bigelow and Mark Boal care to refute this – as the Senate Intelligence Committee has insisted? When war criminals use the movie as justification for their torture, will Bigelow and Boal stand up against them? That will tell us a great deal about their motives and their integrity.

“It was his time to go” – some very dark humor from the New York Post.

Rebecca J. Rosen profiles the Huge-LQG, a distant wall of galaxies that scientists at University of Central Lancashire have uncovered as “quite definitely [the] largest structure ever seen in the entire universe”:

Because the Huge-LQG is so, well, huge, and particularly because it is located so near another huge object, the results throw into doubt the cosmological principle, an assumption that traces back to Einstein, which presupposed that given a large enough scale, the universe should look the same everywhere you look. But with an object this extraordinarily large, it seems that that region of the universe is quite unusual. Even given the cosmological principle, you expect to see some unusually large features, but the Huge-LQG exceeds even the largest expected size “substantially,” [Head of research] Clowes wrote to me over email. “Some of our previous findings came close, but didn’t exceed it. This one does.”

Eric Idle needs to update.

Today on the Dish, Andrew pursued the larger implications of “native ads” after The Atlantic’s apology for its Scientology spot. He digested Kathryn Bigelow’s remarks on Zero Dark Thirty’s veracity, and asked her whether she appreciates all the praise from torture-mongers like Hannity. Disgusted by Egyptian President Morsi’s unearthed remarks on Isrealis, Andrew lamented the effect of the Hagel smears on calling out real anti-Semitism. He also took on more readers for his criticism of Jodie Foster, and introduced us to his friend Norma Holt.

In political coverage, we assessed both the past and future of Obama’s debt-ceiling strategy and wondered whether the return of pork might satisfy Congress’s appetite for progress. Frum and Tomasky counted the ways the NRA blew their latest anti-Obama ad, but not without some pushback from readers. Meanwhile, Jamelle Bouie wasn’t ready to count the South out of politics, Drum took his lead-crime argument all the way to the question of race and Yglesias pondered the economic effects of a super-sleep drug.

On the foreign beat, we looked at why Malians are supporting French boots on their ground, Michael J. Totten weighed the benefits of monarchy against democracy, and Liam Hoare traced the latest spat over the Falkland Islands. Also, we studied Israel’s increasing drift to the right and remembered a time when American cities looked quite a bit like smoggy Beijing.

In assorted coverage, we reflected on the real crux of the Lance Armstrong scandal, figured out what to make of Coke’s fresh ad campaign, and promised thatthis video from NASA will keep you glued to the screen. Trevor Butterworthenvisioned the death of punditry in the new era of automated content analysis, as Tom Vanderbilt explored the streaks of bigotry in Google search queries. Rebecca Greenfield waxed pessimistic about Amtrak’s WiFi overhaul while Aymar Jean Christian downplayed the potential for web series to innovate TV.

While Shalom Auslander struggled to reconcile his rabbis loving words with his awful deeds, Rebecca J. Rosen glanced at the new biggest object in the universe. We witnessed film critics and skateboarders overcome their blindness, and Freddiesearched the English language for the singular “their.” We trekked up to Fairbanks, Alaska for today’s VFYW, watched an old game take on a new rhythm in the MHB, and had to tip our hat to The New York Post’s penchant for black comedy.

– B.J.

(Video: A riveting tour of the International Space Station that a reader calls “my favorite Internet video in years.”)