Month: June 2013

What’s A Bisexual Anyway? Ctd

Readers have added several more questions to our survey:

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Cross-tabulated results will be posted soon. A reader writes:

I confess to being a fascinated outsider (a dude who doesn’t desire men), but if you’re wondering where all the out bisexual men are, look no further than these reader emails to see why they’re so scarce. You have a reader who “doesn’t believe” in bisexuality in guys, and then another “I know from personal experience” addendum. Well, fancy that! Do these guys have any idea how condescending that sounds? To tell someone else “I don’t believe you exist,” or to say “trust me, I know you better than you know yourself” Imagine if a straight guy like me told a gay guy that I “don’t believe” in homosexuality, or that “I know from person experience” that it’s only possible to desire females. I’d be called an absolute wingnut bigot, and rightly so.

I expect religious nutters to hate on anyone who isn’t straight, but I didn’t expect to find such ridiculous intolerance within the “LGBT community.” This is turning into a more fascinating read than I had first anticipated.

Another reader:

“You won’t find any truly bisexual men”?  Hi, I’m a 34-year-old truly bisexual man. I’m married – does it matter to which gender? – because I believe in monogamy. My partner knew my orientation 15 minutes after we met, as has every potential partner that came before. My friends know. My family knows. My co-workers do not, but I work in the government and talking about personal relationships (beyond socially accepted marriage and children) is frowned upon. Co-workers in former jobs knew, however, especially in my 20s when I was dating more frequently.

Unsurprisingly, I’m pretty tired of the sentiment from your reader whose personal experience is somehow a proxy for “data” on the subject. I’ve heard from many people over the years that my orientation is a denial, or a fetish on breaking social mores, or a phase, or a linguistic trick, or something that will settle down when I meet the right person. Partners who have suggested this to me are often surprised at how swiftly they become ex-partners.

I don’t care who came before, who hurt their feelings, how many people have just flat out lied to them. I fought to understand myself for a long time – struggled with religious upbringing, family acceptance, and the social stigma levied by straights and gays alike – and have come to the conclusion that I get to decide who I am. Sorry haters!

At the same time, I understand his frustration.

I think the root of the problem with talking about orientation is that it conflates two types of love – sexual and relational – that are rarely expressed in the same proportion to both genders, regardless of an individual’s orientation. In my 20s, I felt more attraction to dating one gender and sleeping with the other. Though those comfort levels converged sharply over the years, I suppose I’m still not “true” enough to say that I’d approach a relationship with a man the same way I would approach one with a woman.

But then again, why the hell do I need to? What is wrong with this picture that I’ve got to justify this definition of my identity? And believe me, as an out bisexual, when I let someone know, they always have more questions. ALWAYS. (Even before I was married.) Does that happen to straights and gays anymore? I honestly don’t know. But if I were any less secure of a person socially, I’d probably keep my orientation to myself and try to fit with something simpler. Which is why I think your reader’s inability to “believe” in a “true” male bisexual is one of the very reasons he can’t meet one.

Another:

Your reader writes, “While many may disagree with me and that’s fine, I don’t find bisexuals threatening because I don’t believe in them.” This is the problem.

When I was a teenager in the early 1990s, I was attracted to other young men. I was raised Southern Baptist, so this was obviously verboten, and years of prayer failed to make the gay go away. My entire sexual outlook was subsumed with the idea that being attracted to men was wrong. The strange part is that I was sexually attracted to women, but to my teenage logic being attracted to men meant that I couldn’t be attracted to both. (Emotional attraction has never been an issue.) I read enough on AOL – this was the 1990s – to know that “bisexuals don’t exist” and “bisexuals are just what gay men who aren’t comfortable being gay call themselves.” In college, I actively embraced that logic and chalked up my attraction to women as trying to fit in.

When I was 21, I had sex for the first time with a woman, and I thought, “This is great.” I wanted to date women, but my gay friends gave me such a hard time when I shared my “secret” that I felt ashamed: from “you’re lying to yourself” to “would any woman date you if she knew you had had sex with men?”

When I was 25, I moved to Washington, DC, where I decided to be straight. It was a failure because it was horrible lying. I felt that I was playing a straight man when I fact I knew I was sexually attracted to men. Sex aside, how could I talk about college without talking about my life? I thought that women would reject me for my background, but it was really lying to my friends that was the hardest.

For about six years I vacillated between trying to be simply gay to being simply straight. Neither option worked for me: I was unhappy lying to gay men and women about my actual sexual desires, and I was hurt by gay men mocking my sexuality and scared women would reject me out of hand. Eventually my frustration grew to the point of severe depression.

After a lot of counseling, I say that I am bisexual. I once joked to my counselor that “I must be the only man who’s been ashamed he is interested in women.” His solution has worked well for me: admit that my sexuality is fluid and be honest. Unsurprisingly, many of my gay friends have rejected my statement out of hand, but I have a number of gay and straight friends who have seen my evolution over the past 15 years to know that I am who I am. I’ve dated both men and women since admitting this, and I currently have a girlfriend who knows my entire history.

It may be true that there are few bisexual men, but we do exist. I’d much rather be not bi, but it’s the hand I’ve been dealt. But it’s a hell of a lot better being honest about my sexuality.

Another:

I have been following this discussion thread with much interest. It is not easy to discuss to the subject of bisexuality with others. I have identified as bisexual since college. When I first accepted this part of my identity, I came out to my friends and family as gay. The primary reason was because I wanted to explore my sexuality and did not want to have to deal with the pressure from family to suppress my same-sex desire and exclusively date women. After I broke up with my first boyfriend, I decided to tell my family the truth. Since that point, as expected, they have pressured me to get married to a woman and have children. While I am not opposed to that idea, I would like to be free from the pressure and have the ability to pursue romantic interests on my own terms.

My bisexuality also poses problems for me in dating women. The other night I was talking to a girl I have interest in who knows I am bisexual and she said that I need to figure out what I want and stop being confused. I told her what I want is a committed relationship with someone who I love, but it could be with a man or woman. Like some of your other readers, my sexuality varies, meaning sometimes I am more interested in women than men, and vice-versa. However, when I am with someone, I am with that person.

This is the main problem I think most people have with bisexuality. They think that if they are in a relationship with a bisexual, then that person will occasionally want (or need) to be with a person of the opposite sex as them. I cannot speak for other bisexuals, but like most people, I may get caught looking at other men and women, but I have no desire that I need to act on due my bisexuality, if I am already in a committed relationship.

In short, it is hard to navigate the world as a bisexual, which may be why people chose to identify in terms of gay or straight, and why many bisexuals never explore the other part of their sexuality. It is tricky to navigate family relations, as parents want grandchildren and are upset that you are not with a woman, despite the potential for such a relationship. On the other hand, my first boyfriend broke up with me largely because he was disgusted and insecure about the fact that I also liked women (a fact I did not tell him upfront, but in my defense I was wrestling with my identity at that time).

This is why discussions like this one are so important. I am not bisexual because I am a closeted gay or a postmodernist who believes in (but does not have a) fluid identity and want to explore a possibility. I am a man who is attracted to both men and women, who dates both and wants to settle down with a special someone. Hopefully, Mr/Mrs right comes my way, because like most people, all I really want is someone to share my life with who never feels the need to question my commitment to him/her.

How Predictable Is Popularity?

Ozgun Atasoy describes a research experiment that explored the question:

As one would expect, when people are better connected, they tend to unite around popular decisions. But research also suggests that social connection — fostered by Twitter, say — also makes crowds fundamentally less predictable. With social media connecting people to an unprecedented degree, it is possible that the sudden emergence of unexpected collective action will be a defining feature of this era.

Matthew Salganik, Peter Dodds, and Duncan Watts conducted large-scale experiments to investigate the effect of the strength of social influence on collective action. People were given a list of previously unknown songs from unknown bands. They listened to the songs and downloaded them if they wanted to. In the independent condition, people did not see other people’s choices. In the social influence condition, people saw how many times each song had been downloaded by others. The collective outcome in the social influence condition was more unequal. That is, popular choices were much more popular under social influence. When the researchers increased the strength of social influence by displaying the songs in a table ordered by popularity, the collective outcome became even more unequal.

After the events around Gezi Park unfolded, there were attempts at explaining why they happened. Events seem inevitable retrospectively. But the truth is most people did not know that the uprising was coming. But was it knowable? In other words, could a sophisticated observer accurately predict the events?

Salganik, Dodds, and Watts looked at the collective outcomes in eight different “worlds.” That is, eight separate groups of people downloaded songs under social influence. The collective outcomes in different “worlds” were different. Even though people in different “worlds” were indistinguishable and they did the same task under the same conditions, the collective outcomes were different. When the researchers increased the strength of social influence, the collective outcome became even more unpredictable. That is, the difference between the popularities of a given song in different “worlds” increased as the strength of social influence increased. Apparently, in collective decisions there is an inherent unpredictability that cannot be resolved by carefully examining the initial conditions and decision makers. Stronger social influence results in more unpredictability.

Picking A Pseudonym

Matt Soniak sums up the reasoning of eight classic authors:

George Orwell: When Eric Arthur Blair was getting ready to publish his first book, Down and Out in Paris and London, he decided to use a pen name so his family wouldn’t be embarrassed by his time in poverty. He chose the name George Orwell to reflect his love of English tradition and landscape. George is the patron saint of England and the River Orwell, a popular sailing spot, was a place he loved to visit.

Lewis Carroll: While Lewis Carroll might sound delightfully British to American ears, Charles Lutwidge Dodgson is even more so. Dodgson adopted his pen name in 1856 because, according to the Lewis Carroll Society of North America, he was modest and wanted to maintain the privacy of his personal life. When letters addressed to Carroll arrived at Dodgson’s offices at Oxford, he would refuse them to maintain deniability. Dodgson came up with the alias by Latinizing Charles Lutwidge into Carolus Ludovicus, loosely Anglicizing that into Carroll Lewis and then changing their order. It was chosen by his publisher from a list of several possible pen names.

Recent Dish on Orwell here, here, and here, and on Carroll here and here.

Typeface-Off

To illustrate how typeface design affects how we read, Chris Gayomali describes an experiment by Phil Renaud, a college student who noticed his grades were climbing despite no conscious attempt to improve his performance:

What he did change, however, was his essay font — three times, in fact. Renaud went back and looked at his [52] essay scores and the different typefaces he’d used when he submitted his work. His papers were handed to his professors in three different fonts: Times New Roman, Trebuchet MS, and Georgia. Here’s what he tallied:

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Why did Georgia — which he switched to later on in his college career — perform better than the others? Here’s what Renaud wrote:

Maybe fonts speak a lot louder than we think they do. Especially to a professor who has to wade through a collection of them; Times seems to be the norm, so it really doesn’t set off any subconscious triggers. Georgia is enough like Times to retain its academic feel, and is different enough to be something of a relief for the grader. Trebuchet seems to set off a negative trigger, maybe just based on the fact that it’s not as easy to read in print, maybe on the fact that it looks like something off a blog rather than an academic journal. Who knows. [Source]

For the record, the Dish comes to you in Georgia. In other font news, graphic designer Sang Mun has created an “NSA-proof font”:

Sang has no illusions that even a clever cryptographic font—which he says you can use in email messages to shield them from snoops and font-recognition bots—will remain encoded for long. They’re not meant to be long-term tools with which to combat the NSA. Rather, he views them as an awareness-raising measure.

Earlier Dish on typeface here.

(Hat tip: Tess Malone)

Why Engineering Students Need The Humanities

John Horgan makes the case:

[I]t is precisely because science is so powerful that we need the humanities now more than ever. In your science, mathematics and engineering classes, you’re given facts, answers, knowledge, truth. Your professors say, “This is how things are.” They give you certainty. The humanities, at least the way I teach them, give you uncertainty, doubt and skepticism.

The humanities are subversive. They undermine the claims of all authorities, whether political, religious or scientific. This skepticism is especially important when it comes to claims about humanity, about what we are, where we came from, and even what we can be and should be. Science has replaced religion as our main source of answers to these questions. Science has told us a lot about ourselves, and we’re learning more every day. But the humanities remind us that we have an enormous capacity for deluding ourselves.

His case seems to be supported by recent research indicating that reading serious fiction can help us resist “cognitive closure”:

[Psychologist Maja] Djikic and her colleagues describe an experiment featuring 100 University of Toronto students.

After arriving at the lab and providing some personal information, the students read either one of eight short stories or one of eight essays. The fictional stories were by authors including Wallace Stegner, Jean Stafford, and Paul Bowles; the non-fiction essays were by equally illustrious writers such as George Bernard Shaw and Stephen Jay Gould.

Afterwards, each participant filled out a survey measuring their emotional need for certainty and stability. They expressed their agreement or disagreement with such statements as “I don’t like situations that are uncertain” and “I dislike questions that can be answered in many different ways.”

Those who read a short story had significantly lower scores on that test than those who read an essay. Specifically, they expressed less need for order and more comfort with ambiguity. This effect was particularly pronounced among those who reported being frequent readers of either fiction or non-fiction.

Karen Swallow Prior contemplates how reading fiction makes us human:

[R]eading, unlike spoken language, does not come naturally to human beings. It must be taught. Because it goes beyond mere biology, there is something profoundly spiritual — however one understands that word — about the human ability, and impulse, to read. In fact, even the various senses in which we use the word captures this: to “read” means not only to decipher a given and learned set of symbols in a mechanistic way, but it also suggests that very human act of finding meaning, of “interpreting” in the sense of “reading” a person or situation. To read in this sense might be considered one of the most spiritual of all human activities. It is “spiritual reading” — not merely decoding — that unleashes the power that good literature has to reach into our souls and, in so doing, draw and connect us to others.

Recent Dish on the humanities here.

“The Burmese bin Laden”

MYANMAR-UNREST-RELIGION

Max Fisher profiles the “spiritual leader” behind the violent anti-Muslim movement escalating among Buddhists in Burma:

[Ashin] Wirathu calls himself “the Burmese bin Laden” and was recently labeled on the cover of Time magazine as “the face of Burmese terror.” A prominent Burmese human rights activist, after a lifetime of fighting government oppression, now warns that Wirathu’s movement is promoting an ideology akin to neo-Nazism.

Already, the movement has expanded beyond this one self-styled radical Buddhist monk. It’s now expanding across Burma (also known as Myanmar) according to [a NY] Times article. The anti-Muslim sentiment has spread with alarming speed over just the last year, as Burma – which is finally opening up after years of military dictatorship – loosened its strict speech laws. It has prompted boycotts and sermons that can sound an awful lot like calls for violence against Muslims. Monasteries associated with the movement have enrolled 60,000 Burmese children into Sunday school programs.

Walter Russell Mead points out that no one in government is condemning the content of Wirathu’s sermons:

He frequently suggests there is a conspiracy afoot to turn Burma into a Muslim country, that Muslims will overrun “good” Buddhists, force them to convert to Islam, and steal their women and daughters and jobs. In his sermons, heard by thousands of people across the country, he describes violence against Muslims, like the massacre of children in Meiktila in March, as a show of strength.

Nevertheless, President Thein Sein lept to Wirathu’s defense, labeling him a “son of Buddha” and a “noble person” in an official statement. He made no mention of Wirathu’s hate-filled speeches, nor the rampaging mobs that burned and slaughtered their way through Muslim neighborhoods on several occasions earlier this year. As of this writing, celebrated human rights activist and Nobel Laureate Aung San Suu Kyi—whose earlier criticism of violence against Burmese Muslims was pretty weak, at best—has neither defended nor attacked Wirathu.

(Photo: Wirathu attends a conference about the religious violence that has shaken the country at a monastery on the outskirts of Yangon on June 13, 2013. By Ye Aung Thu/AFP/Getty Images)

Should We Maximize The Minimum Wage?

Nick Hanauer wants to raise it to $15:

True, that sounds like a lot. When President Barack Obama called in February for an increase to $9 an hour from $7.25, he was accused of being a dangerous redistributionist. Yet consider this: If the minimum wage had simply tracked U.S. productivity gains since 1968, it would be $21.72 an hour — three times what it is now.

Felix is on board:

There are surely some US jobs which simply aren’t economic at $15 per hour, and those jobs will end up being lost. (In aggregate, as I say, raising the minimum wage is probably good for employment, but the extra jobs at employers taking advantage of all that extra spending aren’t going to be in the same places as the jobs lost at employers who can’t afford to pay that much.) But the point here is that the US has already done a spectacularly good job of exporting most of its exportable low-wage work. As Hanauer says, “virtually all of these low-wage jobs are service jobs that can neither be outsourced nor automated”. As a result, raising the minimum wage will result in many fewer job losses now than it would have done a couple of decades ago.

Dylan Matthews, who isn’t necessarily opposed to small increases in the minimum wage, thinks that a $15 minimum wage is a “terrible idea”:

The evidence we have on the effects of minimum wage increases, [economics professor Arindrajit Dube] notes, are “limited to a historical period where statutory minimum wages have ranged between roughly 35% and 50% of the national median wage.” Hanauer’s proposal would put the minimum wage at roughly 75 percent of the national median, which Dube notes would put it higher than any OECD country, including several European social democracies. “We just do not know what a $15/hour minimum wage would do based on the type of careful research designs that have become the hallmark of modern labor economics, and ones I strive to use in my work,” Dube writes in an e-mail.

Matthews’ bottom line:

There’s a case to be made that mild increases in the minimum wage are worth it, either because one doesn’t believe in employment effects or because one believes the wage increases it causes are worth it. But Hanauer’s proposed increase is recklessly large and even supporters of minimum wage hikes don’t think it’s a serious option.

The Best Of The Dish Today

Well David Gregory asked for it.

If you read one thing today … this suicide note.

If you see one face today … make it this one.

A witness to an execution; the hair on women’s legs; and the best ASL interpreter ever.

The most popular posts were about David Gregory … and sex.

And yes, we only directly checked in on the white bronco once.

See you in the morning. Update from a reader:

Lots of playoff beards getting shaved off tonight – my condolences, Andrew. There’s always next season …

Brazil Is Still Broiling

Another update to the stellar coverage provided by Dish readers, this one from São Paulo:

Fortunately, even though the initial demands by the protesters have been met (the transit fare has returned to its previous level), the protests have continued. In fact, they are showing this amazing level of self-organization. Groups will march together and decide which route to follow, where to stop and chant, where to sit and block the street, etc. There will be announcements about when and where the next protest will happen, and once the end time is reached, the protest will end.

There have been protests for various things, the largest being against PEC 37, which if passed, will make it much harder to catch and convict wrong doers within the government (involved in corruption, the horrors of the military government, etc).

Among the other protests, there was a protest against the Cura Gay (Gay Cure), which if passed would allow psychiatrist/psychologists to offer treatments to those who want to cure their same-sex attraction. This has been outlawed by the government since 1999, as its fraud, the treatment does not exist, and the acceptance of it sends the wrong message. Keep in mind that a poll done asking whether Brazilians thought the law should be passed found that 49% did not believe it should be passed, 36% felt it should and 11% had no opinion. (I have been desperately searching for where I read these numbers, but haven’t been able to find the link.) Also, unlike the US, same-sex marriage is legal and is recognized by the federal government.

Of note, if the Cura Gay legislation is passed, gays may be able to retire or I suppose go on paid disability as they are “sick.” !!!!  Here’s the link. The Cura Gay is being pushed by Marco Feliciano, who is a Deputado Federal (roughly equivalent to a congressman in the US) and who is involved in the Assembleia de Deus (Assembly of God), one of the powerhouse churches of Brazil’s increasingly popular evangelical movement.

After the jump is a longer update from our reader. Meanwhile, Colin Snider pushes back against critics of the protesters:

As is all too often the case amongst neoliberal analysis, they falsely equated growth to development. Sure, Brazil’s economy had grown, but it also retained one of the higher levels of income inequality in the world. … Brazilians had been told for ten years that things had improved, that Brazil had finally “arrived,” and that they were now enjoying material and social benefits that they’d always been excluded from. And in some ways, there were real gains in the 2000s – the purchasing power of the working class and middle class strengthened somewhat, and programs like Bolsa Familia and Fome Zero helped millions of poor families. But at the first sign of economic instability, it all threatened to come apart… .

James Greiff refers to such insecurity as “the middle-class illusion” in Brazil:

Millions of Brazilians have indeed made it into the middle class and enjoy the trappings of a lifestyle that would be recognized by their economic peers in the U.S., Japan, Canada and most of Europe. They have iPhones and SUVs, Nike sneakers, Oakley sunglasses, take overseas vacations, enjoy imported delicacies, get braces to straighten teeth and plastic surgery to mask the wear of time.

They enjoy much of this material plenty, though, inside a personal-security bubble. Houses are fortified behind high walls topped by broken glass and barbed wire, while iron bars seal windows. Apartment complexes are similarly ring-fenced, with entranceways secured by guards, often bearing arms. These are needed not just to keep out robbers, but also so much else of what’s on the other side. Indeed, the middle-class illusion ends at the first step outside the front door.

And Joshua Tucker observes:

As Brazilians move into or climb up the middle class, they inevitably pay more in taxes – yet they also inevitably grow increasingly aware that they do not get their money’s worth. One commonly hears Brazilians complain that they pay “1st world taxes” – about 36% of GDP – but receive “3rd world services” in return. The protests thus represent growing frustration that established political parties are unwilling to implement reforms on both sides of the fiscal coin – to improve public services (particularly healthcare, education, and public safety) and reduce corruption.

Marc Tracy sees the ongoing protests as an outcome of urbanization:

This process upended centuries of a static social order in which the majority were denied many rights. Brazil’s urbanization, then, was in one sense a major step forward for most Brazilians, providing, as Holston put it, “a new density of opportunity” that stemmed from the literal density of the way people actually lived.

But the dialectical result of this new density and these new nominal rights has been that as tremendous inequality has remained—and when it has been ostentatiously exacerbated by, say, hosting international prestige projects such as the World Cup Finals and the Summer Olympics—Brazilians in the satellite cities on the peripheries (and even poorer Brazilians in the favelas, the frequently illegal shanty towns which are almost like the peripheries of the peripheries) have grown angry that their economic rights have not caught up with their political rights.

When you add to this mix the fact that everyone now lives closer to each other—another opportunity borne of density—you have the recipe for these massive protests.

However, when comparing Brazil to Turkey, James Traub finds that the former has democratic institutions better able to handle such strife:

While [Turkish Prime Minister] Erdogan has demonized his foes, President Dilma Rousseff of Brazil has praised protestors for waking the country to its shortcomings. Brazil, too, faces a crisis, but not a crisis of representation, as Turkey does. Larry Diamond, a leading democracy scholar at Stanford, points out that both Rousseff and her Erdogan-like predecessor, Luiz Inacio “Lula” da Silva, had to do far more political bargaining than Erdogan because they rule through coalitions while Erdogan controls a parliamentary majority. And the reason for this, in turn, is that Turkish law excludes parties from parliament which do not win more than 10 percent of the national vote. The Turkish system enables Erdogan’s worst impulses. Working with rival parties might force him to learn a few hard lessons.

Another update from our São Paulo reader on the ground:

The protests and protesters here have been overwhelmingly peaceful and the police response has been largely peaceful for over a week. Following a series of protests in which the Policia Militar (they are the police force for this type of situation) were being very brutal and injured not only protesters but also passersby and journalists, the state governor Geraldo Alckmin, who controls the PM, told them to cool it. Since then, the front-lines of the PM who are following the protests are largely not carrying guns.

On Saturday night, at this protest I was following the police seemed to be in a good mood, at times were laughing along with the protesters. All this while the protesters were halting traffic on busy thoroughfares. Fortunately, many of the drivers seemed to be in favor of the protest, and were honking their horns and giving thumbs-ups. The difference that I saw between now and a week and a half ago is downright shocking.

In other parts of the country, however, the situation is completely different. While it seems that the vast, vast majority of protesters are peaceful and only want to engage in peaceful actions, the police response has been BRUTAL. In this report on Globo’s Jornal Nacional, one can see footage of the police response during a huge protest that occurred in Rio on Thursday June 20th. This was a huge protest with tens of thousands of people. At one end of the avenue were vandals who decided to attempt to break into city hall and do general damage to their local area. But the rest of the crowd were peaceful protesters, many of whom hadn’t even take part in a previous protest out of fear of violence. The way I have described it to my worried American friends is imagine a protest from Times Square to 72nd Street along Broadway. The crowd is peaceful, except for those between 70th and 72nd.

The police response was brutal. Instead of just focusing on the troublemakers (those between 70th and 72nd), they decided to just go bananas, shooting tear gas and rubber bullets at protesters along the length of the crowd. In Globo’s report, there were people who were just waiting for the subway station to be reopened who were targeted. I came across reports of canisters of teargas being shot into bars where people are not even taking part in the protests, and tear gas was apparently even shot into a hospital.

In addition, there was a report in which three “protesters” were picking fights, yelling at the police and punching the horses of the mounted policemen (horrible!). The peaceful protesters (who were apparently everyone else) demanded that the police arrest these three vandals, but the police apparently refused and decided instead to shoot rubber bullets and tear gas at the entire group. The report was indicating that the bad protesters were planted there by the police to give them an excuse to be violent. Apparently, reporters were there but are no reporting this event. Here’s the link.

The police forces should be maintaining security for the peaceful protesters, in my opinion. Many of the people who have hit the streets have come out because of disgust at the violent police response. Brazilians have the constitutional right to protest and on this point Dilma agrees. However, the situation outside of what I have seen in the city of São Paulo has not changed.

Anyway, I don’t know where this is going. What I do know is that politicians have been incredibly spoiled by a populace who felt largely disenfranchised and who had accepted that the government was corrupt, there was no way to stop it, and let’s just focus on football, novelas and Big Brother. That feeling of disenfranchisement seems to have changed.

In this poll by Folha de São Paulo, 66% of people think the protests should continue. The fact that two-thirds of Paulistanos think the protests should continue is amazing, as the protests are negatively affecting all sorts of businesses (due to lack of customers), not to mention the traffic situation. For many of these people, their two-hour commute between work and home is growing even longer.

As everyone knows, Brazil has lots of problems, but Brazilians seem optimistic. According to Fantástico, Globo’s Sunday night news program, 94% percent of those polled thought that the issues pressing Brazil would be addressed, and 82% said they would not vote for a candidate who was corrupt. Here’s the link.