Month: June 2013

Baseball’s War On Steroids, Ctd

Buster Olney reports (paywall) that a war is exactly what most MLB players want:

I’ve written this here before and it’s worth repeating now: In 1995, the players used as replacements during the MLBPA’s strike were treated as scabs thereafter, because they were perceived to be a threat to the union’s stance, and to the other players’ ability to make a living. Well, in 2013, players who choose to take performance-enhancing drugs to gain a competitive advantage over other union members are a far greater threat than the replacement players ever were, and worthy of much harsher treatment from their brethren. Because the players who choose to cheat have effectively chosen to try to take jobs and money illicitly from other union members.

Jonah Keri observes:

Fifteen, 20 years ago, the league and mainstream media were both content to let players smash home runs and fire 97-mph fastballs while said players consumed performance-enhancing substances; the league hadn’t properly codified which substances were allowed and which ones were not, while the media wrote fawning profiles of players who were later found to have used. No one likes to get duped, especially publicly. So we got an onslaught of hysterical articles slamming the league and its players for the spread of PED use. And now we have a league determined to beat back any criticism of its policies, even if it means suspending minor leaguers with flimsy evidence because they can’t defend themselves [because they don’t have a union], firing arbitrators for making honest decisions with which the league didn’t agree, and building cases based largely on the testimony of a broke alleged drug dealer.

Readers chime in:

I don’t have stats or figures or anything resembling first-hand knowledge, but I still think it’s worth pointing out the difference in the two situations. The drug war has been a decades-long bust. It has created many more problems than it has solved, and has not gotten near reducing drug-usage or any of its social or political or economic side-effects.  The baseball war on steroids, however, has certainly been a success.

The period of time from 1996-2010 alone saw the amount of people with 600+ career home runs more than double (Ruth, Aaron and Mays have been joined by five others). Records and precedent were constantly smashed, from Brady Andersons’s 50+ home runs as a leadoff hitter to the single-season home-run record being broken several times over. Of course, most importantly, many of these feats happened in the twilight of players careers, and statistically, Bonds, McGwire and Sosa (not to mention Clemens) had most or some of their best seasons in their 30s. Most athletes bodies break-down as they age, not get better (see: Ken Griffey Jr.).

Since baseball started getting serious about drug testing (not that it’s been a perfect system or successful quite yet), we have seen a return to the status quo. Albert Pujols, after one of the finest first-ten years of baseball ever, is slowing down. Derek Jeter’s been nursing an injury since last October, and has seen most of his stats trickle downwards. Alex Rodriguez has been injured consistently the last two years, as well. Star pitchers like Steve Strasburg or Josh Beckett and Cliff Lee are also breaking down in totally normal ways, that we just didn’t seem to see during the most prominent portion of the steroid era.

There will always be “cheats”, and as many point out, baseball has a wonderful history full of sign stealing, spit balls, and other questionable acts. But steroids are very rarely if ever now tainting the game and de-legitimizing it in ways that was prevalent a few years ago. Policies are definitely working and having an effect. The same cannot be said of the drug war.

Another:

The baseball steroid issue and war on drugs analogy is appropriate, but not for the reasons listed. The real issue is more free market oriented, i.e. about the money. Just as an inner city teen may wonder why he should work for minimum wage at McDonalds when he could make a ton of money selling drugs, look the income and lifestyle discrepancy between minor league baseball players and major league players. In the minors, you ride a bus from Rochester to Brooklyn and salaries range from $30-$125k a year. In the majors you get a private plane flying you from city to city and the league minimum of $480,000. If the steroids can bump you from the minors to the majors, that’s an immediate 284% (minimum) increase in your salary. And MLB clubs can’t void your contract if you test positive for PEDs.

Mental Health Break

Gabe highlights the latest from rising rap star Froggy Fresh:

Considering that the last two songs formed a darkly epic pair about the time that James killed Mike’s mom and then shot Mike, it is nice to see the most violent rap beef in the game getting squashed out on the b-ball court. It is SUMMER after all. But whether it’s in an emergency room or on a basketball court, James is still a bitch.

Kid-Friendly Chemo, Ctd

A reader writes:

The Batman logo on the chemo container seems cute and well-intentioned, but the fact is that chemo is such a horrible experience that can linger for years. Many people report feeling nauseous just from driving by the hospital where they got their treatment. So is the Brazilian hospital dooming these kids to feel queasy every time they see Batman’s logo for years to come? Can’t help but wonder.

Another:

Your post on a Brazilian hospital’s attempt to disguise chemotherapy as “superformula” awoke a strong resistance in me that I’m having difficulty fully understanding. I had Leukemia when I was 9-11 years old, so I know a thing or two about chemotherapy, and would say I hate it as much as anyone else. Suffering from cancer as a small child is unlike anything you could ever experience, and I understand the urge from adults to turn these children’s weakness into strength, their internal pain into power. But to do so underestimates the resiliency and stoicism I’ve seen in every childhood cancer sufferer I’ve ever met.

Those who survive deserve to know that they are fighting the greatest enemy they’ll ever face, and that their only ally will hurt them before it helps. They, like me, will leave understanding what true strength feels like and can wake every morning knowing they’ve already faced the worst day of their lives. Those who die – and sadly there are far too many – already know deep down that they are not like the other kids; there is a reason they don’t go home after a treatment cycle.

There is no need to be blunt about their future, but lying to them adds nothing to their quality of life. The three strongest people I’ve ever known never made it to 12 years old; every evening we would say goodbye for the last time, but then every morning we would play like … well, like kids.

I don’t mean to belittle kind-hearted efforts to improve the lives of kids who are facing such a tragedy. It is important to cheer up “cancer kids” (those Pittsburgh window washers you linked to would make anyone’s day). It is important to make them feel like they’re not alone. But pretending that chemotherapy isn’t the worst thing they’ll ever experience? Not only is that a lie that could make it harder for kids to understand what’s happening to them, but it’s a lie that assumes that they can’t handle the truth. They can.

What Makes SVU Special?

Emily Nussbaum ponders the popular appeal of Law & Order: Special Victims Unit:

You can pause an episode, you can laugh at a bad guy. The cheesiness (cha-chung!) is itself a reassurance. For young women, who are endlessly bombarded with warnings of how to avoid assault, watching can feel like a perverse training manual. What is it like to be cross-examined about your sex life? Is there any way to foil a home invasion?

For survivors, there may be something validating about seeing one’s worst experiences taken seriously, treated not as the B story but as the main event. But the show also has a strange therapeutic quality for any woman, a ritualistic confrontation with fear: it might upset you to watch one rape story, but it thickens your skin to watch a million. (As Bart Simpson once put it, “If you don’t watch the violence, you’ll never get desensitized to it.”) And, of course, the show is also a fantasy about something else, something largely out of reach: an incorruptible legal system, in which the police are eternally in the rape victim’s corner.

Quote For The Day

“I felt I was isolated from what’s happening in the country, and if I was going to advance in life I had to know the society. My parents are not proud of me. The silence is thundering,” – Yehoshua Salant, a 25-year-old father who is in a program to integrate Israel’s Ultra-Orthodox into the working economy.

Will Power Have Power?

Alex Rogers wonders how Samantha Power’s “skepticism of the UN’s effectiveness” will affect her as ambassador:

Despite picking Power, [Obama] may be no more likely to intervene in future cases of genocide, or in current war-torn areas like Syria [than past presidents]. And even if Power got her way, history suggests that a major U.S. humanitarian effort would not start with the UN, as Power has accepted a role in which she believes she has little power. As Laura Secor wrote in the New York Times after the release of “A Problem from Hell,“ “Power appears to have given up on international institutions. She does not argue for empowering them, for liberating them from the narrow interests of the powerful or for altering their terms of engagement in genocidal conflicts. Instead, she presses for the United States to act like something other than the self-interested superpower it is.”

Marc Tracy, pondering why so many UN ambassadors are “people whom even the French would consider intellectuals”, casts Power as the US’ global spokeswoman-in-chief:

The U.N. ambassador has served as an eloquent mouthpiece for American values at the clearest symbol of “the world community” that exists. … Particularly at the U.N.’s lowest moments, where the place seems little more than a collection of schoolchildren squabbling and wasting time, the ambassador’s job is less to get things done and more to forcefully advocate for what the adminstration believes America should stand for. Given how justifiably harsh [Power’s book] “A Problem From Hell” was toward U.S. administrations that looked on as genocides took place, [she] seems like a great choice: she is fierce, she is articulate, and she is decidedly un-diplomatic—and that’s exactly what the job calls for.

I found her acceptance speech rather moving, as a fellow immigrant from Irish stock. Check it out.

Who Is Afraid Of Big Brother?

When you hear lots of rhetoric about Orwell’s Nineteen-Eighty-Four, it’s worth reminding oneself that its themes are infinitely more dire than our current situation. The danger of the abuse of power is omni-present, but as Matthew Steinglass explains, the Orwellian metaphor is too drastic to explain our present unease:

It’s not the totalitarian fear that an agency that knows exactly where we are and who we’re talking to at all times would find it easier to round us up; we’re not a totalitarian state, and in any case, in modern America, if the police want to arrest you, they’ll be able to find you. The legitimate fear boils down to two things. The first is the possibility of illegitimate pressure based on information we didn’t intend to be made public. Everyone has secrets; everyone has things they’d prefer not be publicly known. … This problem is exacerbated by the fact that when we say “the government”, we are actually referring to huge numbers of different agencies and individuals, each of which have their own interests and will use whatever information resources they get their hands on to pursue those interests.

The second is the fear that a pattern of circumstantial activity will lead us to be falsely incriminated, or to suffer administrative penalties that don’t even require any actual indictment.

In the era of the no-fly list, it’s not clear what set of activities are enough to get you to pop up on somebody’s computer screen at DHS and turn your life into a Kafkaesque hassle-dome. Did you visit Qatar, then Pakistan, then Qatar again? Did you spray-paint artistic graffiti on a sidewalk that turned out to be too close to Dick Cheney’s daughter’s house? We don’t know; our security agencies will never tell us. Giving the NSA a vast database of phone calls, and inviting them to search for correlations that might be predictive of terrorist activity, is likely to generate a massive number of false positives.

John Sides notes that “most Americans do not express much anxiety about domestic surveillance”:

 In a recent article (gated), political scientists Samuel J. Best, Brian S. Krueger, and Shanna Pearson-Merkowitz reported the results of a 2007 survey in which they explicitly asked whether Americans were anxious, worried, or scared about “the government monitoring the activities of people like you.”  Only about 30% of Americans said that they were “somewhat” or “very” anxious, worried, or scared.  Best and colleagues note that this is more than some commentators and scholars have suggested.  The question, though, is whether it is “enough” to engender a backlash.  I have not seen comparable questions asked in more recent surveys, but my guess is that there is not a great deal more anxiety.

Many people I admire – from Conor to the Pet Shop Boys – find all this horrifying. I still don’t. Maybe it’s because what’s left of my own privacy was destroyed long ago; maybe it’s because I lived under government surveillance as a non-permanent resident for almost two decades. I had to constantly report where I lived, make sure my visa was always in good standing, and go before all-powerful immigration officials at least every three years. I’m now routinely taken aside for extra interviews whenever I enter the US (I’m told my name is on an Irish terrorist-suspect list, but who knows?) and I had to give the government a sample of my own blood in order to stay here. So apart from my blood, my address, my salary, and almost every detail of my professional and private life, I’ve been a free man. After that, maybe meta-data is never going to terrify me.

Barack and Xi

Anticipating the summit between the two presidents, Osnos predicts “the chances of success this week are high”:

The comparison to Kennedy and Khrushchev can sound melodramatic; the stakes this time are lower in the short term. But they are just as high in the long term. I am optimistic about the chances for success. Both sides know they cannot afford to insult or bully—and neither man is known for it. More importantly, they know that history has been unkind to great powers who fail to come to an accommodation. Neither side wants conflict, but, as of today, neither can exclude the possibility. That is a powerful motivator. “The ultimate question,” Reynolds wrote, “is whether a leader feels that in the last resort he can afford to walk away empty-handed.” The summit in the desert will be the rare case in which neither side can afford to leave empty-handed—or to run the table.

I worry about the Thucydides trap. Stephen Walt is, in contrast, a refreshing glass of iced water:

Neither Obama nor Xi can alter the core interests of the two countries, or wish away the various issues where those interests already conflict or are likely to do so in the future. The best they can achieve is a better understanding of each other’s red lines and resolve and some agreement on those issues where national interests overlap. In this way, each can hope to keep things from getting worse and at the margin make relations a bit warmer. In this sense, personal summitry of the sort being practiced this weekend is the only card either can play.

But even if Obama is successful this weekend, this effort is unlikely to prevent Sino-American rivalry from intensifying in the future. The basic problem is that the two states’ core grand strategies are at odds, and good rapport between these two particular leaders won’t prevent those tensions from re-emerging down the road.

John Cassidy’s perspective:

In the long run … accommodation is the only practical option. China is too big and it’s growing too fast to be contained. By 2016, according to a recent report from the Organization for Economic Coöperation and Development, it will be the world’s biggest economy, and that is only the beginning. Despite a slight slowdown in recent months, China continues to invest heavily in the future. During the next couple of years alone, it is planning to build more than a hundred thousand miles of highways, fifty new airports, and more than five thousand miles of high-speed rail track.

What, then, should Obama do? Despite all the uproar about corporate espionage and hacking, the first thing on his to-do list should be reassuring the Chinese government, and the Chinese people, that the United States seeks coöperation rather than confrontation. As Ross wrote: “The right China policy would assuage, not exploit, Beijing’s anxieties, while protecting U.S. interests in the region.” That doesn’t mean ignoring examples of egregious behavior by Chinese, but it means dealing with them in the right setting. For example, complaints about intellectual property theft can be pursued through the World Trade Organization, which China joined more than a decade ago.

The Inferior Medium? Ctd

Samuel L channels his inner Walter White:

A reader writes:

Here’s a modified version of that Leibovitz rant to show how absurd it is:

In stage narrative, any stage narrative, the commandments are few and simple: Something must always be happening, for otherwise there would be little reason to return to the theatre; and whatever’s happening must happen on stage, for this is a visual medium, and a scene of Oedipus brooding in the agora isn’t quite as gratifying as a scene of Oedipus returning with his eyes pecked out. Athenian new technologies, and the gluttonous theatre going habits they’ve created, have given the medium some more room to play, to build, as it were, character. But the primary principles still apply: To keep us amused, a play, any play, has to parade a quick succession of spectacles, far exceeding the scope of thrills and woes that befall any ordinary or extraordinary person in real life. That’s the nature of entertainment.

Yep, that hack Sophocles never amounted to nothin’.